The revealed that of the 16 states that require districts to offer paid parental leave, only two — Arkansas and Delaware — give teachers their full wages up to 12 weeks. Six other states offer partial pay for up to three months.

Access to paid leave decreases postpartum depression and boosts the likelihood that employees will return to their jobs after having a child, according to the study. Multiple national medical organizations a minimum of 12 weeks of paid time off for new parents.

The number of large school districts offering paid parental leave has in the last three years, from 27 to 64. About 40 are located in states that don’t require the benefit. While this shows district-level progress, the lack of state mandates allows schools to refuse to take action, said Heather Peske, NCTQ president.

“What we know is that leaving it up to districts leaves too much to chance, and it leaves too many teachers high and dry,” she said. 

A 2024 by RAND Corp. found that 32% of teachers have access to paid parental leave, compared with 46% of similar working adults. Of those who received the benefit, 46% of teachers thought it was an adequate amount, compared with 78% of other adults.

The new report highlighted Arkansas as a , saying it’s a prime example of why states need to enact paid leave requirements. An optional program created in 2023 allowed the state and districts to evenly split the cost of substitutes who covered for teachers who were absent for up to 12 weeks. But only 10% of districts participated. 

Last year, lawmakers changed it to a mandatory, state-funded benefit that covered the full cost of long-term substitutes. The study said results of the new program are still unknown because it only took effect in August.

Washington state offers teachers the most time off: 12 to 16 weeks that can be extended to 18 in cases where pregnancy or birth complications arise. But the state offers only partial pay.

Maryland has a cap of $1,000 per week during parental leave, while Minnesota’s program covers between 55% and 90% of teachers’ salaries, depending on income level. In 2019, New Jersey increased its for eligible workers — including teachers — from 66% to 85% of their average wage. That change resulted in a 70% hike in program participation.

Seven states and the District of Columbia provide educators with full pay, but for a shorter amount of time, like six or eight weeks.

In , lawmakers debated in 2018 whether paid parental leave was the best use of limited state dollars, according to the study. Following months of advocacy, Delaware eventually created the nation’s first paid parental leave program for teachers, which NCTQ considers to be a model policy. It offered 12 weeks off, funded by an employee payroll contribution of less than 1%, and the state reimbursed districts for the cost of long-term substitutes. About 3% of teachers used the paid leave benefit in 2024.

“If states reimburse districts the cost of long-term substitutes, districts need only maintain normal operating costs by paying teachers’ salaries as usual,” the study said. “This policy ensures that educators receive their full pay during leave, while having minimal impact on the state’s overall budget.”

NCTQ also recommends that states extend paid parental leave to all teachers who become parents, including fathers and educators who foster or adopt children. About one-third of states that provide paid leave offer reduced benefits for non-birthing parents or none at all. 

“Research shows that when both parents have access to paid leave, families grow stronger, children are healthier and women experience greater career outcomes,” Peske said. “Ensuring leave benefits for all parents helps attract and retain talented teachers in the classroom.”

“The money’s coming. The money’s not coming. Oh no, we have to shut all of our Head Starts. No we don’t,” she said, describing the ping-ponging state leaders have been through between U.S. Secretary Linda McMahon’s efforts to downsize the department and court rulings reversing her actions. “We’re going through total D.C. chaos right now. Every time you turn right, it says turn left.”

To make sense of those shifts, she turns to Adam Schott, her associate secretary for student support and another top official at the Education Department during the Biden administration. In Washington, he oversaw the distribution of $122 billion in relief funds and was a primary point of contact on school improvement efforts. Having him on her team, Marten said, is like having “phone-a-friend on speed dial.”

Schott is part of an exodus of former experts in federal policy, budgeting and data who have literally gone “back to the states,” to borrow McMahon’s catch-phrase. In her eyes, the state level is where the magic happens, away from the one-size-fits-all ethos of Washington. The irony is that a recent crop of state officials are themselves federal ex-pats who resigned or were displaced by McMahon’s layoffs. The 74 also spoke to former department staff working in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota and Illinois. Because of the secretary’s efforts to shutter the department, there have never been so many federal staffers looking for work. 

With the future of the federal government’s role in education uncertain, observers say their expertise is more valuable than ever. 

“The people I worked with were there for like 15, 20 years,” said Kiara Nerenberg, a top data expert who resigned from her position with the National Center for Education Statistics just ahead of the mass layoffs in March. “There’s just so much knowledge that’s now looking for a place to land.”

Maryland’s ‘biggest score’ 

Marten’s team in Delaware also includes , who served as acting secretary at the department before McMahon was confirmed and has decades of experience in the federal government. 

Marten called her “the right hand and the left hand” of multiple secretaries, including Democrat Arne Duncan and Republican Betsy DeVos. Carter stepped into the role of acting chief operating officer for Federal Student Aid last year following after a disastrous launch of the redesigned financial aid form. She oversaw corrections that contributed to a this year. Carter resigned in April and is now helping to overhaul Delaware’s outdated school funding formula.

But Marten didn’t get all the talent. Because of its proximity to Washington, Maryland has scooped up several former staffers. Montgomery County even launched targeting displaced federal employees.

Richard Kincaid leads the division of college and career pathways at the Maryland State Department of Education. His “biggest score,” he said, was hiring Nerenberg, the former NCES staffer. One of her responsibilities was making “all of the tens and hundreds of thousands of points on maps that tell you where schools are,” she said. She was part of to identify neighborhood demographics — vital information for programs like Title I for low-income schools and grants for rural areas. 

Now, she gathers data for career and technical education programs, but is also working to better align career-focused education with the needs of local labor markets. Having Nerenberg “catapulted us years ahead,” Kincaid said. 

Others searching for new jobs traveled far outside Washington. 

Tara Lawley spent 17 years with NCES, where she worked on both higher education and K-12 data collection. She was laid off along with over 1,300 other staff at the department in March while her husband, who worked in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, took the “fork in the road” option, a deferred resignation with several months of paid leave.

In August, she found her new position with the Illinois Board of Higher Education, where she’s the managing director of policy, research and fiscal analysis.

“We sold our house, tore our children out of everything they knew, and moved them across the country,” she said.

Her kids, 5 and 8, are doing fine, she said. But the experience reinforced her view that some decisions shouldn’t be left up to the states. 

“How do you take a [special education plan] from one state to another? That’s a challenge that still exists and it’s certainly not going to be solved if you do it state by state,” she said. “If you’re in a state that’s really not doing well in K-12 education and you move to a different state, your kid can be really far behind.”

‘Connective tissue’

Some former staffers have branched out into agencies that focus on more than just education.

Sarah Mehrotra spent two years in the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, where she administered pandemic recovery efforts like curbing chronic absenteeism and preventing students from becoming homeless. She left the department in January along with other members of Cardona’s team, but knew she wanted to keep doing similar work.

Now she’s part of Maryland Gov. Wes Moore’s Office for Children, where she works on an initiative to in specific communities. They include Frederick County’s , where more than 80% of students in two elementary schools qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and Baltimore’s Cherry Hill neighborhood, where a state grant supports a .

When she was with the department, she said officials were “screaming from the rooftops” about ways districts could blend federal dollars with other sources of funding to re-engage students who became disconnected from school during the pandemic. Now, she said, “It’s super helpful to have the federal, state and local perspective” when working with grantees at the community level.

Those with federal experience, she said, can serve as “connective tissue” between states and the Education Department. 

Republicans say there should be fewer ties to Washington, not more. At least one former department official, now at the state level, agrees. McKenzie Snow, Iowa’s education director, worked as an aide to DeVos and held top education positions in New Hampshire and Virginia. 

She’s among those who, like McMahon, say that states are well equipped to manage federal education funds without the department’s strict oversight. Her state was the first to submit to roll federal funds into a block grant.

‘Their own innovation’

McMahon often points to reading gains in Mississippi and Louisiana to argue that the department is unnecessary. 

“The states that are making great progress — it’s through their own innovation,” she said during a recent . “It’s not coming from the Department of Education.”

But not all states have seen the same progress, and many have experienced significant turnover in leadership since the pandemic, which can contribute to disruption across an agency. Just the state chiefs changed in Florida, Massachusetts, Nevada, Oklahoma and Utah, and since the beginning of 2023, more than 30 states have changed superintendents. 

Having staff with some knowledge of federal grants and requirements is a plus right now, said Anna Edwards, co-founder and chief advocacy officer at Whiteboard Advisors, a consulting group. 

“Given the uncertainty at the federal level, having those answers in house within a state is valuable,” she said. “During the shutdown, leaders couldn’t even talk to anyone at the department.”

Elizabeth Ross, who served in the department during the , has worked for three chiefs since joining the D.C. Office of the State Superintendent of Education in 2020. 

“It’s our job to make sure that students don’t feel that transition, that they continue to have access to all of the resources and support,” she said. 

A former third grade teacher in D.C., she led federal efforts to turn around low-performing schools and revamp No Child Left Behind, with its tough testing and accountability requirements, into the more-flexible Every Student Succeeds Act. 

Under Secretary Duncan, the department used stimulus funds as leverage to get states to adopt the Common Core standards and incorporate student test scores into teacher evaluations. The incentives often drew complaints about government overreach, but they also “catalyzed and generated a lot of reform,” she said. 

What she didn’t have was frequent contact with teachers and parents directly affected by those programs. Now an assistant superintendent, she spends a lot of time in schools and often runs into teachers in the community who ask about specific curriculum materials.

She has new appreciation for their input. 

“My perspective has shifted, compared to when I was at the federal level, on how important local buy-in is for the success of policies,” she said. “It’s something that I understand in a much, much deeper way.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

However, educators and lawmakers should consider options for advancing school choice far more broadly. One potential opportunity: strengthen and expand , which allows students to attend public schools outside their residential zones as long as space is available. 

The latest from EdChoice showed that 79% of Democrats, 75% of Republicans and 73% of independents with school-aged children support open enrollment. 

There are two types of public-school open enrollment: within-district, which lets students transfer to schools inside their assigned district, and cross-district, which lets students enroll outside district boundaries. The of a strong open enrollment law is that all districts must participate so long as schools have open seats available.

Like other school choice policies, open enrollment has gained momentum since the pandemic. Reason Foundation research finds that “ have either a robust cross- or within-district open enrollment policy, while do not, leaving with limited school options.” 

Since 2021, nine states have codified strong open enrollment laws, including , and . But before this recent surge, it wasn’t just red states: six were red or leaned red, three leaned blue and three were purple states. Blue-leaning and purple states, including Delaware and Colorado, have very successful open enrollment laws; others, like California and Washington, have elements of successful public school transfer programs.

In Delaware, whose program ranked seventh in , about used open enrollment during the 2020-21 school year to find an alternative that was the right fit for them. 

Kansas codified its strong open enrollment laws in 2022 with a Democratic governor. Preliminary reports show that more than used the state’s cross-district open enrollment program just launched in 2024. 

Colorado passed its open enrollment law back in 1990. During the 2023-24 school year, nearly 200,000 Colorado students, 28% of the traditional public school population, used open enrollment to find the best public school for them. This is especially notable because this past November, Colorado voters rejected a statewide to establish a right to private school choice. Colorado illustrates how strong open enrollment laws can enjoy success in states where other forms of school choice may struggle to gain traction.

With 2025 legislative sessions starting, lawmakers and school choice advocates should consider public school open enrollment proposals that expand options for families. With its widespread popularity among parents and its success across , purple and states, open enrollment is a winning political issue for the right and left that can benefit the tens of millions of students in public schools.

Blanca wants to know what’s next. 

She was brought to the United States as a child after leaving her home in Acapulco, Mexico, and is now preparing to graduate from Delaware State University.

She’s worried. 

For nearly four years, she’s been able to pursue a degree at DSU while undocumented through , a national program that provides scholarships to undocumented students. 

The program’s full-ride  has granted the 21-year-old college junior, who asked not to use her full name for safety concerns, the freedom to attain higher education without financial or citizenship restrictions.

But her graduation looms and that tenure is coming to an end. Without work authorization in America, she may be limited to entrepreneurship, business ownership or independent contract work — all while possessing an undergraduate degree.

“What are we going to do after college, you’re just gonna have a degree with literally nothing behind it,” Blanca asked. 

She’s not alone in asking the question. 

Blanca is one of at least four fully undocumented students at DSU who have received TheDream.US scholarship and are preparing to leave its benefits behind — sparking anxiety and worries about what comes next. 

The Opportunity Scholarship was created by TheDream.US, a national nonprofit scholarship program backed by the New Venture Fund, for undocumented students who live in “locked out” states where they largely have no access to higher education — either because they’re forced to pay out-of-state tuition or because their state will not admit them into universities. 

The scholarship covers up to $100,000 for bachelor’s degree tuition, housing, meals and fees, at five partner colleges in another state, including DSU.

The students are part of a growing population of thousands of scholarship recipients who are studying while fully undocumented. 

About 74% of the over 4,500 TheDream.US scholars enrolled in college during the 2024-2025 academic year are fully undocumented, according to Hyein Lee, chief operating officer of TheDream.US. This means that three out of every four scholarship scholars are attaining higher education without any form of temporary protected status (TPS). 

The fears and anxieties of undocumented students have only been amplified by the precipice of a second Trump administration. President-elect Donald Trump has promised to enact  against undocumented immigrants during his second administration. 

“It’s really like, what’s next,” Blanca asked. “That’s really the main question after college, ‘OK, now what?’”

Seizing an opportunity 

TheDream.US launched in 2014, two years after then-President Barack Obama created  (DACA) through executive action. DACA was intended to provide temporary relief from deportation to thousands of young immigrants who were studying or working in the country. 

A requirement of DACA was to be in school, however, higher education was largely out of reach for many undocumented students because they did not have access to federal financial aid and limited access to state aid. TheDream.US was created to help these students attain higher education. 

Initially, the program was only open to students who had DACA or , a designation that temporarily protects people who cannot return to their country safely. 

The program was expanded to include fully undocumented students after then-President Trump’s administration  DACA in 2017. 

Today, there’s been over 260 TheDream.US scholarships awarded to DSU students, according to Lee. 

Blanca is one of  who meet the eligibility criteria for DACA but have been barred from entering the program because it’s been tangled in federal litigation since 2017. With new applicants barred from entering and rigid eligibility requirements in place, DACA recipients have aged and the program’s population has continuously decreased over the years. 

The percentage of fully undocumented scholarship alumni without work authorization  from 3% to 8% over two years, according to the 2024 TheDream.US alumni survey report. Many of the current scholars arrived in the country after the June 2007 cutoff date, making them ineligible for DACA under the original rules.

“Even if the program were to be operating today, many of those students would not even be eligible for the program in the first place,” Lee said. 

Two days after Trump won the presidential election last month, DSU President Tony Allen sent a letter to the university’s undocumented students. Allen, who is a close ally to President Joe Biden, described being among the people who were “deeply troubled” by the election result, and underscored the university’s support for undocumented students. 

“Absolutely nothing that has happened on a political level has changed or will change the University’s position of support,” the letter stated. “You are not alone, and help is and always will be here.” 

Allen encouraged students to fill out a form to receive free legal consultation from the , an advocacy group of university and college leaders. 

‘OK, now what?’ 

Receiving the scholarship was like repeating a cycle for Elizabeth. Her mother left her family in Veracruz, Mexico, to migrate to the U.S. in search of a better life for her and her daughter. 

Now Elizabeth was preparing to do the same. 

Elizabeth, who also asked not to use her full name, would have to leave her family and home in North Carolina behind to study in Delaware while undocumented. 

“I had to do it,” she said. “We’re young, we’re leaving everything we’ve known, our whole comfort zone, our whole comfort city, everything to come to this state where we don’t know anyone.”

Now, after nearly four years of studying in Delaware, Elizabeth doesn’t want to return to North Carolina. She wants to see her years of study pay off — but she doesn’t know what’s next. 

“It’s scary,” she said. “The last thing we want to do is do all this and go back where we came from.” 

Jahaira, a 21-year-old sophomore at DSU, cried when she received the Opportunity Scholarship. She came to the U.S. when she was 13 years old after being separated from her cousin at the U.S.-Mexico border near Eagle Pass, Texas.

She was sent back to Mexico where she remained in the custody of the Mexican government for six months. Her mother, who lived in Myrtle Beach, S.C., had to return to Mexico, retrieve Jahaira and cross the border again without authorization.

Sometimes, the thought of the future pops into her mind. 

“What if I graduate and I can’t find a job, or no one can let me apply for a job?” Jahaira said. 

TheDream.US offers  for undocumented students to be able to be paid for non-employment based opportunities at partner institutions. TheDream.US grants a stipend for the partner institutions to be able to pay undocumented students for professional development fellowship and internship roles. 

This year, 500 such TheDream.US scholars participated in the program.

Jahaira has two years left in her business management degree under the scholarship. She has plans to open a painting company with her father, who has been painting for nearly 15 years, in order to have him eventually retire and “take it easy.”

Until then, she’s optimistic about her future after the scholarship ends.

“I still have hope,” Jahaira said. “Hopefully it can get better.”

The commission tasked with studying Delaware’s funding formula for public education on the heels of a report suggesting spending should be increased by upward of $1 billion annually has a large hill to climb.

That’s hampered by an information gap, after a recent survey determined that a large number of the commission members don’t feel they have enough of a grasp on the current or proposed funding systems to formulate a plan.

In recent years, Delaware has come under scrutiny for the way its public education system is funded.  like the Delaware NAACP and Delawareans for Educational Opportunity filed a lawsuit arguing that the state’s education system did not provide an adequate education to all students and therefore violated their rights.

A national consultant, the American Institutes for Research, completed an independent assessment of education funding in Delaware as part of , where it  that the state increase spending by as much as $1 billion to meet its 2030 educational proficiency goals.

After both Democratic and Republican members of the State Senate’s Education Committee raised concerns in a March meeting over how the sum would affect taxpayers, however, the legislature chose to create the Public Education Funding Commission (PEFC) to examine the recommendation.

In its Nov. 13 meeting, the commission released its anonymous survey about whether Delaware should try to reform and improve the longstanding unit count formula that determines state funding support for public schools statewide, or scrap it altogether and create a weighted student formula that many other states have moved to in recent years.

About 48% of respondents said they were neutral, not sure or needed more information. In comparison, 33% voted for improving the current system and 19% voted for creating a brand new system. Ten members of the 31-member commission, which includes legislators, Cabinet leaders, teachers, principals, support professionals, and community advocates, did not respond to the survey.

State Senator and Commission Chair Laura Sturgeon (D-Brandywine Hundred) made it clear that she wished the PEFC’s first two meetings would have provided the “foundational knowledge” necessary to make a decision to rebuild or remodel the current system.

The PEFC’s next two meetings will focus on how public education funding works in Delaware, and specific examples of what a total rebuild would look like, compared to a remodel with small or large changes. Sturgeon added that she hopes people will feel more comfortable choosing a direction after the December and February meetings.

Commission members’ need for more information comes after discussions about pushing back the timeline for issuing final recommendations, which  who argue that the state has been debating and studying the issue for nearly 20 years without making substantive changes.

The commission was slated to submit its first set of recommendations by Oct. 1, 2025, to be considered in the governor’s recommended budget for Fiscal Year 2027. However, the commission previously discussed submitting its recommendations in July 2026 instead, which would delay possible funding until the budget for Fiscal Year 2028.

Although future meetings aim to provide more knowledge, some members were quick to point out that their peers should be doing their own research on the public education funding system rather than waiting for the information to be given.

“Today, a lot of us have been really quiet, but we really need that input if we’re going to move forward and if we’re going to make these transformational changes that we really want in our education system, because it’s too important for us to sit back, be quiet and wait,” said commission member Marcus Wright, who is also a member of the Seaford School District Board of Education. “We’ve got to go out, we’ve got to do the work. We got to do some research on our own as well.”

Wright called on members to lean on those who are on the commission to help “gain the knowledge that you need so that we can move forward.”

Wright also pointed out that the commission doesn’t have much time to form its recommendations, and that the work is too important to do in two-hour blocks once every month.

Sturgeon agreed and called on members to voice their opinions more and said that the commission has also provided reading materials to help people feel more comfortable with the topic.

“I know we’re all super busy, and so just encouraging you to read what you can or ask questions,” Sturgeon said. “Call us, meet with us, meet with whoever, and then when you feel like you understand it well enough please voice your opinion, and please don’t be afraid of having an opinion and then changing your mind later.”

This was originally published on .

The outcome was widely expected in a deep blue state where the last Republican governor left office in 1993. Meyer for the Democratic nomination in a three-way primary decided Sept. 10. 

Education analysts have watched the race for two reasons. The new governor will be under pressure to lead the state’s General Assembly into acting on a quarter-century of recommendations from task forces and commissions on reforming Delaware’s Jim Crow-era school funding system. 

Created decades ago to ensure affluent, white communities would continue to get a disproportionate share of education dollars, the finance formula sends more money to districts that already enjoy bigger budgets thanks to higher property taxes. As Delaware’s population has diversified, the inequities have deepened. Near-unanimity about the scope of the problem has not translated to the political will to boost state funding.

In 2020, Carney settled a lawsuit brought by the ACLU on behalf of the Delaware NAACP and a coalition called Delawareans for Educational Opportunity, in part by agreeing to commission an American Institutes for Research study to determine exactly how underfunded Delaware’s schools are. 

Earlier this year, the researchers reported that  would cost $500 million to $1 billion. After the report’s release, lawmakers created a planning commission to figure out how to raise revenue and right inequities, with an eye toward releasing recommendations in October 2025 for a new funding system to take effect in 2027. Not everyone is convinced the timeline is not simply another instance of kicking the can down the road. 

Now, policy wonks are watching to see whether Meyer’s long experience in K-12 education will translate to political urgency. The governor-elect started his career as a Teach for America corps member at a Wilmington charter school, where virtually all students were impoverished and the inequitable distribution of resources left teachers to struggle. 

During the campaign, Meyer released a detailed, 18-page education platform that included specific proposals for reforming both the state funding system and county-level taxes.

“Funding cannot change overnight but must increase with urgency,” the plan noted, pledging to “Better align our state’s funding system with the AIR report’s recommendation of an additional increase of $3,400 to $6,400 per pupil.”

A Delaware-based found that a substantive increase in young immigrants leads to sizable academic gains for students who were already in English learner programs or who had graduated from them. 

And at a time when immigrant students are portrayed as a drain on U.S. schools, researchers also found that those who had never been enrolled in English learner programs were not significantly impacted. Their performance improved, but by a negligible amount. 

Researchers analyzed student-level administrative data from Delaware covering 125,500 fourth through eighth graders enrolled in public schools between the 2015–16 and 2018–19 school years. They note the timeliness of the study, which was published last month in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association.

President-elect Donald Trump, who won decisively in his re-election bid against Vice President Kamala Harris Tuesday, regularly lambasted immigrants in  throughout his campaign and promised mass deportation of the estimated 11 million people living in the U.S. without legal immigration status.

“What are the effects of immigrants on communities?” asked David Figlio, professor of economics and education at the University of Rochester, in a recent interview with The 74. “Especially those that are ‘new immigrant destinations’ that have not historically had large numbers of foreign-born residents? This paper directly addresses one of the most important potential mechanisms through which immigrant students might affect incumbent students — the consequences of increased linguistic diversity in the classroom.”

Delaware’s share of immigrants increased by 65% between 2000 and 2010 — and by 53% between 2010 and 2019, according to the study. Likewise, the number of English learner students in Delaware public schools increased seven-fold over the past two decades. 

Researchers say the share of English learners in the public school system soared from 2% in 2000 to 11% in 2019: The increase accounted for about half of the overall enrollment growth in Delaware public schools in that timeframe.

Umut Ozek, a senior economist at RAND, said a sudden increase in newcomer students can test schools: their needs might call for added social and academic support. 

But, he said, these findings should assuage concerns by state and federal policy makers that large upticks of newcomer students are overwhelming school districts and degrading classroom achievement, saying such conversations must be rooted in fact. 

“We don’t want these debates to take place in vacuums,” he said. 

Conservative forces have long considered , the 1982 Supreme Court decision that prohibits schools from turning away students based upon their immigration status. 

Politicians in several states are already targeting these students. Oklahoma schools Superintendent Ryan Walters demanded — — a nearly for what he claims is the cost of educating “illegal immigrant children.”

“Under your supervision, the costs in education due to illegal immigration have risen astronomically,” he wrote. “Your failed oversight and efforts are a direct cause of the current crises Oklahoma and other states now face. Oklahoma taxpayers, schools, teachers, and parents should not bear the burden of your failings.”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said two years ago that Plyler should be revisited: A politician introduced legislation that would bar undocumented students from public school. A state representative in made similar remarks earlier this year. 

RAND researchers are not entirely sure why current and former English learners benefit from the arrival of newcomer students but cite three possible explanations: First, they say, immigrant students often trigger increased funding for schools, money that could be particularly helpful to existing English learners. 

For example, if the English learner population reaches a particular threshold, schools might hire additional staff to support these students. Second, a marked uptick of newcomers in the classroom might prompt teachers to use more effective strategies to serve this population, a change they might not have made if their numbers remained small. 

Finally, researchers say, English learners in receiving schools tend to be more academically motivated and can also help their peers feel less isolated. 

This is just one of a handful of studies these researchers have conducted in this area. 

, centered on Florida and published in April 2023, found that the presence of immigrant students has a positive effect on the academic achievement of U.S.-born students, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds. 

in 2018 focused on the impact of Haitian newcomers on existing students in Florida: Researchers found ​​no evidence of negative effects on incumbent students’ school outcomes after the young immigrants arrived. 

Computer labs at Delaware libraries across the state are closed after hackers on Friday seized control of the virtual servers that run the facility’s public-use computers, according to Delaware Division of Libraries Director Annie Norman.

The hackers now are demanding money from the state in order to relinquish control of the system, Norman said. She did not know the exact amount demanded but said she “heard” it was around $1 million.

Norman added that she will direct the Division of Libraries not to pay any ransom, insisting instead that the Delaware libraries rebuild the servers that run the public’s computers.

She did not immediately know when the rebuild will occur, nor when the public-access computers will again be available.

“We see a lot of stories about this around the nation, and it seems to be recommended not to pay the ransom, but to rebuild,” she said.

The hack marks the latest in a trend of high-profile breaches of local government computer systems across the United States. On its website, governments have been “particularly visible targets for ransomware attacks.”

Last year, Kent County’s local government experienced what it called “a hostile network intrusion” which downed its webpage and rendered its office phones unusable for more than a month. 

Last month, the Bayhealth health care system based in Dover was , who were offering much of the stolen data on dark web boards for upward of $1.4 million in Bitcoin.

The Division of Libraries technology staff has been consulting with officials from Microsoft and with the Delaware Department of Technology and Information, Norman said. They still are trying to determine “what happened and where they got it,” she said. 

A spokeswoman from Delaware DTI declined to provide details about their consultancy.

In the days since the hack on Friday, several local libraries posted updates on social media sites about their public computer terminals not working. They did not reveal that the system had been the victim of a ransomware attack. 

On Monday, the Division of Libraries posted a note on its website stating that libraries are “experiencing an extended system/internet outage that is affecting some, not all, library services.”

Norman’s division oversees more than 30 libraries across the state. Each operates a computer lab that offers free access to the internet and low-cost printing. The labs are relied upon by a cross section of society, especially people without regular access to the internet. 

Norman stressed that the libraries remain open and still have WiFi, though she said it has been “a little spotty.”

She also emphasized that library card holders’ information is not currently at risk. 

“The good news is — thank God there’s some good news — is it’s not affecting the catalog, which is where there’s patron information,” she said.

The published on .

This quarter-century of broad agreement notwithstanding, Delaware’s next governor will inherit the problem, a rising price tag for the fix and, critics complain, no clear political roadmap. 

Six candidates are running. Democrats Lt. Gov. Bethany Hall-Long; Matt Meyer, county executive of New Castle, the state’s largest county; and Collin ��›Ჹ����, World Wildlife Federation CEO and a former Delaware environmental official, will face Republicans Mike Ramone, who is minority leader of the state House of Representatives; retired 9/11 first responder Jerry Price; and businessman Bobby Williamson.

The state’s last Republican governor left office in 1993, and this year’s polls again strongly favor Democrats. The current contest, then, will likely be decided by the Sept. 10 primary, in which Hall-Long and Meyer are the front-runners. 

Whoever wins, a recent court case and subsequent legislation commit them to take action. In 2020, outgoing Gov. John Carney settled a lawsuit brought by the ACLU on behalf of the Delaware NAACP and a coalition called Delawareans for Educational Opportunity, in part by agreeing to a small boost in aid for a mushrooming population of disadvantaged students.

The settlement also required the state to commission an American Institutes for Research study to determine exactly how underfunded Delaware’s schools are. Earlier this year, the researchers reported that would cost $500 million to $1 billion.

“An alarmingly clear and negative relationship exists between the percentage of low-income students served by schools and the outcomes they achieve for students,” the report declared.

After the report’s release, lawmakers created a planning commission to figure out how to raise revenue and right inequities, with an eye toward releasing recommendations in October 2025 for a new funding system to take effect in 2027. 

“The time has come for us to stop kicking this can down the road and start working on real systemic reforms,” state Sen. Laura Sturgeon, one of the Democrats leading the charge. 

But others are decrying the appointment of yet one more panel to study what they say is a well-understood problem. ACLU of Delaware Legal Director isn’t convinced that the 2027 timeline — seven years after his organization’s suit was settled and almost a decade after it was filed — does not, in fact, just create more delay. 

Reports by a succession of commissions packed with a Who’s Who of Delaware education advocates, philanthropies and state and local officials were released in , , 2007, , 2015, 2017 and 2021. The only real difference in the new American Institutes for Research report, released this past March, was the price tag. 

A central issue identified over and over: With a few, narrow exceptions, Delaware does not include financial supplements to offset the cost of services needed by children with disabilities, those from impoverished households or English learners. Its unusual “unit-based” funding formula is actually set up to send more money to wealthy school systems than to impoverished ones.

The state tallies the number of teachers a district employs, their years of seniority and other credentials and then sends money to pay for enough educators — at a salary level corresponding to their presumed qualifications — to reach a staff-to-student ratio, or “unit,” spelled out in the law. The staffing ratios apply statewide, but school systems with higher salaries receive more money for each unit.   

Because this means wealthy districts automatically receive more money, those with the most property tax revenue have been able to hire and retain the most sought-after teachers, while struggling, property-poor school systems have no way of competing for faculty or offsetting the costs of poverty. 

All three Democratic candidates and two of the Republicans recently attended an education forum moderated by Marcus Wright, who serves on the board of Seaford School District, an impoverished school system in the southern part of the state. Wright came away concerned about the lack of a plan for moving the reform forward.

“I thought that there were very broad ideas, but not a roadmap or a game plan,” he says. “I’ll just say that I expected more.”

Four of the six candidates agree the school finance formula needs fixing, with calling for a “bipartisan approach” to the overhaul. The two candidates that do not mention the reform are GOPers Price, who favors and career education, and Williamson, who calls for “” vouchers.

The platforms of all three Democrats tick lots of boxes on educator wish lists, with perhaps the most traditional. Funding reform is near the end of her published roster of priorities, which is topped by expanded early childhood education, universal free school meals, spending on student mental health, higher pay for teachers and smaller class sizes. 

Carney, who is term-limited, left Hall-Long with a mixed record. Under the settlement with the ACLU, he immediately increased supplemental funding for the state’s most vulnerable students by an amount starting at $25 million in a year in 2020, rising to $60 million annually starting in 2025. It’s a start, critics concede, but a pittance compared to the $500 million to 1$ billion called for in the AIR report. 

Hall-Long’s candidacy has been dogged by — including complaints about payments she may have made to her husband, who has served as her campaign treasurer since she entered electoral politics in 2016.  

Her , , is a former math teacher who in 2016 was elected New Castle county executive. New Castle is Delaware’s deep-blue northernmost county, home to 60% of the state’s population, 57% of its voters and the city of Wilmington, where school funding inequities are perhaps the largest. 

Meyer started as a Teach for America corps member at an all-boys charter school in Wilmington, where almost every student was impoverished. The — in part because of the uneven playing field Delaware’s various commissions have noted. It closed years after Meyer left. 

As county executive, Meyer was also a defendant in the ACLU suit, which challenged decades of delays in updating the property valuations used to finance local school aid in Delaware’s three counties. His is the most detailed of all the candidates’, including specifics on reforming both the state funding system and county-level taxes.

“Funding cannot change overnight but must increase with urgency,” the document asserts, pledging to “Better align our state’s funding system with the AIR report’s recommendation of an additional increase of $3,400 to $6,400 per pupil.”

Because of the inequities with county and property development taxes, some districts are able to send four times as much funding to schools as their neighbors. Any new state aid formula must account for this, Meyer says in his plan.

The third Democrat, , is a former Delaware secretary of natural resources and environmental control. His education platform commits to fully implementing the recommendations in the AIR report, suggesting that one way to fix the system would be to leave the basic “per-unit” calculation alone and add more funding for challenged students. 

So how will the next governor achieve his or her vision? At the time the state settled the ACLU suit, proponents of the agreement said they thought shifts in state demographics and the composition of the General Assembly might help cement the political will to raise taxes and change the way the money is distributed. One of these shifts is the rapid demographic change in Delaware’s student population. 

For decades, inadequate and inequitable funding was a problem of the state’s blue, urban districts. But more recently, education gaps in Sussex — the state’s southernmost, red-leaning county — have widened as the area’s large poultry processing industry has drawn an influx of Spanish-speaking migrants. Advocates had hoped the shift would drive home the notion that inadequate school resources are not just an urban problem. 

Simultaneously, the 2018 election of a wave of younger, more diverse, left-leaning lawmakers — among them several people of color who sought elected office to advocate for equity in education — was supposed to buoy efforts to reform the system. In 2021, spearheaded by the new lawmakers, a bipartisan swath of the General Assembly passed a resolution committing to overhaul the funding formula. This year, some of the same legislative leaders sponsored the bill that . 

The sponsor and co-sponsor of the 2024 legislation, Sturgeon and state Sen. Elizabeth Lockman, declined to be interviewed for this story; Rep. Nnamdi Chukwuocha did not return emails requesting comment, though he did speak at length for a 2021 74 Million piece on the urgency the pandemic’s academic losses would supposedly lend to efforts to reform the funding system. 

Some are optimistic the new effort will succeed. Zahava Stadler, project director of New America’s Education Funding Equity Initiative and an expert on Delaware’s school funding system, says she understands advocates’ concerns but is less skeptical than some that the commission announced in July will come up with meaningful reforms. 

“Just because the AIR report made specific recommendations doesn’t mean the political system won’t have to hash them out,” she says. “Sometimes these reports sit on a shelf and go nowhere, and sometimes they get results.”

Some of the wonkier shifts are already underway, she notes. Property values for local tax purposes, until recently frozen at 1970s and ‘80s levels, are now being reassessed every five years — a significant change, if not a widely understood one. That will raise revenue, she explains, but the state needs to follow up with a system for more equitably redistributing this money so tax-poor districts aren’t locked out of the gains.

For his part, Bensing, the ACLU director, worries that a general agreement that the system needs fixing without new specifics means more delays. “It’s not politically convenient for our elected leaders to tell voters they are going to increase taxes,” he says. “But that is the right thing to do.”

He wonders whether a new court challenge would add a fresh sense of urgency — or give recalcitrant elected officials the political cover of a legal threat or edict to blame for changes to the tax system.

Wright has more confidence that in the long run there will be change, but decries the impact of the incremental pace on students. 

“How can we compete? How can we fill out classrooms with teachers, with paraprofessionals, with all the people it takes to run a school district?” he asks. “Our kids don’t deserve any less than any other kids.”

As Delaware’s families and students prepare for the start of the new school year later this month, many districts are still struggling to fill open positions before the summer ends. 

More than 700 job openings remain unfilled at schools statewide, with an average of 41 openings per district, according to the Delaware Schools Consortium, which tracks openings across the state at all but four districts – the Appoquinimink, Cape Henlopen, Colonial, and Seaford school districts choose to do their own marketing.

The shortages experienced in Delaware schools are a continuation of a post-COVID trend, and it has led some districts to make more drastic changes.

Last year, the Capital School District serving the greater Dover area employed remote teachers to videoconference into some classrooms while a support professional managed students due to workforce shortages. In May, Capital district families were given less than  that schools would shift to an entirely remote learning due to a shortage in teaching and transportation staff.

The Capital School District still has , and its same-school retention rates for teachers dropped by roughly 13 percentage points between the 2022-23 academic year. 

Capital School District did not respond to Spotlight Delaware’s request for comment on its current needs. It is not alone in the need to bolster workforce levels though.

Brandywine sees the same amount of job openings as previous year

As of Tuesday, the Brandywine School District has 73 total job openings, according to the district’s  page. District spokesman William “Bill” O’Hanlon noted that the number of job openings has been slightly higher than normal since the COVID-19 pandemic and that its 17 vacancies for elementary schools and 15 for its secondary schools are similar to where the district was at this time last year.  

Filling in the hiring gaps in the final weeks of summer is crucial because it’s important to ensure that buildings are well-functioning for its students, O’Hanlon added.

“When you have a school that does not have enough staff members to function adequately for student learning, I think that’s a concern for anybody,” he said. “At the end of the day, we want to make sure that there’s enough staff members in the building who are able to teach students.”

Staff at Brandywine usually speak with the administration before the end of the school year about whether they’ll be returning for the coming school year, which O’Hanlon feels gives the district a “leg up” on the hiring process. The district typically begins planning what its staff will look like for a future school year starting in the spring based on what students’ needs will look like for the following year. 

O’Hanlon also noted the importance of looking at other areas besides educators, like cafeteria aids or custodial workers, who aren’t necessarily included when people think of shortages in education.

“If you don’t have enough cafeteria workers, that might mean longer lunch lines,” he said. “Longer breakfast lines might mean students who are going to be in the cafeteria longer and not in the classroom. If you don’t have enough custodians, again, it’s almost like a domino effect.”

Lake Forest experiences better recruitment year

Lake Forest had  as of Tuesday, which is better than normal, especially in the last five years, according to Human Resources Director Travis Moorman. The district also had a same-school retention rate of 54.8% in 2022 and 52.7% in 2023, according to the . 

The Lake Forest School District also uses the Delaware Schools Consortium as its main resource, but Moorman noted although the consortium system is automated, it requires each district to have its own person to manage it. 

One of the challenges Lake Forest experiences with the consortium site is that their collective bargaining agreement calls for a job to be posted for a specific amount of time.

After a job is posted, Lake Forest primarily relies on word of mouth to recruit and employ many people from the community as it is a smaller district. Like Brandywine, the district also begins planning for future school years starting in the spring. In some cases, Lake Forest is able to start hiring as early as April for the following school year. 

In the past, Moorman has utilized regional job fairs as a way to recruit those who may be early in their careers but has seen an increase in recent graduates wanting to return to their home communities to teach.

“I have found, especially since the pandemic, that a lot of kids in college are more interested in staying home,” he said. “I’ll go to Pittsburgh to a regional job fair there. I’ve gone to Kutztown, gone to Millersville University, of course, we go down here to Salisbury and the University of Maryland, Eastern Shore, they usually do a combined job fair. But a lot of the kids, even down there at Salisbury, a lot of them are coming from the other side of the Chesapeake Bay, and a lot of them had plans to go back home.”

Given the difficulties in hiring through job fairs, Lake Forest has worked hard to recruit its staff through word of mouth or different connections. 

“Our principals here in the district work really hard on recruiting people through connections and past work experiences,” Moorman said. “It’s really kind of a group effort. And this year, for the first time since the pandemic started, it’s really paid off.”

Woodbridge’s recruiters are its staff

Like Lake Forest, the Woodbridge School District, a small district serving the greater Bridgeville area, focuses on staff connections to help bring in new recruits.

“I would say our staff currently help us tremendously … by just discussing their work environment and how they enjoy it,” said Kelley Kirkland, the assistant superintendent at Woodbridge. “Obviously that piques the interest of other people that may not feel the same from wherever they are currently working.” 

Woodbridge has maintained a steady same-school retention rate for its teachers in recent years, with a rate of 56.6% in 2022 and 55.7% in 2023. The district currently has , with two being at the elementary school level and one at the high school level.

Kirkland said the district is in “pretty good standing” with its amount of job openings, especially with teachers returning on Aug. 19. She credits the district’s standing with having a “really good” hiring season this past spring and summer compared to years past. 

Although Woodbridge is seeing a good recruiting year, Kirkland has experienced the stress from trying to fill jobs in the remaining weeks of summer as she previously served as the principal of the high school. 

“At the end of the day, teaching positions are tied to student performance and students that are reporting to our building, so when we have several teacher openings, it’s extremely stressful to think about how we’re going to welcome students back in several weeks, knowing that we don’t have all the positions filled,” Kirkland said. 

Why the shortages?

During COVID, Delaware schools saw an uptick in teachers retiring that exacerbated workforce needs.

The state also has long faced staff competition for new teachers in the region, where traveling out of state to districts in New Jersey, Pennsylvania or Maryland is easy. As of the 2022-23 school year, Delaware ranked 16th overall in average annual educator pay at nearly $69,000, according to the  by the National Education Association.

However, neighboring states ranked seventh (N.J.), ninth (Md.) and 11th (Pa.) in average pay, offering $5,000 to $7,000 more than Delaware. Those averages are particularly impacted by first-year teacher salaries where Delaware has lagged behind by even more.

In response, Gov. John Carney has prioritized teacher salary increases, starting a proposed four-year investment this year to push starting teacher salaries in Delaware to a minimum of $60,0000. 

Finally, teacher shortages come at a time when state educators are expressing frustrations within schools too.

The Delaware State Education Association (DSEA), the union that represents state public school teachers, recently conducted a survey with its members to determine the main issues of the teacher shortage. It found that seven out of 10 teachers are dissatisfied with their teaching conditions. 

“One of the concerns that does come up from members frequently is concern about student behavior in classrooms, and what we can do to address that,” said Jon Neubauer, the director of education policy at DSEA. “I think, mostly from the perspective of our members, we want every child in our schools to be successful, so we know that if there are behavioral issues that need to be addressed, addressing them only improves academic outcomes for the students.”

In response, the state recently  a Student Behavior and School Climate Task Force that is examining the state of Delaware schools and what can improve from a behavioral aspect.

New programs aim to help

DSEA has been working at the state level to identify programs, supports and resources to encourage professionals to stay in Delaware’s school.

Select school districts in the state — including Appoquinimink, Brandywine, Caesar Rodney, Cape Henlopen, Capital, Colonial, Indian River, Milford, Seaford and Smyrna, as well as Academia Antonia Alonso Charter School, the Las Americas Aspira Academy and Campus Community Charter School — also have access to the students enrolled in Delaware Technical Community College’s Bachelor of Science in education program. 

Students enrolled in the program participate in a year-long residency program, where they gain professional development with a teacher starting at the beginning of the school year.

“It’s a co-teaching experience through the end of the school year, so they see the ins and outs of a school year, and that’s including report cards, parent conferences, field trips, decorating a classroom in the beginning of the school year, to parties, you name it,” said Jill Austin, the program’s director. “All of the ins and outs of the school year are much more beneficial to a student because and you build that rapport, you get to see the growth, the academic growth and the social, emotional growth of your students from the beginning of the school year to the end.” 

Del Tech has been working with external stakeholders and with school districts to establish a good rapport, and the stakeholders have told the college which schools need the program’s residents, Austin said. She also has districts reaching out and asking for more residents as well.

The college is also implementing a “grow your own” program, which allows them to bring in vetted paraeducators for a three-year obligation to complete their degree in three years and become a “teacher of record” by 202, Austin added.

Getting students hooked on classic games is one way Principal Sham Bevel has tried to soothe their separation anxiety after the banned cellphones two years ago. At Bayside, students must keep the devices in their lockers during school hours.

But convincing kids there’s something better than posting TikTok videos or browsing friends’ Instagram posts is an ongoing struggle.

“Cellphones are to children what the blanket was to Linus,” Bevel quipped.

Cellphone bans during school hours have gained momentum in recent months, with states like Virginia, and  taking action and the Los Angeles and New York districts moving in that direction.

But schools may find that deciding to remove phones is the easy part. The real test is finding a way to secure and store them that both staff and families find acceptable. Complete bans leave some parents nervous, but partial restrictions often put teachers in the uncomfortable position of policing the rules during valuable class time. 

“All of these have pluses and minuses,” said Todd Reid, spokesman for the Virginia Department of Education. The agency is gathering public comments on how best to implement Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s July 9 to have phone restrictions in place by Jan 1. Officials will release guidance in mid-September. “All of them really come down to how the policies are implemented.”

One approach to banning phones, storing them in students’ lockers, can be hard to enforce, said Kim Whitman, a co-founder of the

“Teachers say that students ask to go to the bathroom and then go get their phones,” she said. “It still allows negative activities to happen between classes — cyberbullying, planning fights and others videoing them.” 

Sheila Kelly, a board member for , a Virginia advocacy group, raised another practical issue: Not all schools have lockers. What’s most important to her is that schools restrict phone use not just in class, but during breaks.

“It’s during those in-between times … that students can experience the mental health advantages of phone-free interactions, allowing them to grow socially and emotionally,” she said.

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A growing number of schools say Yondr pouches, which cost about $25 per student, accomplish that goal. 

The neoprene sleeves, often used at live music and comedy events, lock with a magnetic closure and can be reopened with a device usually mounted near a school exit. Districts among the company’s top customers include and , according to GovSpend, a data company. 

In June, Delaware Gov. John Carney signed a budget that includes $250,000 for a Yondr in middle and high schools this fall. Last year, the company earned $3 million in government contracts — doubling its business from 2022, GovSpend shows.

In New York City, where Chancellor David Banks is currently hammering out the details of a ban expected next year, some teachers prefer Yondr because it takes them out of the enforcement business: Students lock up their phones in a pouch when they come to school in the morning and can’t remove them until they leave in the afternoon.

Vinny Corletta, a Bronx English teacher, used to work in a school where teachers employed incentives to discourage phone use. Kids could rack up points for prizes — from pencils to  sneakers. But frequent reminders still took time away from instruction.

“I’m a teacher; I don’t want to hold 30 cellphones for students all day,.” he said. 

Now he teaches at Middle School 137, where students put their phones in a Yondr pouch when they arrive and then store them in their backpacks. He thinks that even if they can’t access their phones, students prefer having them close by rather than in a locker or classroom storage container.

But no method is foolproof. Students have been known to disable Yondr locks or even surrender a dead older phone while stowing their current model in a backpack. 

“Kids are so smart — sometimes more than adults — and always find loopholes,” said Elmer Roldan, executive director of Communities in Schools of Los Angeles, a nonprofit that provides support services to students in low-income schools. 

He’s worried about students being “policied, patrolled and punished” for violations, recalling the Los Angeles district’s failed iPad rollout in 2013. Students easily broke through the and used the iPads to play online games like Subway Surfers and Temple Run. The district stopped allowing students to take them home.

“I thought the district should’ve hired those kids … to teach district staff about technology security,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if schools exhaust their energy trying to implement this ban.”

Los Angeles officials have until October to specify how they’ll enforce a ban the board approved in June. 

But some L.A. students think adults have blown the issue out of proportion. Alejandro Casillas, who will enter 11th grade at Hamilton High School in Los Angeles this fall, said teachers already confiscate phones if they see them more than once during class or offer extra credit to limit use. He gave up his phone once to get the additional points. 

“I think this image of phones being a distraction is over-exaggerated,” he said. “If the district were to take away cellphones, I think some students would still be distracted.”

Students might think they’re good at multitasking, but experts say that allowing them access to phones in class prevents them from on their lessons. Research also points to following phone bans.

Israel Beltran, a rising sophomore at Mendez High School, said he doesn’t use his phone in class except when teachers allow it during breaks. At that point, he often turns to funny videos on YouTube. But the idea of a total ban makes him feel like he’s back in elementary school. 

“When we had a toy or something we shouldn’t bring to school, they usually would take it away from us and give it back at the end of the day,” he said. 

‘A lifeline’

Parents have been among the most divided over districts’ efforts to ban students’ phones. The Phone-Free Schools Movement has a team of across the country, mostly parents who track district policies and promote cellphone bans for students in their communities. 

But a recent national survey from the showed that while parents support “reasonable limits” on use, a majority — 56% — think students should occasionally have access during school hours.

That’s especially true for parents whose or health issues.

In Los Angeles, Ariel Harman-Holmes doesn’t want an across-the-board ban. She was afraid her son, who will enter sixth grade at the Science Academy STEM Magnet this fall, would lose a phone. So she gave him an Apple Watch, with its own number and data plan. With ADHD and a condition called face blindness, he sometimes can’t recognize people or even familiar places — a limitation that was especially stressful when people wore masks during the pandemic. 

“He couldn’t even tell who was an adult and who was a child. He didn’t know who to trust,” she said. One day he used his watch to call his parents, who helped him get reoriented. Now she plans to have use of the watch written into his special education plan as an accommodation. “I feel like kids with certain disorders or disabilities, like autism, anxiety, possibly depression, need a lifeline to their parents.”

Regardless of which method districts adopt, parents have found that enforcement can be inconsistent. 

Victoria Gordon, whose son Malik attends Republic High School, a Nashville charter, supports leaders’ efforts to minimize use during class. The school’s official policy prohibits students from accessing social media during school hours. But visiting one day last year, she saw her son using his phone in class.  Sometimes, she glimpses photos he posts during school hours.

“Why is my child on Instagram at 10 o’clock in the morning?” she asked. “They’re not implementing what they’re saying.”

The 74 wants to hear from educators, parents and students on how cellphone bans in your states, districts and schools are going. .

The 2021-22 academic year was the hardest for George Read Middle School Principal Nicholas Wolfe, an educator for 17 years. It was the school’s first full year back since the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Wolfe recognized that his students were struggling and started researching the effects of cellphones and social media on adolescents’ mental health. 

“It was one of those things where it’s like, I can’t unknow now what I know, and I need to take action,” he said. “From there, it’s like, ‘All right, what are the ways that I can get to a phone-free environment here at George Read Middle School?’ ”

Wolfe has utilized an “expectation and enforcement of the expectation” structure to create a phone-free environment at his school since , but does not have a phone ban. The expectation in George Read Middle School is that phones will not be used because they’re out of sight, with YONDR phone pouches being the tool to enforce that expectation.

One line item in this year’s  aims to eliminate distractions from phones and social media in classrooms throughout Delaware. 

Lawmakers approved $250,000 to test an expansion of such cell-hiding pouches, like those made by tech company YONDR, in other state middle and high schools, along with other measures.

The Delaware Department of Education will be responsible for gathering experts, creating the system for the pilot program and later evaluating it. The department will also create the regulations for the applications districts will use when applying for funding.

State Sen. Eric Buckson (R-Dover), a former educator, voiced strong support for the pilot program and said the inspiration for its creation came from teacher feedback during Teacher Appreciation Days. 

“I asked [teachers], ‘Hey, if you were king or queen for a day and could write the rules, what’s one of the first things that you would do to get better control of the hallways and the classrooms?’” Buckson said. “Either No. 1 or No. 2 on that list is to take the phones.”

The Delaware State Education Association, the union that represents state public school teachers, feels encouraged that the General Assembly is listening to educators and trying to find solutions and resources to address issues like behavioral issues in schools, said Taylor Hawk, the director of legislation and political organizing at DSEA. 

“That is absolutely encouraging, and we definitely see the cellphone pilot as another example of legislators being responsive to issues that they’re hearing from educators in their districts and we look forward to seeing the results,” Hawk said.

Multiple school districts  like the Los Angeles Unified School District or the entirety of Florida, have implemented their own phone pouch policies in schools.

Critics of phone bans in schools — whether through using pouches or by having a strict “no phones” policy — have raised concerns over how students would be able to contact their families during emergencies, especially in an era of school shootings.

Wolfe has found a middle ground between having students contact their families when needed, and enforcing his phone-free environment. 

While every classroom at George Read Middle is equipped with a phone, students can also go to the office and ask an administrator if they can use their phone to call home, Wolfe said. Students must make sure their phone is out of sight before returning to class. 

Parents, lawmakers and educators in Delaware are also concerned with the state’s test scores in recent years. Only 24% of eighth grade students were  in math during the 2022-23 school year, and 41% were proficient in English/language arts.

Experts and advocates hope to see better behavior and test scores after the pilot’s implementation. Studies have found a  between media multitasking and attention problems and evidence for potential detrimental long-term effects among early adolescents. 

Kenneth Shores, assistant professor at the University of Delaware who specializes in education policy, has also seen adult learners be distracted by their phones during college classes.

“It’s just like a thing that your mind goes to if you’re slightly bored or challenged by material,” Shores said. “Removing those kinds of easy distractors, I think, is great, because it keeps students engaged on the material.” 

Not everyone is convinced that phone bans are an easy solution to rectifying behavior and improving test scores. 

Removing phones from classrooms will not single-handedly fix the issues within Delaware’s education system, said Britney Mumford, the executive director of DelawareCAN, an advocacy group that works on public education improvement and equity.

“It’s going to lead to more engagement, and paired with other things, will hopefully improve test scores,” Mumford said. “We don’t need to treat it as, ‘Oh, we’ve cracked the code, we’ve figured out what the problem is and this is going to solve it.”

While Hawk has heard phone policies posed as a possible solution in conversations about behavioral issues in the classroom, it has come up in addition to other solutions like more resources for mental health professionals, she said.

Buckson expects that the DOE will run out of funds before schools’ needs for phone pouches are satisfied, and has already had “a couple” of schools reach out to him directly. 

 is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Spotlight Delaware maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor-in-Chief Jacob Owens for questions: jowens@spotlightdelaware.org. Follow Spotlight Delaware on  and .

After nearly three decades working in education, I would hardly call myself naive. I’ve been a school counselor, principal and district superintendent. I’ve served or worked in rural, urban and suburban schools. Along the way, I’ve received recognition for closing learning gaps, increasing graduation rates and recruiting male teachers of color to the workforce.

Yet, for all my experience, there’s one thing I underestimated: chronic absenteeism and the challenge of addressing the many factors that contribute to it.

I now recognize that chronic absenteeism is a symptom of deeper, systemic issues in schools and broader society. The reasons for missing class are complex, representing a confluence of school, home and community factors. Logistical challenges like transportation or lack of child care can pose insurmountable barriers, while young people who lack a sense of belonging at school or are generally disengaged may simply opt out.

Because students and families are the groups most impacted by these impediments to attendance, they must also be a part of developing the solutions. consistently shows that engaging communities leads to innovative and effective solutions.

I’m encouraged by the efforts I’ve seen through my work with Digital Promise’s Center for Inclusive Innovation. Inclusive innovation — an education research and development model that fosters deep district-community partnership to create novel student-centered solutions — is an opportunity for students and families, who are often excluded from positions of influence in education, to lead, participate in and benefit from problem solving and decision making. Inclusive innovation is not a new concept, but it is underutilized — and has the potential to significantly impact the nation’s attendance crisis. 

To that end, Digital Promise has Chronic Absenteeism: Insights and Innovations — a six-month cohort supporting 17 school districts ranging from suburban California to rural Ohio. The goal is to address chronic absenteeism through the deep investigation of its root causes, collaboration among districts around shared challenges and partnerships with students and families to identify solutions for improving attendance in their communities.

With the potential to impact more than 210,000 students, the cohort will develop strategies that meet the unique needs of their students and families, together with and alongside their students and communities. These districts will develop a chronic absenteeism blueprint by conducting data analysis; identifying the systems, conditions and processes needed to improve attendance; and engaging students in the design and development of solutions.

El Segundo Unified School District, Greenfield Union School District, Lynwood Unified School District and Mountain View Whisman Schools in California; Adams 12 Five Star Schools in Colorado; Wilmington Learning Collaborative in Delaware; NOLA Public Schools in Louisiana; Roselle Public Schools in New Jersey; East Irondequoit Central School District, Hudson City School District, Mount Vernon School District and Suffern Central School District in New York; Springfield City Public Schools in Ohio; Allentown School District and Elizabeth Forward School District in Pennsylvania; Richland School District 2 in South Carolina; and Spokane Public Schools in Washington.

The cohort will be co-led by Lynwood Superintendent Gudiel Crosthwaite, whose district is making progress in addressing chronic absenteeism. To start, the district asked a basic question of families: What conditions and barriers are preventing each and every student from participating and engaging in school? 

To find answers, Lynwood, which is over 90% Latino/a, distributed four surveys and hosted in-person meetings with families to hear their concerns. They increased communications with parents, including a social media campaign highlighting real students and their positive experiences in school, to remind families how being present and engaged can contribute to young people’s physical and mental well-being. As a result of these efforts, the district went from 1,200 students who attended virtually last year to 55 attending online this year and the rest returning to classes in person. 

Lynwood is also improving attendance among foster youth through a program created with student councils and staff. The program “hires” foster youth, who have lower attendance rates than other students, to work in their schools’ front offices or provide tutoring. This motivates these students because they know they know they have a purpose, build relationships with caring adults and are seen as role models to their younger peers. It also sets them on a pathway to entry-level jobs within the school district or at partnering agencies and afterschool programs, guiding them toward potential careers in education as well.

Another promising approach also draws a clear connection between attending school and students’ career and employment prospects: 

Digital Promise’s district- and community-led cybersecurity initiative provides access to inclusive STEM pathways for high schoolers in 10 school districts, from Alabama to New York. Students participate in a three-year, in-school cybersecurity program, earning industry-valued credentials and, ultimately, opportunities to secure employment and/or enroll in vocational and trade schools or colleges and universities in a related field. In all 10 districts, actual enrollment doubled or tripled projections due to student and parent demand. And those districts have seen a decrease in absenteeism among students in the program. 

For school leaders who want to develop lasting solutions for chronic absenteeism, the first step is to ensure the conditions — and the commitment — are in place to work alongside students, families and community members. This will lead to the next, crucial step: building trust and relationships to design and sustain solutions that enable all students to participate, engage in and thrive at school.

But there is promising news in pockets throughout the country. As students move through elementary school, these bright-spot districts increased reading and writing achievement at a rate double their state averages.

I’ve studied and talked in depth to leaders in two of them — , a network of six public charter schools in Washington, D.C., and the , with four elementary schools in rural Delaware.  

Seaford is the only high-poverty district in the state where, in 2022, students finished third grade above standards on the Smarter Balanced exam and then, as fourth graders in 2023, grew more than a full academic year.

DC Prep’s students take the PARCC exam and saw growth at all achievement levels:

What sets these districts apart? Both have been influenced by the science of reading and created consistency across all aspects of teaching and learning. That is, they use high-quality curricula well matched to student assessments, and all professional learning trains teachers in how to use both well. by RAND finds this degree of consistency is not common in most states and districts. A large majority of teachers do not work in coherent systems.  

“We’re not trying to use a silver bullet here to solve all problems,” says Mary Pendleton, director of humanities at DC Prep. “We’re focused on figuring out what works and doing it.”

Both DC Prep and Seaford combine grade-level reading and writing in one 45- to 60-minute daily block. They are adamant about teaching grade-level texts, even for students who are a year or two behind. Both districts believe this type of supportive instruction can help students move past any frustration and comprehend challenging texts.

At Seaford, teachers use the open-source curriculum , which emphasizes reading whole texts and novels rather than excerpts. To help students who might be struggling with grade-level text, a teacher and the entire class read the text aloud together, a technique known as choral reading, with a clear focus.

For example, fourth graders reading aloud from The Amazing Life of Ben Franklin are prompted to “pay attention to how Franklin got from Boston to Philadelphia.” They then reread the text, working in pairs, and are prompted to think about which parts of modern life are owed to Franklin.

Both districts use these approaches to help build students’ fluency — their ability to read accurately, at an appropriate rate, and with expression. This double dose of reading the same text is in line with the teaching recommended in the Institute for Education Sciences’ practice guide, .

DC Prep uses an inclusion model, where special education teachers and English learner specialists co-teach with the classroom teacher. This allows them to smoothly work with small groups of students around their short-term needs, and to provide more intensive support to those who need it. For instance, in K-2, struggling readers use texts that help build (e.g., “Red Ted was sad”), in addition to the grade-level text the whole class is reading.

Both districts also have a separate foundational skills block for 30 to 45 minutes each day. DC Prep had to extend this skills block, using the series, from K-2 into third grade. They added the curriculum, as their data showed half of the students were having difficulty with phonics, up from 20% before the pandemic.  

Fourth and fifth graders who need it have time dedicated to targeted phonics; those who master the basics of decoding move into studying multisyllable word patterns and have more time for independent reading. No one gets phonics skills instruction they don’t need.

Seaford has taken in new immigrants from Haiti and Central America, so it gives these students a double dose of the skills block as needed, making sure they master letter sounds and other phonics essentials. The district also goes a step further and has a third block of English Language Arts, which alternates between daily discussions of novels, and writing of narrative, informational and opinion essays. In this block, the texts are often above grade level. In each lesson, teachers stop and think aloud, demonstrating one of several strategies that excellent readers use to comprehend a text. Discussions are framed around inferential questions, where students must use clues from the text to arrive at an answer.

Both districts use assessment data to regroup students and adjust their instruction. In her book , Karin Chenoweth wrote about how Seaford does this by using improvement plans in short, 90-day cycles instead of the traditional multi-year plan.  

Similarly, DC Prep uses DIBELS and ANET test data every 10 weeks to shape their priorities for the next quarter. Instructional leaders use data to frequently reconfigure small groups. For example, recent ANET data showed that some third graders who were receiving extra phonics had improved and needed to begin a new focus on close reading strategies.  

This year, the school is focused on improving students’ writing. Assistant principals work with teachers to quickly analyze written responses to reading and adjust instruction for the next day. The APs also observe teachers, do real-time coaching and lead planning meetings with each grade level once a week.

This consistency around curriculum, assessment and instruction has contributed to success, but neither district is satisfied with its students’ growth. They know they have too many who are not yet meeting grade-level expectations.

This need for even greater progress suggests a new direction for educators to consider. Rigorous research has determined which programs or approaches work on average, and that data has informed these districts’ efforts. But insight about how individual students improve does not exist.

New case study research could be useful, comparing students in the same grade and district who improve to those who don’t. Generating this knowledge would provide teachers with the strategies they need to help more young people thrive as readers.

Since January 2021, states have introduced bills and at least 18 have passed laws restricting or banning the teaching of supposed critical race theory. Just states (Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee and Washington) have Black history mandates for K-12 public schools. In addition,  , , and have legislated Black history courses or electives during the last two years. But several of the 12 states have new laws on the books that limit their curriculum. 

The Center for K-12 Black History and Racial Literacy Education at the University at Buffalo has been tracking which states have Black history mandates. The director of the center, LaGarrett King, said it’s important for him and his team to hold teachers and school districts accountable by tracking which states are not only implementing Black history curriculum but actually teaching the lessons.

“If we look at the history of Black history education, whenever there is some form of social or racial strife within society, there’s always this connection to increasing Black history in public schools,” King said. “You saw that right after the Civil War and after Reconstruction, during the late 19th century. You saw that as well during the lynching era in the early 20th century. You saw that in the 1960s during the Civil Rights Movement, and more recently, you saw that during the Black Lives Matter movement.”

Even so, King says that in nearly half of the 12 (Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas and South Carolina), the mandates just seem symbolic, using Florida as an example of a state that has a Black history requirement but new policies that contradict it. Its “Stop W.O.K.E. law” restricts how race and gender are discussed in public schools and prohibits teachers from making students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race, color, sex or national origin.” 

A prominent component of teaching Black history “is the concept of questioning systematic power and oppression, because that’s part of the Black experience in the United States,” King said. “And if you have laws that say, ‘Hey, you can’t talk about systemic racism, whiteness or concepts that say racism is permanent in our society,’ then I think you’re doing the actual concept of Black history wrong… If your Black history is simply about celebrating heroes, well, here’s the thing: Why are these particular people considered heroes?”

In August, the Florida legislature came under fire after a right-wing nonprofit organization called PragerU created a depicting an animated Frederick Douglass referring to slavery as a “compromise” between the Founding Fathers and Southern states. The video was meant to be shown in K-12 schools and was paid for with state funds.

In Delaware, a for K-12 districts and charter schools to teach Black history went into effect this school year, but educators may not be ready. Deangello Eley, assistant principal of Appoquinimink High School, told that many teachers are “concerned they don’t yet have the tools for these conversations.” Eley believes it will take closer to five years for Black history lessons to be fully implemented.

Some places, though, are doing it right, King said. He pointed to New Jersey and to cities such as Philadelphia and Buffalo as examples of school systems that are working to protect and expand their coverage of Black history.

Though Pennsylvania doesn’t have a K-12 Black history mandate, Philadelphia does, and King said he views it as exemplary both in policy and practice. One of Philadelphia’s biggest priorities is ensuring that teachers have adequate training and resources. The district also prioritizes exposing students to Black history lessons that aren’t typically covered in schools and making sure they can apply these concepts to modern issues.

In 2005, Philadelphia became the first city in the United States to require every high schooler to take an African American history class to graduate. Part of the law included integrating African-American history into all K-12 curricula. 

Ismael Jimenez is the district’s first director of social studies curriculum in nine years. Since stepping into his role last year, he has led a team of three in developing best practices and guidelines for teachers. Though Philadelphia did away with its mandated annual teacher training in social studies a few years ago, Jimenez has instituted a special training just for African-American history teachers called the Africana Studies Lecture and Workshop Series. Teachers are paid to attend these workshops several weekends throughout the year. Scholars and community activists are invited. The district also works with educational departments at cultural heritage museums to offer additional professional development for teachers.

Jimenez and his team have been revitalizing the curriculum, which hasn’t been significantly updated in a decade. They aim to step away from relying on textbooks and are building the curriculum from the ground up themselves. 

Kindergartners begin learning basic social studies concepts like what is a community. Starting in first grade, students are introduced to Black history topics such as the meaning of flags, Marcus Garvey and the creation and purpose of the Pan-African flag. Throughout second and third grade, students are taught about other prominent Black figures throughout world history. In fourth grade, topics include enslavement and the riches that it brought Europeans in the Americas. Those lessons continue through fifth grade.

For the first two years of middle school, the focus is Black history outside the U.S. Sixth graders learn about civilizations in Asia and Africa, such as the Kemet in ancient Egypt, and seventh graders study the role of the Spanish in slave trades in the Western world. Jimenez said the goal is to take the emphasis off Europeans in Western studies, spending only a quarter of the year on ancient civilizations like Greece and Rome and focusing instead on North America and Latin America for half of the year. In eighth grade, the curriculum returns to United States history and includes colonialism and the Civil War.

Students are encouraged to focus less on essay writing and multiple-choice tests and more on what the district calls authentic performance tasks to show their knowledge of course material in creative ways, such as conducting mock trials, writing letters to museums inquiring how they obtained certain African artifacts and contacting school districts and companies that make maps to ask about biases and racism in their creation.

“There’s a short video in ninth-grade American U.S. history talking about redlining, and there’s another one about talking about the riots in Miami in the 1980s,” Jimenez said. “These little clips allow students to kind of access [curriculum] visually.” Ninth graders also learn about the creation of the interstate highway system and suburbanization. “We go over how this identity of middle class was tied to whiteness at the exclusion of black people in America.”

In 10th grade, students complete the required African-American history course needed to graduate. The following school year, the curriculum centers on world history, with a large focus on the transatlantic slave trade. In 12th grade, students learn civics and economics, including the Voting Rights Act of 1965, affirmative action and current politics.

“If we’re not engaging in these conversations related to multi-prospectivity and dialectical thinking involving marginalized and historically excluded voices into the conversation, then by default, the teacher is indoctrinating the students because the teacher isn’t allowing them the ability to challenge what they’re being taught,” Jimenez said.

“That’s one thing here that we’re going out of our way to try to make sure is not happening. We’re going to bring up these things that you’ve never heard of that we find interesting and other folks find interesting, but then we’re going to bring in the multiple perspectives related to interpreting it and have dialogue and structured activities around it to really go into the depths.”

While the divides seem stark between red states and blue, policy leaders and practitioners from Texas to Tennessee and California to Colorado are collaborating to create innovative career pathways for students. 

In my home state of Delaware, we’re constantly learning from those other states. John Fitzpatrick, executive director of , serves on the board at my nonprofit, Rodel, and has urged the nation to rethink early college high schools and the expansion of Pathways in Technology Early College High Schools (), in which students earn credit toward an associate degree and hands-on work experience in high-demand, high-wage careers. I serve as an adviser to some exciting work that is leading called , in collaboration with the Colorado Department of Higher Education. This initiative recognizes that not all students want or need to graduate high school in four years and provides scholarships for college courses and high-demand certificate programs. More formally, the nonprofit skill-building organization has created , in which , from blue California to red Tennessee, learn with, and from, one another.  

What are the products of these collaborations? Students gaining meaningful work experience through internships, apprenticeships and completed college coursework or certifications before they’re 18. These pathways — a combination of targeted in-school curriculum and outside, real-world experiences — are aligned with broad sectors like health care or information technology. For example, as is big in my state, a new LLC under Rodel called the is building stronger connections among employers, training providers and high schools. The work is so popular that it has grown from 27 students in 2015, to over 26,000, or more than half of the state’s high schoolers, in 2022. 

These efforts include traditional vocational education but are meant for all kids, regardless of what they want to do after high school. Pathways are not about locking a young person into a career choice at age 14; rather, about helping them make better-informed choices. But as the hard lines between school and work soften — what Jobs for the Future calls the — career exploration is starting earlier and is expanding into middle school.

This reflects a historic shift. In 1910, about 7% of Americans had a high school diploma. By 1940, that figure approached 70%, giving the U.S. the best-educated workforce in the world for much of the 20th century. But many countries have caught up or surpassed us, and a high school diploma isn’t enough anymore. Economists project that by 2027, 70% of family-sustaining careers will require a degree or certification beyond high school. 

Even before the pandemic, the pathways idea was gaining steam. Young people want agency over when, how, what and where they learn. Pathways give them a chance to learn important people skills, and to figure out what they want to do (and don’t want to do).  

Pathways make sense to parents as well. Given the cost of college, families like the idea of their kids getting up to 15 college credits while still in high school and making sound postsecondary decisions to avoid dropping out with .  

Building seamless connections among business, high schools and colleges helps young people and their parents struggling to navigate smart postsecondary decisions, and it helps employers struggling to . And a well-built pathway for an 18-year-old can also work for a 48-year-old looking to update needed work skills. It’s a policy two-fer.

What to do with this common ground? At the federal level, policymakers can set some North Stars. For example, what would it take to increase apprenticeships tenfold? There are only 440,000 registered apprentices in the U.S. today. If America created as many apprenticeships as a share of its labor force as England, Australia and Canada, that number would climb to . 

Similarly, although a growing number of good jobs do not require a four-year degree, federal funds tend to heavily favor bachelor’s degree attainment over other training models. Deepening investments in one- and two-year certification and degree programs would not only even the playing field for new entrants, but aid millions of mid-career professionals. The upcoming of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act presents an opportunity to remedy this.

At the state level, governors and legislatures have a unique opportunity to not only advance an issue that’s good for students and their states, but for the country. Leveraging 50 state-level experiments could create a national conversation to jump-start America’s reinvention and add to the international discourse on how to provide all young people with a fair shot at a meaningful career and a good life.

It’s not how most Black History Month workshops begin. 

“I’m streaming live from a hotel bathroom,” said Atnre Alleyne, co-founder and CEO of TeenSHARP, a college access program. 

Alleyne was speaking in February via Zoom to dozens of high school students in Philadelphia, New Jersey, and Delaware. But his hotel bathroom was in western Ukraine, where, after awakening late that month to the sound of Russian bombs exploding, he and his family fled from their home in a Kyiv suburb. 

With Alleyne’s wife and co-founder, Tatiana Poladko, her 81-year-old father, and their three young children on the other side of the bathroom door, Alleyne loaded a virtual background — a 1968 of high school students on their way to a memorial service for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. — and kicked off the workshop. 

“Injustice anywhere, as Dr. King said, is a threat to justice everywhere,” Alleyne told the students as he drew parallels between the fight against racial tyranny in the United States and political tyranny in Ukraine. “It is really important to be globally aware, globally conscious, and also to think of ways that you can stand up for what’s right.”

The couple’s commitment to their work and their students has been tested in recent years, first through the pandemic, when they transitioned to a virtual program, and then in January 2021, when they moved from Delaware to Poladko’s native Ukraine. The war and the family’s displacement further complicated matters.

But Alleyne, 37, and Poladko, 38, are steadfast. TeenSHARP, they say, is more than just a college access program serving low-income, Black, and Latino students; it is a leadership program. Their goals are more than just getting students accepted to, enrolled in and graduated from college; they are trying to close the gap that, on average, has left Black households with of the wealth of white households.

“I was an excellent student, a 4.0 student, but my parents never sugarcoated it. In this country, with the level of corruption that existed, that didn’t mean a whole lot,” Poladko said of Ukraine. “What I always tell students is that … someone sold you a lie in America that this is not also the case for you as a student of color. Your chances of success are as fleeting as mine were, and they are as dependent on luck as mine were. So what I always tell them is that at TeenSHARP, we are trying to diminish the percent of luck, and we do so by following the blueprint that affluent families have been following for years.”

Replicating that blueprint with fewer resources was already an uphill battle, requiring intensive work from families and the TeenSHARP staff, particularly Poladko, who serves as the college counselor. Living seven time zones and more than 4,000 miles away heightened the degree of difficulty. 

Earlier this year, before Russia invaded Ukraine, Poladko would start one-on-one meetings with early-rising high school seniors at 5:30 a.m. ET, or 12:30 p.m. in Ukraine. After four hours of consulting on waitlists and competing financial aid packages, including calls that Poladko often took while waiting outside her children’s ballet class or piano lesson, she would continue from 2:30 p.m. ET (9:30 p.m. in Ukraine) to around 8 p.m. ET (3 a.m. in Ukraine). 

“They realize that we’re going to go fricking hard for you, and you’re going to go fricking hard for yourself,” she said. “We have to show you how privileged America works — and you don’t know it.”

A flight to safety

The couple’s dedication is such that Russian bombs caused only a momentary pause in TeenSHARP’s programming. After the explosions woke the family on Feb. 24, Alleyne and Poladko, who don’t own a car, began searching for ways out. On Feb. 25, they celebrated their daughter’s Zoryana’s 7th birthday. The next day, they crammed eight people into an acquaintance’s Volkswagen Passat. The family only brought sandwiches and their clothes. After a 2.5-hour drive west, they reached the city of Zhytomyr, where Alleyne hosted the Black History Month workshop. 

“I couldn’t go to sleep [afterward], I was restless,” said Asquith Clarke II, a TeenSHARP alum who logged onto the workshop from Oberlin College in Ohio. “At first I thought to myself, ‘This is crazy, I’m not sure what I can do to support them, I have college things going on.’ But knowing how much Ms. Tatiana and Mr. Atnre have done for me, am I just going to sit here and go to sleep knowing that they’re in danger?” 

For the first time, Clarke wrote to his elected representatives, encouraging them to help Ukraine defend itself. The rising junior posted their replies to Instagram and encouraged his followers to act, too. 

Meanwhile, Alleyne, Poladko, their kids — 7-year-old Zoryana, 4-year-old Nazar and 2-year-old Taras — and her elderly father took a train, another train and a car driven by volunteers to get closer to the Polish border. They reached it after a 5-mile walk, Poladko ushering the children and Alleyne assisting her dad, already weakened from a long case of COVID. 

A series of temporary accommodations, some requiring the family to sleep side-by-side, heads next to toes, led them to Warsaw. 

By March, Alleyne and Poladko were able to enroll their children in day care and elementary school and rent a two-bedroom apartment in Warsaw that overlooks a tree-filled public park. Poladko’s father sleeps in one bedroom, and the couple and their children share three mattresses in the other. The family’s furniture is still in their rental house outside Kyiv, so decorations are limited to artwork the kids bring home from school. “You Are My Sunshine,” says a handmade painting in the living room.

To work, Alleyne perches his laptop on a bookshelf next to a Paw Patrol puzzle and calls it a standing desk. Poladko turned the dining room table into her workspace. When they have calls at the same time, Alleyne often retreats to the bathroom — just as he did in the hotel in western Ukraine. 

And when the couple’s Ukrainian nanny joined them in Warsaw, they developed a routine where she fell asleep in their bedroom while Alleyne and Poladko worked. In the early morning hours, after the couple finished up, they would switch spots, with the nanny sleeping on a tan couch in their otherwise barren living room. 

Ukraine meets Ghana in New Jersey

Alleyne and Poladko have been finding a way forward since 2005, when they met at the Camden campus of Rutgers University, in New Jersey while they each pursued master’s degrees. Poladko had earned a full ride through a fellowship that supports students from overseas. She clicked with Alleyne who, after completing his K-8 schooling in New Jersey, went to Ghana by himself to attend a boarding school. He could relate to Poladko’s experience as a non-native student navigating a thicket of challenges in order to reap educational — and life — opportunities. 

“To understand TeenSHARP, you have to understand Ukraine and Ghana,” Alleyne said with a laugh. “We’re tough.” 

Together, they decided to apply what they’d learned and help historically marginalized students access college and become student-leaders who are successful, high achieving, and reaching their potential (these traits stand for the SHARP in TeenSHARP). These students face hurdles during the entirety of the college process, from being encouraged to apply to colleges beneath their capabilities to , on average, than white students. 

TeenSHARP launched in 2009 with 10 students in the Philadelphia area, and has since expanded across New Jersey and Delaware, graduating more than 500 students and reaching thousands more in one-off programming. At points, Alleyne has taken on outside jobs, including a stint at the Delaware Department of Education and as the founding executive director of DelawareCAN, part of the that advocates for high-quality educational opportunities for all students, regardless of where they live. His salary from those roles allowed Poladko to donate hers back to TeenSHARP, she said, noting that she has not accepted any compensation from the group she co-founded. 

For TeenSHARPies, as they’re called, activities start in 9th grade. A seven-person team communicates with students and their families, offering sessions on the college application process and financial aid applications and promoting the idea of spending 33 hours a week on schoolwork. 

When the pandemic hit, TeenSHARP made its programs virtual and started serving students from across the United States, including Georgia, Ohio, Oregon and Texas. But the staff soon realized that remote instruction was causing their students’ math skills to falter. Alleyne, who as CEO oversees operations and development, reallocated $130,000 from their roughly $1 million annual budget— a “crazy amount of money,” for them, as Poladko said — to provide small-group tutoring. TeenSHARP is largely funded by a constellation of corporations and foundations that have offices in Wilmington, Delaware, including Capital One Bank and WSFS Bank. 

The heart of the program is the intensive advising that Poladko leads for high school juniors and seniors. While carrying a caseload of more than 70 students, Poladko provides one-on-one and group instruction. She estimates spending five to seven hours working with each student just on their personal statement. 

The goal is to be as well-prepared as a student from a wealthy family. TeenSHARP organizes more than two dozen college visits each year. Students are encouraged to apply early to their first choice, and Poladko is not above getting on the phone with an admissions counselor to lobby for one of her students. Lest they get saddled with debt, she encourages students to enroll in the college that is offering them the best overall package, not the best name recognition.

During the program’s College Signing Day event in May — starting at 6 p.m. Eastern, midnight in Warsaw — Poladko passed the Zoom spotlight from one student to another to tick through their acceptances and announce which they’d selected. One student had been accepted by 16 schools. Another by 17. 

“And who is getting your talent this fall?” Poladko asked. 

Back came the responses. 

Carleton College. 

Princeton. 

Yale. 

Macalester College. 

Poladko knows the acceptances — and the decision to attend the school that’s the best fit financially — are hard earned. The program has seen student outcomes remain consistent even through the shift away from in-person support. “Trust-building virtually is definitely not easy,” she said. “But it is definitely possible if students and parents see the commitment to students’ success.”

The couple took a brief pause in June before ramping up for a month-long summer program in July. In the meanwhile, they are still making rental payments on their house in Ukraine, which is 11 miles from Bucha, where the Russian military this spring . They’re paying partly to support the landlord, who recently sent them a video of the two-story property, their stroller still parked outside the front door, and partly because Alleyne and Poladko still hope to return there when it feels safe. They like the quality of life, and Poladko needs to fulfill a residency requirement for the fellowship she received before she can apply for U.S. citizenship.

“We could technically be in our house now,” Alleyne said. “You’re just living with this risk of an air strike.”

The couple is also — now more than $35,000 — that they donate to grassroots leaders and organizations in Ukraine. (Donations are processed through a nonprofit, ; designate Ukraine Grassroots Leaders Fund.)

Wherever they end up, Alleyne and Poladko are confident that TeenSHARP will continue to work with students and families to achieve racial and economic justice. Clarke, the Oberlin student, agrees. 

“It’s really hard to stop them from doing what they do,” he said. “A pandemic, war, they just keep going. It’s really inspirational. I think to myself, ‘If they can do that, then I think anyone can’ — or I don’t see it as impossible.”

This story was supported by a reporting grant from The Pulitzer Center.

The Appoquinimink School District is a rapidly growing district located in Middletown, Delaware. The district has expanded by nearly 45% — to more than 12,000 students from 9,000 10 years ago. This growth in student population also meant that there were more students with more diverse needs than ever before. 

Providing an equitable education for all of our students is what prompted our search for high-quality instructional materials that teachers didn’t have to cobble together themselves. In the past, while we had created learning maps for each unit of study, teachers were still responsible for identifying materials and resources to teach that unit. They were now asking for more curricular support to be able to adequately and optimally educate all students in the district.

A recent visit by the Knowledge Matters School Tour to celebrate our implementation of HQIM in elementary mathematics provided us with a wonderful opportunity to reflect on everything that came together to make our journey a success.

“Teachers writing their own lesson plans from start to finish was a lot of work,” said Jessica Spence, a special education specialist in the district. “It took a lot of time and energy, and we still felt like we were failing students. So burnout for teachers was much higher than versus when we have a resource that has the framework for us and we can really concentrate on giving kids access across the board.”

Instructional leadership has been central to our learning journey. From the very beginning, our math coordinator, Charlie Webb, recognized the importance of involving teachers in the curriculum selection process. She formed a committee consisting of five or six teachers in every grade, who selected two programs to pilot. Teachers didn’t like the first one but loved , a highly rated, comprehensive, PK-5 mathematics curriculum from that utilizes direct instruction, structured investigation and open exploration. Teachers are the ones who selected Bridges, and their collaboration in implementing it is what has been most notable about our experience.  

Bridges represents a dramatically different way for students to learn and for teachers to teach mathematics.

“I think there was a big learning curve between how we learned as children, how we were teaching prior, and the new curriculum,” instructional coach Lori Sebastian said. “Change is scary. Charlie’s good leadership — in making sure all teachers knew this wasn’t just a program that we darted and said, ‘We don’t like what we’re doing, we’ll do something different’; That there has been so much research, piloting, and teacher involvement was key. When you build that background, teacher buy-in is always going to be better.”

One of the most important things Charlie did was to insist we “start slow to go fast”. She knew that moving to a new curriculum was going to be a challenge. Her plan broke the learning down into manageable chunks. That first summer’s professional development, for example, largely focused on the first unit, increasing teachers’ confidence about starting the school year off successfully. School leaders participated in the training as well, so they had a clear understanding of the curriculum’s components and could support the staff. We are blessed to have great instructional coaches, but we believe our administrators need to be equally well versed in the curriculum so they can coach as well. They need to know what they should be hearing and seeing when they go into classrooms.

Throughout year one of implementation, teachers were given time to unpack each unit right before the unit was going to be taught. This was done during professional development days and in professional learning communities. Each school utilized its math lead teacher as a resource. Having someone in the building that could answer questions, model lessons and troubleshoot was key to our success that first year.  

Moving into year two, teachers were ready to dive deeper into the materials and lessons. Charlie shifted the focus to job-embedded professional learning. One of the authors of the Bridges program partnered with the district to assist with this professional learning. Schools focused on lesson studies where teams would co-plan the lessons during PLCs, execute the lesson in a classroom, and return to the PLC to debrief. We encouraged teachers to observe each other teaching. We do a lot of lesson study, which has been extremely valuable and has created a culture of collaboration that has been really important.

“We had so many opportunities to collaborate together to strengthen our knowledge of Bridges,” Brandi Luloffl, math content chair at Townsend Elementary School, shared with the visiting Knowledge Matters team. “We did unit get-togethers, digging into units together, looking at them one unit at a time, so teachers weren’t too overwhelmed with, ‘Here is an entire curriculum; just go with it.’ We were just chunking; and doing it together, playing the games, acting out the lessons — so we really felt in the moment what it was going to be like [to implement the curriculum]. These opportunities with teachers across the district built us together stronger.”

In addition to professional learning for teachers and administrators, math nights were implemented throughout the district where families were invited into schools and given an opportunity to engage with the math. As a result, parents began to feel more comfortable with what — and how — math was being learned in our classrooms.

We took a short break from professional development during the pandemic, during which we were ever so grateful to have a high-quality curriculum already in place, but knew we still had more learning to do. The current focus of our professional development, made possible in part by a state-supported , is to support inclusive classrooms and provide equitable access to grade-level/core curriculum in math classes for all students. The grant makes it possible for our instructional coaches to work with Pia Hansen, director of professional development at The Math Learning Center, who has become an integral part of our professional learning journey in effective mathematics instruction. 

Our educators shared a lot with our Knowledge Matters Campaign visitors about the confidence and mathematical “risk-taking” we’re now seeing in our classrooms, as a result of our implementation of Bridges. The instructional leadership demonstrated by Charlie Webb, our coaches, our external partners, and most of all our teachers has been what has made this possible.

Gina Robinson is director of early learning for Appoquinimink School District in Middletown, Delaware.

Rebecca Feathers is director of elementary curriculum for Appoquinimink School District.

As a professor, nurse, mom and policymaker, access to efficient, effective and equitable early childhood education is and has been an ongoing top priority of mine. Having a holistic and seamless birth-to-5 system for all children in all zip codes is paramount to our attaining actionable results and long-term, well-being and economic health for communities.

In Delaware, we recognized that we needed to consolidate early childhood programs that were fragmented across multiple divisions of the state. This fragmentation caused confusion for parents and providers. Research supports that an easy-to-navigate and streamlined early childhood education system is more efficient and impactful for children, families and early learning professionals.

We knew the current system could be strengthened, so beginning in 2019, the Administration undertook efforts to consolidate Delaware’s early childhood education system. We first moved the Office of Child Care Licensing to the Department of Education to join the Office of Early Learning. We then created an Associate Secretary role to have a singular leader over this work. We are now working on the movement of Part C from our Department of Health and Social Services over to DOE, to continue to streamline early childhood governance and services. We are excited about this continued work.

2. In 2021, you became chair of the Delaware Office of Early Learning Advisory Committee which supports the Delaware Department of Education’s newly formed Early Childhood Support Team. In what ways does the advisory committee aim to support and improve early educational efforts?

I am honored to be the chair of the Advisory Committee, which aims to support the recently formed Early Childhood Support Team. This team includes both the Office of Early Learning (OEL) and the Office of Childcare Licensing (OCCL), which relocated to the Department of Education from a different state agency. Under the helpful guidance of the Hunt Institute, the committee brings together a variety of perspectives, including state lawmakers, agency leaders, early childhood professionals, and business and community representatives. We have heard from national leaders, explored best practices and provided the department with feedback on goals.

Ultimately, we hope that by bringing the oversight of these programs together we can not only achieve greater efficiency and alignment, but also create strong support systems for Delaware’s young children, families and educators. The first 1,825 days of a child’s brain health and development are critical. Eliminating unnecessary barriers and creating a more navigable system will help ensure that we don’t lose a single one of those days.

3. Delaware recently announced a significant investment of over $120 million in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) relief funds to support Delaware’s child care industry. How do you envision this investment supporting Delaware’s child care workforce?

Over the past two years, it became clear to our administration that Delaware’s child care providers needed greater support, as they have stepped up and supplied the essential care and services so many families and frontline workers desperately needed throughout the pandemic.

As we recognized the critical role the childcare workforce has played in sustaining Delaware’s economy, I am delighted with our recent decision to allocate over $120 million ARPA dollars to strengthen the childcare industry. This great investment will go towards Child Care Stabilization grants and direct financial relief to Delaware’s child care workers who rightly deserve our support. These relief funds will not only help our providers keep their doors open but will help pay and retain the child care workforce while increasing resources available to Delaware’s children and families.

We know that children need stable, reliable care, and by prioritizing our workforce, we are in turn ensuring parents can participate in the workforce and that children have access to the high-quality early learning experiences they need. I am grateful that we can assist not only our current workforce but also drive great changes in our early childhood system for years to come. It is my hope that these professionals feel respected and know that as leaders in Delaware, we appreciate their hard work and care about their well-being.

4. Additionally, your administration just supported the creation and launch of the Early Childhood Innovation Center, to be housed at Delaware State University. How will this support and expand equitable pathways to the early childhood profession?

We are excited to support new initiatives that will bolster Delaware’s childcare industry. Delaware State University, in partnership with the state Department of Education and Department of Health and Social Services, will work together over the next five years to establish the Early Childhood Innovation Center (ECIC). This center will offer a substantial boost to Delaware’s current and future child care workforce. The goal of ECIE is to develop a statewide infrastructure to help Delawareans enter the child care workforce through unique pathways and provide professional credentials and career advancement opportunities.

The ECIC also plans to create a scholarship program to support those that are interested in accessing early childhood degree programs and furthering their education. With the creation of the center, we are working to ensure more teachers are equipped with the tools needed to effectively serve Delaware’s young children and prepare them with the skills needed to be successful in kindergarten and beyond.

5. As you often mention, the first five years of life are critical to a child’s development and a good education is one of the central pillars for a stronger Delaware. What is your greatest hope for Delaware’s youngest children in the coming years?

As a mother, nursing professor and policymaker, I am proud of our state’s commitment to supporting the well-being of our children and families. With our continued focus on strengthening the early care and education system, it is my greatest hope that all young Delawareans have access to the services and resources they need to have a solid educational foundation.

Equitable investments in our state’s educational and health systems today will ensure that all children and families in the future are successful across their lifespan. In collaboration with the Hunt Institute administration, task force members and grassroots leaders, we are dedicated to creating a stronger and healthier Delaware.

Note: The photo above was taken before the pandemic.

Could student-run vertical farms — hyper-efficient, clean facilities where produce grows up on racks, instead of out across fields — help stabilize small cities in northwest Tennessee?

Could apprenticeships with local chefs keep disaffected Delaware teens in high school and reopen the state’s restaurants, the source of one-tenth of its jobs?

What if a paycheck earned during high school, and the promise of a better one after attaining a credential in a field where good jobs are going begging, motivates a young person who left school during COVID-19 to come back?

With tectonic shifts in the U.S. labor market, a K-12 establishment desperate to re-engage disaffected students and a proven record of pre-pandemic success stories, career and technical education is having a moment.

Bloomberg Philanthropies has announced $25 million in new grants in two states and nine cities — the latest in a series of initiatives by private donors and state and civic leaders — to boost promising career-pathway programs at a time when they are educational inequities widened by COVID.

With the aim of maximizing the impact of their donations, a number of other philanthropies are collaborating with Bloomberg. Last week, the Walton Family Foundation to nonprofits engaged in career development efforts, including a competitive grant program, the Catalyze Challenge, co-sponsored by the nonprofit American Student Assistance and the Charter School Growth Fund. Other Walton grantees include the think tank New America’s which, among other things, uses data to identify promising initiatives, and , which aims to increase employer participation in career preparation.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, JP Morgan Chase, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Charles Koch Institute and Walmart.org have also recently announced new or increased financial support for CTE. Building on research funded by Bloomberg, the education leadership incubator Chiefs for Change has issued recommendations for states and school districts that want to create programs or boost the effectiveness of existing ones.

Delaware, Texas and Tennessee are among states that have tapped their federal stimulus funds to make job training a bigger part of their pandemic recovery efforts.

The idea is to expand next-generation workforce training programs, which initial research suggests spur greater numbers of students to pursue more challenging academic courses and to stick with them until graduation. Among other things, adding philanthropic dollars and federal pandemic recovery money to existing funding will allow schools to extend such offerings to middle schoolers.

“These kinds of programs obviously are about supporting young people in paths to good jobs and careers, but they also have the dual benefit of stronger engagement and persistence and success in school,” says Jade Grieve, who manages career and technical education programs at Bloomberg Philanthropies. “This is a real opportunity for these programs to re-engage young people in their education in a meaningful way, as well as getting postsecondary credentials.”

Missing students + unfilled jobs = economic warning signs

Throughout the pandemic, millions of children . Large numbers of high school students went to work to help support families reeling from the pandemic-induced recession, as their parents’ low-paying jobs disappeared. Others stayed home to supervise younger siblings or simply stopped attending, remotely or in person. Even after schools started to reopen, absenteeism surged.

At the same time, well-paid white-collar employees were able to work from home, and their children shifted to online classes. Those jobs have largely survived the pandemic, but many of the low-skilled positions have not come back. Currently, according to Bureau of Labor statistics supplied by Walton, the U.S. has 10.4 million unfilled jobs, and more than 8.4 million unemployed Americans . 

In August, The 74 published a series of stories examining the ways in which COVID exacerbated economic and educational inequities, accelerating trends that have widened the chasm between the haves and have-nots in five communities. 

Overall, school systems have a lackluster history of adapting to job market trends and training students for skilled careers that pay a living wage but don’t require a college degree. But one story in the series looked at how school system leaders and workforce development officials teamed up in Reno, Nevada, after the Great Recession of 2008 to make K-12 schools the centerpiece of a plan to create a more sustainable regional economy. That effort has been credited with minimizing the devastating effects of the COVID-19 recession on Reno’s economy and its people.

Reno’s initiative is a marked contrast from traditional so-called vo-tech programs that tracked students into classes with little advanced academic content. And in the decade since it began, CTE programs nationwide have begun shifting toward preparing students for both college and careers.

In 2018, Congress overhauled the Carl D. Perkins Act, which steers career-technical education in the United States. The new law included several — if not, advocates say, enough money to adequately fund cutting-edge programs. 

States that now receive a share of federal workforce preparation funding must show their CTE students receive the same academic rigor as their peers and succeed at the same rates. And the emphasis is far more focused on math, science, engineering, technology, critical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration and entrepreneurship.

Perkins also prods states to make sure CTE programs line up with employers’ needs, so students are trained for careers that are both in demand and bolster their community’s economy. And because exposure to workplaces often changes students’ notions of what field they want to pursue, schools are now encouraged to begin offering career education in middle school. 

Changes to Perkins were beginning to take place when COVID-19 forced schools nationwide to close. Last spring, when Congress approved $123 billion in a third wave of school pandemic recovery funding, there was no requirement that states direct any of the funds targeted to making up lost learning to workforce preparation programs.

“But we were pleasantly surprised to see that many do,” says Kimberly Green, executive director of Advance CTE, a membership organization made up of state career-education leaders. “We know the relevancy of career-technical education, especially at a moment when so many learners aren’t sure of the relevance of school.”

Beyond the tangible benefit of a paycheck, job training programs engage students in a number of ways, she says. Some find their new workplaces more interesting than school. Particularly in high school, students working toward career certificates in certain industries often take a sequence of classes with the same instructor for two years, so “a mentor-mentee relationship gets established,” says Green. “We see boundaries between school and home start to erode.”

Evidence of job-training programs’ effectiveness — not least because they encompass so many disparate models — but that students enrolled in programs that use best practices score as well as their peers on academic assessments, graduate at rates that are similar or better and in many instances obtain more higher education. Early research finds that career and technical education on student engagement.

Urban agriculture, futuristic farming and building an airplane

One state that had started transforming its career and technical education system pre-pandemic is Delaware, which began working with Bloomberg in 2017. In the three years before COVID’s shutdowns, the state was able to enroll half of high school students statewide in workforce programs. In October, Gov. John Carney announced — half federal recovery funds and half private donations — to expand this to 80 percent of high schoolers and half of middle school students.

Like other states incorporating career and technical education into their school recovery plans, Delaware is looking not just at the jobs lost in the pandemic, but at the skills its workforce will need to sustain health care, information technology, chemical manufacturing, tourism and other industries expected to grow in coming years, says Paul Herdman, president and CEO of the Rodel Foundation, which in the state.

Delaware is heavily reliant on tourism, making a desperate shortage of culinary workers especially problematic. Ninety-eight percent of the state’s restaurants have been unable to find enough staff, leaving some 5,000 jobs open. Among the initiatives to train students for unfilled positions are apprenticeships with chefs.

In addition to training people for the jobs officials believe will grow, Delaware’s large-scale effort presents an opportunity to chip away at longstanding inequities in the labor market. Programs now on the table, for example, are geared toward people who were formerly incarcerated and neuro-divergent workers, such as individuals with autism.

Last month, Chiefs for Change released two reports designed to help states and school systems that want to expand career-technical education in their postpandemic plans. The group singled out efforts in New Orleans, the San Antonio Independent School District and Tennessee as examples of how others might expand job training programs.

Tennessee Commissioner of Education Penny Schwinn says the combination of Perkins’ expansion to middle schools and the arrival of federal stimulus funds touched off an explosion of interest. Last spring, when the state Department of Education announced it had new funds available, Schwinn’s office was inundated with applications. Sixty middle schools and 62 high schools sought grants to establish career-prep programs, up from an average of 10 applications a year from high schools. The state was able to fund all of the lower-grades programs and half of the secondary ones.

As in Delaware, the combination of the pandemic’s devastating economic impact and new resources to address it has changed Tennessee’s approach. In handing out its funds, the state is accounting both for the industries it hopes to attract and other issues tied to prosperity, such as stabilizing inner cities and underpopulated rural areas. Among other career areas, state leaders are betting on futuristic farming, using artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge technologies to make both urban and rural agriculture — industries with shrinking workforces — ecologically and economically sustainable. 

For example, using drones to help survey and tend fields can reduce the need for manpower — but agricultural workers will have to know how to operate and maintain the technology. So-called vertical farms, where produce is grown on racks, uses 90 percent less land than conventional agriculture and up to 95 percent less water, making them much more environmentally sound. Highly mechanized according to precise specifications, however, their farmers often rely on artificial intelligence to tend to their produce, requiring workers with robotics and other technology skills.

Other job-based programs recently approved by Schwinn’s office include a forestry program that will transport rural students who otherwise would have little access to specialized career training to a single site in the state’s heavily wooded southwest region, and a high school where aviation students will build — and fly — an airplane.

In the 2017-18 school year, some 7,500 students participated in work-based learning in Tennessee. Two years later, the number had mushroomed to more than 33,000. Schwinn’s goal is for half the state’s middle schools to become designated STEM centers, with science, technology, engineering and math courses that set students up for a career concentration in high school.

“What the last two years has revealed starkly, and I think everyone understands this, is the need to create more opportunities for young people to be connected to good jobs and careers,” says Bloomberg’s Grieve.

Disclosure: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York provide financial support to . The Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to  and the Charter School Growth Fund. 

Lead Art: Getty Images

From the very beginning of the pandemic, the economy responded to COVID-19 in a way that defied conventional wisdom. Many markers typically used to predict how severe a recession will be, and how to confront it, were completely out of whack.

Unemployment immediately shot up to levels far higher than those seen in the worst of the Great Recession of 2008. Small businesses closed at a precipitous rate, with little certainty about whether they would reopen. Many low-income workers were laid off, while others, forced to keep reporting to work despite spiking rates of viral transmission, lost child care as schools shuttered. But at the same time, stock portfolios swelled and affluent consumers flooded delivery services with orders for luxury goods to make homes that now doubled as offices ever more comfortable. For the well-off, the recession was over within weeks — if it was even felt at all.

Even small changes in the way money circulates within a city or neighborhood ripple through the local economy. This one was a shockwave. Wealthy Americans ordered fancy meal kits online and signed up for wine tastings on Zoom rather than spending at the neighborhood restaurants, nail salons, yoga studios and dry cleaners that had kept their less affluent neighbors employed.

John Friedman and Raj Chetty realized they were seeing something unusual. Co-founders of , a team at Harvard University that researches education’s potential to lift children out of poverty, they feared the pandemic had worsened already long odds.

The economists took the unprecedented step of asking credit card companies, payroll processors and other businesses that track money as it moves through the economy in real time to turn over what are essentially trade secrets. Using that information, the researchers built a nationwide online pandemic tracker capable of providing a down-to-the-day snapshot of who is spending and who is struggling, by income level, city, state and county and, in some instances, by zip code.

The data quickly revealed stunning implications on virtually every front.

In place of a typical recession’s V shape, in which people across the socioeconomic spectrum experience both the downturn and the subsequent recovery together, the economists saw a K. Affluent Americans at the top of the K bounced back right away — much more quickly than in a typical recession. Low-income families on the bottom, by contrast, were disproportionately impacted: more likely to be unemployed, quarantined in overcrowded multi-generational housing and experiencing higher rates of infection and death.

The inequities on display were not new, but for many people, the awareness of how profound and widespread they are is. Over the last year and a half, prosperous Americans who can afford iPads, reliable internet and tutors have woken up to headlines showing children forced to log into virtual classes from parking lots — or wherever they could find a Wi-Fi signal — skipping school to work at their own jobs and isolated, alone in COVID’s mental health crisis.

The Opportunity Insights tracker contains one academic dataset: student participation and progress on the math app Zearn, which one-fourth of the nation’s K-5 students have access to. Immediately after schools closed, use of the app among low-income students “completely dropped off,” notes Zearn CEO Shalinee Sharma. As they started logging on again, a yawning gap became apparent. A year into the pandemic, these students’ progress was behind where it should have been, while their wealthier peers were ahead 28 percent.

Because it is widely understood that economic disadvantages show up in schools, The 74 saw an opportunity in Friedman and Chetty’s work. Could their data predict long-lasting effects in the classroom years after COVID-19 has passed? And were there clues as to how educators could address them?

Just as Friedman’s and Chetty’s research holds key insights as to how policymakers could target relief, we knew their economic recovery tracker offered valuable information as schools seek to help the most disadvantaged children recover.

“We already had this deep inequality in American education. And the pandemic has just made it so much worse,” Friedman, a professor of economics at Brown University and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, noted in an interview with The 74. “The pandemic has taken children and set them even further back. Without some really dedicated effort to get these students caught up, what we’ve seen from broader data is that the types of educational gaps that arise in childhood can persist, they create lower college enrollment rates, lower college graduation rates, students earn less when they get out in the labor market. These things can have really large effects down the line.”

Using Opportunity Insights’ data as a starting point, “COVID’s K-Shaped Recession and the Looming Classroom Crisis” is a series of stories probing how the pandemic’s impact on income inequality has shown up in schools in five communities — Delaware; Washington, D.C.; Austin, Texas; Reno, Nevada; and Colorado Springs. Each demonstrates a different aspect of how the K-shaped recession has played out in neighborhoods and schools; and several offer hints as to how educators and policymakers can help students recover lost learning and regain the opportunity to secure a prosperous future.

This article is part of a series examining COVID’s K-shaped recession and what it means for America’s schools. Read the full series here.

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative provide financial support to Opportunity Insights and The 74.

Affluent people were affected, certainly, but not nearly as much as their impoverished neighbors, who felt COVID’s disproportionate impact on multiple fronts: losing jobs and child care, missing meals and lacking even the most basic technology necessary for their kids to participate in distance learning, as nearly half of the state’s school districts kept classrooms closed. 

Coincidentally, the news on Oct. 12 also brought word of a settlement in a lawsuit addressing another longstanding disparity: a Jim Crow-era school funding system that sends dramatically fewer resources to impoverished schools than to wealthy ones. While the nexus between COVID-19 and the lawsuit might not at first be obvious, the agreement in Delawareans for Educational Opportunity v. Carney was celebrated as a first small step toward interrupting the intergenerational cycle of poverty — necessary to a full pandemic recovery.

Because the state’s system for distributing money to schools was created at a time when segregation was enshrined in its constitution, separate but equal — rather than a quality education for disadvantaged children — was the goal. Because of this, and in marked contrast to other states, Delaware schools do not receive any funding to compensate for the costs of meeting the needs of low-income students, those learning English or the youngest children with disabilities. 

Indeed, Delaware is one of a handful of states that reimburse school districts for the cost of their teacher corps, rather than the demographics of their students. Under this system, the districts with the best-paid educators receive more money than those that offer lower salaries, which, as a consequence, end up with novices and teachers whom affluent schools don’t want to hire. 

Pre-pandemic, there wasn’t much debate about the system’s unfairness, or much urgency among state lawmakers to undertake the wholesale overhaul educators have called for since the last recession.

“The equity challenges in our funding system have roots that run deep, so they’ve been challenging to uproot, so to speak,” says Paul Herdman, CEO of Rodel, a nonprofit that has worked on the issue for more than 15 years. “The cold reality is that it’s a relic from the 1940s. It wasn’t built for the group of students we have today. Equity and addressing the unique needs of students simply was not built into the system back then because that was not its charge.”

But COVID heightened the public’s understanding of both the human and the economic costs of the educational inequities. With disadvantaged students and children of color trailing their affluent, mostly white peers, the state’s future prosperity was already imperiled. The pandemic-driven shutdowns of schools and businesses only widened these gaps — and made them visible to more people.

Over the last 16 months, with schools toggling in and out of in-person classes, some students — mostly the children of affluent parents with the time and money to supplement lackluster remote schooling — were freed to learn at an accelerated pace. But many more will return to classrooms having missed foundational lessons, unable to catch up without carefully crafted interventions and support for recovering from COVID’s traumas. The historically wide achievement gap, in short, will be much harder to bridge.

When COVID forced schools to close, affluent Delawareans, like wealthy Americans elsewhere, were confronted with headline after headline about their less privileged neighbors. Parents who shop at the Apple store woke up to the number of children who have no access to the internet. White-collar workers oversaw distance learning in big houses chosen for their proximity to good schools, while children in poor and working-class neighborhoods struggled to find a place to log on. 

Never had inequity — and the relationship among wealth, education and opportunity — been so starkly on display. And never had it been harder to ignore the correlation between race and poverty. The question was whether now would be the moment for Delaware to do something about it.

A reckoning to address the historical disparities is long overdue, says Rep. Nnamdi Chukwuocha, a Wilmington-area Democratic lawmaker and social worker. Without it, recovery from the pandemic will be impossible. “We will hide the true impacts of COVID. It’ll be this blanket approach. It will never be the process of determining what our students need,” he says. “There has always been a way to hide.” 

A K, versus a V

Normally, when economists analyze shifts in employment, consumer spending and other indicators of a community’s financial well-being, they have to wait for state and federal bureaucracies to produce reams of statistics. But as COVID-19 first swept across the country, Opportunity Insights, a team at Harvard University, acquired a number of datasets, some of them from private companies that typically guard their internal financial information.

Using records of individual credit card transactions, payroll processing records, cell phone GPS movements and other information — essentially, trade secrets — they built a nationwide online pandemic tracker capable of providing a down-to-the-day snapshot of who is spending and who is struggling, by income level, city, state and county and, in some instances, by zip code. What they found was stunning.

In a typical recession, Friedman told The 74, economists generally see a V shape: Everyone’s fortunes take a fall, then everyone rebounds together. This time, the Opportunity Insights team saw a K. Money is flowing, but not the way it used to, and this shift in spending sent shock waves through low-income neighborhoods. Instead of buying high-end restaurant meals, for example, affluent people signed up for wine tastings on Zoom. There were waiting lists for home treadmill deliveries, while gyms hemorrhaged members.

WATCH: Beth Hawkins details her latest investigation into COVID’s K-shaped recession and how the fallout will challenge America’s schools

On Oct. 12, in New Castle County, where Wilmington is located, employment among residents earning $27,000 or less a year was down 17 percent — most of the decrease a result of higher-income residents not spending at the businesses that employed their lower-income neighbors. Revenue was down 54 percent statewide at eateries, brew pubs and nail salons. Yet employment was up a percent among higher-income New Castle residents. In New Castle County, small-business revenue overall was down 29 percent, but consumer spending had fallen only 1 percent.

(Friedman and Chetty update the tracker as the underlying information changes. The data in this story was downloaded June 29, 2021.)

The Opportunity Insights tracker contains one academic dataset: student participation and progress on the math app Zearn, which one-fourth of the nation’s K-5 students have access to. Immediately after schools closed, use of the app among low-income students “completely dropped off,” notes Zearn CEO Shalinee Sharma. As they started logging on again, a yawning gap became apparent. A year into the pandemic, these students’ progress was behind where it should have been, while their wealthier peers were ahead 28 percent.   

New research . and the nonprofit assessment concern found wide disparities between white/affluent students and their low-income peers/children of color. Depending on grade and subject, low-income students ended the 2020-21 school year with up to seven months of unfinished learning.

A slew of studies by economists and education scholars have established how poverty, instability and school closures affect children’s chances of academic success, research that has allowed educators and policymakers to project what setbacks schools should be prepared to address.   

According to state data from 2017, of students in grades 3 through 5, 64 percent of low-income children, 85 percent of English learners and 86 percent of students with disabilities could not read at grade level. Broken down by race, the same data showed yawning disparities between white and Asian students and Black, Latino and Native American children.

“This current system is rooted in failure. It is rooted in racism.” —Rep. Nnamdi Chukwuocha

Disadvantaged students are likely to start the new academic year even further behind. In Delaware, they will show up at schools that since 1940 — despite Brown vs. Board of Education, despite passage of the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act and despite a large influx of Spanish-speaking immigrants into the state — have had virtually no money to meet their needs.  

This, many economists and education policymakers agree, is where the inequitable fissures in any community’s economy — and, by extension, its rates of college graduation, employment and earnings, home ownership and even health — begin to open. Left unaddressed, these cracks become chasms, denying opportunity to successive generations.  

“What COVID has provided is an opportunity to really see how glaring the disparities are,” says Chukwuocha. “We just don’t get to the point in our state of saying, ‘We’re going to buckle down and fix this.’”

‘Rooted in failure … and racism’

It was 1950, and Sarah Bulah was fed up. Every day, a bus passed her house, transporting white children to a whites-only school nearby. But Bulah was forced to drive her daughter to the nearest school for Blacks, Hockessin Colored School #107, two miles away. She wrote to the governor of Delaware asking for a school bus to take her 6-year-old, Shirley, to class.

After Gov. Elbert Carvel rejected the request, Bulah turned to Louis Redding, the first Black lawyer admitted to the Delaware bar. 

“He said he wouldn’t help me get a Jim Crow bus to take my girl to any Jim Crow school, but if I was interested in sending her to an integrated school, why, then maybe he’d help,” Bulah would later tell historians. “Well, I thanked God right then and there.” 

Help Redding did, laying the groundwork for a case that, consolidated with four other suits that eventually became Brown vs. Board of Education, led the U.S. Supreme Court to outlaw segregation in schools. Indeed, two of the cases in Brown vs. Board of Education involved segregated schools in or near Wilmington.

There are two things particular to Delaware that are important to understand. One is that, wedged against the Mason-Dixon line, it was a slave-holding state, yet loyal to the Union. Because it did not secede, President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation to slaves in Delaware, who were freed in 1865 — more than two years later, at the end of the Civil War. The state would not ratify the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, outlawing slavery, until 1901.

The other is a holdover from Delaware’s early status as a British colony. Redding pressed Bulah’s case in the state’s Court of Chancery, which, unlike a conventional court, is a place where people may challenge injustices or push for needed laws or policies. A place, its English boosters said, to address “that which ought to be done.”

The Court of Chancery sided with Bulah and Redding, giving the high court a roadmap for deciding Brown — if not for ensuring that states and localities would comply with either the spirit or the letter.

For 25 years after the landmark decision, Delawareans endured their own version of the painful back-and-forth plaguing school systems throughout the United States as courts issued desegregation orders. White families decamped to suburbs and urban districts were consolidated, sparking fresh lawsuits. Busing battles were joined. 

In 1981, the state created four school districts in New Castle County, with the intent of making sure each had a mix of students from Wilmington, where Black households were concentrated, and surrounding suburbs. In 1995, the court declared those districts — Red Clay, Brandywine, Colonial and Christina — integrated. 

But in ensuring a relatively equal racial balance in each of the new school districts, the state ended up effectively gerrymandering families of color into smaller voting jurisdictions where, divided politically, they were minorities. Their children were more likely to attend schools with white pupils, but Black and brown parents lacked the political clout to hold education officials accountable for delivering results for their kids. 

Soon after court supervision ended, schools in the new districts resegregated. By 2015, just six of the 24 schools located within Wilmington city limits had a reading proficiency rate equal to or above the state average of 52 percent. Citywide, just 46 percent of students read at grade level. In math, the city proficiency rate was 35 percent.

“This current system is rooted in failure,” says Chukwuocha. “It is rooted in racism.” 

An inequitable Catch-22

Photographs of Shirley Bulah riding a bus to her new school were said to depict a watershed moment. But the vestiges of Jim Crow remain alive and well in the state’s education funding system. 

Most states weight funding according to student need, with a base per-pupil amount supplemented by additional dollars sent to schools and districts depending on the demographics they serve. A mountain of research has shown that disadvantaged children need more resources to flourish in school.

In recent decades, many states have made efforts to direct more of their dollars to the classrooms with the greatest need. With small exceptions, Delaware to offset the costs of educating children in poverty, those learning English or the youngest children with disabilities. 

On top of this, it is one of nine states that fund districts not according to enrollment or student needs, but based on the number of teachers they employ and those teachers’ salaries. Under this system, a certain number of students adds up to a unit; the number of units determines how many teachers a school can have, as well as some operating costs, such as utilities and facilities. 

On a given day each fall, typically Sept. 30, schools count their students and report enrollment to the state. Officials use this information to tally . For example, in grades K-3, 16.2 students add up to a unit. In higher grades, the number of students constituting a unit is larger. 

Depending on the intensity of their needs, a small number of students in special education starting in grade 3 can constitute a unit. Younger children with disabilities are not counted separately from their classmates in general education, and so do not receive extra resources.    

Once the requisite number of units has been established, districts report their teachers’ seniority levels, degrees and other credentials to the state, which in turn pays the school system according to a salary schedule that reflects each teacher’s seniority and level of education. A district or school is free to pay its teachers more than this amount. 

This creates an inequitable Catch-22: Schools that have more money can hire more expensive teachers, which in turn results in more funding. Schools that pay educators less are typically those that can’t raise local taxes to boost salaries, and thus are locked out of higher state funding.

An additional problem with the formula is that it leaves just 8 percent of state funding for a school’s or district’s discretionary needs. Again, as a result of their small local tax bases, the poorest school systems can’t raise money to fund expenses not in the state formula.

Because of the unusual way payments to schools are calculated, the amount districts spend per pupil is all over the map. Among Wilmington-area districts in 2017, Christina had the highest poverty rate, at 41 percent, but received the least funding, at $16,574. Brandywine, where 29 percent of students are low-income, had the smallest poverty rate and the second-highest revenue, at $18,299 per pupil.

The funding system contains one more confounding element. Though the cost of operating schools has risen steadily between inflation and deepening unmet needs, Delaware law requires districts to base local tax rates on decades-old property values. School levies in Sussex County — the southernmost swath of the state, home to a mix of poultry processors and coastal vacation homes — are based on 1974 property values. Values in northernmost, urban New Castle are fixed at 1983 assessments; in Kent County, home to Dover, the state capital, at 1987 levels. 

COVID, says Chukwuocha, makes reforming the system’s structural inequities more urgent than ever. In the schools with few resources and intense needs, students often were already disengaged. Bringing them back will be an intense, multi-step process. 

“When you look at the impact of the last year, it’s devastating,” he says. “When the pandemic started, we had all these contact tracers. We need something like that — social workers and others to go out into the community and find our kids and understand their needs.”

‘This is our opportunity to fix it’

In 2007, following years of declining enrollment, school closures and poor academic results in Wilmington-area schools, lawmakers appointed a task force to consider potential solutions. Chief among its recommendations were an overhaul of the funding system and consolidation of the four districts created in 1981. 

Over the next decade, some 30 civic, education and nonprofit organizations signed on as members of the coalition Education Equity Delaware, as well as several other campaigns. Adding to the chorus of voices were members of the business community who saw a need for high school graduates with the skills to work in health care, technology and other growing sectors of the economy. 

There was bipartisan agreement that change was needed — yet it didn’t happen. Bills to change the system failed to gain support among lawmakers representing suburban Wilmington districts, who like the predictability of the unit-based system, and those representing the southern parts of the state, who felt the shift would direct a disproportionate amount of money to urban schools.   

And so, in 2018, 70 years after Bulah’s case was heard, the state’s NAACP and Delawareans for Educational Opportunity, a nonprofit made up of parents of disadvantaged students, sued the state and its three counties in the same Court of Chancery where Brown began.

“Delaware fails to provide all low-income children, children with disabilities and children whose first language is not English (collectively, ‘Disadvantaged Students’) with a meaningful opportunity to obtain an adequate education, one that will enable to them to participate as active citizens in a democracy, to be employed in a modern economy and to enjoy the benefits of our country’s social and cultural life,” the lawsuit asserted. 

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The settlement announced Oct. 12 was widely celebrated as a good first step, but one that doesn’t address the structural problems. In 2019, Democratic Gov. John Carney asked lawmakers to approve a new financing mechanism called opportunity funding — extra money for disadvantaged children. Under the terms of the settlement, the size of this pot will more than double, reaching $60 million by 2025.

Totaling an extra $300 per low-income student and $500 for each English learner, the money is welcome even though it is just 4 percent of the state’s education budget. But it’s no substitute for overhauling the way schools are financed, educators and advocates say. 

A few days after members of the General Assembly approved the boost in opportunity funding, two dozen lawmakers, from both parties and both chambers, signed authored by Chukwuocha committing to taking up a comprehensive funding reform.

“WHEREAS, the COVID pandemic has exacerbated existing educational gaps and brought new attention to the need for racial justice in schools, beginning with, but not limited to, how schools are funded,” it states. 

“WHEREAS, there is a need to build upon the urgency of this moment. The confluence of the COVID pandemic and the movement toward racial justice require that we define a path forward for future generations that raises and allocates funding for schools in ways that are more flexible, transparent, equitable [and] based on the needs of students.”  

Chukwuocha is optimistic that this time, there will be a greater willingness to tackle the longstanding issues. In addition to the heightened awareness created by the pandemic, the lack of substantial funding for students learning English is a mounting problem for schools in Kent and Sussex counties, where the Latino population is growing rapidly. 

“I truly believe that the more work we put into it, the more we speak to lawmakers in other parts of the state, the more they see the need,” he says. “They had no idea what was really at play.” 

A return to the status quo, Chukwuocha concludes, would be a mistake:  “We have to have a new foundation. This is our opportunity to fix it. With that, Delaware will truly be what we say it is.”  

This article is part of a series examining COVID’s K-shaped recession and what it means for America’s schools. Read the full series here.

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative provide financial support to Opportunity Insights and The 74.

Claymont Elementary School was constructed in 1969 as a high school. It played a pivotal role in our nation’s fight to create fair and equitable schools for all students, being one of two northern Delaware schools named in the landmark Brown v. The Board of Education court order that declared school segregation unconstitutional.

Today, Claymont is a diverse, 800-student K-5 school serving a predominately low-income population. We house Spanish Immersion, the Brandywine Specialized Autism Program, and a gifted and talented program for grades four through eight, in addition to serving a large multilingual learner population.

Claymont’s journey of transformation through the implementation of high-quality instructional materials occurred just as we were being identified by the Delaware Department of Education as an underperforming school. In 2015, just 41 percent of our students were proficient in English Language Arts and only 39 percent were proficient in math. Based on these scores, we became a state “Focus School,” which required developing a plan together with the state for academic improvement.

Claymont was fortunate that, as this was going on in the background, our district office introduced as our response to intervention curriculum for reading. Using Bookworms, we were able to see our students who receive small-group and intensive interventions make progress much more quickly than they had in the past. We attribute this to the systematic focus on foundational skills contained in the program.

“By targeting decoding skills, we can get to fluency much faster,” says Kristen Cook, Brandywine School District’s reading specialist.

We had heard about Seaford’s success using Bookworms with all students in the class. We visited several other districts and asked our teachers to pilot the materials for one week — and everyone became excited to move forward with the curriculum. Rather than implementing at certain grade levels with certain teachers, we chose to dive all-in and bring the curriculum on across the board. We knew there would be growing pains, and we wanted to go through those together as a team. Everyone knew a change was needed — and everyone wanted to be part of the solution.

Our first priority was to map out our professional development plan, and it was extensive. We received support from our district office and coaches at the University of Delaware. We targeted professional development for specific grade levels and specific content. We differentiated our faculty meetings to address areas of concern revealed by the data, which was gathered both from walkthroughs and benchmark assessments. Coaches supported individual teacher needs. And for educators to share resources and strategies that were working, we devoted staff meeting time and made it the crux of our professional learning communities, in which our teachers regularly gather in small groups to collaborate and learn from each other.

What we’ve learned is that despite Bookworms being a relatively structured (some even say “scripted”) curriculum, it actually provides a framework that enables teachers to deliver powerful, student-centered instruction in their classrooms. One structure, for example, is a focus on a high volume of reading for all students. This is supported by a curated library of 275 whole-length, content-rich texts that students read and study across their K-5 experience. What is not to like about scripting that looks like that? What I find interesting is that our teachers don’t “feel the script.” Instead, they talk about how kids love the books.

“One of the parts that I love is hearing kids walking around talking about books,” fifth-grade teacher Brian Horne told us. “I have been teaching for over 20 years and I never remember [that].”

And it’s not just the students. Kindergarten teacher Meredith Allen said that she, herself, gets excited by every book she reads with her students. It might sound to some ears like an oxymoron: that a very structured curriculum is actually driving a much greater love of reading. But that’s our truth.

Just one year later during the 2018 and 2019 school year, based on the Department of Education criteria, Claymont Elementary was identified as an “Exceptional School.” English Language Arts proficiency scores after implementing Bookworms increased over three years to 62 percent from 41 percent. Proficiency scores in math (we adopted around the same time) rose to 60 percent from 39 percent over the same period.

“It’s been an amazing transformation,” fourth-grade teacher Jodi Engleman told our school tour visitors.

Whether with Bookworms or Eureka Math, we attribute our success to the following:

• Implementing the curriculum with full fidelity, monitored via walkthroughs and observations
• Buy-in by staff and teacher commitment to implementing the curriculum, all of which came as a result of staff seeing positive changes early on
• Staff professional development focused on areas of need that are data-driven and teacher-directed
• Coaches and district office staff providing professional development and individual support to staff as needed
• Professional learning community meetings focused on the curriculum including instruction, data, and strengths/weaknesses
• Ensuring we stayed student-focused. From our data to student’s reactions to the curriculum, we wanted to ensure our students were engaged

Change does not happen overnight. The work we do as educators is not easy, but it is necessary. In each student there is greatness, and it is the job of the educator to find it. As we continue this journey, we are excited about the future for our students — and we remain committed to the process of change so that we can help students achieve their greatness.

“If you, as a district leader, are looking at the data and it’s not producing results, change it,” says Lavina Jones-Davis, Brandywine School District’s director of elementary education.

We invite our fellow educators to embrace the change that high-quality curriculum and curriculum-based professional learning can produce. You’ll be glad you did.

Tamara Grimes Stewart is principal of Claymont Elementary School in Wilmington, Delaware.