But rhetoric alone does not produce impact. Progressive intent is not the same as progressive design or progressive results.

After years inside the nation’s largest school system, helping build improvement strategies and working with families who have rarely experienced the benefits of reform, I believe the mayor’s education plan is strong on aspiration but thin in two areas that determine whether equity becomes reality: a clear framework for communities to shape policy and the system’s capacity to move reforms into practice.

Mamdani is right to speak urgently about expanding opportunity and addressing racial disparities in achievement and discipline. But without a design process rooted in Black and brown students’ experiences, and without the operational strength to turn vision into daily action, New York risks repeating a familiar cycle. The city has produced many equity plans – some I’ve helped craft – that were bold on paper but failed to change the lived realities of the children they targeted.

For decades, New York City has produced reforms for communities rather than with them. Mamdani wants to change that. He describes a future where families, students and educators help shape the policies that govern their lives. But valuing co-creation and building the infrastructure for it are two different tasks. That gap is where his plan is most hazy.

His platform does not yet outline a concrete process for shared design. What does engagement beyond listening sessions look like in a system this large? How will students and families, especially those most affected by inequities, help shape solutions, not just identify problems? These questions remain unanswered.

This absence of structure is not hypothetical. In 2019, the city attempted a more collaborative model through the Imagine NYC Schools initiative, a call for students, families and educators to redesign existing schools and imagine new ones. I was deeply involved in its creation and implementation. It demonstrated that meaningful community design is possible.

But Covid-19 and institutional challenges stalled progress, and the city lacked the long-term supports needed to sustain it across crises and leadership transitions. The lesson was clear: Co-design succeeds only with sustained investment, careful scaffolding and continuity that outlasts political cycles.

Mamdani’s plan does not yet include those commitments. It references student voice but does not require schools to establish student design teams with real authority. It encourages family engagement but does not build mechanisms that allow families, particularly Black and brown families historically marginalized, to shape how equity efforts unfold at the school level. Nor does it commit to updating initiatives based on continuous community feedback.

When communities are excluded from design, schools often reproduce the very conditions they aim to change. Interventions miss cultural complexities. Strategies misread disengagement. Metrics track what is convenient instead of what matters. Designing with the community, not for it, creates structured partnership with those who understand inequity from lived experience. Mamdani has named this value, but he has not yet built the durable process to realize it.

The Implementation Gap Leaders Overlook

Even if Mamdani’s plan were perfectly designed, another challenge remains: What happens when bold vision meets operational reality?

Many reforms fail not because they are misguided but because they lack viable implementation. School systems are complex ecosystems; change in one area creates ripple effects everywhere else. Black and brown students — already navigating inconsistent instruction, resource instability and high staff turnover – are the first to feel the consequences when reforms move faster than the system can absorb them.

Mamdani speaks extensively about vision. He rarely addresses capacity.

Who will train more than 1,600 principals and tens of thousands of teachers to implement these shifts? Who will modernize data systems so inequities are tracked accurately? Who will prevent new initiatives from piling onto unfinished ones, creating reform fatigue that destabilizes schools already under pressure?

An equity agenda without an implementation strategy remains aspirational. The cost of weak execution is not symbolic. It appears in teacher turnover (an issue Mamdani has pledged to address), inconsistent instructional quality and widening trust gaps between schools and families. These conditions disproportionately harm Black and Brown students regardless of ideology.

New York needs more than bold leadership. It needs leadership grounded in proximity to the students and families who live with policy consequences. Trust is earned when leaders treat communities as partners and designers rather than recipients of reform.

Mamdani can move in that direction by requiring major reforms to undergo equity audits led by students, families and educators from the communities most affected. He can also invest in developing more Black and Brown school leaders, who are essential to translating policy into the daily rhythms of classrooms.

None of this work is glamorous. It will not generate headline-ready accomplishments in the first hundred days. But it is the only path to lasting change.

The election of a progressive mayor has raised expectations. But New Yorkers should not assume that the right values automatically produce the right outcomes.

If Mamdani wants his legacy to be more than moral clarity, he must pair vision with structure. That might include:

• Establishing permanent, school-based community design councils with real decision-making authority, not just advisory status.
• Piloting major reforms with a small group of schools before scaling citywide, allowing communities to shape implementation in real time.
• Expanding funding for neighborhood-based partnerships with trusted community organizations to anchor reforms beyond political cycles and sustain accountability.

His selection of New York City Public Schools veteran Kamar Samuels as chancellor is a promising step. Samuels brings credibility and lived experience that could help bridge the gap between City Hall and school communities. But even strong leadership must be supported by systems that distribute power, build capacity and institutionalize feedback.

Black and brown students have waited long enough for promises to become practice. In this climate, the city cannot afford to get this wrong again.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon withdrew the department’s appeal in a federal lawsuit that challenged warning schools against efforts to “preference certain racial groups.” 

In April, she asked states to agreeing to the administration’s view of non-discrimination laws or risk losing federal funds. In , Judge Stephanie A. Gallagher, a district judge for the District of Maryland, called both the letter and the certification requirement “substantively improper.” 

“The administration is entitled to express its viewpoints and to promulgate policies aligned with those viewpoints,” she wrote. “But it must do so within the procedural bounds Congress has outlined. And it may not do so at the expense of constitutional rights.”

Other litigation over the letter and the certification is ongoing.

The department’s tough anti-DEI stance drew a broad mix of reactions. Some Republican state education chiefs welcomed the letter, with Ryan Walters, former Oklahoma superintendent, posting a video of himself signing the form. Blue states refused to sign, while at the district level,  the actions largely sparked confusion over whether they could still hold events related to Black History Month or teach about racism. One Georgia school board and then reinstated it when the court blocked the letter.

The lawsuit, led by American Federation of Teachers, is one of four related to the letter or the threat to withhold funds. The National Education Association, 19 Democratic-led states and the NAACP also challenged the department’s actions. But the department didn’t initially fare well in court. On the same day in late April, Gallagher suspended the letter while two other federal judges blocked enforcement of the certification form.

“With the stroke of a pen, the administration tried to take a hatchet to 60 years of civil rights laws that were meant to create educational opportunity for all kids,” AFT President Randi Weingarten said in a statement. “It took a union to stand in the stead of kids and educators who feared retribution from the government.”

The department did not respond to a request for comment, but its decision in the AFT case doesn’t put the issue to rest.

In the NEA case, the judge has not issued a final ruling, but an remains in place.  The department filed a motion to dismiss the NAACP case last summer, but the court has not yet ruled. The , meanwhile, is set for trial in June. 

While the department was unable to pressure schools through a “dear colleague” letter, it has continued to launch civil rights investigations into districts with diversity and equity initiatives, like Black Student Success Plan. 

Even some conservatives criticized the agency’s use of non-binding guidance to implement policy.

“There are good reasons to be concerned about the capricious use of dear colleague letters. Many of us have been warning about the problems for 15 years now, dating back to Obama’s first term,” said Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. “Seeing the administration instead rely on the machinery of the Office for Civil Rights is probably a good thing, as that should ensure that this is less about federal diktats than about investigations into specific complaints.”

Ingersoll, of course, was wrong. 

The car radically reshaped transportation and, ultimately, modern civilization, albeit with physical, psychological and societal costs. Cars make many things easier but also created traffic, pollution, risk of death from accidents, the suburbs and more. 

Today, thinking that artificial intelligence won’t play a significant role in education is like thinking the automobile wouldn’t change transportation. What we must do now is begin to anticipate the costs we might accrue. One such cost is that the adoption and use of AI could look vastly different in schools and communities with high-poverty rates than in those set in more affluent places. Imagine one town with modern roads, accessible driver’s ed and an array of vehicles. Imagine another town where cars drive on a muddy road, making a mess of street and sidewalk alike so that everyone’s day gets a little more difficult. This is the “smart use divide.” 

The work to improve education outcomes for all American children is most often the work to improve education outcomes for those with the fewest opportunities and resources. If AI can in fact live up to its promise to supercharge education and maximize efficiency in operations, it’s reasonable to believe this will first, or even mostly, happen in the schools and communities that have the opportunities and resources to use AI in smart ways.

It’s not the same as asking whether schools in low-income communities are using AI. Right now those schools are likely using some form of educational technology, some teachers may be using ChatGPT or other tools to create lesson plans, and students are absolutely using AI to cheat (because all students, at all income levels, are doing this). 

The Smart Use Divide is especially problematic because it grows in both directions. Poor AI use will lead to less learning for the students we might worry most about — negative student use of AI such as cheating may become more pronounced or go more unchecked, and positive student uses of AI such as high-quality tutors or other personalized learning approaches are less likely to be correctly applied.

When it comes to educators, it is well established that the least-experienced teachers are more likely to end up at the most challenging schools. Those teachers are likely to have less experience or ability to incorporate AI in effective ways. High-poverty districts are also providing on AI. Only 39% of high-poverty districts reported providing teacher training on AI in the fall of 2024, compared to 67% of other districts. 

If this sounds harsh, it’s only because this is the lesson we have learned through previous rounds of technological innovation. High-poverty schools were the last to have good internet connections, then the last to move from broadband to wireless connectivity. In 2024, found that high-poverty schools are significantly more likely not to vet any of their ed tech products and their students are most likely to have “unsafe apps with digital ads…and behavioral ads.” 

Teachers in high-poverty schools already say that ed tech tools are for “supporting practices related to learning new content, and practicing and assessing new skills.” But their counterparts in more affluent schools say these tools are effective for “supporting student collaboration and research.” In other words, affluent students are using tools to augment learning while lower-income peers are using tools to learn the material in the first place. 

Students’ belief in their own abilities also reinforces and furthers this divide. Students with “are more inclined to rely on AI” while students with more confidence in their academic abilities “were more selective in AI reliance.” We should expect this pattern to repeat with AI-fueled technology. Sadly, relying on AI for learning may well result in less learning happening at all. 

Can we minimize the smart use divide? Here are three ideas that can be implemented now. First, all schools should draw a hard line at the use of generative AI in student schoolwork. At the high school level in particular, this may mean more in-class writing, or using for written exams as a number of colleges have done. The advent of new technology is not a sufficient excuse to allow students to abstain from acts of learning, including writing. 

Second, schools should support effective teacher use of AI. Teachers who use AI tools at least weekly are already saving almost six weeks of work time over the course of the year. But more than one-quarter of teachers are only using AI tools once a month or less. Teachers need training and support to discover the time-saving and quality-enhancing benefits of new AI tools, while ensuring that the very human act of providing feedback and delivering great lessons remain human endeavors. 

Finally, even as automobiles were becoming increasingly prevalent, a solid wagon could still transport a farmer and his goods to market. America knows how to effectively educate students with rigorous, engaging coursework. We’ve done so for centuries. Excellent education has never been equitably distributed, however. 

State, district, and school leaders should pay attention to and engage with AI, but primarily focus on student outcomes. Look to high-poverty districts that are showing significant academic growth, like Somerset ISD near San Antonio, Texas. In spring 2025, 68% of Somerset students scored on or above grade level on the , compared to 47% of all Texas students. Find a school or district with similar demographics to yours that is outperforming you, and figure out what’s working for them. Maybe it’s about smart AI use — or maybe it’s a laser focus on instruction or an ongoing commitment to tutoring. At the same time, don’t abandon what works for the seductive appeal of emerging technology. 

Underlying the excitement about AI hovers a quiet implication that these are tools the education sector has been waiting for, that only with these tools will student learning finally reach long-desired heights. But nobody needs AI to make schools work. Indeed, if a school is failing without any AI tools, there’s no evidence to suggest the adoption of those tools will address the reasons causing the school to fail.

The smart use divide will grow if schools allow for poor AI practices to take hold and if schools allow for the thrill of new AI tools to distract from the core work of teaching and learning. Nobody wants to be the last one holding the buggy reins while everyone zooms along at 60 miles-per-hour, but neither will building stoplights without first paving the road get you to your destination any faster. 

When Ohio mother Joy Palmer raised concerns in 2013 her daughter was already falling behind in first grade, she feared it was because of hearing problems caused by chronic ear infections. School officials told her testing revealed no concerns and her daughter was performing well enough – except for her classroom behavior. 

And when Jackie Castillo-Blaber’s daughter was struggling in 2020 with grasping the alphabet and numbers in kindergarten, school officials in her upstate New York district told her many students were behind because of the pandemic and her daughter’s behavior was the biggest issue.

Three different mothers. Three different states. Three different decades.

Yet, the similarities are striking.

The three mothers of color felt dismissed when they raised concerns. When they insisted something was wrong, they were asked if there were issues at home or whether they knew to read to their children after school — which felt like an attack and criticism of their parenting.

“There’s this view that reading struggles are moral failures,” said Castillo, mother of Genevieve, 9, a fourth grader. “There’s just so much bias … when you look at parents and you say, ‘They’re probably not [doing] enough, that’s the reason why [their kid can’t read].’ ”

But in all three cases, the culprit wasn’t a bad parent or child.

It was undiagnosed dyslexia that began to manifest as frustration. For these three girls, acting out was a way to mask fears of falling behind or an inability to keep up academically with their peers – and later became behaviors that subsided once they received intervention.

A growing number of studies in recent years show students of color, , are for mental health issues and like dyslexia. And despite increased dyslexia screening in many states, many students are still not receiving the support they need. 

While dyslexia affects about one in five people and it’s one of the most common causes for reading difficulties in elementary school children, only 10% of kids with dyslexia receive special education services and intervention, according to the . 

It’s worse for Black and brown kids. 

In 2019, one study found that Black eighth graders were to be identified with a learning disability compared to their white peers.

The mislabeling of Black and brown children influences the support and services they get in the classroom, with experts believing there’s a strong correlation between misidentification, disparities in compared to their white peers and . 

Disabled white students, said Jacqueline Rodriguez, chief executive officer at National Center for Learning Disabilities, are often identified with both a learning disability and mental health issues, but the emphasis “is always on the [learning disability].” 

Yet, for Black and brown families “…we see a ton of emotional disabilities, but we don’t see the corresponding [learning disabilities,” Rodriguez said. 

School officials then “spend so much energy trying to quell the emotional response to the inability to read or write,” Rodriguez continued, “that they don’t actually address the academic interventions that would remove those emotional outbursts.”

Researchers point to an overall when it comes to recognizing dyslexia, but a slowing of teacher diversity and implicit bias may also be key elements in misidentifying disabilities for students of color.

A found school psychologists often believe the behavior of a Black or brown child is “willful or purposeful and not related to a disability,” and under-identification could reflect “a bias by education professionals who tend to be more responsive to white parents, or professionals may hold lower expectations of Black students’ academic abilities which may lead them to ignore a possible disability and ‘problem’ behavior.”

Student impact

A found 50% of dyslexic students reported being bullied and 30% said they felt lazy, stupid or less intelligent than their peers. 

Between 2016 and 2020, the number of children diagnosed with depression and anxiety increased by 27% and 29% respectively. Students with learning disabilities, including dyslexia, were at even higher risks, , according to the .

And those numbers are likely even higher for Black and brown youth who go unidentified, said clinical neuropsychologist Karen Wilson.

“When kids don’t understand what they’re reading, and they don’t understand that the reason why they’re struggling is because of a difference in the way their brain is wired, they will form their own narrative,” Wilson said, who is also the psychology department chair at California State University, Dominguez Hills and expert with , a learning disability advocacy nonprofit.

It’s an ongoing reality for Palmer’s 20-year-old daughter, Dey’Leana, who didn’t receive intervention or learn to read until she was 13. 

“I couldn’t get the confidence back that this little girl had, no matter how much I tried to say, ‘Yes, you’re good!” Palmer said. “Even to this day, … she compares herself to her siblings about what she can and cannot do.”

Jackson remembers times when her daughter would hit herself in the head and repeat the words “I’m stupid,” at home. She would pretend she was sick to avoid going to school. She would break her glasses to have an excuse for why she couldn’t read the words on the page.

In class, she wouldn’t sit still. She became the class clown – a coping mechanism so her peers would laugh at her jokes instead of at her when she read, Jackson said. Her behavior became so disruptive that Jackson began to get daily calls from school officials to come get her daughter.

“She was trying to do anything she could to get out of the classroom to avoid reading,” Jackson said. “As a Black mother – a single mother – at that time, it just was a very traumatizing time for both her and I, especially … not knowing there were rules and regulations to special education, not understanding that they should have been addressing dyslexia.”

In Ohio, Palmer’s daughter refused to do school work. She would stare blankly at her teachers, walk out of the classroom or try to put earphones in. 

“You can always teach a child to read, but once the self esteem is broken, it’s so much harder to repair, if ever,” said Resha Conroy, founder and executive director of the .��

Misidentification of a child’s disability can be expressed in several ways, including externally like Jackson’s daughter, or internally like Palmer’s daughter who tried to avoid drawing attention to herself.

“If you don’t address the reading, the behavior tends to become worse,” said Monica McHale-Small, director of education for the . “No matter what color the kid is, if kids are unidentified, misidentified or late identified, you start to see all those behavioral manifestations. … There’s always that phenomenon where a kid would rather be perceived as bad than to be perceived as dumb.”

For many Black and brown children, a broken self-esteem and externalizing behaviors “pushes them into the ,” Jackson added.

“Why do I say pushed? Because the older they get, the more frustrated, the more anxiety, the more [they think] ‘I need to get out of this classroom before I am humiliated or the teacher calls on me … I’m going to do something that’s going to get me out of this pressure cooker,’” said Jackson, who founded the and has worked with several families because of her experience with her daughter, Latecia.

Black students with disabilities were nearly four times more likely to receive multiple out-of-school suspensions and twice as likely to be expelled than white students with disabilities, according to the 2019 report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

The report also found Black children make up around 19% of all students with disabilities, but made up 50% of students with disabilities in correctional facilities.

Going forward

All 50 states have around dyslexia, according to the National Center for Improving Literacy – including at least in kindergarten – but, there’s still concern about implementation.

“Apart from screening, there has to be action after that, so what do you do if you find that someone is at risk?” Wilson said, adding that legislation doesn’t always mean intervention.

“Even when we think about, the protections that are put in place when we think about IDEA and section 504 –  they’re mandating equitable access – but implementation depends often on district capacity or on family advocacy,” she said. “Protection on paper means very little without accountability and practice.”

Black and brown children are , where there’s higher turnover of staff and more young, or temporary, educators who may not know the signs of learning disabilities or have access to professional development.

General teacher preparation programs offer limited coursework in special education, usually only three to six credit hours, Rodriguez said.

“A school that is well funded with high-quality teachers [that have been in the school system longer] with professional development, … is more apt to identify differences between students that learn and think differently quicker, because they know the red flags,” Rodriguez said. 

A first step forward toward more equitable dyslexia intervention for students of color is to create “more cohesive preparation” between general and special education teachers, she added.

Experts also called for comprehensive bias training and greater teacher diversity efforts to help with disparities in disability identification. 

“Whether well intentioned or not, we do bring bias into the classroom with us, not just around expectations for academics, but also expectations for behavior,” Conroy said. 

White educators may be more prone to implicit bias, and use how students of color are more likely to experience or as reasons behind misbehavior rather than think it’s a disability, according to the 2019 U.S.Commission on Civil Rights report.

It’s something the three mothers experienced repeatedly. 

Jackson was told by Nebraska school officials at one point her daughter wasn’t able to read because her biological mother was incarcerated and she had lived with her grandmother.

“Their justification was they were doing the very best that they could do for her and that she wasn’t trying hard enough,” Jackson said.

Palmer recalled an instance where a teacher had asked if her daughter was “able to be taught by a male teacher or does she have daddy issues?”

“Everyone assumed I was a single mom,” Palmer said. 

Most recently, when Castillo’s daughter began to have trouble in school, including crying out of frustration in class, she was referred to a social worker and asked about what things were like at home.

“There’s an overwhelming bias that a lot of us experience as parents of color … that there must be something broken at home, and that’s why your kid is acting out,” Castillo said. “Nobody had reached out to me to be like, ‘Hey, what have you tried with her? Have you noticed this at home?’ … There’s just this assumption that it’s a broken family.”

Although the three mothers eventually received some special education intervention for their daughters, which prompted some progress, Palmer and Jackson had to seek extra support outside the public school system with tutors or private programs.

“We need to ensure [schools] are working with parents and not against parents, that we are creating a team environment, … so [parents] feel safe and that they are in an environment where the children can get support,” Jackson said. “Children don’t have time to wait for systems to take decades to rectify and reframe education.”

Castillo is still navigating what more can be done for her fourth grader, who is receiving after-school tutoring in a neighboring county, paid by her school district. 

Her daughter is “doing much better” and now is able to de-escalate her frustration “to the point where she’s not crying anymore, and is getting through it,” but she still struggles with reading and writing.

“It’s a work in progress,” Castillo said.

She worries the intervention isn’t enough. She also has had to provide transportation for her daughter’s tutoring sessions, and recently moved the meetings to Zoom “to save money on the gas cost, car repairs and tolls.”  

She believes the tutoring would be more effective if it was during the school and worries about “the educational consequences my daughter will have to pay” if the intervention is not moved.

“[My daughter] needs to be able to write paragraphs right now and she can’t,” Castillo said. “All of these things that are going to lead up into what she needs to do to have a chance at a decent job when she graduates and I don’t see it happening. I see the gap only widening.”

I grew up in Paterson, New Jersey, raised by a single Black teenage mother. She worked long hours and still found the energy to keep me focused. She signed me up for summer academic programs. She made sure homework came before anything else. We didn’t have much, but she never let me think education was optional. For her, education was the one way forward.

Today, when I walk into a classroom at College Achieve Public Schools, where I work, I see faces that remind me of my own, both in the students and the educators teaching them. This was intentional. We realized our scholars would learn best from teachers who know their neighborhoods, understand their challenges and see their potential. So we built a system to achieve that goal. 

Our educators reflect the community we serve. More than half are people of color, with significant representation from Black, Latino, Bengali, Arabic and Asian educators. Black male teachers, a group often underrepresented nationally in education, make up roughly 20% of the faculty, an exceptionally high percentage when compared with the national average of 1%. The team is stable and growing, with a cohort of educators recently hitting the five-year mark and earning tenure. We are proud of these figures, and we know why it’s working.

Our approach is straightforward and replicable. We recruit from the community, pay people as they train, coach them well and show a clear path forward so they stay. 

We partnered with nearby St. Elizabeth and Montclair State universities to hire qualified college students as substitute teachers, pairing each with a veteran mentor. They work as subs while completing their degrees, gaining classroom experience. Once they graduate, they can earn a full teaching certificate through and return as certified teachers. 

Through grants from the New Jersey Department of Education in partnership with Rutgers University, we have helped college students earn their teacher certifications while building direct recruitment pipelines. Paraprofessionals taking part in the program can typically earn their state teaching certification in two to four years, depending on their level of experience and education when they enroll. The program targets fields that have been disproportionately impacted by staff shortages, such as special education, science, math, English as a second language and bilingual education.

Our school also works with Gateway U, a workforce development initiative offering online college degrees, and has partnered with Teach for America to recruit educators. 

We also created a summer co-teacher program in hard-to-staff subjects so aspiring educators can teach in their subject with the help of seasoned educators before working full time the following school year. This past summer, 15 college students participated, and while some have gone to complete their degrees, some have stayed on as substitute teachers at CAPS or volunteered to lead clubs or special programs like robotics. I feel confident that at least half of these students will eventually join full time.

For late-career aspiring educators already in the workforce, we built routes to finish credentials while earning credit, including online degree options and targeted certification support.

In total, our partnerships with teacher-pipeline programs helped the certification cohort grow from 18 in 2018 to 35 in 2025, a 94% increase.

Retention is built into the design. New teachers get scheduled coaching time focused on practice. We reimburse tuition in exchange for a commitment of two full school years after they complete their degree or certificate, and provide leadership development so strong teachers can grow without leaving their classrooms. Many of our school leaders began here as teachers. People stay when they feel seen, improve their craft and can picture the next step. 

Since opening in 2017, College Achieve Public Schools has grown to nearly 200 staff across its five campuses in Paterson. Retention has improved each year, culminating in 86.6% teacher retention and 92.8% overall staff retention and 88% of teachers reporting satisfaction with leadership and school environment for the 2024-25 school year.

This model of development, supported certification and long-term career support can be replicated in any school or district willing to invest in its own community as the future of its teaching force. 

Seeing take similar steps by raising salaries, removing licensing hurdles and encouraging paraprofessionals and aides to pursue teaching credentials is refreshing. These changes open the door for more people from different backgrounds to become teachers and stay in the profession.

Education is about more than academics; it can redirect the course of a child’s life, like mine. Representation matters not just for diversity’s sake, but because it is proven to make . 

A school full of teachers who reflect its community doesn’t happen by accident. It happened because we chose to invest in people. We make it easier for future teachers to see themselves in the classroom and achieve success for our students. As my mother understood, education has the power to open doors I didn’t even know existed. Now, I am proud to do the same for other teachers.

Therefore, the response begins at City Hall.   

Education leaders and equity advocates reject the idea that standing up for students and protecting funding are mutually exclusive. Both can and must be pursued. Every child in New York City deserves to feel safe, seen and supported in school. The new administration should be guided by that commitment. 

EdTrust-New York has expressed to work closely with the Mamdani administration to fulfill the long-standing promise of free, universal child care for children age two and under, as well as full access to Pre-K and 3-K. Families across the city still pay up to $26,000 annually for child care, and too many remain on waitlists.

Meeting this demand requires sustainable funding, additional child care sites, a well-paid workforce and full-day programs in neighborhoods where families live. Such investments would give all children a strong start. 

New York City must also confront the alarming reality that nearly half of fourth graders score below basic proficiency in reading, with even worse outcomes for Black and Latinx students. While initiatives like NYC Reads and NYC Solves mark progress, they need ongoing support and expansion.

EdTrust-New York encourages the Mamdani administration to continue expanding multilingual materials, provide interventions for English learners and students with disabilities, and ensure that all educators receive training in the science of reading. At the same time, the city should work toward developing a comprehensive adolescent literacy plan to support middle and high school students.

Mamdani’s leadership should reflect a deep commitment to a curriculum that honors the identities and experiences of all students. Fully implementing culturally responsive education means expanding Black, Native American, AAPI and Latin studies, as well as giving educators the training and tools needed to teach the curricula. The city’s schools also need greater investment in collective care teams, educators, counselors, nurses and social workers who can provide the academic and emotional support students need.

Segregation continues to divide New York City students by race and class. The incoming administration has an opportunity to take meaningful steps toward integration by encouraging all districts to create integration plans, using admissions models such as lottery. The city also needs to recruit and retain more educators of color and publicly report school integration data to track progress. 

The Mamdani administration should also protect and support immigrant students and multilingual learners, who face growing threats from federal policies and systemic barriers. Schools can strengthen scaffolds in literacy and math, expand bilingual curricula  and provide mental health services for students facing trauma.

In addition, older immigrant students should have access to the full high school experience, not just for language acquisition or diploma-completion programs. Higher education partners can also play a vital role also by expanding financial aid and creating safe, supportive pathways for undocumented students to attend and graduate from college. 

Improving school climate is another key priority, particularly the need to shift from exclusion and punishment to belonging and support. With more than a third of students chronically absent — especially Black, Latino, and those from low-income backgrounds — and many affected by punitive discipline, the city can invest in restorative justice and mental health programs.

That should include funding restorative initiatives in all schools, training educators in healing-centered approaches and increasing weighted funding for the most-affected student groups. 

Under mayoral control, New York City has achieved important system-wide progress, such as the expansion of universal pre-K and the launch of NYC Reads. Mamdani should maintain this structure but ensure stronger accountability and input from parents and students. He can build on this success by ensuring that parents, students and caregivers, who should be granted voting power on Community Education Councils, have meaningful influence over district policy decisions. 

Finally, the Mamdani administration should expand access to college and career pathways. Too few students can enroll in college in high school programs that boost college success. Let’s expand these programs citywide, closing access gaps and strengthening support in college. That should include proven initiatives like CUNY’s ASAP and ACE, which help students persist and graduate despite financial emergencies. 

As Mayor-elect Mamdani prepares to lead the nation’s largest school system, he inherits both profound challenges and enormous opportunities. This moment offers a shared chance to build a public education system that not only aspires to equity but truly delivers on that promise. 

But suggests that in an attempt to right these inequities, those reforms often got it wrong. 

State school finance policies designed to close funding gaps between high- and low-income districts did not reduce racial and ethnic funding inequities and in some cases increased them, according to a study published Wednesday by the American Educational Research Association. 

“I was quite surprised. And depressed, frankly,” said Emily Rauscher, lead co-author and professor at Brown University. “My guess going into the study was that these income based school finance reforms that worked to reduce inequality of funding by income would also at least slightly help reduce racial inequality of funding.”

The U.S. is unique in that school district budgets are tethered to property taxes, meaning schools in wealthier communities automatically start with a larger pot of local funding. Since school desegregation efforts slowed after the 1980s, civil-rights minded policymakers have tried fixing this discrepancy between low-income districts that serve lots of students of color and rich districts that serve lots of white students by directing more money to districts with more low-income kids.

State funds are typically distributed through a formula, or set of formulas, that send money to districts. From there, districts send it to schools. Each state uses different criteria in their formulas, but most try to target at least a portion of their funds to school districts that enroll lots of students with greater needs and those that struggle to raise funds from property taxes. Sometimes, courts make them do it.

According to the , the number of states with co-called “progressive” funding systems — where high-poverty districts receive more per-student funding than low-poverty districts — more than doubled, from 13 states in 2012 to 28 in 2022. States such as New Mexico, Wyoming, California, and Colorado saw some of the largest gains in funding equity during this period. As it stands, more than half of the 48 states studied have at least a modestly progressive distribution of state and local funding, providing at least 5% additional funding to high-poverty districts. That is twice as many states as a decade ago.

But Rauscher and co-author Jeremy Fiel, a professor at Rice University, found that while these reforms narrowed funding gaps by income, they did not lessen — and sometimes widened — disparities by race and ethnicity. 

Using data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the National Center for Education Statistics, the researchers examined the effects of school finance reforms across the U.S. from 1990 to 2022. They found that such policies reduced school spending gaps between the highest- and lowest-income districts by over $1,300 per pupil on average. However, the reforms also increased the spending advantage of districts with low percentages of Black and Hispanic students—by $900 and $1,000 per pupil, respectively.

Reforms were more effective at reducing racial disparities in states where those inequities were already relatively modest. In contrast, reforms were less effective, or even regressive, in states with high levels of racial and economic segregation between school districts. In these more segregated states, reforms not only exacerbated racial and ethnic disparities but also failed to narrow economic gaps.

While the study did not pinpoint the exact reason for this, researchers posited that it may be driven by demographic and political processes related to implementation. Additionally, many funding reforms boosted spending broadly rather than targeting it, leading to minimal effects. Many court-ordered solutions, by contrast, stipulate that states must target racial and ethnic inequality. 

Notably, the funding reforms worked best at directing money to historically marginalized students in districts that were less segregated, likely a reflection of separate policies aimed at supporting students of color, low-income students and their families, Rauscher said. Moreover, the study showed that the biggest inequities exist between states – not within them.

Rauscher offered that it’s likely not random that states funding their education systems the least are also the ones with the highest concentration of students of color. And that’s exactly why, she said, the federal government needs to step up to fix it. 

For many school funding experts, this realization is not surprising. After all, while most states distribute funding relatively evenly by the racial and ethnic composition of districts, wealthier states still spend significantly more per pupil than poorer ones. And since these states tend to have higher shares of white students and lower shares of Black and Hispanic students, national disparities are bound to persist.

“The concentration of non-white students is in the lowest-funded states, and the concentration of white students is in the highest-funded states,” says Rebecca Sibilia, executive director of EdFund, a nonprofit that funds school finance research. “So when you compare the funding levels of a low-income school district in Mississippi that has a lot of Black and Hispanic students to a tawny suburb of Boston in Massachusetts where all the kids are white, you’re going to pick up a huge gap. It just distorts the amount of money when you’re comparing across the entire U.S.”

It’s worth noting, Sibilia says, that recent state funding reforms, like those in Tennessee, Colorado, Mississippi and Alabama, are poised to make a real difference. Tennessee’s model, adopted three years ago, directs more funding to students who need it most, including those living in high concentrations of poverty. It also accounts for students in small and sparsely populated districts, which formulas sometimes shortchange. Meanwhile, Alabama’s model — the newest in the country — includes additional funds for students with special needs, such as those with disabilities or who are English language learners.

“There’s no way that you’re going to change interstate funding differences, because people are so focused on schools in their communities, and because half of the money is coming from local property taxes,” she says. “The federal government can’t touch those dollars, so you have to focus within the state. And when you look at the effect of the intrastate reforms, you tend to see that they’re working.”

The new research comes against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the Education Department, eliminate policies aimed at increasing equity for students of color and significantly curb federal spending, including on long-standing programs like Title I and IDEA, which are the federal government’s two biggest levers for bolstering state education funding.

In other words, it’s a political environment not likely to prioritize issues of racial inequity.

“You’re never going to have a funding formula that says we’re going to add x hundreds of dollars per Black student in each state, because that’s just not a viable policy,” says Eric Hanushek, an economist and senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. “We’ve had these differences all along, and there’s no way that you’re going to suddenly get the federal government stepping in on overall spending differences between states.”

Rauscher says that given the political environment, she’s concerned that her research may be used in bad faith by policymakers who have no interest in closing racial gaps in education. 

Her message to them: “You are mortgaging the future of the country, because all these kids who are under-resourced in school are going to enter adulthood without adequate skills and training. It’s an ongoing battle. We’ve been here before.”

The department said it will reinstate roughly 25 employees Sept. 8, nearly three months after a federal judge told the department to start the process, and will return another 60 every two weeks until early November. 

The plan comes after the Massachusetts district court judge to throw out a June 18 order requiring the department to put the employees back to work. Department officials are now appealing that ruling.

Sean Ouellette, who represents the families and advocates who sued over the firings at OCR, said he was pleased to see “a commitment” from the department.

“I hope they restore staff on the schedule they laid out, or hopefully faster. We’re not really sure it should take that long,” said Ouellette, a senior attorney with Public Justice. “We’re a little skeptical because this only comes after the court called them out on the delay.”

In another personnel development, the department will begin reinstating employees in late January because their positions were linked, sometimes tenuously, to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs. Many of those targeted were told by their supervisors during the first Trump administration to attend a DEI training. The American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, which represents the department staff, filed for arbitration — a dispute resolution process — rather than bringing a lawsuit.

“Because our local refused to stand down, we have learned that a number of our members placed on DEI leave are being returned to duty,” Sheria Smith, president of Local 252, wrote to employees Tuesday. 

But Madi Biedermann, a spokeswoman for the department, disputed that arbitration played a role in the decision.

“The agency determined they are an asset to the workforce,” she said.

The action could slow down progress toward President Donald Trump’s pledge to dismantle the Education Department and eliminate any DEI-related activity — central pieces of his agenda that the public doesn’t necessarily support, according to recent PDK Poll results.��

McMahon fired roughly half its OCR staff members March 11 along with over 1,000 other employees. The Victims Rights Law Center, which represents victims of sexual assault, argued that their dismissal in combination with the closure of seven out of 12 regional offices, left the office unable to perform duties mandated by law. 

The department tried to link the OCR firings to a in which the Supreme Court allowed McMahon to let staff go from other divisions within the agency. In both cases, the courts have yet to issue a final decision on whether the firings were legal. Judge agreed with Public Justice, saying that the OCR case presented “distinct factual circumstances,” and “cannot be lumped in with” the other lawsuit. 

The department disagrees. “At bottom, plaintiffs’ lawsuit is an improper programmatic attack on how the department runs OCR,” wrote Michael Bruns, an attorney with the Justice Department.��In the appeal to the U.S. Appeals Court for the First Circuit, he called the lawsuit “crafty pleading.”

For now, however, Joun’s opinion leaves the department with no further options but to bring back the staff. 

OCR, not surprisingly, hasn’t been able to move through cases as quickly as it did prior to the layoffs. Since March 11, the office has resolved 413 complaints, compared to about 200 per month previously, Steven Schaefer, deputy assistant secretary for policy at OCR, wrote in a filing to the court.  

Ouellette, the Public Justice attorney, said having more attorneys and investigators back to work should help OCR make progress on the backlog.

“At least that will get things back to the way they were, which was already strained,” he said.

‘Called back’

Union officials haven’t received any communication from the department specifying which employees are returning or when they will start work, said spokesman Andrew Feldman. But the department did tell some to report to the cafeteria on Monday for a “brief orientation,” according to a notice to employees shared with The 74.

“We have members who have self-reported to us they have been called back,” Feldman said.

One of those is Kissy Chapman-Thaw, an education program specialist and former teacher. She learned secondhand that she would be among those returning Sept. 8, which she said the department’s IT help desk confirmed Wednesday. 

She oversaw budgeting and higher education grants, including COVID relief funds, but she attended the three-day DEI training in 2019, which she thinks likely contributed to her dismissal.   

“For me, as an African American woman, I felt not just educated, but I understood how to be more sensitive to other people in general,” she said. She refused to quit while her job was in limbo. “After a month, I was like, I’m not going anywhere. They’ve got to fire me. I’m just not going to walk away that easily.”

Adding to the legal challenges over the U.S. Department of Education’s efforts to rid schools of DEI, 19 Democrat-led states sued Friday over an April 3 “dear colleague” letter.  

The threat to withhold funding if states don’t sign what the complaint calls “a novel and unlawful certification” would be “catastrophic for plaintiff states’ students from kindergarten through high school,” the attorneys general wrote.

Collectively, the Democrat-led states stand to lose almost $14 billion, including Title I money for low-income schools and funds for students with disabilities. The complaint asks a federal district court in Massachusetts to declare the April 3 letter unlawful and prevent the department from taking any action based on its interpretation of anti-discrimination laws and the Supreme Court decision that ended racial preferences in college admissions.

States and school districts resisting a U.S. Department of Education ultimatum regarding diversity, equity and inclusion got a temporary reprieve Thursday. Two federal judges — one in and another in the — blocked the department’s ability to withhold federal funding from those that didn’t to its interpretation of non-discrimination laws or agree to end what officials called “impermissible” DEI programs.

A third judge in suspended for now a Feb. 14 “” letter warning districts against racial diversity efforts. The deadline to sign a form certifying compliance was Thursday.

States and districts are “no longer under the immediate threat” of losing funds if they “continue to offer long-standing lawful programs or don’t sign” the form, said Katrina Feldkamp, assistant counsel at the Legal Defense Fund. Representing the NAACP, the law firm is among several groups, including unions, school districts and advocacy groups, involved in three separate lawsuits over the department’s anti-DEI guidance. 

In a statement, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers — part of the Maryland case — called the court’s ruling “a huge win for students, families and educators.” 

The department’s follow-up on Feb. 28 appeared to soften officials’ stance on practices it considers illegal, saying cultural and historical observances were acceptable as long as all students were welcome to participate. But the certification requirement took a firm tone, cautioning states that they could face substantial financial penalties if they sign it and are then found to be in violation. 

“The court finds that threatening penalties under those legal provisions without sufficiently defining the conduct that might trigger liability violates the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition on vagueness,” Judge Dabney Friedrich of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, said in her oral ruling granting a preliminary injunction. The department’s documents, she said, “placed a particular emphasis on certain DEI practices without providing an actual definition of what constitutes DEI or DEI practice.”

At the time of publication 12 states, including Arizona, Arkansas and Montana, and the District of Columbia, had signed the certification. Twenty-two, including California, Michigan and New Mexico, declined to sign, and 17 either hadn’t announced their decision or did not respond to calls or emails from The 74. Madi Biedermann, spokeswoman for the Education Department, said she didn’t know if officials would share the full count of states complying. She didn’t respond to a request for comment on the court rulings. 

Signing the form indicates compliance with Title VI, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin, as well as the department’s view of a 2023 Supreme Court ruling against racial preferences in higher education admissions. 

State chiefs who didn’t sign argued that the Education Department didn’t clearly define DEI and ignored proper procedures for collecting such information. Overall, the documents have left leaders bewildered over whether they stand to lose millions in federal funds. In Denver Public Schools, for example, roughly $36 million in Title I funds for high-poverty schools and another $20 million for special education services are at stake. Like state chiefs in several other blue states, Colorado’s Susana Córdova to sign the document. 

“I think all districts across the country are forced to grapple with this question of ‘What would you do without it?’ ” said Chuck Carpenter, chief financial officer.

Title I funds in his district, Colorado’s largest, cover salaries for school social workers, help to reduce class sizes and support interventions for students who are behind academically. 

“These are very much on-the-ground expenses,” he said. “This doesn’t get caught up in the bureaucracy. This is for real kids and real people.”

Several GOP state chiefs welcomed the department’s message. Arizona state Superintendent Tom Horne , “Thank you for fighting for our Constitution and laws!” along with his signature. Oklahoma chief Ryan Walters posted of himself at his desk signing the form. 

“No DEI in Oklahoma schools,” he said. “We will talk about merit and American exceptionalism, and we’ll have the best school system possible, thanks to President Trump.”

While some state and district leaders likely viewed the form as a “box to check,” others may see it as “provocation,” said Jackie Wernz, a civil rights attorney and consultant who worked in both the Obama and first Trump administrations.

“The department’s shifting guidance in recent months has created a lot of confusion in the field,” she said. “It’s not always clear whether this is a legal compliance issue or a political messaging moment.”

Even some critics of DEI agree. Steven Wilson, a senior fellow at the free market-oriented Pioneer Institute for Public Policy Research in Boston, argues that many schools, including high-performing charter networks, went astray by embracing anti-racist teaching approaches. 

He pointed, for example, to author that “worship of the written word” is evidence of white supremacy and framing around social justice issues. 

“These teachings are enormously destructive,” said Wilson, who founded the Ascend charter school network in Brooklyn, New York. “I would be hard pressed to think of a more damaging message to impart to teachers of Black and brown children than that the worship of the written word is whiteness.” 

But Wilson views the department’s threat to federal funding as equally harmful. “The audacity” of tying the compliance form to funding for programs that serve students in poverty and those with disabilities, he said “has to be vigorously contested.” 

‘Historically underserved’

Title I, the biggest federal education program, totals over $18 billion. Part of the 1960s War on Poverty, it has “really been a cornerstone of federal funding in K-12 for the better part of a century,” said Jess Gartner, founder of Allovue, a school finance technology company that’s now part of PowerSchool. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, currently funded at $15 billion, came a decade later in 1975. 

Officials can’t withhold those funds with “a wave of the hand and a strike of the pen” or because “someone won’t sign a form,” Gartner said. “There is for reporting, investigating and determining that discrimination has actually occurred.” 

In 2023, under former Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, the department withheld federal funds from Maine for not meeting state testing requirements. But that was after two years of being out of compliance, and officials the state could reserve for administrative costs — not the money that goes to schools.

The Trump administration has demonstrated that it will abruptly cancel funding that has already been approved by Congress. That’s why finance officers like Carpenter in Denver are on edge about how the department will respond to states that didn’t sign the form. 

Title I funding supports about half of the Denver district’s 207 schools, where immigrant and non-English-speaking parents especially rely on liaisons like Boni Sanchez Florez. He helps them access after-school classes, mental health services and low-cost internet. But  Florez also encourages them to take leadership roles and speak up about issues that affect their children, like .

“It’s hard enough for them to walk in a building with a staff that is predominantly 80% white. How do you build that trust in a community that doesn’t trust the system?” asked Florez, who moved to the U.S. from Mexico as a child. “If I’m in my dad’s shoes 30 years ago, I would want people to reach out to me.”

Nearby in Jeffco Public Schools, Colorado’s second largest district, roughly 100 staff members are directly paid with Title I funds, said Tara Peña, chief of family partnerships and community engagement. They include three “family ambassadors” who work out of a mobile welcome center — a customized bus that hosts enrollment fairs, book giveaways and what Peña called “goodwill events.”

The welcome center staff signs families up for Medicaid or free lunch programs and teams up with other community groups to distribute school and hygiene supplies.

“A loss in federal funding would be very destructive and be very impactful to the supports and the services that we provide to our most vulnerable students,” Peña said. “The students who’ve been historically underserved would continue to be the ones that would be harmed.” 

‘Four years?’

The potential cuts to funding also come as districts across the country are finalizing their budgets for the upcoming school year, with federal funds in mind. Before McMahon announced the certification requirement on April 3, most had already issued contracts for staff for this fall. 

In California, which receives over $2 billion in Title I funds and almost $1.6 billion from IDEA, the deadline to issue any layoff notices was March 15. 

That means districts would still be obligated to pay employees whose salaries come from those sources “whether they get funding or don’t,” said Michael Fine, CEO of the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, a state agency responsible for financial oversight of districts. “Districts did not contemplate such a loss before the March 15 layoff window.”

Districts in Michigan, another state that declined to sign the form, are in the same predicament. For now, the Detroit Public Schools Community District — where roughly 25% of the budget comes from federal sources — has committed to not letting any employees go. But Jeremy Vidito, chief financial officer, said that could just be a temporary solution if the department fully cuts Title I. 

“Maybe we can bridge two years with our fund balance. But four years? There’s no way,” he said. “It will mean school closures. It will mean reduced services for our kids and walking back the intervention programs.”

With a student poverty rate of  more than 80%, the nearly $125 million Detroit receives in Title I funding pays for counselors, social workers, and art and music teachers, as well as  high school administrators who are focused on keeping ninth graders on track for graduation. 

For LaQuitta Brown’s son Kermari, a 7 year old with autism, art has been especially important. He struggled to speak until last year, but he could communicate with his mother by drawing pictures, Brown said. Through special education, he receives speech and occupational therapy. His mother also depends on a mobile vision screening program for his checkups.

“He wouldn’t be where he would be without those services,” she said. “It takes a village, especially when you have a child needing special attention.”

Title I also supports high-dosage tutoring in Detroit, one of the reasons, Vidito said, why the district outperformed most other large, urban systems in a from researchers at Harvard and Stanford universities. Last school year, the district also saw in reading than the state as a whole.

“We are seeing results,” he said. “We have committed to educating all kids, but if we start to defund education, then we’re stepping back from that commitment.”

Most right-leaning think tanks, like the Heritage Foundation, welcome the department’s certification requirement and its interpretation of the decision. 

That opinion didn’t mention K-12 schools, but it has “broad implications for the use of racial preferences in public education services at the K-12 and postsecondary levels,” said Jonathan Butcher, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. “The majority opinion and supporting opinions deal with rooting out racism writ large from education.” 

But Wilson at the Pioneer Institute said the AFT lawsuit is “one of those relatively rare moments” of agreement he has with AFT President Randi Weingarten. She said the anti-DEI directives would hamper schools’ efforts to teach accurate history, including the harms of slavery and persecution of minority groups. 

“If that is what [the department] has in mind as a federal prohibition, that would be devastating.” he said. Trump, is “claiming, rather flamboyantly, to devolve education back to the states while announcing this unprecedented intrusion into what schools and districts may teach.”

The 74’s Mark Keierleber contributed to this story.

But the result was something else.

Parents bombarded the dedicated email address with off-topic rants on issues from kids using outdated textbooks to districts that failed to pay for special education evaluations. In the end, the process likely attracted more critics than supporters to the governor’s cause.  urged Black parents to “flood” the governor with complaints about “history being silenced.” The state shut the tip line down offering scant evidence of indoctrination.

A New Hampshire project met . State officials disabled it last year after a ruled that the state’s 2021 “banned concepts” laws that restricted lessons on LGBTQ issues and racial history were too vague. 

But in Oklahoma, a school safety alert system that Superintendent Ryan Walters uses to expose and punish what he calls the Five complaints pointed to books that Walters deemed “pornographic” in a district north of Oklahoma City. His accusation sparked a legal battle over whether the state chief could control the contents of school libraries. 

Richard Cobb, superintendent of the Mid-Del Schools, outside Oklahoma City, called the online system “a huge overreach.” 

“It’s frustrating because anyone can report anything,” he said. “Then the burden is on us to prove our innocence.”

And for many educators, there’s the rub — especially now that the Trump administration has made combating diversity, equity and inclusion an urgent national priority.

On Feb. 27, the U.S. Department of Education launched the . Its name leaves no doubt about its purpose — to uncover and eradicate examples of diversity, equity and inclusion in more than 100,000 schools across the nation. In a statement, Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice urged parents to “share the receipts of the betrayal that has happened in our public schools.”

Trump made the issue a hallmark of his campaign, calling such policies “absolute nonsense” and “illegal.” 

On the department’s portal, a simple online form invites parents to report “illegal discriminatory practices“ that the department will use to launch investigations. 

But the department didn’t say what made DEI illegal, and the concept has proved notoriously difficult to define. Schools have implemented race-focused activities like in elementary school, drawing backlash from parents who say the lessons make their children feel ashamed. But others have blocked lessons of clear historical significance, such as about Ruby Bridges, the first Black child to attend a school in New Orleans. 

Even in its attempt to eliminate DEI, the department has found the concept to be something of a moving target.

The launch of the portal followed a stern from the Office for Civil Rights that districts could face investigation if they treat “students differently on the basis of race.” In response, some teachers from lessons on Black history. A day after unveiling the portal, however, officials followed up with a more , explaining that cultural observances like Black History Month and International Holocaust Remembrance Day would be acceptable as long as all students, regardless of race, are welcome to participate. 

But the department recently resumed the offensive. Last week, it told states and districts to sign a document certifying that they have eliminated DEI practices or risk losing millions of dollars in federal funding. The department has since extended the deadline until April 24, said Madi Biedermann, a department spokeswoman.

New York is among of states that has . Washington state Superintendent Chris Reykdal called the department’s ultimatum “an assault on the autonomy of states” and said it would be “irresponsible” to sign the certification. California also seems to be . In an emailed statement, the state education agency called the demand “another attempt to impose a national ideology on local schools by threatening to withhold vital resources for students.”

Adding to the outsize stakes is the way the Trump administration has weaponized the issue, canceling grants and connected with even tangential connections to DEI work. In some cases, it has used DEI as an excuse to challenge legitimate history and bolster thinly veiled discrimination. Using artificial intelligence to comb through over 1,000 web pages, the Pentagon to notable achievements among minority members of the military. It later restored some of them. And in January, Trump for a fatal mid-air collision between a helicopter and a plane over the Potomac River.

Those who have worked in states that have implemented tip lines expect End DEI to meet with a similar flurry of confusion, tangents, spam, personal grievances — and a chill on important classroom discussions.

“I can see the parallel” with Oklahoma, Cobb said. “We’ve seen the Trump administration bully powerful law firms and Ivy League schools into submission. I imagine they would have zero qualms about applying similar pressure to individuals or school districts.”

‘Snitch line mentality’

The department’s move comes amid deep national divisions about DEI. A January by The Economist and YouGov found a roughly even split, with 45% in favor of ending such programs in government and schools, and 40% opposed.

As Trump took office on Jan. 20, another survey attempted to gauge the effects of critical race theory on classroom instruction. The results were similarly mixed. Fifty-eight percent  of high school students reported that their  teachers frequently make comments like, “We must be actively anti-racist,” while 42% responded that teachers support the Black Lives Matter movement. At the same time, 77% said their teachers either never or rarely made them feel uncomfortable about disagreeing with their point of view. 

Brian Kisida, a government and public affairs professor at the University of Missouri and a lead author of the study, said the department’s portal could give parents a vehicle for reporting actual discrimination against their children. But he expressed concern that the likely result would be to magnify the polarization it is designed to eradicate, saying “this snitch line mentality can do more harm than good.”

“I expect many of these disputes could be solved if parents and educators just had good-faith conversations with each other, and both sides would likely learn something in the process,” he said.

Some wonder how the department can thoughtfully navigate the issues, given the dramatic cuts to the program that normally would have been responsible for investigating discrimination complaints: the department’s civil rights office.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon eliminated half of the OCR staff along with seven regional offices that handle investigations. With its remaining employees, the department redirected civil rights enforcement toward administration priorities like ending antisemitic protests on college campuses and keeping transgender students out of girls’ sports. 

“If you’re dismantling the Department of Education and moving everything somewhere else, who are these people that are going to do the investigation?” asked LaToya Baldwin Clark, a law professor at the University of California Los Angeles who . “Who are these people that actually do any type of enforcement?”

Biedermann, the department spokeswoman, would not say who is reviewing the submissions or whether officials have followed up on any tips. But unlike the Department of Defense, she said staff members at the department — not AI — will review submissions to identify potential areas for investigation. Biederman offered no information on how many reports the system has received, but Marleigh Schaefer, a spokeswoman for Moms for Liberty, said “thousands of parents have submitted to the portal.” 

One of them is Lauren McDonough, part of a Texas conservative group called Families Engaged.

In her complaint to the department, she described her failed attempts to get the Richardson Independent School District to pass a policy requiring students to use bathrooms that match their sex assigned at birth. She became concerned after learning that a trans girl in first grade attends her daughters’ school. In an email, a district official told her that schools consider transgender students’ requests on a case-by-case basis.

“I was like ‘What the heck, it takes five minutes,’ ” McDonough said of the form. “If something comes of it, great, but my hopes are very low. I feel like I have to exhaust my resources as a parent.”

Biedermann said people who make submissions shouldn’t necessarily expect a response and described the portal as a “tool to identify where and if there are pockets or patterns of … violations.”

Not surprisingly, the site, created by staff from billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, fell prey to pranks. “Y’all know what to do …Copy the Bee Movie script,” one critic — a reference to an about sending the entire script from the 2014 movie to crash a site. Three former staffers at the department said in the rush to get the portal up, the site went down within 12 hours.

“We were laughing about it,” said a former employee who asked to remain anonymous to protect colleagues still at the department. 

Biedermann acknowledged that the portal was initially overwhelmed, but said it resumed operations in about an hour and is now working smoothly.

‘Name names’ 

In Virginia, Youngkin set up his special email address to make good on a promise to listen to parents’ concerns. His successful run for governor in 2021 tapped into deep anger over remote learning and fears that critical race theory was infiltrating classrooms. An academic principle usually reserved for graduate schools, CRT argues that racism is built into the fabric of American institutions.

As governor, Youngkin’s first banned classroom lessons based on CRT. On a , he promoted the tip line as a way to track down “inherently divisive teaching practices.” 

He called out the Fairfax County district for a high school English assignment, titled Privilege Bingo, that was intended to teach students about diverse perspectives. The squares on the bingo card listed features such as being white, Christian, male and able-bodied. , an Army veteran complained that the lesson listed being part of a military family as an example of privilege. The district apologized and revised the activity, but said it remained committed to teaching students how to understand multiple viewpoints. Youngkin pledged to wipe out similar lessons from Virginia classrooms. 

“We’re going to make sure that we catalog it all,” he said.

But the effort didn’t go as planned. Teachers in the Prince William County district, next to Fairfax, thought it was a joke. They even ordered custom T-shirts that read “Hi tip line? I’d like to report Virginia teachers for being incredible at what they do. Thanks Bye.” 

“We just couldn’t believe that they were going to spend tax dollars to run this tip line, but not fully fund our schools to decrease class sizes,” said Angie Trerotola, a high school social studies teacher in Prince William.  

Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update got into the act. Co-anchor Colin Jost quipped, “You know you’re racist when you call the cops about a Black character in a book.”

In response to public records requests, the governor’s staff initially submissions to the tip line. But when several news outlets sued, the governor turned over 350 emails as part of a settlement, few of which pointed to lessons Youngkin was trying to eliminate. A spokesman referred The 74 to a statement it released in the fall of 2022 explaining that it the tip line because it was “receiving little to no volume.”

A similar tip line in Rhode Island also failed to gain traction. The Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity, a nonprofit, at the height of outrage and confusion over how schools were teaching racial issues. It called on parents to “‘name names’ of those indoctrinating our kids.” 

The free market think tank and the conservative Civics Alliance collaborated on that said state social studies standards are “animated by a radical identity-politics ideology” and show “hostility toward America.” The standards expect students to study Latino history, workers’ rights and feminism, they wrote, but distort “history where white men played the leading roles.”

More recently, Mike Stenhouse, the center’s CEO, that a policy that recognizes transgender students and protects their decision to use restrooms and locker rooms that align with their gender identity puts them at risk of a civil rights investigation by the Trump administration.

But after four years, the group’s tip line had nothing to show for it, Stenhouse said in an email. The line “has not yielded any notable results” or received many “credible responses,” he said. Stenhouse blamed the lack of participation on the center’s failure to adequately promote the site.

‘Soup du jour’

In Oklahoma, Superintendent Walters has had more success getting the public’s help. His predecessor, Joy Hofmeister, launched a website called Awareity to report school security risks. Walters turned to it to and districts violating a state law banning divisive concepts and his own mandates.

last year focused on two books in the Edmond School District’s high school libraries. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, is an award-winning bestseller about an Afghan boy’s relationship with his father set against the backdrop of the Soviet-Afghan war, and The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is a memoir about growing up in a dysfunctional family. Both books include descriptions of sexual assault.

Walters threatened to downgrade the district’s accreditation if they didn’t remove them. When the district sued over his rule, it had chosen to “peddle porn and is leading the charge to undermine parents in Oklahoma.”

Cobb, the Mid-Del superintendent, didn’t pull the books, but others preemptively removed the titles and similar ones Walters labeled “filth.”

“I guess we all have to make our own decisions,” Cobb said. “But I’d rather stand up and fight than comply in advance with something that is wrong.”

Walters lost the case Edmond brought against him last year. The Oklahoma Supreme Court accused the superintendent of acting with “unauthorized quasi-judicial authority” and said decisions over library materials are up to local districts. 

The option to report “pornographic materials or sexualized content” no longer appears in Awareity’s dropdown menu. The public also can no longer use it to report that a teacher is violating the state’s divisive concepts law. Last June, a federal judge parts of the legislation, finding some of the language confusing for teachers to follow. 

But Walters has a new use for Awareity. The public can report a “violation of religious liberty and patriotism rights.” Those categories complement his controversial mandate for teachers to in the classroom and that students should be allowed to fly and display the American flag at school “without infringement.” 

“It’s like the soup du jour — whatever issues seem to be playing well at the current time,” said Brendon Hoover, coordinator at the Kirkpatrick Policy Group, which advocates for schools having full-time librarians.

He worked with Oklahoma Appleseed for Law and Justice, a nonprofit law firm, to file an open records request for Awareity files. Complaints included objections to schools offering Stamped, by anti-racist author Ibram Kendi, and a middle school book fair featuring selections from the LGBTQ-themed Heartstopper series of graphic novels.

The Oklahoma Department of Education did not respond to questions about Awareity.

Hoover blames the current atmosphere surrounding classroom instruction for contributing to an exodus of teachers from the profession and the state. Last year, Oklahoma approved nearly for teachers to fill vacancies, breaking a previous record, the Oklahoma Voice reported.

“Oklahoma has a huge teacher shortage,” Hoover said, “and it’s because teachers are under attack by their own state Superintendent.”

One former Oklahoma health teacher got tired of being a target. Describing herself as a “blue drop in a red sea,” she said the threat of being reported for discussing racial issues was one reason she left the classroom in 2022. She stopped teaching a lesson about how the slave trade likely contributed to Black Americans’ to certain diseases like diabetes and high blood pressure. After parents complained, an administrator encouraged her to drop the material from her curriculum.

“What the parents heard was, ‘White folks did this to Black folks,’ ” said the teacher, who asked to remain anonymous to protect future job prospects.

UCLA’s Clark said she expects the new End DEI portal to create a similar chill. 

“These mechanisms to surveil and to monitor teachers and principals are ripe for reports that are not serious or not given in good faith,” she said. Ultimately, she said, “the purpose is to get people to self-censor.”

As a result, corporations and institutions are rescinding their DEI commitments, and negative consequences are emerging. For instance, enrollment of Black and Hispanic students at selective colleges after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action.

Beyond the courts, the White House has launched its own anti-DEI initiatives, such as the executive order on January 21 — which arrived just as the nation was honoring Martin Luther King Jr. The order asserts that DEI policies “deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement in favor of an unlawful, corrosive, and pernicious identity-based spoils system.”

As someone who has studied moral philosophy and psychology and worked on DEI initiatives throughout my career in education, I find these assumptions disturbing. Meritocracy is an ideal worth striving for, but the playing field is not level in many settings, particularly in education.

Education is rife with systemic inequities that disproportionately and predictably disadvantage students based on race, gender, socioeconomic status, disability, and language. These barriers hinder fair access to resources and opportunities. For example, schools in economically disadvantaged communities, especially those serving students of color, often struggle to attract and retain experienced, highly qualified educators.

When I worked at a charter school in Indianapolis serving multilingual students and students of color, the average teacher tenure was just three years, meaning most were novices. In contrast, when I was an administrator in a highly affluent Chicago suburb, the teaching staff was a mix of experienced and new educators, most with advanced degrees and credentials. 

The disparities were staggering. consistently shows that teacher quality strongly influences student achievement. With high teacher turnover, it is nearly impossible to make strong gains, because the faculty and staff are unable to build the critical level of expertise needed for achieving excellence. Without DEI initiatives, how are schools supposed to address these persistent inequities?

People define DEI in various ways. In my work, DEI initiatives focus on analyzing, studying, and addressing inequities; promoting and valuing diversity; and creating environments that foster inclusion and belonging. For example, my team and I applied DEI frameworks to explore ways to increase the success of historically marginalized groups in STEM courses and career pathways. h showed that one barrier for many students was a lack of connections to STEM professionals. 

A school questionnaire revealed that most of our students did not personally know a scientist or understand what an engineer does. In response, we developed a STEM strategic plan that intentionally incorporated mentoring opportunities with scientists and engineers who identified as female or as people of color. In addition, we expanded access to assistive technologies for students who might otherwise struggle to fully engage with STEM content. Tools such as language translators, closed captioning, and text readers improved accessibility for multilingual learners and students receiving special education services. 

At its core, DEI is about fostering a fair and just society. Eliminating DEI programs allows deeply flawed systems to persist. In education, women and people of color remain underrepresented in leadership roles. The School Superintendents Association’s 2020 found that the typical superintendent is male and white. At the time of the study, only 27% of superintendents were women. 

A from the University of Texas at Austin confirmed similar numbers in Texas, despite women comprising 76% of the teaching workforce. This suggests that the path to leadership is not equally accessible to women, even as they are held to the same credentialing and training requirements as men. DEI initiatives help identify and address these disparities.

The same study found racial disparities in leadership, as well. While Hispanic students made up 53% of Texas’s student population, 79% of school superintendents were white. Research has shown that students of color benefit from educators who share their identities, suggesting that increasing Hispanic representation in educational leadership could better serve Texas youth. Yet, Trump’s recent executive order prohibits considering race in hiring decisions.

Opponents have irresponsibly weaponized the term “DEI hire” to argue that marginalized individuals who attain leadership positions are unqualified, reinforcing harmful stereotypes and deepening inequities. This perspective assumes that white superintendents dominate leadership positions solely due to merit, an argument that dangerously echoes long-debunked racial hierarchies of intelligence.

True DEI is not about being anti-white or indoctrinating students with a liberal ideology. It is about ensuring that all individuals, especially the historically marginalized, have equitable access to success. The current backlash against DEI risks cementing barriers that have persisted for generations, leaving educators with fewer tools to address disparities.

At its core, education is meant to be a great equalizer. But without intentional efforts to level the playing field, it often reinforces existing inequalities. DEI is not a threat to meritocracy – it is an essential mechanism for achieving it. As educators, we have a moral obligation to uphold these principles, ensuring that fairness and justice remain foundational in our schools and society.

Experts consider a released by the department late Friday to be more in line with how the courts have traditionally viewed illegal discrimination.

“This is such a far cry from what they put out two weeks ago,” said Jackie Wernz, a civil rights attorney and consultant who worked in both the Obama and first Trump administrations. “It’s downright reasonable.”

Part of the Trump administration’s larger effort to root out diversity, equity and inclusion, the called diversity a “nebulous” goal and warned that districts could be subject to investigations for treating “students differently on the basis of race.” It prompted opposition from , and education . And it left some educators wondering topics like Black History Month.

The Q&A, however, asserts that officials would not automatically consider anything labelled DEI to be illegal and would examine as part of its investigations whether a policy actually resulted in discrimination against students. Cultural and historical observances are fine, the document says, as long as all students are welcome to participate, regardless of race.

“They were trying to see how far they could go, and then they got the pushback,” Wernz said, noting the timing of the department’s guidance. “I love that they say you can celebrate Black history at the end of the month.”

In a on the changes, Wernz noted that the department clarified that it would need evidence that a particular racial group was harmed before it decided to launch an investigation. But she still warned districts to avoid lessons that separate students by race or assignments that ask them to identify their race. 

Neeraja Deshpande, a policy analyst at the conservative Independent Women’s Forum, said there was no need to walk back any instructions to districts.

“I don’t think the earlier letter needed to be softened,” she said. “But, of course, school districts were going to have questions and this seemed to answer them.”

‘Vagueness, Confusion and Chaos’

The department is still likely to get wide-ranging reports of what members of the public consider “divisive ideologies and indoctrination.” The portal it unveiled last week doesn’t define what the department considers to be illegal discrimination. 

The additional guidance hasn’t prompted the American Federation of Teachers to drop its federal lawsuit over the original letter. In a statement, AFT President Randi Weingarten said that the Q&A “just made things murkier.”

Last week, the union, along with AFT-Maryland and the American Sociological Association, sued, appeared to ban the teaching of “systemic and structural racism” in American history. The lawsuit says the teachers would be afraid to discuss Jim Crow laws, the internment of Japanese Americans and other examples of historical discrimination.

The Q&A doesn’t discuss how teachers should approach lessons on history and only says, “OCR’s assessment of school policies and programs depends on the facts and circumstances of each case.”

“If you are a classroom teacher, you still have no idea what you can or can’t teach when it comes to the history of the United States and the world,” Weingarten  said. “It seems like vagueness, confusion and chaos is the point.”

Leaders say they have no plans to hit pause on the project despite a from the U.S. Department of Education that warns against efforts to “preference certain racial groups.” The strongly worded message from Craig Trainor, the top civil rights official at the department, said schools could be investigated for treating “students differently on the basis of race.” 

The Long Beach community asked for “a space that lifts the experience of Black youth,” said Deputy Superintendent Tiffany Brown, adding that the district has a “commitment to listen to those voices.”

Long Beach is not alone. While many school leaders at the letter’s tone, several left-leaning states and districts have since countered Trainor’s threats with tough statements of their own. 

“We’re going to be as inclusive as we’ve always been,” said Gustavo Balderas, superintendent of the Beaverton School District in Oregon. He called the department’s letter “an attempt to bully” districts. “Let’s not be hyper-reactive to things that come out right now.”

Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey in a statement that DEI efforts make the state stronger. California state Superintendent assured districts that memos can’t override existing law or “impose new terms on existing agreements.” And Illinois state chief Tony Sanders reminded educators that state law on the history of different racial groups and LGBTQ issues. 

The letter is part of the Trump administration’s larger DEI offensive, which has included and the cancellation of millions of dollars in contracts related to equity goals.

On Thursday, the department unveiled , a website where the public can report schools they think are illegally discriminating against students.

Many districts and advocacy organizations like , the School Superintendents Association, have homed in on a footnote in Trainor’s letter stating that it “does not have the force and effect of law and does not bind the public or create new legal standards.” 

“It is just a letter. It’s not rules or regs. It’s not changing law,” said Sonia Park, executive director of the Diverse Charter Schools Association, a network with member schools nationwide. “We have diverse in our name. It’s not something we’re going to fade away from.” 

The letter referenced , a 2023 ruling in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down racial preferences in college admissions. But some experts say the letter is inconsistent with the court’s opinion. 

“The letter goes far beyond what the Supreme Court said in SFFA, and, indeed, even contradicts it,” said Neal McCluskey, director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the libertarian Cato Institute. Trainor, for example, said that when making admission decisions, colleges can’t factor essays in which students write about the role of race in their lives. 

But that’s the opposite of what the court ruled, McCluskey said. In the majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts said nothing in the ruling “should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise.” 

According to Madison Biedermann, a spokeswoman for the department, officials plan to issue additional guidance. Andrew Manna, an Indianapolis-area education lawyer, said it might also take an actual complaint against a district or an OCR investigation to get clarity on what officials consider to be illegal discrimination. 

But some welcome the department’s more muscular approach. 

“I think, and hope, the department will be at least as strict as the Obama administration was,” said Neeraja Deshpande, a policy analyst at the conservative Independent Women’s Forum. She’s referring to a 2014 alerting districts that they risked civil rights investigations if they disproportionately disciplined Black and Hispanic students. A few months later, OCR launched an investigation into the , later finding over 100 instances where Black students were disciplined more harshly than their white peers for similar infractions.

“This is a fundamental question of fairness, as was SFFA,” Deshpande said. “OCR should absolutely go after schools that undermine fairness via unfair DEI preferences.”

Groups or classes or extra academic support aimed at specific are among the practices that Parents Defending Education, a conservative advocacy group, argues are illegal.

The American Federation of Teachers, along with AFT-Maryland and the American Sociological Association, is challenging the letter. They in federal court Tuesday, saying the “vague and clearly unconstitutional memo is a grave attack on students, our profession and knowledge itself.”

‘Target-rich environment’

Leaders in more right-leaning parts of the country said they’re also not worried about Trainor’s letter, largely because lawmakers in their states have already banned DEI.

Last year, Utah, for example, passed that labels diversity, equity and inclusion “prohibited discriminatory practices.” When Utah’s education department gave the legislature a compliance update, there were no violations to report, state Superintendent Sydnee Dickson told The 74. 

“We didn’t need to make dramatic changes in our K-12 system,” she said. 

Trainor’s letter followed an from the president that called on the education department to devise a plan for stripping districts of their federal funds if they advance “discriminatory equity ideology.” Officials have until the end of April to devise such policies. 

But the OCR letter accelerates the process, warning districts to “cease all efforts” to accomplish what it calls “nebulous” diversity goals and that it will begin taking “appropriate measures to assess compliance” March 1. The department has yet to specify what those measures might be.

Parents Defending Education has already done a lot of the work for the new administration. The organization keeps a of districts nationwide that have equity-related policies and initiatives. Last year, it forced the Los Angeles district to revise its Black Student Achievement Plan, which provided additional counseling and academic support in schools predominantly serving Black students. All students, not just those who are Black, are now eligible for the extra help. 

 The group’s list has more districts from California than from any other state. 

“California is a target-rich environment for the administration’s causes,” said Laura Preston, director of government affairs for F3Law, which handles education cases throughout the state. 

She suggested that the state might not want to risk the loss of federal education funds at a time when state resources are needed to rebuild parts of Los Angeles ravaged by fire. But she also questioned OCR’s ability to conduct thorough investigations when the department is . The letter, she said, sets up a potential clash between states and the federal government. prohibits the government from mandating or controlling instruction or withholding funds from districts if they don’t comply. 

“Trump keeps saying he wants states’ rights [and] then tries to be the federal school board,” she said. “It doesn’t work in the long haul.”

‘Committed to full compliance’

To show that some education leaders welcome Trainor’s message, the department last week highlighted statements from several state chiefs who agree with the letter. 

“I applaud this directive from the U.S. Department of Education and Florida stands ready to assist other states to end racial preferences in education,” said Manny Diaz, Florida education commissioner. And Ellen Weaver, state superintendent in South Carolina, said her department is “committed to full compliance with the U.S. Department of Education’s directive.”

But Diaz, Weaver and Dickson from Utah were also among the 12 state education leaders who last month told Linda McMahon, Trump’s education secretary nominee, that they wanted the department to stop issuing “dear colleague” letters intended to push states to “take actions aligned to the current administration’s priorities and opinions.”

McCluskey at Cato said the letter is still consistent with their request, which was to clearly state that dear colleague letters are not legally binding. But he still finds such missives problematic.

“For all intents and purposes they impose new law, while those who issue them simultaneously claim they legally change nothing,” he said. “Of course, they shouldn’t change anything. Changing law is a legislative responsibility.”

Aaron Spence, superintendent of the Loudoun County Public Schools in Virginia — which has long been targeted on Parents Defending Education’s — said he’s tried to reassure the community that his district isn’t doing anything illegal, like using racial quotas or hiring staff based on race instead of qualifications.

In January 2022, just after his election, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin issued an demanding that schools avoid “inherently divisive concepts.” But Spence doesn’t view his district’s to be controversial and said under , districts are required to report student progress for different subgroups. 

“People get this pie mentality, which is ‘Oh gosh, if they do more for this group of students, they’re doing less for this group of students,’ ” he said. “The goal for everybody is 100% success. We’re working to ensure all of them get over the bar of achievement that we’ve set for them.”

returns to Austin, Texas, running March 3-6. As always, it’ll offer a huge number of panels, discussions, film screenings, musical performances and workshops exploring education, innovation and the future of schooling.

Keynote speakers this year include neuroscientist , founder of Ness Labs, an online educational platform for knowledge workers; astronaut, author and TV host , and , CEO of Search for Common Ground, an international non-profit. Idriss will speak about what it means to be strong in the face of opposition — and how to turn conflict into cooperation. Also featured: indy musical artist Jill Sobule, from her musical F*ck 7th Grade.

As in 2024, artificial intelligence remains a major focus, with dozens of sessions exploring AI’s potential and pitfalls. But other topics are on tap as well, including sessions on playful learning, book bans and the benefits of prison journalism. 

To help guide the way, we’ve scoured the to highlight 25 of the most significant presenters, topics and panels: 

Monday, March 3:

A new independent film features a Seattle school counselor who builds a world-class Ultimate Frisbee team with a group of immigrant children at Hazel Wolf K-8 School. 

Generative AI is accelerating the adoption of a skills-based economy, but many are skeptical about its value, impact and the pace of growth. Will AI spark meaningful change and a new economic order, or is it just another overhyped trend? Meena Naik of Jobs for the Future leads a discussion with Colorado Community College System Associate Vice Chancellor Michael Macklin, Nick Moore, an education advisor to Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, and Best Buy’s Ryan Hanson.

The Clayton Christensen Institute’s Julia Freeland Fisher headlines a panel that looks at how generative AI can help students access 24/7 help in navigating pathways to college. As new models take root, the panel will explore what entrepreneurs are learning about what students want from these systems. Will AI level the playing field or perpetuate inequality? 

New research shows students who are engaged in schoolwork not only do better in school but are happier and more confident in life. And educators say they’d be happier at work and less likely to leave the profession if students engaged more deeply. In this session, LEGO Education’s Bo Stjerne Thomsen will explore the science behind playful learning and how it can get students and teachers excited again.

Mike Yates of The Reinvention Lab at Teach for America leads an interactive session offering participants the chance to build their own AI tools to solve real problems they face at work, school or home. The session is for AI novices as well as those simply curious about how the technology works. Participants will get free access to .

Join Charlotte West of Open Campus, Lawrence Bartley of The Marshall Project and Yukari Kane of the Prison Journalism Project to explore real-life stories from behind bars. Journalism training is transforming the lives of a few of the more than 1.9 million people incarcerated in the U.S., teaching skills from time management to communication and allowing inmates to feel connected to society while building job skills. 

Tuesday, March 4:

Amid the hand-wringing about what AI means for the future of education, there’s been little conversation about how a few smart educators are already employing it to shift possibilities for student engagement and classroom instruction. In this workshop, attendees will learn how to leverage promising practices emerging from research with real educators using AI in writing, creating their own chatbots and differentiating support plans. 

AI-enabled tools can be helpful for students conducting research, outlining written work, or proofing and editing submissions. But there’s a fine line between using AI appropriately and taking advantage of it, leaving many students wondering, “How much AI is too much?” This session, led by Turnitin’s Annie Chechitelli, will discuss the rise of GenAI, its intersection with academia and academic integrity, and how to determine appropriate usage.  

Explore the real-world impact of AI in education during this interactive session hosted by Zhuo Chen, a text analysis instructor at the nonprofit education startup Constellate, and Dylan Ruediger of the research and consulting group Ithaka S+R. Chen and Ruediger will share successes and challenges in using AI to advance student learning, engagement and skills. 

In 2025, authors face unprecedented challenges. This session, which features Scholastic editor and young adult novelist David Levithan, as well as Emily Kirkpatrick, executive director of the National Council of Teachers of English, will explore the battle for freedom of expression and the importance of defending reading in the face of censorship attempts and book bans.

Kate Arend and Kim Lessing, the co-presidents of Amy Poehler’s production company Paper Kite Productions, will be live to record their workplace and career advice podcast “Million Dollar Advice.” The pair will tackle topics such as setting and maintaining boundaries, learning from Gen Z, dealing with complicated work dynamics, and more. They will also take live audience questions.

With rising recognition of neurodivergent students, advocates say AI can revolutionize how schools support them by streamlining tasks, optimizing resources and enhancing personalized learning. In the process, schools can overcome challenges in mainstreaming students with learning differences. This panel features educators and advocates as well as Alex Kotran, co-founder and CEO of The AI Education Project.

Assessments are often disruptive, cumbersome or disconnected from classroom learning. But a few advocates and developers say AI-powered assessment tools offer an easier, more streamlined way for students to demonstrate learning — and for educators to adapt instruction to meet their needs. This session, moderated by The 74’s Greg Toppo, features Khan Academy’s Kristen DiCerbo, Curriculum Associates’ Kristen Huff and Akisha Osei Sarfo, director of research at the Council of the Great City Schools.

Wednesday, March 5:

Gun violence is now the leading cause of death for American children and teens, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, yet coverage of gun violence’s impact on youth is usually reported by adults. Run, Hide, Fight: Growing Up Under the Gun is a 30-minute documentary by student journalists about how gun violence affects young Americans. Produced by PBS News Student Reporting Labs in collaboration with 14 student journalists in five cities, it centers the perspectives of young people who live their lives in the shadow of this threat. 

Educators are at the forefront of testing, using artificial intelligence and teaching their communities about it. In this interactive session, participants will hear from educators and ed tech specialists on the ground working to support the use of AI to improve learning. The session includes Stacie Johnson, director of professional learning at Khan Academy, and Dina Neyman, Khan Academy’s director of district success. 

As AI becomes increasingly present in the classroom, educators are understandably concerned about how it might disrupt their teaching. An expert panel featuring Jake Baskin, executive director of the Computer Science Teachers Association andKarim Meghji of Code.org, will look at how teaching will change in an age of AI, exploring frameworks for teaching AI skills and sharing best practices for integrating AI literacy across disciplines.

Generation Alpha is the first to experience generative artificial intelligence from the start of their educational journeys. To thrive in a world featuring AI requires educators helping them tap into their natural creativity, navigating unique opportunities and challenges. In this session, a cross-industry panel of experts discuss strategies to integrate AI into learning, allowing critical thinking and curiosity to flourish while enabling early learners to become architects of AI, not just users.

Join a panel of educators, tech leaders and nonprofit officials as they discuss AI’s ethical complexities and its impact on the education of Black children. This panel will address historical disparities, biases in technology, and the critical need for ethical AI in education. It will also offer unique perspectives into the benefits and challenges of AI in Black children’s education, sharing best practices to promote the safe, ethical and legal use of AI in classrooms.

Is teacher morale shaped by where teachers work? Find out as Education Week releases its annual State of Teaching survey. States and school districts drive how teachers are prepared, paid and promoted, and the findings will raise new questions about what leaders and policymakers should consider as they work to support an essential profession. The session features Holly Kurtz, director of EdWeek Research Center, Stephen Sawchuk, EdWeek assistant managing editor, and assistant editor Sarah D. Sparks.

While most students in U.S. public schools are now young people of color, more than 80% of their teachers are white. How do white educators understand and address these dynamics? Join a live recording of a podcast that brings together white educators with Christopher Emdin and sam seidel, co-editors of From White Folks Who Teach in the Hood: Reflections on Race, Culture, and Identity (Beacon, 2024).

Schools are locked in a battle with students over fears they’re using generative artificial intelligence to plagiarize existing work. In this session, join Elliott Hedman, a “customer obsession engineer” with mPath, who with colleagues and students co-designed a GenAI writing tool to reframe AI use. Hedman will share three strategies that not only prevent plagiarism but also teach students how to use GenAI more productively.  

Thursday, March 6:

Join futurists Sinead Bovell and Natalie Monbiot for a fireside discussion about how we prepare kids for a future we cannot yet see but know will be radically transformed by technology. Bovell and Monbiot will discuss the impact of artificial intelligence on our world and the workforce, as well as its implications for education. 

Young children spend 80% of their time outside of school, but too many lack access to experiences that encourage learning through hands-on activities and play. While these opportunities exist in middle-class and upper-income neighborhoods, they’re often inaccessible to families in low-income communities. In this session, a panel of designers and educators featuring Sarah Lytle, who leads the Playful Learning Landscapes Action Network, will look at how communities are transforming overlooked spaces such as sidewalks, shelters and even jails into nurturing learning environments accessible to all kids.

In this session, participants will build an AI chatbot alongside designers and engineers from Stanford University and Stanford’s d.school, getting to the core of how AI works. Participants will conceptualize, outline and create conversation flows for their own AI assistant and explore methods that technical teams use to infuse warmth and adaptability into interactions and develop reliable chatbots.  

In this session, participants will learn how educators, technologists and policymakers work to develop AI responsibly. Panelists include Isabelle Hau of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, Amelia Kelly, chief technology officer of the Irish AI startup SoapBox Labs, and Merlyn Mind CEO Levi Belnap. They’ll talk about how policymakers and educators can work with developers to ensure transparency and accuracy of AI tools.��

For example, teachers in districts with the highest concentrations of poverty are almost three times more likely to be early in their career, with less than three years of experience. And students in these districts are 16 times more likely to learn from a teacher with temporary or emergency credentials than their peers in Michigan’s wealthiest school districts.

“The teacher shortage crisis that we hear a lot about here in Michigan is far worse for our students with the greatest needs,” said Jen DeNeal, director of policy and research at EdTrust-Midwest and lead author of the report. 

DeNeal noted that research shows that novice, not fully credentialed teachers are generally less effective in the classroom.

While the national teacher shortage in certain subjects has been as an intractable issue that’s worsened since the pandemic, the EdTrust study released last month uniquely zooms in on district-level data and demonstrates the scope of the problem.

“Having gaps is, of course, not a surprise,” said Michael Hansen, a senior fellow at the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution. “Having gaps of this magnitude is pretty stark.”

DeNeal and her team at EdTrust, which advocates for educational equity with a focus on children who have been traditionally underserved, spent two years analyzing educator workforce data from public and non-public sources, conducting focus groups and reviewing previous research.

They used Michigan’s a state funding formula passed in 2023 that includes an index for concentrations of poverty, to divide school districts into six bands. Band one includes districts with fewer than 20% of students living in concentrated poverty while band six includes districts where 85% to 100% of students live in these conditions. 

Researchers then looked at how highly qualified teachers — defined as those who were fully certified with more than three years of experience teaching in their certification or more refined speciality areas — were distributed across these districts.

They found that in the 2022-23 school year, more than 16% of teachers in high-poverty districts were teaching a subject or grade not listed on their license — that’s twice the state average. These districts accounted for more than a third of all out-of-field educators in the state, despite only employing 13.5% of Michigan teachers. 

While out-of-field teachers are typically a stop-gap resource preferable to a revolving door of substitutes, they may lack the content knowledge and skills needed to effectively teach, and students who learn from them tend to have in that subject. Those with emergency credentials are also able to fill teacher vacancies when more qualified ones aren’t available, though they’re more likely to be rated as when compared to other new teachers.

Hansen noted that being trained and fully licensed makes a teacher more likely to provide quality instruction in the classroom, but “it’s no guarantee.” And while these findings do likely point to a “more effective teacher workforce in these more affluent settings, and … a less effective workforce in the high-needs settings, it’s probably not the case that it’s going to be 16 times more effective.”

Yet, “of all these different factors and characteristics that they’re highlighting in this report, experience is the number one that’s documented to show an impact across multiple studies and multiple grades,” he added.

Persistent vacancies may be particularly hard to fill in Michigan, where teacher attrition is slightly worse than the national average, and teacher turnover is far higher for students living in poverty. For example Black students, who account for only 18% of the statewide student enrollment, make up 45% of where teachers were most likely to leave.

In districts where a majority of children are Black, students were nearly four times more likely to learn from an out-of-field teacher, four times more likely to learn from a teacher with emergency credentials and nearly twice as likely to learn from a beginning teacher than in districts serving primarily white students.

In focus groups, teachers pointed to a number of factors contributing to the shortage, including the pandemic, discipline challenges and chronic absenteeism. They also reported that their classrooms are overfilled, they have less one-on-one time with students and less planning time because they’re being called on to substitute teach. One issue, though, came up again and again: pay.

“We’re not competitive regionally and we’re not terribly competitive nationally,” DeNeal said.

Between Michigan’s inflation-adjusted teacher salary fell more than 20%, representing the second-largest teacher salary decline in the country. First-year teachers in Michigan earned, on average, about $39,000 a year, rendering it 39th nationally and last among Great Lake states. And researchers found that teachers in the wealthiest district are paid, on average, about $4,000 more annually than those in the poorest districts.

This is exactly the opposite of what the pay structure should look like, according to Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the American Institute of Research and the University of Washington. He argued that teachers in more challenging environments should be paid more than their peers to compensate for the additional hurdles.

“I don’t think this is an issue where we need a lot of research to know that this problem exists and to know at least what some of the potential solutions are,” he said. “This is an issue where the politics I think make it challenging to implement at least some of the solutions.”

DeNeal said that although these challenges are “troubling and extremely persistent, they are not insurmountable.”

The report put forward five recommendations, based on teacher focus groups and previous research: prioritize fair and equitable funding; improve state education data systems to increase transparency; provide greater support for school administrators; focus on making teaching an attractive and competitive career and increase access to high-quality professional development for teachers.

Thomas Morgan, spokesperson for the Michigan Education Association, emphasized the importance of incorporating teacher voice in the solutions.

“When you want to know what to do to fix our schools,” he said, “the first people you should talk to are people working on the front lines: those teachers working in our schools. They see things, they live it, they breathe it and they should be consulted.”

Like learning to read by third grade, taking eighth grade math is a pivotal moment in a child’s education. Students who pass Algebra 1 in eighth grade are more likely to sign up for more advanced math courses, and those who pass more advanced math courses are more likely to graduate from college and earn more money. “Algebra in eighth grade is a gateway to a lot of further opportunities,” said Dan Goldhaber, an economist who studies education at the American Institutes for Research, in a recent webinar.

Researchers are trying to understand why so few Black and Hispanic students and low-income students of all races are making it through this early gate. While 25 percent of white students passed algebra in eighth  grade in 2021, only 13 percent of Black students did, according to the most recent .

A collection of surveys of teachers and principals, conducted by the research organization RAND, suggests three problems at the poorest middle schools, which are disproportionately populated with Black and Hispanic students. Many don’t offer algebra at all. Their teachers have less training and math expertise, and they describe how they spend classroom time differently than teachers do at wealthier schools. That means the most advanced students at many middle schools in poor communities don’t have the opportunity to learn algebra, and many students at high-poverty schools aren’t receiving the kind of math lessons that could help them get ready for the subject. 

In 2023 and 2024, RAND surveyed more than 3,000 school principals and almost 1,000 math teachers across the country. The educators are part of a specially constructed national sample, designed to reflect all public schools and the demographics of the U.S. student population. A  analyzing some of the survey findings was released in October 2024. (That analysis was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is among the many funders of The Hechinger Report.)

The poorest 25 percent of schools had vastly different course offerings and teachers than the wealthiest 25 percent. Most strikingly, nearly a quarter of the highest poverty schools didn’t offer algebra at all to any eighth graders, compared with only 6 percent of the wealthiest schools. 

Conversely, poor schools are much less likely to adopt an algebra-for-all policy in eighth grade. Nearly half of the wealthiest schools offered algebra to all of their eighth grade students, regardless of math ability, compared with about a third of the poorest schools. 

Math teachers at high-poverty schools tended to have weaker professional preparation. They were far more likely to have entered the profession without first earning a traditional education degree at a college or university, instead completing an alternative certification program on the job, often without student teaching under supervision. And they were less likely to have a graduate degree or hold a mathematics credential. 

In surveys, a third of math teachers at high-poverty schools reported that they spent more than half of class time teaching topics that were below grade level, as well as managing student behavior and disciplining students. Lecture-style instruction, as opposed to classroom discussion, was far more common at the poorest schools compared to the wealthiest schools. RAND researchers also detected similar discrepancies in instructional patterns when they examined schools along racial and ethnic lines, with Black and Hispanic students receiving “less optimal” instruction than white students. But these discrepancies were stronger by income than by race, suggesting that poverty may be a bigger factor than bias.

Many communities have tried putting more eighth graders into algebra classes, but that has sometimes left unprepared students worse off.  “Simply giving them an eighth grade algebra course is not a magic bullet,” said AIR’s Goldhaber, who commented on the RAND analysis during a Nov. 5 . Either the material is too challenging and the students fail or the course was “algebra” in name only and didn’t really cover the content. And without a college preparatory track of advanced math classes to take after algebra, the benefits of taking Algebra 1 in eighth grade are unlikely to accrue.

It’s also not economically practical for many low-income middle schools to offer an Algebra 1 course when only a handful of students are advanced enough to take it. A teacher would have to be hired even for a few students and those resources might be more effectively spent on something else that would benefit more students. That puts the most advanced students at low-income schools at a particular disadvantage. “It’s a difficult issue for schools to tackle on their own,” said Goldhaber. 

Improving math teacher quality at the poorest schools is a critical first step. Some researchers have suggested paying strong math teachers more to work at high-poverty schools, but that would also require the renegotiation of union contracts in many cities. And, even with financial incentives, there is a shortage of math teachers. 

For students, AIR’s Goldhaber argues the time to intervene in math is in elementary school to make sure more low-income students have strong basic math skills. “Do it before middle school,” said Goldhaber. “For many students, middle school is too late.”

That has long been a dream of testmakers: to embed assessments in student work and, in a sense, make them indistinguishable.

For very young children, however, that’s a challenge. Much of what they know is revealed not through easy-to-interpret writing, but talk and play. To assess these kids effectively, one needs to be able to turn their quirky utterances into data.

That’s the basic idea behind Curriculum Associates’ of Dublin-based SoapBox Labs. The has spent the past decade developing software that understands the unique speech of children and translates it reliably into text. As schools focus on the Science of Reading, that could be the key to making assessments a more seamless part of teachers’ workflow, especially for those who instruct children as young as pre-kindergarten.

“The future of assessment is invisible because it is integrated with instruction,” said Kristen Huff, Curriculum Associates’ head of assessment and research. “It is not disruptive. It’s authentic. And it helps the teacher personalize the learning path for each student.”

Like virtually every other educational publisher, Massachusetts-based Curriculum Associates, founded in 1969, is trying to figure out how to offer teachers about student learning.

The publisher’s popular reading and math programs are used by an estimated 13 million students nationwide. Curriculum Associates now says its reading program speech recognition technology that can be operated not just by teachers but by the youngest students, with artificial intelligence listening and revealing exactly how well they understand the words they read and, some day, the math they do.��

The new tool will likely roll out next fall, the publisher says. 

For years, educators have puzzled over how to effectively assess the work of young children. They typically can’t just sit down, read texts and answer questions. They need hands-on instruction through different kinds of media — watching, listening and reading in equal measure — to understand what they’re learning. They act out stories, they sing, they chant rhymes, they talk and move around. 

Paper-and-pencil tests are mostly out of the question. 

To those who have studied it, voice offers the quickest means of assessing a child’s abilities, since in all but the most special cases there’s little space between a child’s thoughts and his or her utterances. “It’s the most natural way for most children to convey information,” said Amelia Kelly, SoapBox’s chief technology officer. 

But putting a keyboard, mouse, trackpad or even a touch screen in front of many students creates “confounding factors” that limit their ability to show what they know, she said.

By capturing students’ voices as they read independently on a tablet or laptop, then translating that into text and comparing it to what’s on screen, teachers can get valuable insights into kids’ understanding. Good voice assessments can help teachers see gaps in children’s learning so schools can challenge them with appropriate work. 

But processing kids’ voices accurately is another challenge altogether. 

‘They shout, they whisper, they sing’

SoapBox founder Patricia Scanlon, an engineer with a Ph.D in speech recognition technology, has said the company grew out of her personal experience watching her own child struggle to learn how to read. 

One day in 2013, she opened an email from the maker of a game her 3-year-old daughter was using for help. The app automatically sent parents updates, and this one told Scanlon her child had completed seven levels in the game, a major achievement. 

“Suitably impressed,” Scanlon asked her daughter to show her the game. She soon realized that the child hadn’t actually mastered the material — she’d simply guessed at the correct answers and gathered rewards without mastering the skills. “She had learned to hack the game,” Scanlon said, impressed with her daughter’s ingenuity — but steamed at a wasted opportunity.

What was missing, she realized, was a way for the game to hold her daughter accountable, to “invisibly and continuously” quiz and assess her progress, despite the fact that, at age 3, she and most kids can’t hold a pencil, control a mouse or type on a keyboard.

With her background, Scanlon knew that even in 2013, speech recognition technology worked well for adults but not for younger children, who have higher pitched voices and rarely follow standard language rules: “They shout, they whisper, they sing, they elongate, they over-pronounce the words,” she said.

Of course, children come to school with regional accents and years of learning distinctive dialects at home. And millions of kids are learning English as they enter school. So she began building a proprietary “voice engine” that would accurately record what young children say in real-world, noisy environments and on ordinary consumer devices like Chromebooks and iPads.

At the time, the biggest AI voice recognition systems such as (Amazon’s Alexa was still about ) were being trained almost exclusively on adult voices, in “grown-up” situations: consumers purchasing products, drivers seeking directions or hikers asking about the weather. 

Siri and other systems worked well for these nominal tasks, but they weren’t built for school, where children are struggling to learn. Kelly, SoapBox’s CTO, compared it to training an AI-guided self-driving car on a Formula 1 racetrack instead of a crowded, congested street. When you finally got the car out onto the streets, it wouldn’t work.

So Scanlon and her colleagues spent the next decade training SoapBox’s AI to learn from children in both Europe and the U.S. That meant teaching the AI that a word said by an English language learner in Dublin is the same one spoken by one in Philadelphia or a kid from the American South.

“If it doesn’t work for every student equally, then it doesn’t work,” said Kelly.

She sees that functionality as an ethical concern. Voice-activated AI “can be the great equalizer here,” she said. “I think it can help solve the literacy crisis — but only if people use it. And people are only going to use it if they trust it. And they’re only going to trust it if it works.”

The terms of the November sale weren’t disclosed, but it will almost certainly create a huge competitive advantage for Curriculum Associates, which gets exclusive access to a technology that has been widely used by other publishers.

Before the acquisition, SoapBox had licensed its technology to dozens of education providers such as McGraw Hill, Scholastic and Amplify, essentially enabling them to outsource voice recognition for their own products. With the 2023 deal, those partnerships stopped, Curriculum Associates said.

According to , before the acquisition, Soapbox had raised $10.4 million in funding since 2017. Its most recent investor last year was the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which provided an undisclosed sum to underwrite development of a voice engine for U.S. students.

By next fall, Curriculum Associates envisions that the technology will be so simple to use that even the youngest students could work independently, putting themselves through the paces of self-guided games and activities that evaluate their reading skills on an ongoing basis. While it’s still piloting the technology in schools, one teacher who has seen a preview said she’s eager to see it in action. 

LaTanya Renea Arias of Kingsland Elementary School in Kingsland, Ga., said having better data about students is key not just to learning but equity — especially when 55% of students are people of color but 80% of teachers are white.

Though she has taught for a decade, she said, “I don’t have an ear to pick up every single dialect, to have great understanding of how a word that I pronounce sounds differently” when a particular student says it. “But I still need to credit them with their learning and their knowledge.”

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to The 74.

New , released today by nonprofit Advocates for Children of New York revealed around 27,000 more students experienced homelessness than in 2022-23 for a total of 146,000 children. Roughly one in eight children lacked a permanent place to call home.

An influx of and a have likely contributed to the stark increase, experts said, outside of persistent drivers like the city’s . 

The 23% increase after a decade of mostly under 10% increases has alarmed education and housing advocates who called for the city, state and department of education to address shortages, , expand , improve the , and prioritize placing students into housing nearest to their school. 

According to the latest demographic data of students in temporary housing available from the 2022-23 school year, one in three were English language learners and nearly all were Black or Latino. 

This marks the ninth consecutive year student homelessness has exceeded 100,000. The latest tally of students could fill all seats in Yankee Stadium nearly three times over. Each of the city’s 32 school districts saw increases, but students experiencing homelessness were most highly concentrated in the south Bronx, upper Manhattan, and central Brooklyn’s Brownsville and Bushwick, where the city’s largest shelters are.

“The challenges remain stubbornly persistent,” said Jennifer Pringle, director of AFC’s Learners in Temporary Housing Project. “…If we’re [going to] talk about ending family homelessness, we need to make sure that education is front and center. Young adults who don’t have a high school diploma are four to five times more likely to experience homelessness as adults. We have to make sure that our young people right now in shelter are getting the support that they need, so they graduate and flourish beyond high school.”

The numbers, while unsurprising to experts familiar with the growing crisis, are likely still an undercount as to how many children are experiencing homelessness. Data capture only school-aged children, but “the most common age that someone is in shelter is under the age of 5,” said Henry Love, vice president of public policy and strategy with Women in Need, the city and nation’s largest shelter provider. 

“We’re probably talking about a quarter of a million or 200,000 children, at least,” Love said, emphasizing families are the main population in shelters today. “I’m still wrapping my mind around it.”

He added that the situation has been exacerbated by Mayor Eric Adams’ vetoing a package of the City Councils’ housing bills, which would have expanded financial assistance to families at risk of homelessness. After the Council attempted to override the vetoes, a . The decision is now being appealed in court, leaving thousands of families in limbo. 

“The number one thing is if we could keep people in their homes,” he said. “…We have decided by de facto that instead of giving these kids housing that they deserve, we said, you know what, we’ll give you shelter instead.”

Just over half of last year’s students who lived in temporary housing were “doubled-up,” sharing homes with friends or family, and more than 60,000 spent nights in the city’s shelters.

Data obtained from the state’s department of education also revealed alarming education outcomes for students in temporary housing in the 2022-23 school year, the latest available: on state reading and writing tests, proficiency for third through eighth graders was 20 points lower on average; and the high school dropout rate was three times higher than that of their peers. 

Students in shelter experienced the most negative educational impacts, seeing rates of chronic absenteeism closer to 70%, in part due to the city’s common practice of initially , adding strain to already costly and lengthy transportation routes. 

About 18% of students in shelters had to move schools at least once during the school year, four times the rate for permanently housed students. 

“It’s not good for students, it’s not good for the school to have that level of churn among your student population. You think about the connections that kids have to their peers, their teachers and how vital those relationships are and how much they can help a student during a time of housing instability,” AFC’s Pringle said. “Yet for so many families, they’re forced to contend between these ridiculously long commutes or transferring schools.” 

Mayor Adams’ administration also enacted an “inhumane” 60-day stay limit on particular shelters, disproportionately impacting the .

In addition to housing policy reforms, adjusting the state’s per-pupil formula would be critical in boosting kids’ educational outcomes by allowing schools to adequately invest in family outreach, attendance improvement, wrap around services with local community organizations, and academic tutoring. 

In a statement, Department of Education spokesperson Chyann Tull said the system has provided “field support, enrollment support, transportation services for students and parents, access to counseling, immunization assistance, and academic support.” 

The city has a goal of placing 85% of students in the same borough as their school, but “they haven’t gotten anywhere close to that .. more needs to be done there,” Pringle added. “I think it’s recognized by the fact that they set a goal that they are not achieving – they know that they need to do better.”

Such a classification is racist, sexist, classist, inaccurate and — worst of all, they say — lasting. Many Americans who absorbed such messages in their youth continue to define themselves this way decades later. 

And they those insecurities to their children, as if math competency is an innate trait and not a learned skill. This sort of old-school thinking has, for generations, sidelined students of all types, including girls, and those who come from impoverished communities, math equity advocates say. Pushed away from STEM at an early age, they learn to count themselves out of lucrative opportunities. 

“The highest point that they can reach is drastically diminished if they are put on these lower tracks,” said Marian Dingle, a veteran teacher and head of , a group that aims to boost mathematics education for all students, with a focus on Hispanics. 

Math experts are calling for a new mindset, saying teachers and parents should expect that some children might need extra time — or tutoring — to master mathematical concepts and that these accommodations do not reflect negatively on their overall ability or potential. 

“Research shows that when students are labeled based on perceived math aptitude, it risks negatively impacting the student’s self-efficacy and motivation, leading to long-term struggles with math and kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Lasana Tunica-El, senior deputy director of campaigns for . “They’ve received and heard this labeling — and then they fulfill the labeling.”

Pamela Seda, president of the , which works to empower Black children by boosting their access and success in mathematics, said she would love to see a more progressive, flexible and inclusive mindset adopted in the nation’s classrooms. But, she said, American schools are quick to place students on one path or another, often influenced by the child’s race. Critical decisions are made early — and they stick.

“We use math as a means to sort kids by who gets to be at the top and who gets to be at the bottom,” she said. “Our systems have not changed.”

Seda, who spent 26 years teaching in public schools, isn’t sure why people’s notions around success in math have become so rigid. Children, she said, need individualized help. 

She recalled teaching her own kids — now adults — how to do their own laundry when they were young. Ranging in age from 5 to 9, she instructed each one on how to sort their clothes and operate the washing machine, she said. Her youngest needed a step stool to complete the task, but his mother was not deterred. 

“It never crossed my mind that he couldn’t do it,” Seda said of him. 

And that’s the same mentality educators must adopt when it comes to their students, she said. A math coordinator for three different school districts, she’s tried to create such learning environments and encouraged other teachers to do the same.

“The challenge is, they still work within schools and within systems that undermine that,” she said. “They are trying to do the best they can.” 

Math anxiety leads to another complexity, said Tunica-El. It impacts not only the general public but the . Many shy away from teaching mathematical concepts even in the early grades because they are unsure of their abilities. 

“And then some of that is superimposed onto students, unfortunately,” he said. 

Dingle, of TODOS: Math for All, noted that many math educators come into the field for different reasons: Some are fascinated with the subject matter while others are more interested in working with students. 

“So you’ve got all these different types of people thrown into the mix,” she said. “If we just start from a place of assets, I think it’s easier to lean into the normalization of the idea that learning is learning and it doesn’t matter the pace.”

Dingle said educators need to embrace the idea that certain skills are imperative to being human, including numeracy, mathematical skill and mathematical intuition. 

Josh Recio, systemic transformation lead at at UT Austin, said math is unusual in that the ultimate goal for many students is to take calculus in their senior year of high school — what might be considered as the ultimate signpost of whether they are ‘good at math.’ 

“But the only way to do that is to accelerate at some point because it takes five math classes to get to calculus — and there’s only four years of high school,” he said. 

Students who wish to reach this goal must take algebra in the eighth grade.

“So, you start seeing students placed into actual advanced courses starting in sixth grade, but that identification happens prior to that,” Recio said, sometimes as early as second or third grade. 

Some believe that the only way to eliminate tracking is to place all students on an accelerated path, but Recio disagrees. 

“I don’t think doing it for every student is right,” he said. “There are students who are ready to accelerate and there are those who are not. We need to continue to create opportunities to get them to that point.”

Alan Garfinkel, professor of integrative biology and physiology and medicine at UCLA, isn’t sure that’s a worthy objective. He questioned the value of added time and tutoring because the math we are teaching inside America’s classrooms, he argued, does not meet the moment.

“What does it mean to be good at math?” he asked. “The standard answer back then — and the standard answer right now — is that ‘good at math’ means the ability to rattle off formulas. It’s stupid pet tricks to solve absolutely trivial problems. That whole attitude is the enemy.”

More valuable, he said, would be for students to see — and solve — real-world problems by formulating them in mathematical terms and understanding how they evolved in a systematic way. He cited stopping the spread of COVID through modeling or finding out why people still turn away from electric vehicles, despite their benefits. 

“If you gave me a magic wand that I could use to make the entire population earn A’s in AP Calculus,” he said, “I wouldn’t take it.” 

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to The Charles A. Dana Center and The 74.

In the decades since, the nation has seen meaningful progress. Attainment gaps, while still present, have narrowed. English learners receive more targeted support, and students with disabilities have greater opportunities to learn in mainstream classrooms.

Even as educators celebrate that progress, we cannot deny that the country still fails to provide equal educational opportunity for all students — particularly those who are Black or Latino or who live in low-income communities.

The most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress exam showed of eighth graders are proficient in reading, and reach that bar in math. Outcomes for students from low-income households are even worse, with only 18% proficient in reading and 13% in math. Black and Latino students similarly trail white students.

These unacceptable outcomes reflect persistent inequities in resource allocation. On average, high-poverty districts receive in public education funding, primarily from state and local governments, than low-poverty districts. Those gaps translate into diminished learning opportunities, most notably in access to experienced and effective teachers. High-poverty schools experienced educators, with schools predominantly serving students of color being to employ uncertified teachers as those that have the fewest.

As a former civil rights lawyer, I saw the power and the limitations of the act to remedy these pernicious inequities. It has enabled attorneys to sue when there is evidence of non-compliance, such as delays in implementing special education services or disproportionate tracking of Black and Latino students into remedial classes. In my experience, those cases were largely successful, with judges calling for corrective actions. But too often, school systems ignored or only partly implemented judges’ orders, forcing attorneys to sue again. 

I joined KIPP, the nation’s largest network of public charter schools, after recognizing that while legal advocacy is essential, true progress requires transformational change led by those with the direct power to improve the nation’s education system.

Obviously, this includes efforts to guarantee access to high-quality public schools in every community, a promise stated in the act that remains unfulfilled.

In a world where patterns of residential segregation persist, the country needs bold, coordinated investments to ensure that all students receive a great education in their neighborhood. These include federal incentives to foster equity and innovation, with true accountability for results. A few areas where policymakers can begin enacting the required changes include:

• Prioritizing the critically important role of teachers. The federal government should launch a Marshall Plan for educators, reimagining the country’s approach to teacher preparation and backing salary increases to attract more qualified applicants. By investing in teacher recruitment and development, schools can both increase the skill level of new teachers and the capacity of veterans to drive the educational improvements children deserve, while improving diversity in the teacher workforce and ensuring the best-prepared educators work in the schools where they are most needed. 

• Revolutionizing the federal approach to school funding. Research increased education spending can lead to improved outcomes — but too frequently, federal dollars are allocated without sufficient guardrails, leading to programs being financed with little evidence. Federal funding must instead support proven strategies that drive outcomes for students. This means targeting resources toward evidence-based interventions such as literacy instruction grounded in the science of reading, along with robust accountability to ensure those resources translate into better results for students. Such efforts tend to meet resistance from across the ideological spectrum — teachers unions sometimes bristle at accountability measures, while conservative officials often resist federal oversight. But policymakers must have the courage to put students’ needs first.

• Ensuring access to rigorous college preparatory coursework. All students deserve an education that prepares them for lifelong success, including access to eighth-grade algebra, Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate courses, and advanced math and science classes that are prerequisites for admission to selective colleges. Currently, high schools in low-income communities are to offer calculus and physics than those predominantly serving more affluent students. Innovative approaches such as partnerships with local colleges can prevent students from being locked out of opportunity based on their zip code. 

No nation can thrive if large segments of its population receive a sub-par education that constrains economic and social mobility. The Equal Educational Opportunities Act was a critical step in making the nation’s public education system more equitable and effective. Now, it’s time to build on that legacy and take the bold actions needed to truly transform America’s schools and create a more just and prosperous society for all.

A new report from the  released this week studied the influence of socioeconomic status (SES) on disparities in reading, mathematics, and science achievement among racial and ethnic groups of elementary students in the United States.

Among other things, the study looked at which SES factors best explain existing achievement gaps, along with disparities among high-achieving students. The authors analyzed two sets of data from the federal Early Child Longitudinal Study, from 1998-99 and 2010-11.

The study’s resulting analysis “a broad set of family SES factors explains a substantial portion of racial achievement gaps: between 34 and 64 percent of the Black-white gap and between 51 and 77 percent of the Hispanic-white gap, depending on the subject and grade level.”

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“Racial achievement gaps in schools are well documented and remain a significant cause of concern in education. Troubling too is that the role of socioeconomic disparities in mediating these gaps remains unresolved,” the “While SES accounts for much of the racial achievement disparities, closing these gaps requires a comprehensive approach, including improving school quality and supporting family stability.”

The institute’s study used a broad set of measures of family background, including parents’ education, family finances, household structure, and “household opportunity factors.” The latter measure refers to academic, enrichment, and familial activities.

The authors of the study, University of Albany’s Eric Hengyu Hu and Paul L. Morgan, identified the following key findings from their analysis:

• Racial achievement gaps decrease significantly when controlling for the SES factors (though SES explains more of the Hispanic-white gap than the Black-white gap).
• Of all the SES factors analyzed, household income best explains the Black-white gap in academic achievement and mother’s education best explains the Hispanic-white gap.
• SES indicators, and the extent to which they explain racial/ethnic achievement gaps, are stable over time (1998-99 and 2010-11).
• SES also helps explain racial and ethnic excellence gaps (differences in the proportions of student groups within the highest achievement levels). The SES factors explain a larger share of Hispanic-white excellence gaps than Black-white excellence gaps across the board.
• The Black-white achievement gap grows as students age through elementary school, while the Hispanic-white gap shrinks.

Key findings from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s study.

To close such gaps, the authors recommend investments in early childhood education and income supplements, such as expanding child tax credits.

“Because achievement gaps are already evident by elementary school, including as early as kindergarten, investing in high-quality early childhood education programs, especially in underprivileged communities, may be beneficial in mitigating the effects of socioeconomic disparities,” the report says.

In addition to early childhood investments, the authors also propose the following solutions:

• Support programs to help parents earn their high school diplomas or higher education credentials.
• Economic support and financial aid for low-income families.
• Addressing racial and ethnic disparities, including the adoption of “curricula that reflect diverse cultures and programs that specifically support underrepresented students,” and student-teacher racial and ethnic matching.

“Whatever the approach, there is no denying the urgency of making the U.S. educational system more equitable,” the report says. “…The time to act is now. By enacting comprehensive and inclusive policies, we can narrow achievement gaps and create a more just educational landscape for the next generation.”

You can download and read the full study .

A look a gaps in North Carolina

Achievement gaps — also known as opportunity or equity gaps — follow national trends in North Carolina.

, following the start of the pandemic, only 51% of students tested as grade-level proficient. Proficiency was even lower among historically disadvantaged students, at 33% for Black students, 40% for Hispanic students, and 35% for economically disadvantaged students.

While those rates slightly increased during , gaps and low proficiency rates persist.

More highlights from the report

Thomas B. Fordham Institute President Michael J. Petrilli wrote in the report’s foreword that “the vast racial disparities in socioeconomic conditions and prenatal and early-life health experiences explain the achievement gaps we see between racial and ethnic groups, at least at school entry.”

Citing by economists Roland Fryer and Steven Levitt, “Understanding the Black-White Test Score Gap in the First Two Years of School,” Petrilli writes that this suggests that “universal, race-neutral interventions designed to improve the academic, social, economic, and health conditions of the poor would lift all boats and would also narrow racial gaps.”

Using data from the federal Early Child Longitudinal Study — data cited by Fryer and Levitt, along with more recent data — Petrilli said the report aimed to answer a few questions:

• Had the relationship between socioeconomic achievement gaps and racial/ethnic achievement gaps shifted?
• Was the Black-white gap still growing during elementary school?
• And how did all of this look for the white-Hispanic gap and for subjects beyond just reading and math?

Here is a look at the measures explored in the institute’s paper.

The institute’s study found that family socioeconomic factors explain more “of the Black-white achievement gap in first grade reading than in other subjects and grade levels.” The report proposes this may be the case because parents play a larger role in teaching language skills to young children than they do for math and science.

“The advantages of high SES—and disadvantages of low SES—thus show up more for students’ initial reading skills than for their math and science ones,” the report says. “As students get older and benefit from classroom instruction, their relative advantages and disadvantages start to matter less.”

However, while the gap narrows with age, there is still a gap. According to the report, this likely means “we still haven’t closed the ‘school quality gap’ between Black students and their white peers.”

As mentioned above, the report also found that family socioeconomic factors “explain more of the Hispanic-white achievement gap than the Black-white achievement gap.”

According to the report, this could be because Hispanic children in Spanish-speaking families “have latent potential that is obscured by their lack of English skills.”

The report also suggests that non-socioeconomic factors, racism, and bias affect Black children at higher rates than their Hispanic peers.

“For lower-income Black children, who are more likely to experience deep, persistent poverty than other groups, the combination of ‘adverse childhood experiences’ might exacerbate inequalities,” the report says. “And for middle class Black children, bias, stereotype threat, and related factors might be especially at play. This might also be why the Black-white achievement gap grows over the course of elementary school, while the Hispanic-white gap shrinks.”

Petrilli concludes: “When it comes to the interplay between race, poverty, and schooling, the honest read is that it’s complicated. What’s undeniable, though, is that much hard work remains, especially when it comes to providing effective schools to marginalized students, especially those who are Black. Let’s keep at it.”

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

, who helped register Black residents to vote in Mississippi during the Civil Rights Movement, believed civil rights went beyond the ballot box. To Moses, who was a teacher as well as an activist, math literacy is a civil right: a requirement to earning a living wage in modern society. In 1982, he founded the to ensure that “students at the bottom get the math literacy they need.”

Sixteen months ago, North Carolina’s highest court ordered the state legislature to spend $800 million to improve K-12 education — a landmark ruling that seemed to end a decades-long legal battle over adequate funding for schools.

The opinion, delivered 28 years after the suit was filed, was supposed to fund efforts in some of the state’s poorest districts for teacher and principal training, more books and supplies and expanded pre-K.

But those remedies are now in jeopardy as the Supreme Court, with a fresh political makeover, once again considers the case. 

When a trial court ordered the state to spend surplus funds on the remedies, Republican leaders who control the legislature appealed. They argue that the court never had the authority to issue “a sweeping statewide order” based on the claims of the original plaintiffs: five poor, rural districts. 

To the districts and equity advocates, however, the move smacks of a political power play. Under the former Democratic majority on the court, the ruling was tight — a 4-3 vote for the districts. Following the November 2022 election, the court flipped to a 5-2 majority in the Republicans’ favor.

If the court overturns the opinion, today’s students would be the “third generation of children since this lawsuit was filed to pass through our state school system without the benefit of relief,” Melanie Dubis, lead attorney for the districts, said during oral arguments in late February. The state, she said, has the “constitutional duty to provide the children the opportunity for a sound basic education.”

Matthew Tilley, the attorney who argued the case for House Speaker Tim Moore and Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger, said it is his firm’s “policy not to comment on ongoing client cases.”

It could be months before the court issues an opinion on the case. That leaves districts in the state, which ranks nationally in per-student funding, in limbo. But experts suggest the case has implications beyond the education budget. In a state where lawmakers seek over Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, and last year overrode 19 of his vetoes, the court’s decision to rehear the case raises questions about whether the legislature is exceeding its authority.

“This case is about having power over the courts,” said , a lawyer who co-founded The Innovation Project, a school leadership network. “The balance of power that helps government function properly is … at stake.”

‘Righting that wrong’

With the 70th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision ending school segregation this spring, other observers see the conservative court’s decision to reopen Hoke County Board of Education v. North Carolina — also known as the “Leandro” case — as a setback for efforts to address segregation’s legacy. 

“It’s important for us as a country to be righting that wrong and to ensure that we invest in schools and districts having high concentrations of students of color,” said Ary Amerikaner, co-founder of , a nonprofit promoting integration. “Underfunding of public schools in certain districts and states is deeply connected to racial segregation and racial inequities. That is certainly no different in North Carolina.” 

The statewide between poor and non-poor districts has grown wider in recent years, according to a 2020 report from Public School Forum, a research and advocacy group. School systems without a strong tax base, like the five original plaintiffs, predominantly serve minority students — those who were more likely to because of the pandemic and need extra help. Meanwhile, districts have turned to for-profit companies to provide and long-term substitutes to fill vacancies as they await the additional funding the was supposed to provide.

To Anthony Jackson, superintendent of the Chatham County Schools, west of Raleigh, the plan would address some of the growing district’s greatest needs, including more funding for competitive salaries and additional pre-K slots for 4-year-olds on waiting lists.

“It would mean resources to recruit, retain and reward the best teachers and get them in front of our kids,” he said. “It would mean a strong leader standing at the schoolhouse door in every one of our schools.”

Jackson previously served six years as superintendent of Vance County schools, one of the original plaintiff districts. Located next to the Wake County district, the state’s largest, Vance struggles to fill classrooms with qualified staff, Jackson said.

Under the plan, Vance would receive an extra $16 million by 2028, a that could pay for 35 more teaching assistants, 47 more nurses and mental health professionals, and 46 more spaces for pre-kindergartners, according to Every Child NC, an advocacy group that calculated the impact on each district. 

According to the most recent from an early-childhood education research and advocacy group, the state serves 19% of its 4-year-olds in public pre-K, but no 3-year-olds.

“We’ve got to support parents from the day they have that child. Kids go home for five years and then we expect them all to show up at the schoolhouse door at the same place,” Jackson said. Noting the state’s passage last year of a universal that provides up to $7,500 per student for private school tuition and other educational expenses, he added that if the state can find resources for school choice, “I’m sure we could find resources for universal pre-K.”

But others say the plan does not directly address student achievement.

“Will the teachers get paid adequately? Will people be able to go to schools without mold? Those are things that are important, but they’re not about performance,” said Marcus Brandon, executive director of NorthCarolinaCAN, a nonprofit that advocates for school choice. A former Democratic state representative, he said he supports the Leandro plan in principle, but still thinks the court has the authority to throw it out.

During February’s oral arguments, Tilley, who represents legislative leaders, argued that the remedial plan “dictates virtually every aspect of education policy and funding” and that the court’s ruling removed “those decisions … from the democratic process.” He stressed that an earlier court order in 2004 limited the relief to just one county, Hoke, and said the court should not have found a statewide violation.

In her response, Dubis accused the lawmakers of “gamesmanship” and said it’s illogical to apply the solutions only to Hoke, but not to other districts with, for example, similar teacher vacancies.

“It is a system that works on a statewide basis,” she said.

The outcome of the long-running case also rests on a second, but no less significant, matter.

Just months after the 2022 opinion, the new conservative court undercut the decision by ruling, in what McColl called “shadow litigation,” that the state controller can’t transfer surplus funds to pay for the relief. That means that even if the school districts win, it’s likely that funding for the plan would be further delayed.

“That’s what makes this so odd,” McColl said. “Without the ability to enforce a money remedy, these cases just don’t serve a lot of purpose.”

Like McColl, Derek Black, a University of South Carolina law professor and a member of the Brown’s Promise advisory board, has followed the Leandro case for years. He was among the legal scholars who submitted a January amicus brief, arguing that, unlike state legislatures, which often repeal prior laws when the party in power changes, courts are obligated to uphold prior judicial decisions even when they disagree.

The brief noted that over the course of the litigation, both Democratic and Republican justices authored unanimous decisions in the case. 

“If overturned, it would be a huge shock to the rule of law,” Black told The 74. “To allow do-overs would mean that litigation would never end and that no judicial decision would ever be binding. I hope and believe that this court understands that.”

The 83,916-to-16,105 March 5 tally, according to from the San Francisco Department of Elections, reflects public frustration with the district’s decision to delay the course for all students until the 9th grade. Not only did it deny advanced learners an opportunity to challenge themselves with rigorous coursework — and put them on track for high school calculus  — opponents said, but it also did little to boost Black and Hispanic student achievement in the subject. 

There are in San Francisco. Turnout was roughly 21% on this Super Tuesday, which also included the presidential primary and the primary to fill the U.S. Senate seat of Bay Area Democrat Dianne Feinstein.

The algebra ballot measure is not binding and the school board had already to return the course to the middle school. But the results did drive home a lesson to a board that has for failing to perform to residents’ satisfaction. 

“The voters have made it very clear they want our public schools to teach as many kids as much as possible,” said Patrick Wolff, who had children in the district from 2010 to 2022. “The people of San Francisco understand that true equity and justice in our public schools never requires compromising academic excellence.”

Wolff, cofounder of Families for San Francisco, which was later absorbed into TogetherSF, said he wants the board’s vote — and the public’s — to bring lasting change. 

“I hope that our elected officials and public school administrators have heard the people’s message,” he said. “The only way to keep public school reform on track is for the people to keep being informed, engaged and involved.”

SFUSD’s struggle with algebra reflects a nationwide battle over when to introduce the topic. Student participation varies across the country. While some school systems, including Dallas, have crafted policies that have greatly increased students’ chance to take the course in middle schools, others use highly selective enrollment processes, which often leads to the exclusion of Black, Hispanic and low-income children. 

Rex Ridgeway, who, along with several others, regarding algebra last year, expected strong voter response. 

“This was the first time that the public was able to speak out publicly about Algebra 1 after 10 years of damage to our kids,” he said. “I was not surprised by how passionate people are on Algebra 1.”

The answer can’t be that the district simply returns to an earlier, failed approach, said one expert whose organization promotes math policies that support equity in college readiness and success.

“So, the prior tracking policy didn’t lead to equitable outcomes,” Melodie Baker, national policy director at Just Equations, told The 74 before this week’s vote. “Detracking didn’t lead to equitable outcomes either. So it makes sense that they’re not sticking with it, but they’ll need to find new ways to implement eighth-grade algebra that ensure better outcomes for Black and Latinx students. Not just revert to what they were doing before.”

Meredith Dodson, executive director of SF Parents, said Wednesday that the public’s work to improve SFUSD is not over.

“In addition to finally bringing algebra back to middle school, our district also needs to figure out how to better prepare kids so more of them can access algebra in middle school and higher level math beyond that,” she said. “We know we still have a long road ahead to make sure that every student has the academic support they need coming from our district — and that starts early.”

In Natasha Sonia Alford’s newly released memoir, American Negra, she describes an early childhood memory of being the new kid at school: “What are you?” another student asked. “I’m Puerto Rican and Black,” she responded, noting these were “the only words I had at the time to explain my identity in terms that made sense.” 

“Language mattered,” she writes, “and yet at this age no one had prepared us to explain who we were accurately.” Her memoir does just that: it is an exploration of her intersecting identities and an explanation of their impact on her experiences as a student, teacher, hedge fund management associate and journalist.

Alford’s story begins with her childhood in Syracuse, New York, where she excelled academically and was ultimately selected as one of three college-bound students to be profiled by the local newspaper during her junior year. After receiving acceptance letters from a number of selective schools, including Howard University, Alford enrolled at Harvard. 

Despite her successes and on-paper credentials, as she calls them, Alford struggled at first to find her passion and her place as the pressures of perfectionism wore on her. 

While American Negra is a study of Alford’s personal identities, it is also an analysis of American society more broadly, with a particular focus on our education system. She writes about the mantra she was taught that for kids of color in the U.S., education is the path out of marginalization. She encourages readers, though, to expand their understanding of this idea: too often, she argues, students are told that in order to be successful in school they must erase parts of themselves and conform. 

“I wanted to unmask the image of the successful, inner-city poster child with this book,” Alford told The 74. “The point is that that pressure to be ‘twice as good,’ if you bring up a child in that culture and with that rhetoric, they may still struggle years from now — even after they’ve left school — to feel like they are worthy and that they are good enough.” 

Years after graduating from Harvard, the 37-year-old, former Teach for America alum said she finally felt ready to take a risk and pursue a career in media. Alford, who got her master’s at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and who freelanced for The 74 early in her career, now serves as the vice president of digital content and an anchor at TheGrio, where she leads a national team reporting on critical issues facing Black communities. She is also a CNN political analyst and the recipient of numerous awards including “Emerging Journalist of the Year” in 2018 by the National Association of Black Journalists. 

American Negra, published by HarperCollins on Feb. 27, was named a “Best (and Most Anticipated) Nonfiction Book of 2024” by and the audio version list for Black and African-American books. The 74’s Amanda Geduld chatted with Alford about her book, education policy and solutions journalism. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

The 74: I want to start with a little bit of context. Can you explain to our readers how you selected the title for your book, American Negra?

“American Negra” is a phrase that describes what it’s like to live at the intersection of two worlds. I wanted to paint a portrait of an American experience that we don’t see often portrayed in the mainstream: being an African American and being a Latina — Puerto Rican specifically. The term “negra” just means a Black woman. If it’s “negro” it means a Black man. When you are in Latino cultures, it is not uncommon for somebody to refer to you as a “negra.” It is often a term of endearment, but it can also be used as an insult. But the point is, ultimately, that they are centering your race and your identity.

What makes it so interesting is that often in Latino cultures, we hear about color blindness and we hear about racial democracy. There’s an assumption that because many Latinos are people of color, there’s not really an issue with race — that race is something that is sort of a U.S. obsession. And so there’s a bit of a contradiction in that obviously: a culture that doesn’t really see itself focused on race to identify people by their race. I wanted to highlight that experience, while also making it clear that my experience was one that is based in America. I’m an upstate girl — grew up in Syracuse, New York — and so my experience of being Black and Latina is very much influenced by the United States and all of our recent politics and all of our histories.

And then finally, I think it’s also a declaration. It’s an embracing of the term because for some people to be called “negra,” or to be identified that way, is a bit of an insult. They don’t want to be called Black. But for me, I’m really centering my Black identity to say that no matter where I go, I’m a Black woman. It shapes my experience. I’m proud of it. 

So much of your book comes back to the themes of education and opportunity. What inspired you to tell the story in this way — with such a heavy focus on the education system — and can you talk about the ways in which your Black and Puerto Rican identities shaped this journey?

That is exactly why there’s an apple on the front cover of the book. That was very much intentional, because this is an education story as much as it is a story about identity. The reason why is because for so many communities of color — communities that are marginalized in the United States — education is our path out of that marginalization. At least that’s the message that we are told from the time that we are children. And that was the message that my parents imparted to me: that I came from two peoples who had been discriminated against in this country at various points in time throughout history, but education was something that no one could take from me.

What you see in this book is the pursuit of education, but also the pursuit of authentic self. I think too often when we talk about education and young people, it’s framed through this lens of conformity: you go to school, you have to assume a different identity, you have to speak a certain way, there are certain careers that are so-called successful. At each step of the way, young people are shedding parts of themselves or feel that they’re forced to. In the end, they may not recognize themselves. They may have succeeded on paper, but they’ve lost themselves in the process. 

I wanted to disrupt the education narrative that ends with someone getting into the Ivy League or getting into college and that being the end. And say no, actually, that’s when things just get started. The success is not just getting into this institution or conforming to this institution, but it is what you do with [it]. That’s the power of education … 

In terms of your own path to becoming an educator, your senior year at Harvard, when you were initially debating your career in education, you write in your book about this fear that people might say, “You went to Harvard to become a teacher? Shouldn’t you be doing better than that?” I’m wondering where you think this devaluation of educators comes from and what we can do to combat it.

There’s this really … about how high achievers learn to not become teachers. It explains essentially that we have created a culture in which young people pick up messages about what careers are valued and which ones are not. In terms of where this comes from, I can only assume that there’s a gendered dynamic to this. 

There is an element of sexism that has made its way into education and the fact that the majority of teachers are women, and women are not always paid what they deserve — we are often behind in terms of our male counterparts and many more are behind when you look at the different segments of women by race. So we are a society that gives teachers lip service, but doesn’t actually back it up with a financial investment in teachers and education more broadly. 

I actually don’t blame young people for seeing that. I don’t think that young people should have to be martyrs, frankly, especially young people who may be coming from working-class families themselves — may be coming out of broken educational systems. To go back and teach I don’t think they should have to struggle. From my short time in the education policy space and just in education, my takeaway was that we have a pipeline problem in terms of recruiting generally, but that in order to change education, you’re going to have to pay the talent — you’re going to have to pay them, you’re going to have to nurture them, and that it shouldn’t be an industry that you’re going into to make a sacrifice … This is something where we’re going to make the investment and see the results or not make the investment and the overall system will continue to struggle …

How can we get teachers to persist in the classroom when they’re up against challenges like the ones that you write about, like chronic absenteeism or eighth graders reading at a first-grade reading level? 

… I think what maybe would’ve kept me in the classroom was just having realistic expectations about what I could do in two years. Sometimes when teachers come in, they’re idealistic and they’re not necessarily ready for how long these problems have been brewing. If a student has not been supported academically from kindergarten, and you get them in fifth grade, there has to be some level-setting about what you can do. 

And so one critique I have of the short-term teaching programs is just with the optimism and the accountability and the expectation of making change. Sometimes there’s also unrealistic pressure put on a new teacher about what they can accomplish in one or two years, and that can be really deflating. If that teacher comes in hoping for the best, working really hard, going above and beyond, and they don’t see the “results” that are so valued by the people who are counting the numbers and counting the test scores, that makes them feel like a failure. When in fact, it takes much longer to build — whether it’s building school culture, establishing yourself within the school community, or just becoming the teacher that you truly can be … 

You recently tweeted about Nikki Haley’s “revisionist history” and the general idea within the Republican Party of color blindness. You were on CNN talking about why those narratives are so harmful, and I’m wondering if you can comment a little bit more on that in terms of how this plays out in the educational landscape.

She’s used the talking point many times: that if we tell children America was once a racist country, that somehow they will feel disempowered, and that they will feel like victims, and that they will have no incentive to try. That couldn’t be further from the truth. We have examples every day of people who were fully aware of America’s racist history, and who are strong in spite of that, who invested in this country in spite of that, who served this country in the military and in schools and universities, in spite of what they faced … 

We have to contend with this history because it’s ours. We have to own it. And that’s how we become a better county with each passing year, with each passing decade. But to ignore it is to handicap our children. It can leave them without context or understanding of what they’re looking at. What it does, then, [is lead to them] blaming themselves, believing that they’re inferior, thinking that something is wrong with them, and not necessarily wrong with the systems that produce many of the inequalities that we see today. 

So I completely differ from Nikki Haley in terms of my approach to history, and also just my general acceptance of America’s past. But I think it’s instructive and yet another reason why teachers are on the front lines of these culture wars around what is true and what is not. I give my deepest respect to all the history teachers and all the social studies teachers, because they’re doing some serious work right now that is important for raising a conscious generation who will go forth empowered to make change for the better.

You also recently wrote about race in higher education specifically around the former president of Harvard, Claudine Gay, stepping down. And this line really stuck out to me from your :  “With a new generation of Black students and young people looking to us adults for lessons from this moment, perhaps they are better served to know the truth: that even being ‘twice as good’ won’t always protect you from people who need your failure to justify their blind rage.” I’m wondering if you can expand a little bit more on how you experienced Gay’s stepping down and the vitriol that she received, especially as an alum of Harvard.

It became apparent right away that the attacks on Dr. Claudine Gay were about more than her testimony on the Hill. We’ve essentially forgotten about the third president who testified. It just went to show that this was always about more than the initial conversation of anti-semitism. What was really disheartening was that she became a punching bag for all of these critics’ anger and rage and a sense of frustration with what they feel is a loss. What they feel is that Black people’s advancement is somehow their loss, even though we’re all in this together. We’re all living and creating community and shaping this society together. Somehow they see it as a zero sum game … 

I wanted to unmask the image of the successful, inner-city poster child with this book. The point is that that pressure to be “twice as good,” if you bring up a child in that culture, and with that rhetoric, they may still struggle years from now — even after they’ve left school — to feel like they are worthy and that they are good enough. 

I read an article, I think it’s called “Contingencies of Self-Worth,” and the biggest lesson of that piece is that our own self worth can’t be contingent upon grades or upon getting into a certain school. We have to shift the way that we’re teaching young people about their value. And so “twice as good” is a survival strategy, but it’s not necessarily a strategy to thrive. I hope that my story — by being honest about many of the struggles that I’ve had despite having acquired certain credentials on paper — [encourages] others to talk about some of their struggles as well, and that we can cultivate a new generation that will be kinder to themselves and also accepting of the fullness of their humanity.

As a high schooler, you were followed by the local newspaper for all of your accomplishments. What kind of impact did that have to be so perceived at all times? It was because you were a role model and accomplishing so much, but I wonder what kind of narrative that instills in a young person about what they need to do to be successful.

Right. It was certainly a privilege, and I am grateful for the coverage that the local paper gave and appreciate that they wanted to show a young person of color from the city doing positive things. However, that also created a sense that failure was not an option. Making mistakes was not OK. And it inhibited me in ways. There were certain things that I wanted to try or do that I was afraid to do because I couldn’t guarantee my success. And that is not a way to go through life. You have to make mistakes, you have to experiment. You have to fully spread your wings in order to discover yourself and so really, I don’t spread my wings fully until I’m long gone from college. 

Five years after that I truly am honest with myself about what I’ve always wanted to do, and that was journalism and media. And I’ve made peace with, “OK, this might not work out, but I have to give it a try. I have to know if this is what I’m supposed to be doing.” It took much longer because of that perfectionist mindset that wouldn’t give me the freedom to try right out of school. 

My story is my story. I’m happy still. I think my life still worked out. I ended up where I wanted to be. I still feel blessed. But maybe someone else will be able to get to their destination a little bit sooner if they’re able to let go of some of that perfectionist weight that can keep you down.

As a former educator and now a journalist, what are education journalists getting right and wrong today? And how can we strengthen our coverage and make sure that we’re combating some of these problematic narratives that have become so ingrained over the years?

I know that journalists are working hard, and it’s not always easy. We have deadlines and fewer and fewer resources. I know many of us are doing the best that we can. But I would encourage us to move towards solutions journalism. We are dealing with a public that is weary. They’ve been hearing about problems nonstop. And it’s our job to also provide examples of what is working. Who’s getting it right. And not in a superficial way of “this overachiever managed to do X, Y and Z.” But what risks were taken? What experimentation is happening that’s really inspiring? 

I think it’s our job to highlight those things and also highlight diverse examples of this. Be open to information. Be open to inspiration coming from unexpected places and give people a reason to hope. That is our job as much as it is to point out what is not working. Because I think people who are living it know that a lot of this is not working. So I think that we can do that work to point them towards potential solutions and then hopefully people are inspired to go out and enact it at a grander scale.