Pensions are sort of like New Year’s resolutions. Policymakers always promise, to themselves and to their constituents, that this will be the year they’ll finally get their financial house in order and bolster their pensions. But inevitably, something shiny comes along and distracts them.  

Oklahoma is grappling with this dilemma right now. After years of dutifully funneling millions of extra dollars into its beleaguered teacher pension plan, state policymakers are now considering scaling back. Instead, they would like to use that money to fund : pay raises for active teachers, more money for its school choice tax credit program, plus new investments in reading and math.

It’s likely to be a popular list. But it threatens to derail the ���ٲ��ٱ�’s progress on pension funding. 

Oklahoma has actually done better on the pension front than most other states. Thanks to a combination of benefit cuts, plus a surge of new contributions, it has dramatically improved the health of its teacher pension plan. 

For example, the system’s unfunded liability, essentially the difference between how much it had promised and how much it had saved toward those promises, from $10.4 billion in 2010 down to $6.1 billion last year. Its funded ratio — a comparison between its assets and its liabilities — has improved from in 2010 all the way 80% as of last June. 

Oklahoma’s teacher plan is still not quite as well-funded as the median state and local plan — which was funded last year — but the ���ٲ��ٱ�’s policymakers deserve kudos for making progress. Current and retired Oklahoma teachers should be thankful that their retirement plan is in much better shape than it was 16 years ago.

So how did they do it? First, legislators raised the retirement age from 62 to 65 and extended the amount of time that a teacher would need to work to qualify for a benefit from five to seven years. (This is called the vesting period, and these tend to be longer for teachers than for workers in the private sector. For example, according to a survey of Vanguard 401(k) plans, of employees are immediately vested in their employer’s retirement contributions.) These policy changes meant that any Oklahoma teacher who started after Oct. 31, 2011, had to wait just a bit longer to qualify for retirement benefits than those who came before them.  

A rising stock market certainly helped the pension plan as well, but the biggest change was on the funding side. From 2001 to 2011, Oklahoma was contributing less each year than what its actuaries said it needed to. Instead of paying off their metaphorical credit card in full, they made only minimum payments, which led to a large financial hole.

But every year since 2012, Oklahoma has put in more than what its actuaries said it needed to. As of , individuals were required to contribute 7% of their salaries. Employers like school districts paid 9.5% of each employee’s salary. And the state contributed a percentage of its revenues from sales taxes, cigarette taxes, corporate income taxes, individual income taxes and lottery proceeds. This extra state contribution came out to $456 million last year, and this is the portion that state legislators now want to cut back.

Oklahoma’s teacher pension plan is in much better shape today than it was. But it’s instructive to compare it with the plan Oklahoma offers to other state employees, which is in even better shape than the teacher plan.

That largely comes down to how far legislators went in designing reforms for each plan. In the case of the teachers, Oklahoma’s legislators were more hands-off. Teachers continue to be placed in the same defined benefit pension plan, for example. On average, their benefits are worth 10.67% of their salary, according to the plan’s latest . But remember that teachers themselves are paying about two-thirds of that cost, which means that most of the contributions made by the state and its school districts are paying for the plan’s unfunded liabilities, not for benefits for today’s workers. Moreover, the benefit structure is so heavily that someone would have to teach in Oklahoma for decades just to earn more than what they personally contributed.

Meanwhile, state employees have been enrolled in a portable defined contribution 401(k)-style plan since 2015. Members are required to contribute 4.5% of their salary, their employer contributes 6% and employees qualify for a growing share of those contributions over five years. A in the state legislature would raise those contribution rates and drop the vesting requirement altogether. Oklahoma’s higher education employees get an deal.

Putting the benefit situation aside, Oklahoma deserves credit for making substantial progress funding its teacher pension plan. According to the latest financial projections, the ���ٲ��ٱ�’s actuaries expect that the plan could be fully funded by 2034. However, that assumption depends on its investments earning a 7% return every year. They also cautioned that one risk to its projection is that “actual contributions from the state may not be made in accordance with the current arrangement.” 

If Oklahoma legislators go forward with their plans to divert some of the money toward new expenses, they’d be putting all their hard-earned funding progress at risk.  

The national nonprofit broke down the results of its , which describes trends in state funding to schools in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. in a recent .

“In order to be fair, school funding must be both adequate and equitable,” said Danielle Farrie, Education Law Center research director. “So this means that states provide an overall level of funding that’s sufficient to provide all students with the resources that they need to meet state standards, and that the funding should be distributed so that students in poverty receive more.”

One of the most concerning report findings is the decline in funding to schools with high rates of children from low-income families, compared to schools with more affluent populations, Farrie said. States are progressive if high-poverty schools receive at least 5% more funding in state money than those in more affluent areas. States that do the opposite are labeled regressive. States have a flat distribution of funding if the amount is similar on both sides.

In 2023, 17 states were labeled progressive, reversing a decade-long increase of progressive states that peaked at 28 in 2022. 

Utah was the most progressive state, funneling 60% more funding per-pupil to high-poverty districts than others The most regressive state was Connecticut, which provided 19% less money to high-poverty districts. 

The analysis, which focused on state dollars amid an influx of federal COVID-relief funding,  also found that most states maintained or at least slightly increased per-pupil funding levels from 2022 after adjusting for inflation.

“This is a dramatic departure from the previous year, when high inflation rates basically wiped out most of the nominal per-pupil funding increases in most states,” Farrie said.

Some states experienced significant funding boosts. From 2022 to 2023, California increased its per-pupil funding by 19%. Washington, D.C., and Hawaii jumped 15% while Michigan moved up by 13%. 

The Education Law Center credited California’s positive gains to its more than a decade ago. Even so, school districts have recently called for more state funding as teachers unions have demanded better pay and working conditions. Seven superintendents signed an in February to advocate for “more stable, adequate and predictable funding from the state.”

“Rising housing costs, inflation and everyday living costs are affecting educators and classified staff across California,” the letter says. “Many are making difficult personal choices simply to remain in the profession or continue serving their communities.”

The largest funding loss from 2022 to 2023 was in Louisiana, which declined by 8%, moving its ranking in how well schools are funded from 25th in the nation to 38th.

Overall, 22 states fund their schools above the national average of $17,853 per student. New York is the top state at $29,440, followed by Vermont, Washington, D.C., New Jersey and Connecticut. The lowest state funding level comes in Idaho, which provides $11,085 per student.  North Carolina, Utah, Arizona and Nevada fund at similar levels. 

“In North Carolina, our funding is grossly inadequate, and it’s been the subject of lawsuits,” said Kris Nordstrom, senior policy analyst at the , in the webinar. “It’s inequitable for all student groups and it’s been that way, sadly, for a long time.”

North Carolina has been under fire for more than 30 years because of inadequate school funding. Lawsuits eventually led to the creation of a remedial plan in 2022 for the state to better fund public schools, but it was after appeals were filed to stop payments to districts. The case has since been under the advisement of the North Carolina Supreme Court, which has yet to issue a ruling.

“I think our anticipation is that if we ever do get a ruling that it won’t be a good one,” Nordstrom said. “Our school funding continues to be flat or decreasing once you account for the additional costs facing schools. So it’s pretty bleak.”

The Education Law Center also ranked states based on their funding efforts, which compares funding levels against each ���ٲ��ٱ�’s gross domestic product. North Carolina is at the bottom of the ranking, providing $12,193 when its GDP per capita is $58,639. The top state is Vermont, which gives schools $27,067 per-pupil while its GDP per capita is $54,318. 

“Obviously in North Carolina, you’ve seen our school funding effort plummet,” Nordstrom said. “But in almost every state, school funding has decreased since before the Great Recession. So the money exists in our economy to provide much more robust funding for schools than we currently are.”

If San Francisco educators walk out, it will be the city’s first teacher strike in nearly 50 years. United Educators of San Francisco approved a walkout with the second of two nearly unanimous votes last week. Its bargaining team is to decide within 10 days whether it will strike. 

United Teachers of Los Angeles, which represents more than 35,000 educators in California’s largest school district, has been in negotiations since February 2025. Both parties clashed over pay raises and in December. A strike vote passed with a member approval on Monday. 

With 6,500 members, United Educators of San Francisco has been negotiating with the district since March. The union asked for a 14% pay increase for support staff and 9% for teachers over two years, along with improvements to health care coverage, special education teacher workloads and family housing. 

“We remain prepared to hear any real solutions the district may formally bring to the table that will stabilize our district for our students, educators and families,” the union said in a Tuesday. 

The San Francisco Unified School District has a 2% yearly increase, totaling 6% over three years. It on Saturday that a $102 budget deficit makes it impossible to meet the union’s demands.

“Any raises above the current proposals from the district will force further cuts at school sites that will impact the district’s ability to serve all of its students long-term,” the district .

The union that San Francisco Unified recently allocated $111 million to its rainy-day fund, “money members say needs to be directed back to classrooms and school sites.”

In Los Angeles, the union is an 18% immediate pay raise with a 3% bump the second year of the contract. Los Angeles Unified two consecutive raises of 2.5% and 2% and a one-time payment of 1% of an employee’s salary. A strike deadline has not yet been set.

Cheryl Coney, the union’s executive director, wrote in a to the district that drastic raises are needed because more than 20% of members qualify for low-income housing and roughly one-third leave Los Angeles Unified by their fifth year on the job. 

The union the district can afford pay increases with a $5 billion reserve, but officials budget constraints recently worsened because of enrollment declines, the expiration of pandemic aid and increased operating costs. The district’s projects a $1.6 billion deficit by the 2027-28 school year.

“We recognize the real financial strain on educators and staff but must make difficult decisions to preserve classrooms, student services and long-term stability within finite resources,” the district said in a Jan. 31 . “This moment calls for collaboration between all parties to reach a sustainable resolution.”

The Los Angeles and San Francisco superintendents joined representatives of five other school districts in a Monday that asked advocates, nonprofits and lawmakers to help campaign for more funding from the state. 

“Educators and staff deserve to feel valued and supported, and districts recognize and respect those realities,” the letter says. “At the same time, school systems cannot spend resources they do not receive, nor can local negotiations resolve statewide enrollment trends or the loss of temporary federal funding.”

The strike votes in Los Angeles and San Francisco come amid a by the California Teachers Association, focusing negotiations in 32 districts statewide around : wages, staffing and student stability — meaning fewer layoffs and school closures. The also aims to pressure the state to improve school funding.

A from the statewide union found that 88% of educators identified insufficient school funding and low pay as serious issues for 2026.

Several California teachers unions already walked out of the classroom this school year or are close to striking. United Teachers of Richmond, located north of San Francisco, staged a in December. Five unions — Natomas, Twin Rivers, Rocklin, Woodland Joint and Washington — are at an impasse, along with Madera Unified Teachers Association in central California and Berkeley Federation of Teachers.

More than 90% of San Diego Education Association members recently a one-day unfair labor practice strike for Feb. 26. The union said it’s protesting as San Diego Unified’s repeated contract violations regarding special education staffing caseloads.

The district recently reignited its dormant nonprofit, the , hiring a new executive director to court dollars from corporations and foundations. The effort has brought in some $26 million so far, including from well-known players in L.A. entertainment and business, on its way to a $100 million goal for the foundation’s first five years. 

A renewed focus on raising private money for school districts across the country comes as student needs are growing and leaders worry about shifting federal policy, education philanthropy officials said. 

“What’s occurring right now is that those that don’t have them are forming foundations, or reforming them if they’ve gone dormant,” said Mike Taylor, head of the National Association of Education Foundations, who said he’s been fielding calls since the summer from school districts looking to navigate the uncertainty around federal funding and leverage community resources.

In Los Angeles, the initial fundraising push has helped families impacted by last year’s wildfires and supported the district’s neediest schools.

“I want to level the playing field,” said Sadie Stockdale Jefferson, who came in to lead the LAUSD foundation this summer after serving in a similar role for Chicago Public Schools and running a University of Chicago think tank focused on public education. “We’re taking the best of what we know works to improve education and ensuring those initiatives reach the schools and classrooms that need them the most.”

A major initial focus of the foundation will be on what LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho calls “priority schools,” with lagging academic performance and the highest student needs in a district that educates everyone from the wealthy elite to families experiencing homelessness or poverty.

Jefferson recently saw a breakdown of private support to district schools by region and said she realized: “The disparity is shocking,” adding she wants foundation money to primarily support campuses without their own parent-run fundraising efforts. 

The philanthropic money is still a drop in the bucket in the district’s more than . But it represents a potential new revenue stream at a time when LAUSD continues to shed students and run a deficit. 

Carvalho is looking to the foundation to support students in ways the district can’t, like sending homeless students off to college with a new laptop, or providing emergency cash to families impacted by the wildfires. “Sometimes the need is acute,” Carvalho said, with foundation money typically being deployed quickly and with less bureaucracy. 

Many of the needs Carvalho ticked off as foundation priorities are those students face outside the classroom. But he said he’s also open to private money supporting the district academically, particularly in the priority schools. District support for priority schools involves teacher coaching, strengthening curriculum and providing tutoring. 

“Government dollars will only go so far, and there are unmet needs that often foundations can address and support,” Carvalho said.  

The foundation has also taken on music education, riding off the popularity of “The Last Repair Shop,” an Oscar-winning short film about the highly skilled team that keeps scores of district-owned instruments working for LAUSD students. Jefferson said she’s hoping to replicate a sponsor-a-school program she ran in Chicago, offering businesses a way to directly help local schools. 

Using private money for public education can be controversial, particularly when funders are seen as exerting too much pressure or pushing for school reforms like charter schools.

Carvalho and others involved in Los Angeles’s fundraising say they’re aiming to avoid that tension as they address critical needs in the district of 400,000 students. 

Of the nation’s 13,000 school districts, around 6,000 have foundations, the majority volunteer-run, Taylor said. The focus of district foundations has evolved, he said, from being thought of as a vehicle to buy extra books or classroom materials. The needs and challenges have deepened since the pandemic. Philanthropic money now goes toward building partnerships for workforce development, supporting teacher retention and addressing student mental-health challenges, Taylor said.

LAUSD’s foundation has recruited board members from local business, education and philanthropic organizations.

Board Chairman Michael Fleming, the president of the David Bohnett Foundation, said he was drawn to the role after hearing Carvalho’s vision for an organization that could move fast and target specific goals, including investing in the priority schools. 

He’s also committed to bridging the divide between public and private funding. “There is this innate distrust sometimes between a government entity and philanthropy, and vice versa,” Fleming said. “They each see the world very differently and say: ‘You don’t understand the way we operate.’ I think that’s false.”

Enthusiasm for private investment in public school districts has fallen in and out of favor over the decades. Initial waves of corporate and foundation money aimed to revolutionize education.  

“When things don’t dramatically get better, the energy and resources and attention ebb,” said Jeffrey Henig, a professor emeritus at Columbia’s Teachers College who has followed education philanthropy. Many private foundations doubled down on charter schools, which then made school districts wary of partnerships. In Los Angeles, a nonprofit launched by LAUSD leaders in the 2010s later merged with an entity that backed charters, putting it at odds with the district it initially set out to help. 

Henig sees today’s philanthropists more focused on supporting strong school leaders, rather than looking to fundamentally disrupt the way education is delivered. 

That shift makes sense to Erica Lim, a senior program officer at the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation. Broad, along with the foundations of “Two and a Half Men” co-creator Chuck Lorre and L.A. Clippers owner Steve Ballmer, to the LAUSD foundation to support its priority schools.

Lim said she was encouraged by the stability Carvalho has brought to LAUSD since he joined in 2022 after a string of short-tenured leaders. The former Miami-Dade Public Schools superintendent now has a contract to keep him in the L.A. job until at least 2030.

“We’re not looking to backfill or solve really systemic budget issues,” Lim said. “That’s for district leaders to solve.” Instead, Broad wants its investments to help kick-start new initiatives or scale programs that show promise. 

Carvalho said the district won’t be turning to philanthropy to fund core areas of the budget. That said, he could see the foundation being used as a stopgap if, for instance, the federal government cut off longstanding funding to support English language learners. “That would be a legitimate support from the foundation,” Carvalho said, “Which could be a likely scenario in the months to come.”

In reviving the foundation, Carvalho changed the bylaws to give himself less power over its board, a move he saw as helping ensure its independence. Jefferson works with the LAUSD Education Foundation board to direct funds, with district input. 

Fleming, the board chair, said he’s looking for the foundation to outlast the many prior attempts and avoid drama. “We simply want to get resources for the schools and for students,” he said. “That’s it.” 

Some families enrolled in the Idaho Home Learning Academy public virtual charter school used state funding to pay for virtual reality headsets, hoverboards, hunting equipment, video games and video game controllers, paddleboards, smart watches, admission tickets to water parks and subscriptions to streaming services like Netflix and Hulu, according to a new state watchdog report released Tuesday.

The nonpartisan , which is commonly referred to as OPE, released the Tuesday at the Idaho State Capitol after the release was authorized by the

OPE released the evaluation report after multiple Idaho legislators signed a March 5 letter requesting the office study the Idaho Home Learning Academy’s finances, expenditures, policies, contracts and student achievement results.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

The Idaho Home Learning Academy, or IHLA for short, is a rapidly growing public virtual charter school authorized by the small, rural Oneida School District.

There were about 7,600 online students enrolled at Idaho Home Learning Academy during the 2024-25 school year, many of which do not live within the traditional geographic boundaries of the Oneida School District.

New report raises questions about how supplemental learning funds are used by some families

As part of Idaho Home Learning Academy’s contract, its education service providers administer supplemental learning funds of $1,700 to $1,800 per student to families enrolled in IHLA that were paid for by Idaho taxpayer dollars, the report found. The money is intended to help pay families for education expenses, and the OPE evaluators found that the largest share of the funds were spent on technology expenses, such as computers, printers and internet access. Other significant sources of supplemental learning fund expenses went for physical education activities and performing arts expenses, the OPE report found.

However, OPE evaluators found that some families used their share of funding for tuition and fees at private schools and programs. Some families also used their funds for noneducational board games, kitchen items like BBQ tongs, cosmetics, a home theater projector screen, video games, Nintendo Switch controllers, a Meta Quest virtual reality headset, movie DVDs, weapons, sights lasers, shooting targets, remote controlled cars, hoverboards, action figures, smartwatches, water park tickets and the cost of registering website domain names, the OPE report found.

Families with students enrolled at Idaho Home Learning Academy are able to access the funds though both direct ordering programs and reimbursements. The OPE report found that Idaho Home Learning Academy’s three service providers (Braintree, Home Ed and Harmony) spent about $12.5 million providing supplemental learning funds for IHLA families during the 2024-25 school year. Service providers said that some families did not spend any or all of their supplemental learning funds, and the money was retained by the service providers, not returned back to the state or school district, the OPE report found.

Idaho governor, superintendent of public instruction respond to OPE report’s findings

Idaho Gov. Brad Little called the report’s findings “troubling” in a letter released with the report Tuesday.

“We also have an obligation to be responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars,” Little wrote. “The OPE report on IHLA is troubling, especially as it pertains to supplemental learning fund expenses, academic performance, supplemental curriculum and the funding formula that enables virtual programs to receive more funding than brick-and-mortar public schools. The OPE report reveals that statutory safeguards are insufficient, oversight is inconsistent and accountability measures have not kept pace with the fast expansion of the IHLA program.”

The OPE evaluation report findings come at a time when every dollar of state funding in Idaho is being stretched further amid a revenue shortfall. All state agencies outside of the K-12 public school system are implementing 3% mid-year budget holdbacks, and the, the Idaho Capital Sun previously reported.

Idaho Superintendent of Public Instruction Debbie Critchfield said the report raised concerns for her as well.

“(The OPE report) also raises important questions about whether direct and indirect payments to families are a proper and legal use of funds appropriated for public schools,” Critchfield wrote in a Nov. 26 letter to OPE leadership.

The OPE evaluation report found that limited oversight and accountability create uncertainty about how supplemental learning funds paid for with state taxpayer dollars are used and whether students’ curriculum choices align with state standards and transparency requirements.

Idaho state laws and administrative rules do not specifically allow or prohibit the use of supplemental learning funds, the OPE report found. That finding was one of several “policy gray areas” that the OPE evaluation report documented.

Little concluded his letter by saying he is ready to work with the Idaho Legislature, the Idaho State Department of Education and the Idaho State Board of Education to restore meaningful accountability for the use of taxpayer dollars.

“I have carefully reviewed the recommendations provided in this report and strongly encourage the Legislature to address the loopholes in state statute,” Little wrote.

Oneida School District superintendent stresses Idaho Home Learning Academy did not break state law

In response to the OPE report, Oneida School District Superintendent Dallan Rupp, who is also a member of the Idaho Home Learning Academy School board, emphasized that the report did not find that IHLA was guilty of any misconduct.

“Importantly, the OPE report did not identify any misconduct at IHLA,” Rupp said during a meeting Tuesday at the Idaho State Capitol in Boise. “This outcome underscores the effectiveness of Oneida School District’s oversight and reflects IHLA’s consistent compliance with Idaho’s laws, statutes, rules, regulations and procedures, as well as its cooperative relationship with the Idaho State Department of Education. We remain fully committed to operating within all established guidelines, just as we have in the past.”

Idaho Sen. James Ruchti, D-Pocatello, said it was beside the point that the school didn’t break any laws.

“I’m extremely concerned,” Ruchti said during Tuesday’s meeting at the Idaho State Capitol in Boise. “This is public money – public taxpayer money – and we have an obligation to make sure that it’s spent appropriately and with oversight. And so, yes, it may not have violated any statutory requirements at this point. But what I’m saying is that what I saw in that presentation caused me serious concerns about how IHLA and other online teaching institutions are able to spend public dollars in a way that was not intended.”

Idaho watchdog report found most online virtual teachers were part-time employees

OPE also found that most Idaho Home Learning Academy teachers were part-time, unlike traditional schools, and the Idaho Home Learning Academy spends much less on salaries and benefits than it receives from the ���ٲ��ٱ�’s salary apportionment formula.

The report found IHLA was able to use the savings it realized in state funding provided to pay for staff salaries and health benefits to instead use at IHLA’s discretion or to pay its education service providers.

The OPE report found that most of IHLA’s teachers are part-time employees and do not provide full-time direct instruction to students. Instead, the report found that Idaho Home Learning Academy’s kindergarten through eighth grade instructional model relied heavily on parent-directed learning and that IHLA teachers typically offered feedback and oversight instead of direct instruction.

According to the report, IHLA reported $46.3 million in total expenditures from state funds during the 2024-25 school year. While traditional brick-and-mortar public schools’ largest expenditures are for staff salaries and benefits, the report found that only 36% of IHLA’s expenditures went to staff. A larger portion – 45% of IHLA’s total expenditures, or $20.6 million – went to paying education service providers.

The OPE report also found that Idaho Home Learning Academy’s students lagged behind statewide averages for scores on Idaho Standards Achievement Test, or ISAT. The OPE report found 42% of IHLA students were proficient in English language arts during the 2024-25 school year, compared to the statewide average of 52% of Idaho students.

The report also found just 25% of IHLA students were proficient in math during the 2024-25 school year, compared to the Idaho statewide average of 43%.

However, the OPE report highlighted that some IHLA families interviewed for the report said they do not believe statewide standardized tests are a good measure of student learning. The report also noted that many Idaho Home Learning Academy families identified themselves as homeschoolers and said they were using IHLA by choice because they were unhappy with the quality of education in traditional brick-and-mortar schools or felt that their child’s educational needs were not being met by more traditional public schools.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Idaho Capital Sun maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Christina Lords for questions: info@idahocapitalsun.com.

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.”

In an early-morning post Thursday, Trump said he told the U.S. Department of Commerce to begin work on a new census “based on modern day facts and figures” adding, “People who are in our Country illegally WILL NOT BE COUNTED IN THE CENSUS.”

The U.S. Census count is held once a decade and helps determine federal education funding. Bruce Baker, a professor at the University of Miami and a leading scholar on public school financing, said that if fewer people are counted, federal funding for schools, which is based on and child poverty rates, would shrink. 

“The states that depend more on federal aid have the most to lose,” he said. And while the percentage of such aid is relatively small, he said, “these days, every dollar matters.”  

Pew Research reports the federal government provided of total funding for public elementary and secondary schools in fiscal 2022, according to . The National Education Association said the money helps lower class size, support students with disabilities and feed hungry children. It breaks . 

Other studies confirm federal education funding across the U.S. Mississippi reported the greatest percentage of federal education aid in 2022, coming in at 23.3% followed by South Dakota at 21.7%, Montana at 20.9%, Alaska at 20.6% and Arkansas at 20.4%. 

Federal money is delivered to schools in many forms. In fiscal year 2024, Pew notes, the Education Department doled out $18.8 billion for schools with large numbers of poor, neglected, delinquent and other “educationally disadvantaged” students, $15.5 billion for special education programs for children with disabilities, $5.5 billion for school improvement, and $2.2 billion for career, technical and adult education among many other grants. The federal government also spent billions on COVID recovery. 

Trump’s call to revise the census comes amid massive cutbacks at the education department, changing how critical programs are implemented — and toward the end of a nail-biting summer with many in education gripped by fear after the administration temporarily withheld $7 billion in funding. 

It also comes just weeks after he announced undocumented children could no longer participate in Head Start. In addition, adults without papers were banned from career and technical education programs and adult education, though both groups now have a brief reprieve. 

The nation is home to some . California had such residents in 2022, followed by Texas, with more than 2 million and Florida which had 590,000, according to data released last year.

This isn’t the first time Trump has tried to tinker with the U.S. Census: In his first term, he proposed the addition of a , one critics say would have resulted in a dramatic undercount and produced a massive loss of funding in immigrant-heavy communities where even those in the country legally would be fearful of responding. The matter made its way to the Supreme Court, with Chief Justice casting the deciding vote against the addition. 

Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute, said Trump could try to obtain residents’ immigration status in two ways: add questions about citizenship to the census itself, as he earlier proposed, or try to pull information from other federal data.  

In either case, she said, undocumented immigrants and those who live, work and study alongside them, would lose out. 

“If there are more people in a community, there is more need for infrastructure,” she said. “U.S. citizens would be hurt if that funding was insufficient.”

However, Trump’s census plan would be and it’s unclear when it would be implemented: Population counts take several years to plan. Also , not the president, determines the manner of conducting the tally. 

Trump’s intention to exclude undocumented immigrants from the census, coupled with his earlier attack on birthright citizenship, is enough to roil those concerned about the dignity of all U.S. residents.

“If you don’t count all people, you won’t be able to provide equal protection to all people,” said Alejandra Vázquez Baur, a fellow with The Century Foundation. “So this plan to not count undocumented people is a clear abandonment of that constitutional promise of equal protection.”

And with each new edict targeting the undocumented, she said, she fears the nation will inch closer to a direct attack on Plyler v. Doe, the landmark 1982 Supreme Court ruling that a child cannot be denied a public education based on immigration status. 

Hayward Derrick Horton, a professor of sociology at the University of Albany, said the census impacts all areas of civic life, calling it the engine that makes society work. He noted, too, that the U.S. Census is the gold standard for data collection and is respected globally. 

“So, what’s being threatened is not only the integrity of what this society is about in terms of being able to know exactly how many people we have and the allocations of the right resources to the right places, but it also invalidates this society to the world,” he said.  

Horton said he believes the fear of losing a numerical majority — and the power and money that comes with it — is driving these efforts to erase an entire group — in this case, — from the census.

White people comprised in 1980. Recent reports put the current figure at White residents will no longer be the majority by 2045, reported.  

“Here in the U.S., the white population controls the wealth, status and power — and they also control the numbers,” he said. 

CONCORD — After voting to cut off debate on the latest Education Freedom Account expansion bill, the House Republican majority approved a bill that would do away with an income cap beginning July 1.

Under the bill, there would be a 10,000 student cap on the program that has grown in four years from 1,635 students to about 5,400 students and in cost from $8 million to over $30 million.

Currently there is an income cap of 350 percent of the federal poverty level — or $112,525 for a family of four — on the program that would be eliminated next school year under Senate Bill 295, which the House passed Thursday.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

House Bill 115, which is now before the Senate, would eliminate the cap beginning with the 2026-2027 school year, and would have a cap of 400 percent next school year, or $128,600 for a family of four.

Deputy Majority Leader Joe Sweeney, R-Salem, moved the previous question as the bill came to the floor which cuts off debate on the issue.

The House has debated the issue at length this session and in the past, he said.

But Rep. Laura Telerski, D-Nashua, opposed the motion saying the issue of school vouchers is extremely important to the public and voters want to hear what their representatives have to say about it, and urged her colleagues to vote against “the silencing of the debate.”

But the House voted 185-155 to cut off debate before it began.

Under the bill, if enrollment in the program reaches 90 percent of the student limit, the cap would be increased by 25 percent or to 12,500 the following school year.

The bill also sets up a priority system if the cap is reached before the expansion.

The priorities would be:

1. Student currently enrolled in the program,

2. Sibling of an enrolled student,

3. Student with disabilities, and

4. Student with family income less than 350 percent of the federal poverty guidelines.

Rep. David Luneau, D-Hopkinton, tried to amend the bill to require a performance audit currently being done by the Legislative Budget Assistant’s Office, be completed and the organization administering the program have “a clean bill of health” before there could be any expansion of the program.

He noted a sample audit several years ago found that 12 out of 50 applications were approved in error by the Children’s Scholarship Fund that administers the program.

The amendment would force the company to comply with “The laws and rules we have passed in this body and to take what we are doing seriously,” Luneau said.

But House Education Funding Chair Rep. Rick Ladd, R-Haverhill, called the amendment another trap and delaying tactic to implementing the EFA program, noting no date has been set for the audit’s release.

And he said most performance audits are 120 pages with many findings that would have to be resolved before the program could be expanded.

The amendment was defeated on a 199-165 vote.

Rep. Hope Damon, D-Croydon, urged her colleagues to defeat the bill.

“(We should not be) expanding the EFA voucher program to a cost of $100 million when we lack adequate revenues to fund essential needs of New Hampshire citizens, such as Medicaid, the state employee retirement system, affordable housing, and corrections safe staffing,” Damon said. “We should fund our impressive university system that benefits our economy rather than paying stipends to wealthy families. And most importantly the public statewide has overwhelmingly and repeatedly opposed this Free State marketing scheme.”

But Ladd said the program is not a voucher program or a voucher scam and not a recruiting tool for people moving into New Hampshire, but for parents justified in wanting alternatives if their child is struggling, or being bullied or not being challenged in a “one-size-fits-all situation.”
The bill was initially approved on a 188-176 vote and was sent to the House Finance Committee for review before coming back for a final vote.

House Bill 115 has had a public hearing before the Senate Education Committee but has yet to come before the Senate for a vote.

The House also approved Senate Bill 292 which would establish a floor under state aid for special education costs that exceed three-and-a-half times the average per pupil cost the previous year. School districts have been receiving prorated state reimbursement for those costs under what was the catastrophic aid program that have been about 50 percent of their expenditures.

The bill would require that school districts receive at least 80 percent of their special education costs that reach the catastrophic level.

The bill was referred to House Finance for review before a final vote is taken on the bill.

Garry Rayno may be reached at garry.rayno@yahoo.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The U.S. Department of Education is giving state education agencies 10 days to certify that their schools do not engage in any practices that the administration believes illegally promote diversity, equity, and inclusion.

In a letter sent Thursday, the Education Department told state schools chiefs that they must that their schools are in compliance with its controversial interpretation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and with the .

Those that do not sign will not receive any federal funding, officials said. Federal funding represents about 10% of all K-12 funding nationwide but makes up a larger share of local budgets in high-poverty districts.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

The threat comes as many school districts are preparing their budgets for the next school year.

“Federal financial assistance is a privilege, not a right,” Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary for civil rights, said in a statement. “When state education commissioners accept federal funds, they agree to abide by federal antidiscrimination requirements.

“Unfortunately, we have seen too many schools flout or outright violate these obligations, including by using DEI programs to discriminate against one group of Americans to favor another based on identity characteristics in clear violation of Title VI.”

The Students for Fair Admissions decision barred the use of racial considerations in college admissions but . But that the decision meant any consideration of race or of proxies for race in educational settings would violate civil rights law.

The Trump administration has said that would extend to considering race as a factor in school admissions, hiring or promoting staff, awarding students scholarships or prizes, providing students with administrative support, and deciding how students should be sanctioned or disciplined.

For example, dropping the use of test scores as an admissions criteria for a selective program with the hopes of increasing racial diversity or holding a separate graduation ceremony to recognize students of a particular ethnic group could violate the law.

Many legal experts believe the administration’s interpretation is incorrect and goes much further than the Supreme Court did.

The generated significant confusion among school and district leaders and is . At the same time, conservative groups have adopted its argument to challenge initiatives that aim to address long-standing disparities, such as .

The demand that state education agencies certify compliance represents the latest attempt by the Trump administration to change local practices without engaging in lengthy investigations of individual complaints. State education departments would be responsible for ensuring school districts and charter schools comply.

The administration has slashed staff in the Office for Civil Rights as part of a larger downsizing of the Education Department.

Historically, even when school districts were found to be in violation of the law, the federal government has worked with them on resolution agreements .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What would that mean for America’s schools?

The answer depends on whether to take Trump literally­, and assume everything the department does would cease, or to take him seriously in the sense that he wants to close the department but shift many of its funding streams and functions to other federal agencies. The latter is closer to how the Heritage Foundation’s and former Institute of Education Sciences Director Mark Schneider describe the potential changes.

For example, Project 2025 recommended shifting Title I money and special education funding through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act () into the Department of Health and Human Services.

As The 74’s Linda Jacobson noted earlier this month, these and other programs run by the Department of Education are congressionally authorized, so the decisions over funding levels and oversight should ultimately come down to Congress. But the Trump administration could try to both move funding streams and weaken federal oversight of them. For example, Project 2025 also recommended converting the Title I program and IDEA from their current forms to “no-strings-attached formula block grant(s).”

I worked with the to understand how these issues might play out for states and schools. Here are three potential scenarios:  

Take Trump literally: The department is closed and all its programs cease to exist 

Most people might assume that closing the department means all its operations will cease. Given congressional political dynamics, this is unlikely. Still, it’s important to understand the full suite of funding that flows from the department.

This year, school districts will an estimated $44 billion in formula funding for elementary and secondary programs from the department. In addition to a wide variety of competitive and other line items, this includes:

•   $18.6 billion for low-income students in Title I schools;
  
•  $15.4 billion for students with disabilities under IDEA;
  
• $2.2 billion for district investments in class size reductions and other teacher initiatives;
  
• $1.3 billion for before- and after-school programs;
  
•  $940 million for English learners;
  
• $1.5 billion for vocational and adult education.

The department also oversees higher education funding. This year, college students nationwide will receive an estimated $41.4 billion in Pell Grants and work study funds, and they will take out $93 billion in federally backed student loans. If the department is closed, that funding would be at risk as well.

Take Trump seriously but not literally: The department is closed, but many of its funding streams live on in other federal agencies

Under this scenario, the situation is less dire. It’s possible Congress could simply move the funding streams that currently sit at the department over to Health and Human Services, Treasury or other agencies. If all programs found a new home, schools could theoretically be held harmless financially.

However, the authors of Project 2025 proposed that Congress shift both the agency responsible for federal education funding and the form that funding takes. If it were converted into block grants, which carry less federal oversight, states would no longer be subject to government requirements around annual testing, school accountability or services for English learners and students with disabilities. Students would also lose important federal protections.

Similarly, the department’s Office for Civil Rights is tasked with resolving legal complaints and accusations of discrimination against schools and districts. In 2024 alone, Americans on a variety of offenses, mostly pertaining to disability rights, racial or sexual harassment, or other forms of discrimination. If the department closed, it’s unclear where these types of cases would be resolved, or if the claimants would have the same rights to ask for a resolution as they do now.

Congress makes no changes: The money keeps flowing, and the Trump administration weakens and weaponizes the department

Given today’s political dynamics, this is perhaps the most likely outcome. It’s unlikely that congressional Republicans will have the votes to dismantle the department entirely, and they will likely not have the time or political capital to think through a full replacement plan. During the first Trump administration, for example, the official President’s Budget proposed a handful of programmatic cuts, but Congress mostly ignored those and continued Title I, IDEA and other programs at or slightly above their previous levels. If this scenario plays out, schools would be unaffected financially, since the money would continue to flow at current levels.

But the administration might still try to weaken the department and its influence over state and local education policy. Some of this has already started to take shape, with a series of contract cancellations and of department workers hired within the last 12 months.

It’s unclear how far this will go. Would the administration stop enforcing certain provisions of federal law, including perhaps the requirement for annual testing or the identification of and intervention in low-performing schools? Twelve state chiefs have already sent a letter asking for more funding flexibility and waivers to unnamed federal requirements. One signatory was North Dakota Chief Kirsten Baesler, who has since been nominated as the department’s assistant secretary.

While the department’s new leadership has yet to take over, the administration has also attempted to weaponize the federal role by launching OCR investigations of gender issues related to and . The department also sent a “Dear Colleague” letter warning that OCR plans to schools or districts that pursue what the administration considers to be overreach on issues related to gender and diversity, equity and inclusion.

Ultimately, the administration will have to make a choice on education policy. Does it want to cede control to states and local school districts or wade into very fine-grain details over curriculum and sports and bathrooms? So far, it has opted more for the latter than the former.  

OKLAHOMA CITY — As state officials in the next fiscal year, lawmakers on Tuesday appeared doubtful of requests to spend millions on Bibles for public schools and salary increases at the Oklahoma State Department of Education.

The agency’s leader, state Superintendent Ryan Walters, again asked for $3 million to purchase copies of the Bible, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution to place in every public school classroom. He also requested $2.3 million for a 6% cost-of-living salary bump for Education Department employees, who last saw a pay raise in 2019.

Although his total budget request would increase the agency’s funding by $113 million, Walters hinted at “potential staff cuts” to limit the Education Department’s operational expenses during a meeting Tuesday with the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

“I​​ do believe we can save $1.3 million in some of the costs that we’ve been able to absorb through rolling positions together, cutting positions that are duplicated in their services,” Walters said during the meeting.

Members of the influential appropriations committee heard Walters’ budget requests for the 2026 fiscal year. The state is required to pay some of the projected expenses, such as an extra $88.6 million for the rising cost of health insurance for public school employees.

Another $4 million would increase the teacher maternity leave fund, which Walters said is growing in popularity. He also asked for $500,000 to offer firearms training to teachers.

Senators of both parties questioned Walters’ request for $3 million to buy 55,000 copies of the King James Version Bible, which they suggested could be donated to schools or found for free online.

House lawmakers last week.

The state superintendent has advocated for more instruction on the Bible to help contextualize American history and the beliefs of the country’s founding fathers. He said he doesn’t intend for schools to preach Christianity to students.

Last year, he to incorporate the Bible into their lesson plans and that would mandate instruction on biblical stories. His agency already spent under $25,000 on 532 copies of Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA Bible, which is informally known as the Trump Bible because it has the president’s endorsement.

Walters’ Bible instruction mandate already on church-state separation grounds.

Sen. Brenda Stanley, R-Midwest City, said she never encountered a classroom that didn’t have a Bible available to students during her 43-year career in education.

Sen. Dave Rader, R-Tulsa, encouraged Walters to exhaust all resources for Bible donations before having the Legislature consider spending $3 million.

“We could take the $3 million elsewhere, if somebody is willing to make those available to us at no cost,” Rader said during the hearing.

The Senate committee also appeared dubious of funding a COLA increase for over the past two years. Walters told the committee the Education Department employed 520 people when he took office in January 2023 and that it now counts 460 employees.

“If you have decreased your (full-time employees), it would appear to me that there are already dollars inside your operating budget to offer salary increases,” Sen. Kristen Thompson, R-Edmond, told Walters during the hearing.

Walters disagreed that staff departures would be enough to fund the increase. A complicating factor is the large number of federally funded salaries at the agency, he said.

The department has considered reducing its staff even further after the state Board of Equalization in the 2026 fiscal year, Walters said.

The projection is preliminary, and the Board of Equalization will meet again this month for updated numbers.

“After the last Board of Equalization meeting, we really went in and tried to do a deep dive into can we continue to see cuts, and we believe that we do need to be able to do that,” Walters said.

Legislative leaders are preparing to limit expenses in light of the budget projections, especially as Gov. Kevin Stitt , flat agency budgets and “eliminating wasteful government spending.”

The governor suggested no funding increases to public schools nor to the state Education Department in .

House Speaker Kyle Hilbert, R-Bristow, said Monday that he shares many of the governor’s priorities “as we seek to tighten our belt fiscally this year.” Senate President Pro Tem Lonnie Paxton, R-Tuttle, echoed Stitt’s tax-cut message when he endorsed “improving the lives of Oklahomans by allowing them to keep more of their hard-earned money.”

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

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.”

Education funding is back on the docket for the Alaska Legislature. On Friday, Independent Rep. Rebecca Himschoot of Sitka introduced legislation, , to substantially increase the amount of funding per student.

The two-page bill would increase the base student allocation, the core of the ���ٲ��ٱ�’s school funding formula.

The base student allocation is currently $5,960 for .

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

If passed, the new legislation would boost the BSA by $1,000 next school year, as well as two increases of $404 each in the following two years.

In addition, the bill would adjust for inflation each year, based on the average consumer price index over the previous three years.

For next school year, the BSA would total $7,249, a 22% increase. By the 2027-2028 school year, it would reach an estimated $8,510, for a total increase of roughly 43% over three years.

Lawmakers say the boost will help address a major historical shortfall in funding. School costs rose by nearly 40% since 2011, while the BSA increased by only 10%, Himschoot filed along with the bill.

“There’s a huge gap there,” Himschoot said in a news conference Friday. “All of us have noticed, and have heard from parents, from families, from school districts, that that gap is there. And it’s causing huge, huge problems and taking opportunity away from our students. So this bill looks to correct that.”

House lawmakers also hope to address the ���ٲ��ٱ�’s teacher shortage. Vacancies have more than doubled since 2021, from 260 to 598 full-time certified teaching positions vacant this year, by the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development. This year’s state budget increased school funding by an amount equal to a $680 BSA increase, but did not make a permanent change to the formula.

“One-time funding is not effective,” said Democratic Rep. Andi Story of Juneau, who is co-chair of the House Education Committee with Himschoot. “Many families … have seen too big of a churn by teaching staff, and a lot of that has to do with only one-time funding coming. So we know we need to make it permanent and this bill addresses that.”

Last year, Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed a bill to increase per-pupil spending, what he said was the need to address education policy issues, including teacher retention and provisions to support charter schools.

“Without a comprehensive plan to address the education issues of the state, simply increasing funding to the current system does nothing to increase the educational outcomes and potential of our youth,” Dunleavy

Legislators sought to override the veto, but the effort , resulting in the state enacting the one-time funding increase.

This year, lawmakers acknowledged there are major issues to address with rising district costs, particularly for transportation, heating and insurance costs, as well as declining school enrollment. Proponents of the bill aim to boost the base student allocation tied to inflation, on a continuous basis so school districts can address those deficits and plan for the future.

“It shifts the risk,” Rep. Himschoot said. “The risks of inflation fall on districts right now, and it shifts that risk to the state.”

On Monday, the House education committee heard impassioned testimony from school officials, parents, and business, municipal and tribal leaders from around the state, in support of the funding boost.

“We have no health, no social-emotional learning, and no physical education curriculum. We have no in-person music, art or foreign language programs,” said Madeline Aguillard, superintendent of the Kuspuk School District in the middle Kuskokwim River region, detailing extensive budget cuts already made.

“We have extremely reduced academic programs. We have no in-person career and technical education courses. We have no advanced courses for students pushing to pursue higher education or technical fields. We haven’t been able to adopt a social studies curriculum in the last decade,” she said.

“Some of these things can be provided online, and we do rely on a lot of online vendors,” she added. “However, we lack the adequate technology to be able to even provide devices for all of our students.”

The legislation comes at a time when school districts across the state are facing major deficits and considering school consolidation and closures, including in , , , the and .

Steve Rowe, an Anchorage parent of three and owner of a general contracting company, testified to the committee that the cost of school funding is essential.

“I promise you, I scream ‘budget’ every day to about 50 different people, and to stay within it,” Rowe said. “But I also can stand back and recognize at certain points, it doesn’t matter what the budget is in certain sectors, we have to fund those no matter what the cost is, and if that means making it painful somewhere else, then so be it. That’s just what we have to do. I believe education has to be one of those.”

Jenna Wright, president of the Anchorage Economic Development Corp., highlighted the economic costs of Alaska’s current school issues.

“I have heard from more than one employer over the last year that has said they’ve lost a candidate because of perceptions about a lack of education system,” Wright said. “So by underfunding education, we’re losing families, workers and taxpayers to other states with better-funded schools. This is eroding our economic base and undermining our efforts to grow a robust economy.”

Increasing the BSA is one part of the school funding formula

Alaska has a complicated public schools for its approximately

The base student allocation is just one part of the formula, which takes into account several factors, including the number of students enrolled, number of correspondence students, school sizes, location in urban or rural areas called district cost factor, career technical education and special needs students.

The state contributes about 62% of funding to school districts, along with municipal, federal and some grant funding. But how far that funding goes also depends on the district.

Alaska has 53 school districts across the state, and 34 of those are located in municipalities with tax revenue to contribute to schools.

There are 19 districts that are Regional Education Attendance Areas with no municipal government and no taxing power. “So their only source of funding is the state or federal government,” said Alexei Painter, director of the Alaska Legislative Finance Division, which analyzes the budget for lawmakers. Painter provided an overview of the school funding formula to the House Education Committee on Jan. 24.

The path for school funding legislation

Lawmakers in both the House and Senate have said that school funding is one of their main priorities this year.

Dunleavy has also said he plans to introduce legislation to increase school funding. His in December reduced education funding by $213 million, since it did not continue with the one-time funding.

He said in school funding could be added, if lawmakers can agree to certain changes in education policy.

Sen. Löki Tobin of Anchorage, chair of the Senate Education Committee, said she is planning to introduce school funding legislation in the Senate. This week, the House Education Committee is holding public testimony on the proposed BSA increase legislation on Wednesday, Jan. 29, from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alaska Beacon maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Andrew Kitchenman for questions: info@alaskabeacon.com.

When schools were handed an unprecedented $129 billion in federal pandemic aid, it wasn’t surprising that COVID-related equipment topped the shopping list as schools rushed to snap up hotspots, laptops, desk dividers, and air filters.

But another widespread pattern is emerging as federal officials tally up the spending: Many districts also used their one-time funding to take care of longstanding needs, like replacing aging infrastructure and outdated textbooks, that schools previously wanted to tackle but could not afford to do so.

Around 1 in 3 school districts and charter operators nationwide, or some 5,200, used COVID relief during the 2022-23 school year to adopt new curriculum or learning materials, . That made it the most common strategy to address learning loss, which schools spent $11 billion on that year.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

Schools spent some $6 billion in federal pandemic aid that same year to . That meant 1 out of every 10 COVID relief dollars spent during the 2022-23 school year went toward a school building. It was six times more than what states spent on tutoring.

And half of all COVID relief dollars schools spent that year, or just under $25 billion, were spent on staff salaries and benefits. A good chunk of that went toward paying new social workers and school nurses, with the aid.

Now that the COVID aid is mostly gone — — schools are confronting big questions about how they will cover curriculum overhauls and critical building repairs going forward, as well as how many of those additional staffers will lose their jobs. Many school districts, especially those with declining enrollments, are considering closing schools or cutting programs to balance their budgets.

The report looks at how the nation’s roughly 16,000 school districts and charter operators spent just over $49 billion in COVID relief dollars during the 2022-23 school year. Nearly all of the first two COVID relief packages had been exhausted and schools were halfway through spending their last and largest aid package by the end of the 2022-23 school year. Schools had spent some $117 billion in pandemic aid by that point.

Investing in people and projects with the potential for long-term payoffs made sense, federal officials say, and the Biden administration encouraged this type of spending.

Federal officials also believe provisions in the COVID aid laws that required states to maintain their own school funding will help schools return to more usual levels of funding more easily than they did following the Great Recession. When stimulus packages enacted in the wake of that financial crisis expired, many states slashed education funding and .

“There are certainly difficult decisions that are going to get made after $130 billion is fully invested,” said Adam Schott, the principal deputy assistant secretary in the Education Department’s Office of Elementary and Secondary Education. “We are just not seeing the type of fiscal cliff that we saw 10, 12, 15 years ago.”

Part of the reason for that, Schott said, is that the Biden administration urged schools to spend the pandemic aid on both immediate needs but also long-term academic goals.

To the administration, investing in school buildings — and getting rid of issues like asbestos, mold, and lead — was also crucial.

“For decades, we’ve known that a classroom that’s 90 degrees in May or in September is an impediment to in-person learning,” Schott said. “We saw this as really core to academic recovery.”

Many schools spent on curriculum amid worrying test scores

The new data about spending on curriculum and classroom materials comes as many states and districts and math, opting for materials that .

That spending also coincides with of and test score data showing that American children are academically stagnant or falling behind their earlier counterparts. That was true even before the pandemic. But the trend is .

And while recent state test scores have shown , “We are clearly not where we ought to be,” Schott said.

Now that the federal COVID aid is gone, “states have to be ready to grab the baton,” he added, whether that’s finding new ways to spend existing federal funding, or adding money to state education budgets. “We’re going to keep beating that drum with every minute we’ve got left.”

The new federal report also comes as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to start his second term in a few days. It’s unclear how or if top education officials in his administration will push schools to continue pandemic-era programs.

On the campaign trail, , and give more responsibility to state officials — who already largely control what and how kids learn.

By the 2022-23 school year, most students were back to learning in person for a second school year. The pandemic was declared officially over halfway through the school year. But many students were struggling to follow the routines of school. .

was a — though it’s unclear if some of these programs helped kids improve academically. About 2 in 5 school districts or charter school operators used COVID aid on summer programs that school year, reaching around 4.5 million students.

A smaller number of districts and charter operators — around 1 in 10 nationally, or around 2,100 — used pandemic money to add instructional time. Researchers were .

Meanwhile, states spent $1 billion on tutoring that school year, and districts ran intensive tutoring programs that reached some 3 million kids, or around 6% of public school students. Of those students, around half were from low-income families, while 13% were students with disabilities and 14% were learning English as a new language — suggesting that many students from historically disadvantaged backgrounds did not receive tutoring.

— a figure researchers have already said was likely much smaller than the share of kids who needed extra academic help after the pandemic’s disruptions to learning.

The report points out that COVID aid helped to put “more people working in America’s schools than at any time in the last decade.” As of October 2024, the report notes, schools had added some 643,000 jobs since 2021, with a 43% increase in social workers and a 23% increase in school nurses.

Some school finance experts have criticized schools for . They’ve said the hiring and firing is destabilizing, especially for schools that already had more staff turnover prior to the pandemic.

Still, Schott defended that use of the money. He pointed out that some of the added spending helped to raise low teacher pay or invest in gummed-up educator pipelines. Other spending got “more caring eyes on kids” at a chaotic time.

“You couldn’t maintain consistency for kids, you couldn’t deliver instruction, you couldn’t get core nutrition services flowing without people,” he said.

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

The , from right-leaning education advocacy group , reveals opinions about local school control, open enrollment and funding from 1,000 registered voters across the nation. 

The majority of survey respondents support ending assigned school zones — district boundaries that determine which school students attend, depending on their home address. Nearly two-thirds (65%) said they support giving children access to the best public school that works for them, regardless of the neighborhood they live in.

About 56% said K-12 education is headed in the wrong direction, a finding that should be an “alarm bell” for policymakers, said Matt Frendeway, vice president of strategy for Yes. Every Kid. One-third (31%) of respondents said education is going in the right direction, while 12% said they didn’t know.

“Families don’t feel like things are working,” he said.

The results are similar to the findings of . found that in 2024, 55% of people said they were dissatisfied with the quality of K-12 education in the U.S.

Frendeway said the Yes. Every Kid. survey results suggest that voters want less federal involvement and more flexibility in education.

When asked who they trust the most to decide how local education funding is spent, 20% of respondents said their state department of education, 18% said teachers and 15% said parents.

About 14% chose their local school board, 12% said individual schools and 12% preferred the federal government.

While 74% of respondents said Washington should fund public schools, only 28% said it should decide what schools spend the money on. 

Districts receive from Washington, with state and local governments supplying the rest. The money is funneled through programs such as Title I for low-income schools and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which supports special education students.

The role of federal funding has recently come under scrutiny, especially with the election of President Donald Trump, who has called for shifting more funding to the states or altogether. 

In the Yes. Every Kid. survey, 59% of respondents said they would support ending all federal requirements tied to education funding and instead sending money directly to states to spend.

About 62% said they support each state tailoring education programs to the needs of their own student populations. 

Frendeway said one approach is to increase block grant funding, which is money that comes from the federal government but is administered by state or local governments.

“Governors would have more say in how to benefit schools in their state,” he said. “It brings the funds closer to those who need it and deserve it.”

Other education groups have warned that dismantling federal funding by worsening teacher shortages and quality instruction for vulnerable students, according to the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning policy institute.

Indiana’s largest teachers union listed educator pay boosts, increased public school funding and consolidated training requirements among its top asks for the 2025 legislative session.

The Indiana State Teachers Association, which represents roughly 40,000 Hoosier educators, released a priority agenda on Tuesday — just weeks before state lawmakers are set to return to the Statehouse.

Jennifer Smith-Margraf, ISTA’s vice president, emphasized that “equitable funding for Indiana’s public schools” is of highest concern to the union.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

The 2025 session will see state legislators craft the ���ٲ��ٱ�’s next biennial budget, about half of which has historically been earmarked for education.

In recent years, however, Indiana’s Republican-dominated legislature has opted to grow the ���ٲ��ٱ�’s private school voucher system at a faster rate — a shift ISTA has long opposed.

“We’re here to speak for educators and every student whose future depends on a fair, safe and supportive learning environment,” Smith-Margraf said during a Tuesday news conference. “Hoosiers value strong public schools that provide equal opportunities for all students. Whether Black or white, Latino, Asian, Native (American) or newcomer, every Hoosier child deserves a quality education, and that starts with well-funded schools.”

Top priorities focus on funding increases

A two-page agenda released by ISTA officials breaks the union’s priorities down into five categories.

A section on funding emphasizes increased funding to “efficiently support” Indiana’s public schools. That includes greater funding for early childhood education, as well as additional dollars to ensure that schools can adequately afford students’ textbook costs.

In 2023, the General Assembly mandated K-12 schools to cover the cost of textbooks and a range of other curricular materials, but district officials have since expressed concerns that the state dollars they’ve received .

“What we’re asking (lawmakers) to do is to not just cover the textbook portion of it, but the fee portion of it, because we don’t believe that parents should be responsible for that, especially if they’re out working two, three and four jobs,” Smith-Margraf said.

The union is also advocating for Indiana’s compulsory school attendance age to drop to six, meaning kindergarten would become a requirement for Hoosier kids. Currently, Indiana students are not required to attend school until age seven, when first grade begins.

“Every child deserves a solid start,” Smith-Margraf said in reference to mandated kindergarten. “This funding will help make that possible.”

Another bundle of ISTA requests center around “fair compensation and benefits for educators.” The union wants to see teacher salaries aligned with “inflation-adjusted” benchmarks — which Smith-Margraf said would close the 22.8% pay gap with other professions. ISTA is also asking for all public school employees to receive 12 weeks of parental leave.

The showed the average teacher salary in Indiana during the last school year — up from $58,531 the year prior.

ISTA is not recommending a specific minimum salary, however. Baseline educator pay in the state currently sits at $40,000.

“We’re looking at how inflation has affected all of our different locals across the state, and we are looking for an increase in funding that will help make sure that we are paid competitively,” Smith-Margraf said. “We also know when we look at our surrounding states that we are not keeping up with salary increases with them, and we continue to lose folks across the border to Michigan, to Ohio, to Illinois and to Kentucky. And so we know we have work to do in looking at those metrics to make sure that our pay is competitive.”

“We have a critical educator shortage,” she continued. “We just have so many good people who are either retiring early or who are leaving the profession because they’re burnt out from many different things … we can all see from the numbers that there are too many of them leaving, and there are too many openings statewide. And that’s affecting those things that the legislature has talked about being really important: making sure that every kid can read by third grade, making sure that we have numeracy skills in fifth grade, making sure that we have folks around who are qualified to implement these new high school diplomas.”

‘Hopeful’ about new administration

Reduced training requirements via the creation of a five-year cycle for state-mandated professional development is among the union’s other priorities, too. That would “reduce redundancy and improve efficiency,” and affect trainings around suicide awareness and child abuse prevention, according to ISTA officials.

Smith-Margraf also noted teachers’ request to exclude veteran teachers from the ���ٲ��ٱ�’s new — and controversial — literacy licensure requirement, allowing for the completion of an 80-hour science of reading course, instead.

After the requirement was approved by the General Assembly earlier this year, the “unfair” and “overwhelming” 80-hour training. Many pleaded for to be made available for teachers to complete the professional development course — or that it be removed as a requirement altogether.

The ���ٲ��ٱ�’s education department has since adjusted and added training options. Some educators have already been exempted from the licensure requirements, as long as they aren’t teaching literacy to students past fifth grade.

Additionally included among ISTA’s priorities is:

The addition of 500 school counselors statewide to lower Indiana’s counselor-to-student ratio from 694:1 to 500:1, and to reduce non-counselor duties.

Establishing “clear reporting mechanisms” for violence against school staff, as well as penalties for non-compliant districts, especially in light of a in which thousands of Hoosier teachers and other school workers said they were hurt by students on the job during the last academic year.

Promotion of restorative justice programs over suspensions for non-violent offenses among students.
Giving teachers mandatory collective bargaining rights in “decisions impacting their safety and working conditions.”

Increasing funding for diversity scholarships and programs to recruit and retain minority educators.
Allowing the bargaining of schools’ reserve funds that exceed 25% of a district’s budget.

Smith-Margraf said many of the union’s priorities are aligned with those in Gov.-elect Mike Braun’s agenda. She noted that ISTA is actively meeting with the new Republican governor’s administration and other state officials ahead of the legislative session.

“Gov.-elect Braun and various members of leadership from both parties have talked about all of these things as being priorities, and so they’re priorities for them, and they’re priorities for us,” Smith-Margraf said. “We’re looking forward to working together with them as we go through the legislative session to figure out how we’re going to fund these and implement these different priorities. But since these are priorities for all of us and for our state, we believe that’s how it stays top of mind for everyone.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Indiana Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Niki Kelly for questions: info@indianacapitalchronicle.com.

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 ���ٲ��ٱ�’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 ���ٲ��ٱ�’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.”

Education has never been a top priority of President-elect Donald Trump’s, but that doesn’t mean schools — or students — will be immune from Trump’s agenda in the next four years, education experts say. 

Trump may slash school funding, cut civil rights protections and gut the U.S. Department of Education, based on his previous statements and the visions outlined in the  and , a conservative manifesto reimagining the federal government. 

But students may experience the most devastating effects. Trump has  of undocumented residents and crackdowns on LGBTQ rights, which could lead to higher absenteeism, higher rates of bullying and greater anxiety generally on school campuses.

“The stress created by the threat of deportations cannot be overestimated,” said UCLA education professor John Rogers, who’s studied how politics plays out in K-12 education. “It absolutely will have an impact on attendance, and it absolutely will affect parents’ ability to participate in their children’s education.”

Student  somewhat in California since the COVID-19 pandemic, but remains very high — 24.3% last year. During the first Trump presidency, Latino student attendance and academic performance dropped significantly in areas affected by deportation arrests, . 

During Trump’s first term, his deportation efforts were foiled a bit by the courts and by disorganization at the White House, Rogers said, but those obstacles aren’t likely to be present this time.

That could leave thousands of children vulnerable to deportation or becoming separated from their parents. More than  were undocumented in the most recent census count, and almost half of California children have , the Public Policy Institute of California reported. Most of the undocumented residents are from Latin America, but a majority of newer arrivals come from Asia.

Threat to cut $8 billion for California schools 

LGBTQ students are also likely to face challenges under a Trump presidency. Trump has often disparaged “woke” policies that protect the rights of trans students and threatened to withhold federal funding for states that uphold those policies. In California, that could mean a loss of about $8 billion, or 7% of the overall education budget.

But beyond financial matters, the anti-LGBTQ language is likely to exacerbate challenges for trans students, Rogers said. Students’ rights to use bathrooms and play on sports teams that align with their gender identity are among the protections that Republicans have singled out for elimination.   

“This election proved that the culturally divisive rhetoric can be an effective way to garner public support,” Rogers said. “Now that Trump has a bully pulpit, I expect we’ll see an amplification of this rhetoric.”

Mike Kirst, former president of the State Board of Education, agreed that the threat of deportations may be Trump’s biggest effect on California schools. 

“If they succeed in deporting a lot of families, that will be horrific for California schools,” Kirst said. “That’s what keeps me up at night.”

More power to the states?

The other proposals — dismantling the U.S. Department of Education, or eliminating “woke” curriculum, for example — would be complicated and time-consuming to accomplish, he said. Eliminating the Department of Education would require majority votes in Congress, which would be a difficult hurdle because the department provides many popular programs with bipartisan support, such as special education.

Curriculum is left to the states, and the federal government has no input.

Traditionally, Republican presidents have sought to minimize the federal government’s role in education, leaving most decisions to the states. If Trump takes that approach, California’s mostly Democratic leadership would have some independence from the Republican power brokers in Washington, D.C., Kirst said.  

Regardless, Trump would be able to use executive orders to scale back Title I, which provides benefits to low-income students, and Title IX, which prohibits gender discrimination. And school choice, school vouchers and promotion of charter schools are likely to be priorities of the incoming Secretary of Education, although it’s not clear how much impact those policies would have in California.

Trump has also been outspoken in his opposition to teachers unions, saying he wants to eliminate tenure and institute merit pay.

The California Teachers Association, which campaigned heavily for Vice President Kamala Harris, said it was undeterred by Trump’s attacks.

“We are prepared to stand up against any attacks on our students, public education, workers’ rights and our broader communities that may come,” union president David Goldberg said. “We’re committed to fight for the future we all deserve.”

In a rare display of unity, Los Angeles Unified board members and union leaders also vowed to push back against any policies that would negatively affect students and families.

“We stand together in our commitment to protect, affirm and support everyone in the Los Angeles Unified community,” the groups released in a joint statement. “We will always provide a safe, welcoming and inclusive environment for all students, families and employees.”

State leaders fight back

At the state level, elected officials said they’d fight Trump’s efforts to interfere in California. State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond on Friday said he’d ask the governor to backfill any funds the federal government withholds from California, and he’d sponsor legislation to protect students.

He also reminded school districts that laws already exist to protect undocumented and LGBTQ students. , passed this year, bans school staff from “outing” students to their families. And , a 1982 U.S. Supreme Court case, prohibits schools from denying students an education based on their immigration status. The state offers a plethora of guidance on how schools can support  and  students and their families. 

“While others demonize education, we will continue to help California students, wherever they are,” Thurmond said.

Attorney General Rob Bonta vowed to fight Trump’s policies with legal action, much as his predecessor Xavier Becerra did by filing or joining more than 100 lawsuits during the first Trump term. Gov. Gavin Newsom last week said he’d work with the Legislature to  and otherwise “” California.

Students, meanwhile, are waiting to see how the policies — and pushback — will play out in the coming months. Maria Davila, a high school senior in Beaumont in Riverside County, said that for now, she’s not overly worried about how a Trump presidency would affect schools. Some of her peers are concerned, she said, but she has faith that student activism and adult leadership will protect young people from the most extreme outcomes.

“In California we have legislative leaders who listen to students and care about young people,” said Davila, a volunteer with a youth advocacy group called GenUp. “I think we’ll get the support we need. Students can be hopeful.”

This was originally published on .

On Nov. 8, Orleans Parish School Board leaders informed school leaders that the projected deficit had grown to at least $36 million and could still increase in coming months. To offset the shortfall, which comes to at least $1,000 per student, district leaders hope to tap reserves to loan schools some $15 million. On Nov. 14, Superintendent Avis Williams announced her resignation, effective Dec. 1. 

Three months into the academic year, New Orleans school leaders have learned that because of a series of miscalculations by district officials, their funding will drop dramatically, starting with their October payment.

The early back-of-the-envelope math is alarming, according to financial consultants who help the city’s schools manage their budgets. The initial estimate is that annual funding will fall by at least $20 million.

NOLA Public Schools leaders say they are working with city officials, who collect the taxes that help support what was until recently an all-charter district, to pin down the exact amount. But so far, there has not been an official calculation of how big the error is.

In the meantime, school administrators say they have only rough, varying estimates of how much lower their actual payments will be, no idea how long the shortfall may affect their budgets or whether their allotments will continue to decrease as the district reworks its ledgers. 

“The impact of $700 to $900 per pupil for a school of 500 students could translate to the loss of six or seven teacher positions,” says Joe Keeney, founder of 4^th Sector Solutions, a consulting firm that provides charter schools with financial and administrative services. “It could be upward of $400,000 for some [individual] schools.” 

The timing makes the red ink especially problematic. New Orleans schools, like many throughout the country, are struggling to survive the so-called fiscal cliff, the one-two punch of enrollment declines — which translate to less state funding — and the end of federal pandemic recovery aid.

“We are a quarter of the way into our school year,” says Rhonda Kalifey-Aluise, CEO of the city’s largest charter network, KIPP New Orleans Schools. “There is no way to say, ‘Okay, I have to cut $500-$800-$1,000 a kid.’ It’s impossible to do. These numbers are so big.” 

At an Oct. 22 school board meeting, Superintendent Avis Williams said she is researching options. “I do for this happening because it was on the district’s watch,” she said.

NOLA Public Schools typically tells its 67 charter schools in March how much money they can expect to receive for the following school year, including local property and sales tax revenue. They use those estimates to draw up their budgets for the year. Schools get the funds in monthly payments, and near the end of the academic year, small expected differences between projections and actual revenue are reconciled.

For fiscal year 2024, the district’s finance team projected an 18% increase in income from property taxes and a 3% hike in sales tax revenue. But it based those estimates on the full calendar year, instead of the fiscal year starting in July. Property tax collections actually rose by slightly less than 9% while sales taxes fell 1%. 

District leaders didn’t disclose the until an Oct. 9 meeting attended only by a handful of charter finance leaders, according to Caroline Roemer, executive director of the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools, and some of those present. 

“Moreover, the district’s limited information was presented without any definitive statements about how this would impact schools, why the over-projections occurred or what actions they should take, leaving schools to speculate on the next steps,” Roemer wrote in an Oct. 17 to district leadership. “Finally and significantly, the district has yet to formally notify all school leaders of this urgent matter.”

In response to questions from The 74, a district spokesperson said the discrepancy in revenue projections was identified earlier this month: “As soon as we realized the variance between the projected and actual revenues, we began working with our auditors and the city of New Orleans to verify the data and make necessary adjustments.”  

But at the Oct. 22 board meeting, Comptroller Nyesha Veal said NOLA Public Schools staff began receiving monthly updates from the city in May indicating the March projections were incorrect. At the board meeting two days later, Veal said she had not realized that no one communicated the shortfall to school officials until she met with them Oct. 9. 

At a meeting Oct. 23 with board members and school leaders, district staff blamed the mistake on a “personnel issue” they refused to describe, according to association staffers present. They also said the unspecified issue should have triggered a review.   

In her , Roemer wrote that there were similar discrepancies last year: “Last spring, the district also alerted school finance directors that the district made over-projection miscalculations for the 2023 fiscal year and erred in how they presented and utilized the 2023 fiscal year audited actuals of revenue collected in the 2022 fiscal year.”

District officials dispute this, but KIPP New Orleans CFO Katie Walmsley and other school finance chiefs say they have been told multiple times that discrepancies from past years persist. Most recently, at the Oct. 23 meeting, Veal again told the CFOs there were miscalculations for fiscal year 2023. A district report due to the state at the end of the calendar year will contain audited totals, Walmsley says.

Among the examples Walmsley cited were miscounts of different groups of students who receive extra per-pupil funding. “District staff have confused themselves by not being extra-precise,” she says. “It’s only coming to light because us CFOs have asked questions such as, ‘Why did the number of over-aged students double year-over-year?’ ” 

Reacting to the news at public meetings held Oct. 22 and 24, members of the Orleans Parish School Board called for the district to hire a , form a working group of outside experts and school leaders, come up with a plan for communicating with school administrators and produce a report explaining what went wrong. 

“As a board, we are focused on getting to the root of the problem, finding a solution going forward and communicating with all stakeholders,” says Olin Parker, chair of the board’s finance committee. “What I have pushed the superintendent on is that if there is ultimately a negative impact, we also need to bear some of the brunt of this.”

The lack of communication, Roemer wrote in her letter, is just the latest of a series of episodes in which the district — which hired Williams as superintendent in July 2022 — has not engaged school leaders about citywide issues. This is a major departure from past practices in what was an all-charter school system from 2017 until this academic year.  

The former chief of Selma City Schools in Alabama, Williams had no experience with charter schools when she took the reins in New Orleans. Before her appointment, district and charter community administrators had met frequently to troubleshoot common problems. 

Policies crafted with the input of charter leaders, who operate independently of the district, include processes for enrolling and disciplining students and holding schools accountable for academic and financial performance. 

Roemer and others have said Williams has not engaged with school leaders on . “Recent failures by district staff and systems have caused major issues,” Roemer wrote in her Oct. 17 letter, including problems with enrollment, absenteeism, accidental data breaches, funding for student support programs and “misinformation about laws applicable to charter schools.” 

During a board meeting last winter, Roemer complained about poor communications regarding a series of decisions Williams made on the fate of an underperforming school that by law was likely to lose its charter. The superintendent ultimately chose to open a new, traditional, district-run school in the failing charter’s building.

The move came after months of confusion as to how the district planned to deal with declining enrollment. In February, its nonprofit partner, New Schools for New Orleans, warned that its 4,000 vacant seats had . 

On average, each of the city’s K-8 schools had space for 550 students but enrolled 484, leaving a funding gap of $625,000. In opening a new school, Williams missed an opportunity to lower the overall vacancy rate through attrition, critics charged. 

“In short,” Roemer wrote, “this district has yet to properly or successfully execute many of the functions they are directly responsible for as a school itydistrict — and functions that had previously worked until now.”

Schools do their own budget projections involving state and federal aid but depend on the district for local tax calculations. Because Louisiana, like many states, sends extra aid to districts with low property taxes — and because discrepancies from fiscal year 2023 are still being tallied — the mistake will also cost schools an as-yet unknown amount of state aid. 

In addition, schools that enroll large numbers of children with profound needs will suffer disproportionately large losses because New Orleans apportions money based on a long list of weights — extra funding intended to offset the cost of educating students with disabilities, who are learning English, are over-aged and have been suspended or involved with the criminal justice system, among other challenges. 

Because the combination of enrollment declines and the end of one-time COVID aid could put schools on shaky financial footing, 4^th Sector Solutions had already urged its clients to shift from annual budgets to multiyear plans, says Jonathan Tebeleff, vice president of the firm’s New Orleans finance team: “We’ve been working to put them in a position where they won’t sail over that fiscal cliff.” 

Some older schools or those in large networks have built up reserve funds that may help cushion the blow, but newer, standalone charter schools don’t, says Kalifey-Aluise. Even for those schools that have rainy-day funds, spending down savings can leave them vulnerable in emergencies. 

“KIPP has a board policy of putting money away every year, but some of that is literally reserved for disasters, like hurricanes,” she says. “The conversation we haven’t had is whether there is a systemwide way to make people whole?”

Unlike a traditional district, which can move money from one budget line to another when need be, NOLA Public Schools has relatively little financial wiggle room. Its main source of revenue is the 2% of each school’s allotment it receives as a charter authorizer. Because the schools operate autonomously, there are relatively few central office staff.  

In order to pay for district assistance with issues such as teacher recruitment, student mental health support and specialized staff training, New Orleans charter schools contribute to a . It’s not clear whether that account can be tapped to help make up the tax shortfall.

Also unclear is how the red ink will impact schools slated for charter renewal in the next couple of years. By law, fiscal health is a large part of the evaluation that is used to determine whether a school’s charter will be renewed or rescinded. 

In an Oct. 25 letter, New Schools for New Orleans CEO Dana Peterson told city school leaders that the organization — which serves as the school system’s research and policy partner — had agreed to pay for an outside expert to help the district improve its finance operations. School leaders will meet with him in early November to discuss the impact of the shortfall.    

At the Oct. 24 board meeting, district finance officials said they hoped to have hard numbers by Oct. 30, so schools can begin planning how to make up the deficit.

As the brother of a recent graduate from the University of Wyoming’s College of Education, Rep. Landon Brown (R-Cheyenne) has seen firsthand how lagging teacher salaries in Wyoming affect the ���ٲ��ٱ�’s pool of educators. 

“The offer that he received from Arizona was $22,000 more a year than what he was offered for any school district here in the state of Wyoming, including Cheyenne, where his home was,” Brown told his colleagues on the Joint Education Committee Thursday. 

“He picked up and moved to the state of Arizona, where he’s going to pay income tax, because he can make $22,000 more a year,” he continued. 

In the face of such anecdotes, as well as empirical evidence that Wyoming is , the Joint Education Committee recommended an 8.5% “external cost adjustment,” or temporary increase in funding, for teacher and other school staff salaries for the 2025-26 school year. The body voted 11-1 to recommend the increase.

The recommendation, which also includes shifts in funding for school materials and utilities, would increase funding by approximately $66.4 million in total. That would bring the funding in alignment with Wyoming’s “evidence-based model.” That funding model was implemented after the Wyoming Supreme Court in 1995 declared the ���ٲ��ٱ�’s K-12 school finance system unconstitutional for failing to “provide for the establishment and maintenance of a complete and uniform system of public instruction.” The new formula relies on consultants using complex economic data to periodically define appropriate funding levels instead of elected officials. 

The pay bump still has hurdles to clear. The Appropriations Committee will make its own recommendation on the matter to Gov. Mark Gordon by Nov. 1. 

But the Education Committee’s decision could represent a response to critics who say Wyoming has lost its ability to recruit and retain quality educators because it hasn’t kept up with the high relative pay it once offered. 

Background 

Wyoming periodically “recalibrates” how much the state is willing to spend on education and how the funds should be split — a complicated undertaking done with the help of consultants. The next recalibration is scheduled for 2025.

During the non-recalibration years, lawmakers decide whether inflation and cost models demand an external cost adjustment to appropriately fund staff, supplies and utilities. Any changes are then reflected in Wyoming’s Educational Block Grant Funding, a spending measure approved by the Legislature.

The committee’s discussion last week honed in on pay for teachers and other school staff. 

In 2010, teaching salaries in Wyoming were about 25% higher than salaries in adjacent states, according to a  by economics researcher Christiana Stoddard. But over the next decade, the ���ٲ��ٱ�’s average teacher wage didn’t increase much, going from $59,268 in 2012 to $60,650 in 2020, the report states. 

Today, Wyoming still exceeds many Western states for teacher pay, but its edge has slipped. It’s ranked No. 26 in the nation for its average teacher salary of  $61,979, 

Teacher pay in surrounding states is creeping up, Stoddard told the committee Thursday, including in Utah, which now surpasses Wyoming. Teaching wages have also fallen relative to salaries in other comparable occupations in the state, she said. 

“Cost pressures matter because they affect the quality of teachers, and we know that teacher quality makes an enormous difference in terms of student outcomes,” Stoddard said. Many Wyoming school districts, she said, have opted to hire fewer personnel at a higher pay to remain competitive. 

Stoddard noted another concerning trend: “a pretty sharp drop in the number of bachelor’s degrees from the University of Wyoming who are graduating in teaching.” UW has been a major source of new teachers to Wyoming schools.

In an effort to sustain teaching levels, districts are coming up with creative solutions. Wyoming reported 190 teachers using emergency or provisional credentials and four teachers working outside their licensed subject area for the 2021-22 school year, according to a Learning Policy Institute  on the state of the teacher workforce. 

Keeping constitutional 

After listening to reports on the state of school funding Thursday, Sen. Chris Rothfuss (D-Laramie) made a motion to recommend an external cost adjustment that includes the 8.5% increase for both professional and non-professional staff. 

The total $66.4-million difference in the funding that adjustment would represent is “not an arbitrary number,” Rothfuss said. 

Instead, it’s the figure legislative staff identified to ensure Wyoming follows its constitutional mandates, he said. “It is the amount that it takes to make a constitutional, statutory model equivalent to the evidence-based model.” 

Sheridan County School District 1 Business Manager Jeremy Smith encouraged the 8.5% recommendation. The conversation leading to it, he said, had a consistent theme: high teaching salaries can attract quality candidates even when they have alternate employment opportunities. 

One only has to look at the University of Wyoming graduation data to see that Wyomingites are being dissuaded from the profession, Smith said. He also pointed to a 2022 survey conducted by the University of Wyoming’s College of Education and the Wyoming Education Association that found 65% of Wyoming’s teachers would quit if they could. 

“Teachers aren’t very satisfied in their profession right now for a whole host of reasons, but one is certainly salary,” Smith said. “You’ve got to give the ECA, it’s got to be substantial and substantive in order to turn the ship around.”

Sen. Charles Scott (R-Casper) was the sole lawmaker to protest, calling the adjustment “out of line.” 

Rep. Brown of Cheyenne, meanwhile, spoke in support of it, saying that failing to sustain external cost adjustments has already proven to be unwise. 

“We’re not funding our school districts with the valuable resources they need to teach these kids,” he said before the committee passed the recommendation. 

Lea esta historia en 

California announced today which schools will share a windfall to bolster career paths for students – but delays and mishaps have meant that thousands of students missed the opportunity to participate.

An estimated 300 K-12 schools will share $450 million to set up internships, boost dual-enrollment programs at community colleges and take other steps to connect students to high-paying jobs in health care, technology, the arts and other fields. 

The announcement comes after a tumultuous few months for the Golden State Pathways program, which is part of California’s broader effort to  at high schools and community colleges. Alongside other investments, the program is intended to ultimately make career training available to every student.

Initially  in 2022, the Golden State Pathways Program was supposed to roll out the following year, with schools applying for grants and the state Education Department announcing winners in January 2024.

But in spring 2023, a brewing state budget deficit led some legislators to  and sending the money elsewhere. After protests from school districts and career education advocates, the program survived  — then faced more delays when the state pushed back the application deadline.

In May, the Education Department announced that 302 school school districts won grant money, but , some of those grants were for far different amounts than what the schools had applied for. 

In July, the state abruptly revoked the entire roster of grant recipients, saying it needed to review the applications again given that school districts had flooded it with appeals.

“The California Department of Education takes Golden State Pathways, as well as all of California’s investments in workforce-ready educational opportunities, very seriously, and we are committed to ensuring that these funds get to local educational agencies as quickly as possible. We recognize the impact that this (delay) has had on districts, and every effort is underway to ensure that funds are distributed as swiftly as possible,” Elizabeth Sanders, spokesperson for the Education Department, said in an email this week, adding that the agency is working to “ensure that all communication moving forward is clear, responsive, and collaborative.”

School districts and career education advocates were irate. The delay meant they could not move forward with plans for this fall, even though many had already committed to programs. In early September, a group of 20 school districts and nonprofits  to state officials, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, imploring them to speed up the process.

“We respectfully ask that you do everything in your power to get promised Golden State Pathways grant dollars flowing, sent, and received to the hundreds of local education agencies that have planned, staffed and set expectations for this funding across California communities,” they wrote. “Time is of the essence for the communities that depend on them.”

The delays were especially painful for districts that have been scrambling to help students recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. Since campuses reopened, they’ve grappled with ,  and an uptick in student misbehavior. Many students, meanwhile, have struggled with . 

Career pathways have offered some hope. Students who participate in them  higher graduation rates, higher rates of college enrollment and higher earnings later in life, according to research compiled by Policy Analysis for California Education, a nonprofit think tank.

By improving career paths for students, the state also hopes to spur its own economy by providing skilled workers for growing industries such as health care, technology and climate-related fields.

Students missing out

But the delays and uncertainty have forced schools and organizations to freeze hiring and planning.

“We’re in a holding pattern and the school year has already begun. We’re missing an opportunity to reach more students and help more school districts with their goals,” said Kirk Anne Taylor, executive director of Climate Action Pathways for Schools, a nonprofit that provides paid internships for high school students to work on environmental projects in their schools and communities.

Porterville Unified in Tulare County is among the districts that risked postponing its career pathways expansion plans. The district was hoping to use Golden State Pathways grant money this year to expand its climate internship program, where students create energy audits of school buildings and recommend ways to save gas and electricity. Over the past three years, the students’ audits have  more than $830,000 in energy costs. Students have also worked on green schoolyard projects and a switch to electric buses.

Taylor’s organization ended up finding another funding source for Porterville’s program, but other districts weren’t so lucky, she said.

“It’s a great program in Porterville and we’re eager to move forward … there and elsewhere,” Taylor said. 

In Los Angeles, a nonprofit called UNITE-LA connects schools with local businesses, setting up internships, job shadowing opportunities, mock interviews, professional speakers and other avenues for students to gain career experience. Due to the delays, plans to expand its programs at dozens of Los Angeles County high schools have been scuttled for a year.

Career education “really has the power to transform students’ lives,” said Carrie Lemmon, UNITE-LA senior vice president of systems change strategy. “So many students are struggling right now. We’re grateful for the grants, but every year we wait to implement these reforms, we’re losing more students.”

This was originally published on .

Virginia lawmakers are carefully examining the ���ٲ��ٱ�’s 52-year-old funding formula, which determines the funding level for public schools.

During its first meeting in Richmond on Monday, a small subcommittee of lawmakers faced the reality that the transformation could take a while, with members of the public in attendance and watching online.

Lawmakers said they hope to move forward swiftly, but not too quickly, after a December showed that local governments in Virginia are spending far more than the state for K-12 education to fund the Standards of Quality in Virginia school divisions.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

Researchers learned that for fiscal year 2021, school divisions needed close to $11 billion in state and local funding. Instead, schools spent $17.3 billion, $6.6 billion more than the funding formula indicated was needed. Researchers said local governments covered the “vast amount” of funding.

The Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, which studied the formula, said lawmakers could partially replace the SOQ formula by using student-based calculations for special education and English learner funding, or fully replace the entire staffing-based formula with a new student-based formula.

According to the Senate Appropriations Committee, since the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission published its report on the Standards of Quality last December, funding for public education is projected to increase by $1.85 billion between fiscal years 2023 and 2026. $1.17 billion of this new funding will result from new policy spending, including salary increases.

Policy experts told legislators from the House and Senate that other states have taken around three years to adopt new funding formulas. According to the Learning Policy Institute, a nonprofit that studies ways to improve education policy, nine states, including Tennessee and Pennsylvania, have adopted new funding formulas since 2000.

“The education system today does not look the same as it did when our funding system was designed,” said Sen. Mamie Locke, D-Hampton, serving as the committee chair. “This is our opportunity to evaluate the current system and ensure that it is aligned to meet the needs of our students and school divisions for the next half-century.”

Del. Sam Rasoul, D-Roanoke, chair of the House Education Committee, said funding for public education is one of the largest components of the ���ٲ��ٱ�’s budget. As a result, he said funding schools often impacts other priorities around the commonwealth.

“For that reason, we will be careful, thoughtful and deliberate as we move through this process to make sure we get it right,” Rasoul said.

Del. Terry Austin, R-Botetourt, said he would like to see the Department of Education staff and the Secretary of Education involved in the lengthy process. Neither Secretary of Education Aimee Guidera nor any Department of Education staff appeared to be present for the meeting on Monday. The legislature $600,000 to the department over the next two years to support the subcommittee.

“I don’t want to see us work through this very quickly,” Austin added. “Although we can move through it in a timely fashion with a good, organized work plan, … this is something that’s going to be very challenging because there is tremendous diversity in the commonwealth of Virginia from one border to another, both east, west, north and south.”

Some Democratic lawmakers, including Locke, believe much of the work the committee will be tackling could have been addressed in two that Gov. Glenn Youngkin vetoed last session. The bill would have raised teacher salaries to the national average.

In his veto, Youngkin said he supported the desire of “ensuring that teachers and state-funded education support positions are funded competitively,” but passed up on the legislation because it relied heavily on what he viewed as flawed data from the , which represents educators across the country.

However, while the governor and legislature could not agree on the two bills, they agreed on reforming the funding formula.

Christian Martinez, a spokesman for Youngkin, said the governor has been clear that the funding formula is “archaic” and an “opportunity for real reform.”

“The commonwealth needs a more effective K-12 funding formula that strategically allocates resources to meet the specific needs of students, teachers, and school divisions, ensuring that critical needs are addressed effectively,” Martinez said in a statement.

The committee will keep its period open through Thursday. Lawmakers will review a draft work plan at its next meeting on Oct. 31.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Virginia Mercury maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Samantha Willis for questions: info@virginiamercury.com. Follow Virginia Mercury on and .