The ruling came about nine months after the American Academy of Pediatrics and other groups filed a lawsuit against longtime vaccine skeptic, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr.,  and the department he leads, which includes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  In it, the plaintiffs argued that Kennedy Jr.’s advisory committee appointments — and the panel’s subsequent votes to roll back childhood vaccine recommendations — were unlawful.

David Hill, a pediatrician who has been practicing for over 30 years, serves as a spokesperson for the AAP. He recently told The 74 that while he and his colleagues are “very happy” with this latest development, “we’re also all still holding our breaths.”

“This is one moment in a lengthy process,” he added. “It is an encouraging moment, but I don’t think any of us are under the impression that this is over yet.”

Most of Hill’s work centers around hospitalized children and newborn care, which means he is often the first pediatrician a family meets and the one parents talk to about vaccinating their kids. He recently started practicing in Seattle after spending years working in North Carolina, where he served a widely diverse group of patients.

The families he works with, he said, have “vastly different socioeconomic backgrounds and value systems and understandings of health,” which has given him a unique perspective into on-the-ground impacts of shifting vaccine policies.

While not new to public discourse, vaccine skepticism has significantly swelled and gained greater footing since Kennedy Jr. took the helm of the nation’s health care system last February. Following his appointment, he swiftly fired all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, also known as ACIP, replacing them with hastily hand-picked advisors who largely shared his views on vaccines. 

The committee has since voted to overturn a recommendation that all newborns receive the hepatitis B vaccine; change policies surrounding the measles, mumps, rubella and varicella (chickenpox) combination vaccine; and roll back recommendations around 2025’s COVID- 19 booster. Then, this January, officials announced a plan to overhaul the U.S. childhood vaccine schedule, significantly reducing the number of shots routinely recommended for all kids — all amid already falling vaccine rates, measles outbreaks and The AAP and other groups were also cut off from their long-standing liaison roles. 

It was in response to all of these decisions that the AAP, a trusted source of information for pediatricians and families for nearly a century, began boycotting ACIP meetings, released a competing vaccination schedule, filed their lawsuit and effectively severed ties with the committee.

March’s preliminary injunction halts the changes to the pediatric immunization schedule, and stays Kennedy Jr. ‘s 13 appointments to the committee, essentially rendering it unable to meet. All votes made by the now-stayed ACIP appointments are also overturned — at least temporarily. 

When asked to comment, HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon said this week that the department looked forward to the judge’s decision being overturned, but would not say whether it had filed an appeal.

The 74’s Amanda Geduld recently spoke with Hill about his organization’s lawsuit and how childhood vaccine sentiments have shifted over the past three decades. The impacts he’s seen in his own practice are particularly illuminating.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

What is the most common question that parents ask you about vaccinating their newborns? Is there one vaccine they’re particularly concerned about?

I have the most experience in my current role with the first hepatitis B vaccine, but I think it is a fantastic model for the questions that we get about other vaccines. For example, I recently admitted a child at the hospital with an infection and breathing difficulty at age 2 who had not yet been vaccinated against Haemophilus influenza B (Hib) and pneumococcal pneumonia. 

And we had to think about this child very differently, because these are complications of viral illnesses that used to be absolutely horrendous — with meningitis, aggressive pneumonia, severe ear infections, infections of the bone around the ear or behind the ear. And really, because of the effectiveness of the vaccines against these illnesses, we have been lulled into not worrying about them very much anymore. And so we had to make sure that the team was aware that this was a possibility — these complications with this baby. 

But most often I’m talking about hepatitis B, and usually I’m the one who begins with the questions, and I say, “Hey, I noticed that your child has not had the hepatitis B vaccine we usually give. Do you mind sharing with me your thoughts about that?”

How have those conversations shifted, if at all, over the past three decades that you’ve been practicing medicine?

Well, they used to be vanishingly rare. And not a “never” event, but a rare enough event that if it occurred, it was remarkable. It might be the first thing I would tell my wife when I came home that evening, or something I would comment to my colleagues about when I went into the office. “You’ll never believe this, but we had a patient turn down [the] hepatitis B vaccine today.”

And that is because there was a widely shared understanding that this was an important intervention to keep children healthy for the rest of their lives, and that it was an extraordinarily low-risk intervention with a very high degree of reward. 

And it wasn’t a never event. It’s always been there, but it was remarkable. It was unusual, and the script has flipped to the extent now that when I’m first reviewing a newborn’s chart before I go into the room, I actually breathe a sigh of relief when I see that they have gotten their vaccine, because a really significant proportion of my patients — especially just in the last five or six months — have decided that they are going to delay it or maybe not get it at all.

How much of that do you attribute to this current administration and to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s leadership of HHS?

I think that there’s a very apropos chicken-and-egg question here. The wellness industry has put an enormous amount of money and effort into undermining confidence in traditional medicine, and that, of course, allows them to expand their market. It’s a market which is extraordinarily profitable. 

But if patients have trust in traditional medicine, then they’re less likely to purchase those products or to go to those providers. So there has been a decades-long effort — in terms of marketing, in terms of influence — that has been well funded and extraordinarily successful. 

It certainly did not start with the election of Donald J. Trump, either the first time or the second time. It definitely was accelerated by the success of a number of proponents of these efforts to achieve power within the United States government, to achieve federal power. 

And as much as people distrust the government, they really do listen to what the government says. So when the message coming from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or from the Department of Health and Human Services, are messages undermining confidence in traditional medicine — whether we like it or not — that really does have a bearing on the decisions that people make.

Last July, the AAP sued HHS and Kennedy Jr. over vaccine policies. Then, in March, a judge issued a stay, which essentially means that a lot of the votes that ACIP made are overturned — at least for now. One of those involves the Hep B vaccine birth dose. Can you talk a little bit about the initial decision that was made by ACIP to delay that birth dose, and how you saw that impacting patients on the ground?

I think the really good news for those of us in public health and those of us striving for child health is that the initial decisions made by the ACIP — the ones that were recently stayed by the court — had not yet come to affect what vaccines were available to children. And so the stay has also not changed that, because payers were still paying for the vaccines, suppliers were still supplying them, manufacturers were still making them, hospitals and offices were still stocking them. 

So I think it’s very good news that we had not yet seen our worst case scenario of some of these vaccines becoming unavailable or unaffordable. We, on the ground, are very happy to see a court agreeing with our professional opinion that there was no scientific basis for making these changes, and yet I think we’re also all still holding our breaths, because this is not done. There will be appeals. This is one moment in a lengthy process. It is an encouraging moment, but I don’t think any of us are under the impression that this is over yet.

You mentioned that the judge’s ruling luckily came before some of the worst case scenarios were able to play out. But are you aware of any pediatricians on the ground who had started shifting any of their practices based on ACIP votes?

I am not. I am quite involved in the American Academy of Pediatrics, and listen to a lot of lines of communication. And I think we were all trained to follow the best evidence. And the American Academy of Pediatrics, and scores of other medical organizations, endorsed an evidence-based vaccine schedule that was very similar to the prior vaccine schedule, and that is, as far as I know, what all of my colleagues were referring to.

If the judge had not issued this preliminary injunction, do you think providers on the ground ultimately would have shifted their practices to match the new ACIP guidelines? Or would they have stuck to the evidence-based practices regardless?

You know, I have great confidence that my colleagues would have continued to follow the evidence wherever it leads. I think the fear would have been that some other barriers to following that evidence might have arisen — in terms of reimbursement, manufacturing, liability — that would have made it more difficult for us to do what we know is right for children.

I would imagine that the majority of parents across the country are not keeping super close tabs on this lawsuit or tuning into ACIP meetings, but they are reading the headlines, and they’re seeing these rulings go back and forth and practices being implemented and then rolled back. I’m wondering what impact that back-and-forth messaging is having on parents. Is that leading to confusion?

Oh, I know that it is leading to massive confusion. When you look at a marketing campaign, as this has been, people don’t have to be convinced that a message like this is correct, they just have to have some doubt. And so the fact that these conflicting announcements or decisions are sowing doubt is really enough to dramatically change the landscape that we are looking at at this point in terms of communicating with parents, in terms of following the best practices for public health and in terms of protecting children.

So what is your big takeaway of the judge’s latest ruling then? What impact will this stay have for parents and providers on the ground?

I think the most important shift that I’ve seen — and as a professional medical communicator, it is a shift that I welcome — is that pediatricians and health care providers as a whole, and scientists and public health officials are coming to terms with a new understanding of how critical our communication is. And it is across the board revolutionizing the way that we communicate, both individually and in public.

Can you talk a little bit about how that communication is revolutionizing, specifically when you’re talking to patients and parents of patients?

Yeah, absolutely. My dad is still a practicing pediatrician at age 84, and throughout his career he could count on the fact that he was the doctor being enough for most people. He walks in the room in a white coat with years of experience and an absolutely spectacular education at the best institutions the country has to offer, and has a wall of diplomas behind him, and people will be like, “OK, you know a thing.” It’s just like when I walk onto my airplane and I see the pilot with all the gold bars on his epaulet. I’m like, “Oh, this guy probably knows how to fly an airplane. I’m going to take my seat.”

The relationship between doctors and patients and doctors and the public has changed in a way that I don’t think is going to change back. No matter what happens, we can’t just sit down in the chair and say, “Hey, I’m the doctor. Here’s what you need to do. Trust me, I studied, I know some stuff.” Patients are really demanding — and appropriately so — that we show first that we care and that we can listen and that their value system, their understanding, their goals for their child’s health are the most important thing in that room — that we are servants who can bring our knowledge to bear to further this family’s goals for their child. … 

My mentor for many years, Dr. Tom Blackstone in Wilmington, North Carolina, used to sit me down early in my career and say, “Davey, they don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” And those are the very wise words of someone who’s been doing this for a long time, and I think those are words we all have to live by.

I love that — that’s a beautiful sentiment. Well you talked about how there have been shifts in medicine you don’t necessarily foresee going back. I’m going to ask you to look into a crystal ball here, if you will, and tell me if you foresee this moment as a shift in policy moving forward. 

In other words, might this be a time the administration moves away from the attacks on vaccine policy and perhaps more towards other elements of the MAHA movement, like nutrition? Or is this stay merely a brief pause before the vaccine battle continues?

I would tend more toward the brief pause, and I would be thrilled if MAHA acted aggressively on some of their (other) priorities. There is more common ground between the stated priorities of the MAHA movement and the priorities of pediatricians. We would love to see kids get more fresh, healthy food in their diets. We would love to see aggressive measures taken to reduce pollutants in the water, in the air, in farming practices. We would love to see efforts toward increasing family activity and generating safe green spaces for exercise and play really put at the forefront of policy. 

I think, in a very sincere way, there are a ton of common goals that pediatricians and the MAHA movement share. I am disappointed that on many of these fronts, it appears that this administration is actually taking steps backwards rather than forwards. Taking steps to allow greater degrees of pollution that we know harm children; taking steps to allow greater use of chemicals in farming; taking steps to decrease the availability of fresh, healthy food in schools, for example. 

And people have done this — there are forums where pediatricians and MAHA advocates sit down and find that they agree on a lot. So I think we would love to see any of those priorities move to the forefront of the movement. … The attack on vaccines, unfortunately, is very much an attack on public health, and so I think we are still waiting to see what the next steps are going to be before we relax.

The AAP has always been a highly trusted organization and leading authority on children’s health, but I would imagine that role has been pretty seriously magnified over the past year or so with this shift in leadership. Can you talk a little bit about what that feels like from inside the organization and how that’s impacted some of your public-facing actions?

Past administrations have certainly cooperated in more concert with the American Academy of Pediatrics, regardless of whether the leadership was Republican or Democratic. We are a nonpartisan organization, and we have enjoyed close working relationships with pretty much every administration. I believe it is unprecedented since we began working with the ACIP to terminate that relationship. So that certainly would appear to be a flash point. 

However, as a pediatrician of a certain age, I also recall that this is very much in continuity with the American Academy of Pediatrics taking positions in favor of child health that were at times quite unpopular with the public. We were out there early talking about tobacco-free spaces and tobacco-free homes. Those of us who are old enough to remember when people smoked in restaurants and airports and pretty much anywhere they wanted to also recall that there was a tremendous backlash on that. 

When the American Academy of Pediatrics came out in favor of taking lead out of gasoline and paint that was dramatically unpopular. The fuel industry and the paint industry, the builders, really protested quite loudly against that. Even car seats, bike helmets, things that we all take for granted as public safety measures — like who would not have their baby in a car seat right now? — were incredibly controversial when they began, and the American Academy of Pediatrics always stood up for child health and safety first and understood that if children’s health was benefited, eventually the public would understand. …

So to some extent, we are just following in the footsteps of those who came before us, and I certainly hope that when I’m not working anymore, there will be another generation to continue in that path, because it’s the right path.

Is there anything I haven’t asked about — having to do with this current administration and vaccine policy — that you think is important for readers to understand, given the news of the past couple of weeks?

I think first of all, that the public is wise enough to see where these attacks on vaccines could lead, and to make good decisions regarding child health moving forward. I don’t think we’re going to be having the same conversation in 10 years, or even five years, because as we see measles sweep through certain states, we’re also seeing people in those states recognize what a danger it is. And part of what we’re seeing is parents asking if they can have their babies vaccinated against measles at six months of age, which they can, it just doesn’t keep them from needing the next two vaccines. 

I think that the public is really very intelligent, and that people are already waking up to what these changes mean for public health, and I think for the most part, they don’t like it. One truism that I’ve witnessed as a pediatrician throughout my career is that parents love their children. They want the best for their children. Everybody holds their baby, imagining what that little being is going to turn into, how they’re going to grow, what they’re going to accomplish, and knowing that, I know that societally, we are going to ultimately make good choices, because that’s what it means to love our children.

While teachers of all grades shape their students’ lives, kindergarten teachers play a unique role in that they build a formative early bridge from home to school. They introduce fundamental academic skills, build foundations for social and emotional development and help young learners develop confidence, curiosity and a lifelong love of learning. 

“As an educator, my mission has always been clear: to ensure every student, regardless of background, zip code, or circumstance, has access to a high-quality education,” Gray wrote in a published by the NEA Foundation. “I see my work as an act of justice.”

Gray has started a number of programs at her school to support students in need, including working with classes to raise funds to donate to peers and creating opportunities for families to volunteer as tutors. She has also participated in various teacher advocacy efforts. Gray has testified before her state’s legislature about issues such as mentorship and compensation, and has participated in the , which aims to improve the teaching profession and student outcomes.

In the conversation below, she reflects on her career, the importance of mentorship in education and what drives her to make change — whether launching a new initiative at her school or using her voice to advocate for change across her profession. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I’m curious about your career and how you got to this point.

I have been an educator for 13 years in the public school system in Texas. I have [spent] the majority of my years teaching kindergarten in Temple ISD [Independent School District] in Temple, Texas … but I have taught at multiple campuses with different demographics.

One campus I was at was all about teaching students social-emotional skills … I got a chance to build relationships, and I learned a lot [about] emotional growth.

I had an opportunity to teach my first year at a campus that had … a lot of attendance issues. On my first meet-the-teacher night, I had maybe three parents show up. By the end of the year celebration, every single parent and grandparent showed up. That was probably the turning point to let me know I was in the right space. 

What has mentorship meant to you in your career?

Before I started as a teacher, I was working at a day care, and I was in a pre-K 3 class, and that was really my first official class, but it wasn’t at a public school. When I had the opportunity to get my certification, I got a chance to teach in the school district with my mentor, Leah Suchomel, who taught kindergarten. She taught me so many things that I didn’t get in the books or in the classroom. Yes, I learned a lot about … the different theories and Harry [and Rosemary] Wong’s but until you’re actually in a setting with a teacher that is willing to trust you enough to teach her class — and just that compassion that she showed, not only to me but to her students — I still take [that] to this day.

How have you paid that forward as a mentor?

My mentee came from Texas A&M. Her mom was an assistant principal. Her grandma was a teacher. Her aunt was a principal. So she came from a long line of educators, but when she told them she wanted to be a teacher, they asked her, “Are you sure?” Because it is different from when they were teachers. 

I thought about what my mentor taught me, and I tried to see what my mentee needed to be successful for when she would become a mentor. It’s like a torch being passed.

How did the pandemic change your experience as a teacher?

During the pandemic, you could see a difference in the social-emotional status of our students. Before the pandemic, we were trying to get kids to learn how to use technology, but after the pandemic, I noticed my students wanted to have me read them big books. They didn’t want to just always be on a tablet to learn. I mean, that’s a tool as well, but they really craved that attention. 

Right now, I feel like we have so many students that are having to learn how to regulate their emotions. When they are playing … or working with classmates, they have to learn, How does this person feel before I react? If they’re on an iPad, nobody is there to tell them, “Hey, you’re being rude on this game.” They have to learn … the body language of someone who needs space. They missed a lot of that during their first years of growing up.

You’ve started a few programs and clubs at your school. Why did you start the Stars Helping Stars program?

I started that program when I began here at this school. I saw one of my students that was kind of struggling. I overheard him tell one of his classmates that he had slept in his car last night. And then his mom had called me and let me know that they had lost their housing. So, what I did with our kids — since it’s a STEM campus — we repurposed items from recyclables such as snowglobes, jewelry boxes, guitars, water guns and containers and sold them in order to get gift cards for homeless families at our school. 

The next year, that effort evolved into a tutoring group. Parents would come in and tutor kids on Tuesdays before school or after school. … And we saw a significant increase in our students’ accountability. 

What about the Breakfast Club program?

Once a month I’ll have mentors that will come through and just do different activities with about a group of 25 kids that range from kindergarten all the way to fifth grade. The high school volleyball team volunteered to come in, and they played volleyball. A group of soldiers came, including my spouse, and they did different stations where they had to talk like a soldier, act like a soldier, sound like a soldier…. Maybe one day they want to grow up to be in the military. We don’t know, but just planting those seeds so they can see things outside of their home and outside of the classroom, that’s the whole point.

Do you think being someone who gets things off the ground is part of why you won this award? 

I do believe that it plays a big role. … That and also just being a person of action. That picture behind me — that is me signing with the governor of Texas. (House Bill 2 authorized $8.5 billion in new . A portion of that funding went toward teacher and staff pay raises.) And that day, I sat at the table speaking for 384,000 teachers that are in Texas that needed that extra pay. There were other teachers in different parts of Texas … who had to work pick-up jobs during Christmas just to make ends meet. And I wanted to do something about it. And so just being able to tell our stories together, bring our stories together — to sit and pass a bill of one of the largest allotments that has been passed in Texas. 

As the only elementary school teacher to win this NEA Foundation award, what do you have to say about the early years?

I think that early childhood sets such a big seed … for our students to have character, to have work ethic, to understand the importance of [this] journey. … I always have kids that end up being best friends, and I have at least one or two that end up being best friends all the way up to high school.

I’ve been teaching long enough to have those memories. Thanks to Facebook, I can see where they tag [me in photos from when] they were in kindergarten and now they are getting ready to graduate. It’s like, “This all because of you, Ms. Gray.” 

How do you cultivate friendships and relationships that last a lifetime? 

Part of it is the atmosphere in a classroom. It’s just everyone uplifting each other. And if someone doesn’t, if you don’t like what someone else said, it’s okay to disagree, but it’s not okay to just totally not listen to that person.

That’s what some of it is. Also, just being able to have … relationships with families. 

Whenever we have parent conferences — I don’t just do the beginning of the year, I do the middle of the year as well because I want [parents] to know that we are partners. The majority of the time they’re here with us, with the teachers, not at home. And so just building their relationship … you can understand like, “Oh, I understand the reason why he may need the extra hug today.”

Decades of research in developmental psychology and neuroscience reveal that early stress, particularly in the first few years of life, can influence brain development, behavior and well-being. 

Megan Gunnar has dedicated her career to understanding the relationship between stress biology and neurobehavioral development in children. As a professor at the University of Minnesota’s and director of the — which studies how children and adolescents regulate stress and emotions — she has influenced and mentored generations of researchers. 

After earning her doctorate in developmental psychology from Stanford University in 1978, Gunnar completed postdoctoral training in psychoneuroendocrinology at Stanford Medical School before joining the faculty at the University of Minnesota in 1979. Over the years, she’s authored studies, including research on the intersection of , and has been a leader in for parents and caregivers. 

“Megan Gunnar is a force of nature,” says Ellen Galinsky, president and co-founder of Families and Work Institute and author of The Breakthrough Years and Mind in the Making. “With a rare background in psychology and developmental psychoneuroendocrinology, she has broken new ground in research on the effects of stress on infants, children and adolescents. She is a gifted communicator, known for phrases that make her findings unforgettable, and a true field-builder.”

As Gunnar prepares to retire at the end of this academic year, she reflects on what decades of research suggest about how early stress shapes the developing brain. In the conversation below, she discusses how her field has advanced, the challenges of modern stressors on children and families, and what parents and caregivers can draw from her field to support infants and young children today. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why are the earlier years so important for brain development? 

The brain is in the process of getting itself organized during those years. When you add to the development of the brain, it’s on top of the brain that’s already been developed. There are such things as sensitive periods when things get established and then get solidified. … Nature decided to have these sensitive periods.

What can change during these periods?

Things like executive functions, being able to learn to have inhibitory control. These begin to be established early, but we can work on them. You can work on self-regulation throughout your life. It’s harder later than it is earlier, but it never completely closes off. 

How can adults recognize stress in children?

Parents are not going to run around taking measures of cortisol. Signs that a child needs help are often that they start misbehaving. The canary in the coal mine is misbehavior.

Any parent knows this. A kid is going along fine. They start acting [out] all of a sudden. What’s going on? Bad kids? No, they’re probably hungry. Or maybe something else is going on that’s troubling them, especially if it lasts longer. It might be that they’ve had problems with friends at school. They might be worried about something. When they get more clingy or more crabby than usual, that’s a sort of sign that they’re a little stressed and they need some support of some kind.

What’s the best way to respond?

One of the things that we do so frequently with kids is say, “Don’t do this,” but then we don’t tell them what we want them to do. Any good preschool teacher will tell them what they’re supposed to do. They don’t say, “Stop making loud noise.” They say, “Use your indoor voice.” One of the misconceptions that we have is that kids know how they’re supposed to behave. And if we want to change the behavior, it’s often easier and better to tell them how we want them to behave.

When a child is feeling stressed and upset, asking what’s wrong can be sort of tough because sometimes they don’t really know what’s wrong. But [saying] “Come, let’s sit together and let’s breathe together,” and modeling the behavior of calming down and getting them calmer before you try to probe to figure out what’s going on is a wise thing.

There’s a lot of parenting advice on the internet, especially on Instagram. Where can parents and educators of young children turn for quality information?

Zero to Three’s is wonderful. If you’re an educator or a parent who likes to read complicated things, then the puts out working papers that go in more depth. [Gunnar is a founding member.] 

I wouldn’t look at any influencer. I just would go to Zero to Three or the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development if it’s more of a health question, and the if it’s more of a mental health question, absolutely not to the influencers. They’re just there to catch your attention.

You were a pioneer in treating child psychology as a science related to other sciences. Can you unpack the term “biobehavioral”? Do you think of it as an approach or as a field of study?

Psychology used to be about behavior and how we think — how we conceptualize and talk about thinking, right? But not about the body that all that was happening in. We’re not a disembodied brain. That’s been the biggest change since I got in the field 50 years ago. 

Now you hear the term “psychological science,” and that is the shift — to move from just looking at behavior to looking at the processes and the mechanisms underlying behavior, including how the brain acts and so on. It’s also other endocrine systems, immune functioning, how all of that plays together to influence the way people behave.

So it’s everywhere. And you either talk about it as “psychobiology” or “biobehavioral,” putting words together, but it’s a whole system.

Given your work as an educator, professor and mentor, are there promising avenues or researchers on the horizon?

I think many of us feel now that we’ve filled in enough of the pieces of the mechanisms for how things happen, not that we see the association, but we understand the mechanisms … and we can continue to do that, but it’s really time to stop admiring the problem and to move upstream and try to change the conditions that are leading to the problem. … I think around the globe, that is the movement — to understand how to link the work we do to the policy, and show that certain policies are providing for better health outcomes through mechanisms that we now understand. 

I think there are some really amazing people out there that are doing some really phenomenal work. Many of them are actually my former students, but there are others as well. … The work is getting more interdisciplinary. The lines between disciplines are just fading, which is really lovely. And I tell students: You don’t want to be a dilettante. You don’t want to know a little bit about a lot of things and not much about anything. You need to be somebody who is an expert in X so that you can be at the table, but you really do need to broaden your scope and be able to work with people from different disciplines. 

If what we’re going to do is not only understand what the problem is, but what are the mechanisms for it, and how do we link that to policy, you’re going to need to be able to talk to economists who want to know the return on investment.

Can you say more about the consequences of not investing enough in early education and early educators? 

I really feel for those educators. They’re not paid enough. And we expect so much of them. And the ones who are laying down the fundamentals are paid the least, and they are often the least trained and the least supported. We just have to get to the point where we recognize that the best investment — as we’ve been saying for years, as the economists have helped us say — is in high-quality education available to all children from birth.

How has the science in your field advanced? 

The science has advanced in that we understand more and more about what’s happening inside a kid, biologically and in the brain. But the basic understanding of what children need in order to feel safe and secure, we’ve known for a long time. Now we understand a lot more about the how and the why of it.

The capacity to look at the physiology and how the brain responds has been just unbelievably exciting and illuminating. It has certainly helped us understand the importance of the earliest years in terms of the programming of the biology of stress.

What do you recommend for parents in this moment? 

Are we talking about normal life stress, or are we talking about buffering the children who are living in the areas where ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) is swarming and whistles are blowing and people are being dragged from their cars? Those are two related but somewhat distinct issues. 

Given that you’re living and working in Minnesota, I’m curious what your thoughts are on the latter.

I am envisioning what it would be like for a child 10 and under, or maybe 7 and under, living in those houses in the Longfellow neighborhood, where periodically, there are . There are men terrifyingly dressed, marching with guns in your street. 

I think the best thing [a parent can] do right now is to spend their evening watching old [episodes of] Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood because he was amazing at listening to children talk about their fears without adding to them. If you remember, one of the things he said, about when terrible things happen, is to look for the helpers. If I were a parent with a small child living in those neighborhoods, I would help my child reframe the whistleblowers as helpers coming, rather than emphasizing the scary guys. 

The other thing that I think is really important for parents to remember is that when a child asks a question, and we hear that question with our adult mind, like, “What are those bad people doing?” — the next step always with a young child is, “Well, what are you thinking might be happening?” So that you come in with your answer where they’re at, rather than this big thing that may be way beyond what they were thinking. 

Disclosure: Ellen Galinsky was Chief Science Officer of the Bezos Family Foundation from 2016-2022. The Bezos Family Foundation provided financial support to Early Learning Nation.

Nivens’ commitment to leadership, communication, professionalism and community involvement helped him achieve the on Thursday at The School Superintendent Association’s national conference in Nashville.

The organization selected Nivens from three other finalists in Maine, Kentucky and Maryland. He’s led a district of nearly 50,000 students west of Houston since 2021, part of his 30 years of education experience that began with teacher and principal roles in Dallas.

“If you’re smart, you realize you don’t get here by yourself,” he said. “It’s a lot of people — 49,000 kids back home, 6,500 staff are working right now doing a phenomenal job. But it’s a tremendous honor.”

Nivens spoke with The 74’s Lauren Wagner on Friday at the conference. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What initiatives and developments are you most proud of during your tenure at Lamar Consolidated?

We are opening an in-district charter school for kids with autism spectrum disorder. The traditional setting works for some, but not for all. So what can we do to support a group of students who want that support? I sat with a parent back in November, and they were paying $40,000 a year to get their child support outside of school. So we want to try to support kids and families. That’s our purpose. It’s opening in August, but we’ve been planning this for two years.

I would also say we’ve increased the number of students who are thinking about post-secondary [plans]. I secured private funding for a college superintendent trip. So I take two juniors from every high school — 14 kids who are first-time college goers — and I take them out of state. It’s fully funded by private donors. Those kids haven’t even been out of the county. We’ve done it three years in a row now. The first year was Louisiana, last year was Arizona and then North Carolina.

We’re opening a brand new career technical education center in August. Lamar didn’t have a CTE center when I got there — we were partnering with different colleges. I don’t believe kids should have to decide what they’re going to do so early. The system is built where you have to say, ‘Okay, child, you have to choose advanced academics or advanced band or athletics. Pick and choose.’ Give them options. You know, they’re 14 years old. We wanted to make sure everybody had options on what they wanted to do. 

Your district has rapidly grown since you started your role in 2021. What challenges have you dealt with to keep up?

We’ve added about 14,000 kids. There are 49,000 now and when I got there, there were around 36,000. I’ve opened 15 schools in five years, and that takes planning. My chief operations officer and his team do a great job helping me and bringing me data, and we think about where schools would go and when they need to go. 

Another challenge is that since we’re growing so fast, we have to rezone schools. We’ve had a lot of resistance from parents. Finally, I publicly intervened, because we may take students out of one historic school and put them in a brand new campus, and parents are like, ‘No, I went to that school.’ But that’s not fair. I was like, ‘Just because you went there 50 years ago doesn’t mean these kids should still be in that school.’ Our first bond issue in 2022 was $1.5 billion, and the one in 2025 was $1.9 billion. And the community supported it. 

What’s your favorite part about your job?

Definitely campus visits. I love listening to our babies. I taught elementary school and didn’t like it because they were too small — I was a high school guy. But now when I have a tough day, I go to a campus and go see some pre-K babies, some kindergarten babies. They’re the sweetest. And they don’t judge anything. One kid was like, ‘You’re as big as a truck!’ And I said, ‘That’s the laugh I needed today, man.’ By far, that’s my best part of my job.

Did you want to become a superintendent when you first began teaching?

No. I didn’t want to. I wanted to be a head football coach. That was it. I worked with a lot of great people, but I worked with a few who were not good with kids. I would have my [students] call me and say, ‘Coach, I don’t have a ride.’ Or, you know, ‘My mama’s high.’ All kinds of stuff. And I would go pick them up or whatever I needed to do. After school, I would take them home, and I would buy them food. And I didn’t see [some teachers] doing that. And I was like, ‘Why are you in this job if you’re not doing that?’ They always would talk bad about the job and I was like, ‘Do you hate kids?’ So I would go home and talk to my wife about it, and she would say, ‘What are you going to do about it?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m their peer. I can’t do anything about it.’ She said, ‘Yeah, you can. Become a principal.’

So as a principal, I did all the hiring, and if you didn’t know how to teach math, that was fine. If you’re a good person and you love kids, we could teach you how to teach math, right? Then I started working with other principals who I thought weren’t doing as much as they could for their campuses. So it was kind of the same mindset — you know what, I’ll become a superintendent.

What keeps you up at night right now as a superintendent?

In general it’s the contrast between COVID and now. When COVID hit, all the parents had to teach their own kids and their teachers were heroes, right? Now it’s like the world has forgotten that, and the reverence for the job and for the profession is gone. You know, give teachers an opportunity. It’s an automatic, ‘My son said this.’ And, ‘Why did you do that? I’m going to get you fired.’ It’s a cancel culture. So I talk a lot in my community about grace. We’re all human. The teacher might have done something wrong, and I’m not saying we’re always right, but let’s have a conversation about it. I don’t think anybody has bad intentions, right? But let’s have some grace with each other. Let’s be more kind to each other.

A focused on computer science and artificial intelligence aims to teach young kids to build, program and prototype together. In essence, students build their own machine learning models, solving problems, inventing characters and telling stories connected to their interests. The program, designed by Lego Education to be used in K-8 classrooms, offers project-based experiences for kids to work on in small groups. The lessons use Lego bricks, and some are screen free, while others require access to a device, such as a laptop or tablet, so kids can access an app which has a “coding canvas,” with icon-based coding.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, professor of psychology at Temple University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, commends Lego for using the science of playful learning to teach computer science. “When children learn to solve problems with hands-on materials,” she states, “they are more likely to not only learn material but to be able to transfer what they have learned. In my experience, the Lego team has always worked with scientists to develop teaching tools that are aligned with the very best science on how children learn. It is one of the few companies committed to this way of doing business.” (Hirsh-Pasek has collaborated with the Lego Foundation on other projects but did not take part in this initiative.)

In a significant departure from many other AI products, data from the children never leaves the computer. “A really strong perspective that we had was that we don’t want anybody else to have the data — we don’t even want the data. We want that to stay in the classroom and on the computer, said Andrew Sliwinski, head of product experience for Lego Education. From a technical and design perspective, Sliwinski said, “It’s much easier to just send data to the cloud or use one of the big APIs [Application Program Interfaces], or one of the big companies that are out there. But when you do that, you sort of betray that principle of being able to guarantee privacy and safety to the child, and to the parent and to the teacher.”

Maybe Big Tech could learn a thing or two from Big Toy.

In an interview with Mark Swartz, Sliwinski explains his role, the evolution of the curriculum and his hopes for AI more broadly. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What do you do at Lego Education?

My team is responsible for product strategy, design, engineering and, most importantly, the educational impact of our product. So really the development of our learning experiences from end to end. Lego stole me from the , where I worked on creative tools for children for many years, including, most notably, , which is a programming language for kids. 

Were you in the classroom before that?

I started working in education in 2002. I was living in Detroit, working as a tutor, and I was invited to support students in Detroit public schools with the Michigan Educational Assessment Program, the state’s big standardized test [at the time]. I’ve basically been working in some way, shape or form in education ever since. 

What do you see as the through line between that work, and what you’re doing now?

When I showed up in Detroit all those years ago, my biggest reflection was: These are kids that don’t see the purpose in mathematics. They don’t feel connected to it. They don’t understand how it connects to their lives. And so for me, it was like, “Well, let’s solve that problem.” And yeah, the rest is history. 

Were you a Lego kid yourself? 

We didn’t have Legos, but we had all manner of other building materials at our disposal, like cardboard boxes and wooden blocks and access to hammers and screwdrivers and all of that fun stuff. So I grew up building things and learning through making. 

Why is it important for children to understand what’s behind AI?

The phrase AI literacy is being used a lot, and I think it’s being used in a very general way that is sometimes unhelpful. AI literacy is about more than how children use AI. It’s about those foundational literacies that help children understand what AI is, because I’m not just interested in children developing an understanding of how to use ChatGPT to do a specific project or a specific location. I want children to understand what probability is. I want children to understand that machines reason differently than humans do — and why that is. I want children to understand that AI learns from data, and that data can have biases, and that data can have ethical considerations, and that data output is only as good as the input, right? Garbage in, garbage out. 

What does responsible AI education look like for young kids?

What we’re moving forward with with Lego education is really focused on … those foundations. The way that I sometimes like to talk about it with the team is: So much of what is being put in front of kids today is like learning how to use the black box of an AI model or an AI tool — I’m much more interested in giving the kids a screwdriver and letting them take the box apart. 

But that last analogy is figurative. 

Yes. There are no screwdrivers that come in the box, but not as figurative as you might think. In the tool, the kids actually get to train their own machine learning models … So a bunch of kids will work together in a group of four. That’s something that’s different. It is collaborative. 

What lessons can we draw from the use of earlier technological developments, such as TV and the internet, in building products for young kids?

These technologies are most effective when they serve as a catalyst for joint engagement between children and adults together, rather than sort of acting as a digital babysitter, whether that’s cartoons or whether that’s Club Penguin [a Disney game that ran from 2005 to 2017]. … 

One of the most powerful things that you can say to a child is, “I don’t know. Let’s go figure it out together.” And I think that there’s so much that parents and teachers and kids don’t know about AI, but that kids are curious about. And us expressing our own curiosity, and supporting that curiosity and engaging together is a really powerful thing. 

What guardrails has your team put in place for young children? 

When we started working on this, one of the things that was really important was to have a set of principles and a set of lines — we call them red lines, lines that we will not cross — because I think it’s so easy when you’re working in technology development to sort of lose track of some of those principles. We established that way, way early in the project. 

Some of the ones that are maybe less apparent are things like [how] no data from the children will ever leave the computer. It is never transmitted over the internet. It is never saved to disk. It is never sent to Lego. It is never sent to any third party. And if you look at the predominant paradigm and a lot of the tools that are out there, that is not the case. …

…We’re the Lego Group. If we don’t care about child safety and well-being, who does? And so I think it’s been this huge responsibility, but also like this really great opportunity for us to put forward something that we feel lives up to our values. … People are always surprised by how much my team goes around the world testing in classrooms, testing with children and talking with educators and experts. We even have child developmental psychologists that are on staff. And so much of what we do is about developing the right things in collaboration with young people and educators. 

How did you test the experience with young children?

One of the most recent tests that I [did] was testing some of the AI features for the very young kids — the kindergarten to second grade group [in Chicago public schools.] One of the things that we do as the product matures is we stop being the teachers in the classroom and we actually just give the box to a … teacher in their normal day-to-day classroom and we say, “Good luck.” And then we watch, because it’s not enough for the kids to have a great experience when we show up knowing the product and we teach it. … It has to work for the teachers, otherwise it doesn’t matter. 

One of the most interesting, but also humbling things that you do as a designer for children and teachers is taking it into the field, right? Because all of the assumptions and ideas and intentions that you have, they go out the window when you put it in front of a 5-year-old. That process is just so rewarding.

Did anything surprise you about how they put it to use? 

I was observing a group of 4- or 5-year-olds, and they were working on this lesson where they had to build a toothbrush for a dinosaur. Part of that was figuring out how motors work and how sensors interact, but it was kind of a funny setup — the dinosaur mouth that we had built had these big teeth in it. 

The 5-year-olds didn’t see a dinosaur. They saw a swimming pool, because the bottom of the dinosaur’s jaw had these big teeth around it, and they were like, “Oh, it’s a swimming pool.” So then they designed dinosaurs that went into the swimming pool. 

You kind of come in with these stories and intentions of what you think kids are going to connect to. … And then you get there and it’s just one little detail of how the model was designed just throws the whole lesson out the window.

How are educators responding?

We’re doing this in a way where the teacher is able to come along for the journey, where we’ve prepared all of the materials that are necessary for a teacher, who often feels less confident about computer science and AI than their students do, giving them everything that they need to feel not just prepared, but to feel confident. 

There’s this kind of power dynamic that’s happening with AI today, where we’re more focused on what computers can do than we are on what children can do right now. And I think that’s really fundamental to our approach … When you get a bunch of kids together to train a Lego robot how to dance, this kind of fear dissipates. They see the cause and effect between the model that they trained and what’s happening in the world, and they realize that the machine only knows what they taught it. 

The AI is no longer the smartest thing in the room. They’re the smartest thing in the room, and the AI is a tool. 

As of last month, had enacted phone restrictions in K-12 classrooms, with 27 banning phones in classrooms outright. In many cases, schools are asking students to drop their phones in Yondr pouches for the school day, at a cost of about $30 per student annually. 

What you may not know is that the pouches have been floating around for more than a decade, first appearing in an Oakland biker bar — and that the man behind them had thinkers like French philosopher and English novelist on his mind as he developed the idea.

More than a decade later, Graham Dugoni sees the pouches as a low-tech, countercultural way to help young people begin to see unexplored frontiers in their own lives.

Born in Oregon in 1986, Dugoni briefly played professional soccer in Norway and the U.S. before taking his first real “adult” job in finance in Atlanta. He recalls a “Kafka-esque” experience toiling away in a windowless office — in his free time, he began immersing himself in philosophy and teaching himself jazz piano. 

Philosophers like and got him thinking about technology and society, while jazz — with its improvisations and emphasis on self-expression — pushed him to explore broader themes of personal freedom.

A pivotal moment happened in 2012, when Dugoni, by then based in California’s Bay Area, was enjoying a music festival. He watched in shock as an intoxicated concertgoer danced uninhibitedly while a perfect stranger filmed him with a smartphone, then uploaded the video to social media. Dugoni began searching for a way to make such interactions impossible, wondering how he could create phone-free spaces that foster genuine connection — and a measure of privacy.

“To see someone just having a good time and being uninhibited and watching them be filmed and posted online,” he said in an interview, “I just followed it out logically. Where does that go?”

He’d read enough about the corrosive effects of technology to know that while tech can help create a more open, democratic society, “You don’t get something for nothing.” He knew that giving up privacy in the public sphere could have “a tremendously huge impact on people’s ability to communicate, to express themselves freely, to be swept up into a shared moment.”

In 2014, Dugoni developed the first magnetic pouches out of materials from his local hardware store and began selling them door-to-door — his first customer was a biker bar in Oakland that wanted to dissuade patrons from filming its burlesque shows. Around the same time, he signed his first school.

Then, in 2015, he got a call from comedian Dave Chappelle’s manager, who wanted to at his shows to enforce a no-phones policy. That helped push Yondr into public consciousness, with schools, artists and venues soon queuing up.

The disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic began shifting parents’ attitudes around mobile phones and schools. And Jonathan Haidt’s 2024 book , which urged schools to go phone-free, pushed the company to even bigger prominence. Yondr now boasts about 150 employees. The company, which is privately held, doesn’t share revenue figures, but a spokeswoman said it has seen “sustained triple-digit growth” over the past three years. Its pouches are used by about 2.5 million students in all 50 states and 45 countries, and the company said the figure could triple once total sales are tallied by the end of the year.

TIME included the pouches as their “” — under the “Social Good” heading, which also included a new malaria vaccine and a 3D-printed resin water filter for people without access to safe drinking water. 

By now, many students understand the importance of going phone-free, even if the locking pouch impinges on their social life. “It’s not the best, but I think it’s for the best,” one student last spring. 

The 74’s Greg Toppo recently chatted with Dugoni, 39, to ask him about the company’s origins, his philosophy and why he considers phone-free schools as spaces where kids can be kids, focus on their studies and develop vital relationships.

Their conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

I wanted to ask you about that 2012 music festival where you came up with the idea for the pouches. What was on your mind? 

I was looking at the smartphone, and the fact that everyone had a recording device, but also access to the Internet. I knew that that was a fundamentally new human experience, and that, from a pure sociology standpoint, there are going to be questions asked because of that that have never been asked before. No one’s had to ask questions about what degree of privacy can you assume in the public sphere. No one had to think about what effect would the ability to be recorded or show up online in any context do to social interaction, to the idea of privacy, to the idea of intimacy. 

This new tool, I felt, was ushering in these questions. But I was walking around San Francisco in my waking life, and no one else was aware of them. In an education setting, it was happening in a different way to the same degree: the push to put more tech into the classroom, faster, which was really nonsensical in a lot of ways. But at a music festival, to see someone just having a good time and being uninhibited and watching them be filmed and posted online, I just followed it out logically. Where does that go? 

I had read enough of people like Foucault and things like that to understand what that ultimately leads to. In a lot of tech society, there’s this idea that transparency in all things is going to create a more open society and more democratization. And like anything, you don’t get something for nothing. You give something up. And that’s how I saw it playing out. If there’s no degree of privacy in the public sphere, I saw it having a tremendously huge impact on people’s ability to communicate, to express themselves freely, to be swept up into a shared moment — things that are deeply valuable for an individual’s psychology, but also the collective consciousness and experience of civil society.

You guys strike me as a privacy company, first and foremost, but also a tech company that’s turning back the clock, in a way. Is that the way you see yourselves?

Not really. I would say we’re a bit of a counterculture company, really. And I would say we’re definitely not a tech company.

I purposely, early on, did not go with early venture capital money because there’s a certain profile that those companies have to follow. What I’m about, especially for young people in a school setting, but also people in daily life, is a sense of choice and a sense of freedom, and especially showing this younger generation that there is a way to walk through the world that’s not completely mediated by screens and the Internet. 

It’s not poo-pooing technology or what it can do. The question is, really, how do you integrate it into our lives? And I don’t think anyone has a perfect answer for it. But I’ve always felt that phone-free schools and spaces, that Yondr started — we created that concept — is a really good way to give people some sense of what that is, because people have to experience it. 

How quickly did you start thinking about schools as users of these pouches?

Our first customer was a venue, and we got a lot of notoriety early on from working with certain artists, like Dave Chappelle. But really, at the same time that we started working with a few venues, we got our first school customer around the Bay Area. So from the very beginning, the two pillars of the company have been centered on those two — that’s been lost in the general story a bit. Now, going around the Bay in 2014, talking about a phone-free school, you can imagine how many doors got shut in my face. But even then, from talking to teachers, I knew it was a huge problem — it just hadn’t floated up into general awareness enough for superintendents to take any notice of it. But teachers knew, even back then.

So where was this brave new school that came to you and said, “We need to do this”?

Well, they didn’t come to me. I went to them. I was going door-to-door. The first school that said Yes was Peninsula High School in San Bruno, south of San Francisco.

And what did they see that nobody else did?

I would say principals and teachers fell into two camps, for the most part, around phones. One group saw it as so far gone that this was a bell that could not be unrung. On the other side, you had teachers and people who knew it was a huge deal, but they were trying to figure out a solution. For a lot of reasons, it’s a difficult thing to unwind. It’s wrapped up with social behavior, social psychology, habits, all of those things. So this principal fell into that camp: someone who had the gusto, the energy and wanted to try to do something. I came to them and said, “Look, I think there’s a way to do this, and I think I can help you do it.” Now, I didn’t know anything about how to actually make it work, so it didn’t work so great in the early days. But we’ve spent the last 11 years figuring out all the things that have to go with it to make this work for a school, a district, and now whole states.

As you said, the ethos at the time was to get more tech in schools, not less. I can see what you were up against.

The drive, at the end of the day, to make things faster, easier, cheaper and more available, it’s very tantalizing. You’re turning kids and people in general into information-retrieval machines, which is very different than critical thinking.

What changed? Obviously COVID had a hand in this. What else? 

Eleven years ago, everything was different, and our team was out on the ground, going into schools. And basically the way we’ve grown as a company to where we are now — we operate in all 50 states, we’re in 45 countries and millions of students use Yondr every day — we did it brick-by-brick, school-by-school. We went in and helped them actually do it, figure out a policy, help them implement it, learn from them how to do it. We’ve had a huge ground game over the years. Up until COVID, we were building that out. We were building around pockets of teachers at first, who helped us figure it out, and then we realized we had to expand into the whole school to make it work. Then it started to grow. And we’re building up just by word of mouth, teachers and principals saying, “Hey, this works, and this company has helped us.” 

Then COVID hit, and that basically flattened out our business. We almost went under. But it also had an incredibly positive effect in the aftermath, because so many teachers — and parents especially — saw what it meant for their kid to be behind a screen for that long. They saw what was happening. So out of COVID, the conversation completely flipped. Whereas before our team was out kind of evangelizing, saying, “Hey, here’s what a phone-free school is, a phone-free space is” — we invented the term — we have people kicking it back to us now and saying, “Yeah, we get it. There’s a problem here, and we’re looking for a solution.” The zeitgeist really changed and people’s awareness clicked over. 

I guess Jonathan Haidt’s book didn’t hurt.

It added a lot of fuel to the fire, but it was, in terms of us, all the schools mentioned [in the book], they’re Yondr schools. So we already knew it. But the general awareness that it generated was tremendous.

A couple of weeks ago, I was in a school in Boston that’s using these pouches. My favorite comment from a teacher was, “My students are laughing at my jokes again.” What are some of the reactions that you remember?

Those are the little stories we look for. We have the case studies that show improvements in academic performance, teachers getting more teaching time back, students feeling safer on campus. But the way I see what we do is that it’s a broader cultural shift inside of a school. And so stories like you just mentioned, we hear that all the time: Teachers are seeing the students’ eyes again. We hear a lot that the body language, the posture of students inside the hallways, totally changes. We hear a lot of times that more books have been checked out in the first three weeks at a library than the entire previous school year.

One that’s most interesting to me, in a way, is we’ve heard from a lot of schools that more lunches are being eaten at the cafeteria. It’s not because the kids are less distracted. It’s because a lot of kids are afraid of eating lunch in the cafeteria because they don’t want to be filmed or recorded in an embarrassing moment and posted online. 

What I like about those stories is they help people who are not in the day-to-day, like teachers are, realize what an existential situation these young kids are stepping into. And it reframes that: A phone-free school is not taking something away from students. We’re trying to give them a space to be kids and to focus on their studies, develop the social relationships, a sense of identity that they’re going to need. And phone-free space is part of that.  

Speaking about technology, you recently said it has “this total neutralizing effect on people’s ability to express themselves, because there’s no such thing as intimacy without privacy.” That seems like a big part of this project.

It’s very difficult to find frontiers in modern society anymore: Places you can go where there’s unexpected things, there’s adventure, there’s a sense of unexplored territory. That’s especially hard for this younger generation, which has grown up always being able to look around corners. Things are curated and manicured, and they know where people are at all times. You can look at it through the lens of privacy, which is real, but also through that lens of just what’s unexplored. And when you go to a show that uses Yondr, it’s unexplored. What happens there is for the people who are there. And it makes the experience richer. It leaves a deeper impression on the people there. 

What about the ways students try to get around these pouches? How do you view that? Do you view that as helping you problem-solve or rethink the pouches themselves?

Of course it happens. We’ll talk to principals and be super candid: “You know the students who are going to buck against a new policy, and you know there are going to be students who smuggle a phone through their sock, or whatever.” 

I always want to hear the stories. I smirk a little bit, because it’s good to see that students are using their ingenuity and being creative. But it’s not really about that. The broader message is that it precipitates a cultural shift in the school, where the expectation is that the school is phone-free, bell-to-bell. What we found is that after two or three weeks, that becomes the new normal. Once you establish that inside a school, and a culture that supports it, that’s the point. So if a student finds a workaround, or they want to bring in a phone, the important thing is that the community is ready to deal with that in a way that is appropriate for them. If you reinforce the benefits of a phone-free culture, eventually you win everyone over as they start to see the results.

So we’re not naive about it. We know we’re not going to win over every 16-year-old overnight. But we can convince them and show them that they might enjoy it once they’ve experienced it.

I was listening to a call-in show about phone-free schools the other day, and one of the panelists pointed out that if school is a training ground for students’ real lives, the only jobs where they’re going to have to put away their phones are low-paying service jobs. I’d never thought about it in those terms. Does that give you pause?

There’s something much more fundamental than that happening. I’ve talked to a lot of people in different state agencies. I can tell you they’re having an extremely difficult time hiring young people right now, and a lot of that comes down to their ability to focus, to think critically and to just socialize. Those are skills that you’re less likely to develop if you have a crutch in your pocket that makes those things less risky or easier. A lot of modern technology, it ultimately makes something easier. Now, that’s fine. We do a lot of trade-offs in our life for convenience. But when you get down to what education is about, it’s not just about using a tool. You have to be able to build up critical thinking muscles and some of the aptitude that’s going to carry you through life. 

People say, “Well, we should teach kids how to use these devices.” Absolutely. How do you plan to do that? If you have something in your pocket soliciting your attention all the time, that becomes basically wired into your central nervous system and always offers you a path of least resistance when anything difficult comes along, how do you plan to educate someone, especially a digital native who has no experience of the world without it? So it’s more, “How do you believe human psychology works, and how do you actually develop habits and patterns of thinking?” 

The pouch is more of an impulse disrupter. A student feels the phantom vibration in their pocket. They reach for it. Hand feels the pouch. You’re allowing a new pathway to emerge and develop that leads to a new habit. Because it’s hard to make the argument that young people are not going to have enough exposure to the Internet and their phones to learn how to use them. You can make a lot of arguments to say that six to eight hours a day without it to focus on their studies and being a kid is probably a good thing, given what we know. 

Last question: Talk about your tech habits.

I’ve had a flip phone for 10 years. I’m not saying everyone should do that. That’s my own choice. It makes a lot of things in life very inconvenient, very difficult. But on balance, it helps me because I have fewer inputs than the average person. My morning, I’m not flipping open the news and getting carried away to some place about things I can’t affect in any positive way, which is a big part of the modern world as well. If you allow everything to solicit your attention and your empathy, what are you left with to affect the things positively that you can control? 

That’s a funny effect of digital media in general: There’s a lot of important things, and it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t care about them, but what can you affect? For me, that’s a choice I have. So I operate in front of the computer, or I do phone calls. It slows my world down. I place a big emphasis company-wide on writing, on clarity of writing, and clarity of thinking that comes out of that. 

And then in my own home life, it’s all about boundaries. Technology as a theme — this is not just the Internet — it’s not totally neutral. Albert Borgmann and Martin Heidegger write about this: It’s not something that knocks at the door and asks permission to enter. You have to create boundaries. And to me, boundaries are best created in a physical way. So I use a computer in one room in my house. That’s it. So my mental associations are, if I’m here, I’m doing work. 

In the 21st century, the scope and complexity of issues have piled up, constituting what Ariella Cook-Shonkoff refers to as a “polycrisis” — which she defines as a “a confluence of overlapping existential stressors” in her recent book, Raising Anti-Doomers: How to Bring Up Resilient Kids through Climate Change and Tumultuous Times.

The book guides parents and caregivers through navigating difficult conversations about  topics like climate change, racism, pandemics, gun violence and political polarization. 

A “doomer mindset,” as Cook-Shonkoff describes it, is a psychological barrier that “deflates your energy, and squashes your sense of purpose and meaning in life. It can feel like a quick knee-jerk emotional response that overcomes you, or it can gradually eclipse you until one day you wake up under a blanket of depression.” The antidote, in a word, is hope.

Cook-Shonkoff draws from her experiences as a marriage and family therapist and as a former member of the executive committee of the , which promotes climate-aware therapy. Here, she shares parenting insights from her book and emphasizes the importance of maintaining a clear-eyed view of what’s at stake for children, families and the planet.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Many of the parents you quote in the book said they feel isolated and ill-equipped for the challenges they’re faced with. How did we get to this point?

What we see again and again is a failure of adults in charge — whether in government or private sectors — to protect kids’ best interests and consider their healthy development and safety. Be it common-sense gun safety laws, digital-free school environments, restrictions on social media accounts, and so on. Wherever there was bipartisan compromise or regulatory bodies in the past to protect children’s health, it’s nonexistent now. So unfortunately the onus — and immense burden of raising kids — has shifted fully onto parents.

What made you want to make this more than just a book about climate change?

The book really was born out of some of my personal experience in grappling with raising kids while the wildfires were starting to intensify in Northern California. It was originally going to be a climate-focused book, and then my publisher and I decided to expand that. 

It’s hard to separate climate from all the other layers of existential stress. For example, I’ve worked with undocumented families, and for children, there can be real fear in leaving behind their parents and going to school. They hold that anxiety, and it manifests, often as a stomachache or a headache.The book also addresses gun violence and school shootings. It’s absolutely traumatic to be in school, a place of learning and curiosity, and to have to do active shooter drills again and again. 

How young is too young to talk about these topics?

People want an easy formula for this, but it comes through trial and error. I don’t think you necessarily need to introduce the tough subjects at a really young age. There’s a protected time when you’re filtering out a lot of the realities and letting your kid grow up into the world and make connections. As they get older and more curious, kids are asking questions and hearing things at school, and you have less control over what they’re exposed to. That’s when it becomes important to think about how to bring up a subject that is not maybe the most pleasant. There’s an expression, “No fear before fourth grade,” which means not introducing really scary stuff before they’re able to get support and think through issues in a slightly more sophisticated way. 

Sometimes, the subjects come up before fourth grade.

Parents don’t always have a choice, depending on different factors, about when they have difficult conversations with their kids. But I think how you talk is what makes the difference. If you speak in a gentle voice, and you’re calmer, and your own nervous system is regulated, that’s very different from if you’re on edge, sad, depressed. Do you have a lot of unprocessed emotions yourself? Those can transfer onto your kids. 

Beyond acknowledging the polycrisis, it sounds like taking care of yourself is one thing you want parents and caregivers to come away with. What are some other words of wisdom parents need right now?

Yes, taking care of ourselves and just continuing to regulate our nervous systems because we have to remember that it filters down to the kids. That’s really critical. I think that “the parent club” [a tool Cook-Shonkoff uses in her book to describe a community including parents, guardian, caregivers, foster parents, involved family or community members] is a way that parents can support each other. Parent groups have enormous potential for developing community and resilience in the face of toxic politics and culture.

How do parents move from self-care to social change? 

We do have to do emotional processing, or, as I call it, emotional metabolizing, and we can’t squash or deny and keep pretending life is a certain way. We have to just be real about it. And from there, we can raise healthier families and take action and have some society-level impacts. If you develop those capacities early in a child, by the time they’re in high school, they’re ready to be advocates for themsleves and to be part of their communities. 

What else have you seen that works?

My book explores spending time in the more-than-human world [a phrase coined by ecologist and geophilosopher David Abram]. We can see our place in the world or just understand things differently when we’re out in the natural world. Spending time in communities, creating these little intentional communities, making music, writing lyrics, writing poems, creating art, making a mural — all that stuff is more powerful than people realize. 

Who or what gives you hope?

Two women who influenced my work recently passed. One of them was Jane Goodall. Meeting her in my hometown when I was 17 years old was pivotal for me. She started a youth program in our town, and I was a president of the environmental club in the high school and was on this panel with her. Her steady advocacy around animal welfare, the environment and human rights countered my frustration with the adult world. It showed me that some adults did care. There was both a gentleness and firmness to her demeanor, and I could tell that she was a quiet force to be reckoned with. Joanna Macy, an eco-Buddhist philosopher-activist, also meant a lot to me. When I first came across her work, as a mom with my own eco-anxiety, it felt relieving to have my intense feelings of hope and grief so well articulated. And that she had a clear program — and a literal path forward through all of my pain and fear — was a lifeline for which I remain grateful for today.

Bill McCallum, a lead writer for the Common Core math standards, and Kristin Umland, then a faculty member at the University of New Mexico, led the effort, which was supposed to last a year or two. 

At first, Umland said, the organization was focused on helping other groups, including the and testing companies, improve their products to meet the more rigorous standards. 

Eventually, she said, the group shifted to creating the curriculum — including lesson plans — that it felt best served students as they strove to achieve both a conceptual understanding of math, the why of how math works, alongside procedural fluency, the ability to solve problems. 

Illustrative Mathematics now encompasses 90 employees — all are remote workers — with no central location. For those states that still use it, the curriculum is aligned to Common Core standards — and there are also state-specific versions for those states that don’t.

“Our goal is to change outcomes for students, regardless of the standards they are using,” Umland said. “Math is math, and all states agree that kids should learn math.”

Select schools within the New York City system have been using Illustrative Mathematics for half a decade. A recent, massive rollout across hundreds of campuses has been met with sharp criticism from many teachers and  

Some said the curriculum and for students to practice what they’ve learned. One educator acknowledged these initial growing pains but said , one that helped students more easily understand abstract concepts.  

Umland has heard all of the complaints. While she acknowledges these early days struggles,  it doesn’t mean the move is a failure. Only that it needs more time, she said. 

“There’s no magic bullet,” she said. “If there was, somebody would have figured it out by now.”

Los Angeles, which adopted the curriculum in its middle and high schools in 2023, meanwhile, .

The 74 talked with Umland recently about the math wars, how her organization’s approach stands out from the rest and about Illustrative Mathematics’s bumpy New York City rollout.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Where does Illustrative Mathematics fit into the math wars? And by math wars, I mean that push and pull between teacher- and child-centered learning? 

We always see ourselves as a third way. There’s no-one-size-fits-all for all students in all contexts. There are times when students need to understand and hear a direct explanation. And there are other times they should be given a chance to think about it for themselves, make sense of it, grapple with it and discuss it. So, it’s not either or. It’s what’s appropriate for what you’re trying to help students learn in the particular moment.

What type of lesson would require a direct explanation? 

So, a perfect example is when kids are learning to count. There’s no way they can figure that out on their own. Numbers are different in different languages. That’s a completely cultural thing. That’s something you have to learn by hearing other people say the number to you. 

But when you’re starting to do addition, once they understand what three is and what two is, you can say, “If I have three marbles and two marbles, how many marbles do I have altogether?” 

The things that are cultural have to be taught directly. But once you understand what the meaning is, you can figure it out. 

How does Illustrative Mathematics’s approach to teaching and learning compare to most other curriculum methods?

A lot of folks learn mathematics from an “I do, we do, you do model,” where the teacher does an example question, then they work together with the students, and then the students go practice.

Our method sort of flips that model on its head, allowing students to think about a problem so they can get oriented to it. And then there’s discussion where they make sense of it. 

And, finally, the teacher brings it all together. It gives students a chance to think for themselves before being shown something. 

I can show you how to do two plus three by counting it all myself, or I can say, “Here’s a picture that shows two marbles and three marbles. How many marbles do you see altogether?”

Some kids will know how to count it and will do it. And some kids won’t. They’ll talk about it, share their strategies, and then the teacher can make sure that the student who does it correctly shows their solution. Or if none of the students do it, they can show them how.

Illustrative Mathematics had a rough rollout in New York City. What went wrong for some teachers/schools? 

A lot of the complaints weren’t necessarily about the curriculum itself, but about the rollout or the implementation. 

Teachers need to have professional development where they get oriented to the design structure and they get a chance to experience what a lesson feels like. They need a chance to practice.

Ideally, they have opportunities to collaborate with their colleagues on planning and they have coaching support as they go. It’s just sometimes hard to coordinate all of those pieces.

A lot of teachers, in the first couple of months, are still trying to understand how it works. But once they get to the second or third month, then they start to see how it works. When something is new, it’s harder. It doesn’t necessarily make sense. And it takes time for people to get oriented to it. 

We’re seeing the best success in the places where they’ve been doing it longer. They’ve put in a lot of time to support it and when they get to that phase, then they’re really seeing the outcomes for students.

What do you want to fix about mathematics education in this country?  

A lot of school districts have come to realize that they need high-quality instructional materials. They’ve made that commitment. Then they start to ask themselves, “OK, so what do we do for (struggling students)?”

In a multi-tiered system of support, tier one instruction is the core instruction that all students receive. Students identified as needing additional support will receive tier two instruction. Often, this means they will be pulled for small group instruction or additional instruction.

One of the problems is that for many of these students, it’s like they’re on a highway and then they get pulled off onto the frontage road — only they never find a way back. They end up on a parallel track. What we want is to figure out how to support these students.

How might you help kids stay on track? 

Right now, we’re really focusing on early math. We are currently developing a pre-K math curriculum. It will be available next school year. If you can get to students early, it has an exponential impact on them before they head on to later grades. If we can do a better job with the youngest math learners, they won’t have the problems that we see at the secondary level in the future. 

For a year and a half in 2023 and 2024, Cohen traversed the country, interviewing educators, researchers and policymakers and observing tutoring sessions in seven states and the District of Columbia. 

Now the vice president of policy for the education group , Cohen shares her findings in a new book, out today from Harvard Education Press: .

She explores “the accidental experiment” that took place across American schools starting in 2020, as researchers figured out the principles of what was originally called “high-dosage tutoring” but has come to be known as “high-impact tutoring.” 

Its four pillars, according to Stanford’s : 

1. It must take place at least three days a week.
2. Sessions last at least 30 minutes.
3. Sessions are with a consistent tutor.
4. There are no more than four students working in a group. 

The moment couldn’t have been more tailor-made for such a comprehensive intervention. In the course of just a few months, federal aid to K–12 schools more than tripled, with districts slated to get at least 90% of the new funding. Federal rules eventually dictated that they reserve at least 20% of the largest pot of money to treat pandemic-related learning loss. Tutoring, Cohen writes, “quickly became the watchword of how learning loss should be addressed.”

Cohen interviewed everyone from Stanford scholar Susanna Loeb, whose research helped lay the groundwork for the movement, to Katreena Shelby, a Washington, D.C., middle school principal who somehow found a way to get a tutor for every student in her school.

Ahead of the book’s publication, Cohen spoke to The 74’s Greg Toppo about her findings and her belief that, despite the bleakness of the past few years, educators “want to do good things for kids, and they’re willing to try new things.”

Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

I want to start with a kind of impertinent question: I believe it was former U.S. Education Secretary Bill Bennett who said that many schools serve up what he called a “14-egg omelet.” Have you heard of this?

No, but I like where it’s going.

When what they’re doing doesn’t work, they just do more of the same. I’m guessing you would say that high-impact tutoring does not resemble one of Bennett’s lousy omelets. Are schools truly doing something different?

It’s, of course, impossible to answer universally for every school and every tutoring program. And there have been tutoring programs that haven’t been super additive. But at this point, the schools that have implemented high-impact or high-dosage tutoring within the definition of what that is — and to the gold standard that the evidence suggests — are offering something different. Whether that’s home fries on the side of the omelet or a salad, you can choose, but it’s something else.

You write that a couple of places have done better jobs than others. New Mexico, for instance, seems to have made a few missteps. What’s the difference between places where tutoring is working and where it’s not?

Where tutoring works the best is where it is a strategy in service of a broader goal. Sometimes in education we make the mistake of thinking the thing is the goal, and tutoring isn’t the goal. I don’t want people to do tutoring just to do tutoring. I care if kids are learning in school, and so the places that are doing a great job with tutoring, first of all, are doing tutoring in service of the goal of improving learning, and that means it’s often connected to lots of other pieces around instruction, curriculum and all sorts of other things. One is being strategic. Two is recognizing that to do this kind of program well requires a lot of effort on the implementation side, and being willing to put in the resources necessary. Literally assigning someone at a district or at a school a role of high-impact tutoring manager — who a significant part, if not all, of their job for some period of time is making sure this program is working — is another hallmark of places that have had success as well.

When you were in Louisiana, you looked at this Teach for America Ignite program, and you mention that it’s become a strong pipeline for TFA Fellows and, by extension, teachers. Should we look at tutoring as a pipeline for teaching?

I think so. We have an evergreen population of college students, even if fewer than we used to. We’re always going to have some amount of college students. And what’s generally true about those young adults is that a lot of them are looking for ways to make some money, and a lot of them are not sure what they really want to do with their lives. So one of the interesting things — and the TFA program highlights this — is that when you create opportunities for young people to be involved in education, as a tutor, for example, they start thinking, “Oh, maybe this is a career that I would want to do.”

I like to joke that teacher unions have done such a great PR job that they’ve actually convinced people that they shouldn’t want to be teachers. They’ve convinced the American public that teachers don’t get paid enough and aren’t respected. And if you look at parent polls, more than 50% of parents in this country say they to become teachers.

But what we’ve learned from some of the tutoring with college students is that when you actually give them a positive framework to enter the education space and interact with young people in this way, they start thinking about it. It’s not just the TFA program — I would say also the in charter schools in New York and New Jersey, that also has had partnerships in D.C. and other places. Similarly, they’re using college grads through the AmeriCorps program. A lot of those young people end up sticking around and becoming teachers.

At a school in D.C., you met Delilah, who you say could easily pass for a high school student, but she’s doing this great job leading students on a lesson about Homer’s Odyssey. It made me think that tutoring could blur the boundaries between who is an effective teacher — and how we find them. Do you have any thoughts on that?

I don’t know about “blur,” but it certainly broadens how we might think about who can play effective roles in the learning of young people. And we see that in a few places. This isn’t in the book, but in Chattanooga, Tenn., they had a that started during COVID where they actually hired high school students to tutor elementary school students. And those high schoolers, I believe, were getting school credit, and were getting paid. I spoke with this young woman, and she would literally walk down the hill from her high school to the elementary school, where she worked as a tutor and got real-world experience. She said she felt like she was treated like one of the staff at the school, and it was an incredibly positive experience. She is now graduating high school a year early and enrolling at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville to become a teacher, and she’s the first person in her family to go to college. 

The other thing that I did write about is the way that education schools are rethinking the role of tutoring in teacher prep. We have all these college kids or young adults that we might want to expose to education. But then what about those who already think they want to work in education? The dean of the ed school of Bowling Green State University, which is the biggest teacher prep program in Ohio, has always been committed to giving kids as much field work and experience as possible, because she says, “I want to make sure before I send these students as graduates into classrooms, that that’s really where they want to be. How many different kinds of opportunities can we give people who think they want to be teachers to actually play teacher-like roles?” And so they’ve really leaned into tutoring. They think that the experience of me, Liz, trying to really just help Greg master how to read or how to do third-grade math is going to help me in the classroom, but also gives me more touch points to make sure this is really what I want to do. 

Another way to think about that: A principal in Alexandria, Va., told me, “The one thing I’m always looking for is how do I get my kids more time? More time learning. How do we give our kids more time?” And it wasn’t just him that I heard this from. This is a repeated theme that school leaders and teachers feel: Tutoring helps them add time. Time on task, quality learning time. And time is often the most precious resource we have in education, and that is how a lot of folks are thinking about this.

One of the things you say is that if tutoring is woven into a school culture, the relationship that the student has with the tutor can be this “fulcrum that changes the student’s trajectory.” You’re imagining that tutoring could really transform schools at a very basic level, that the student-tutor relationship is transformative for a lot of kids.

That’s right. What made this story so powerful was the power of the relationships. To me, the big takeaway is that young people are really hungry for meaningful adult relationships in ways beyond what even the best classroom teacher can possibly give to a full classroom of kids. Even when I interviewed some of those TFA college tutors, the thing they would tell me that surprised them about their experience was that kids were willing to open up to them even after just building a relationship on a Zoom call and doing tutoring. And I don’t know if it’s because after the pandemic there had been so much disconnect and isolation that people were hungry for a reconnect, or if it’s just a truism of human nature that we like to have relationships with other humans.

There’s something really powerful about bringing more people in to interact with young people in education, in an educational setting, in a variety of ways. And that’s why, even though generally I’m pretty bullish on tech — I don’t write in the book at all about AI because the stuff’s being built too rapidly — while tech can inform and empower, what’s happened, at least in the last five years, is really a story about human relationships, and it’s worth telling in a time when people feel more separate.

Near the end of the book, you talk about one way to make tutoring work on a large scale, something called outcomes-based contracting. Would you like to talk about that?

I wrote a whole chapter about contracting, and tried to make it so you wouldn’t fall asleep while you read it. Partly why I dedicated so much space to it is because I actually think that we spend a lot of money on education in this country — we really do — and we don’t often get a lot for it. And so it’s interesting that we have this model now. Tutoring is the perfect case study to do an outcomes-based contract, because we have potentially clear outcomes that we’re trying to measure: We want kids to grow a certain amount, and then we can actually link the money to what we’re getting from it. 

Especially now that federal COVID funds are gone, district and state budgets are tightening. I hope we don’t throw the success of tutoring that we’ve had to the wayside and instead think about how do we continue helping it deliver on its promise? And so if you can measure it and then pay only for getting the results that you want, that seems worthwhile, and something that we probably haven’t spent enough time exploring.

Speaking of ESSER funds, that’s a lot of money that’s basically gone. You mention AmeriCorps as well — AmeriCorps is either. Going forward, where can schools turn if they want to fund these sorts of things? What’s out there that is not at so much risk?

First of all, some districts are using their Title I funds. Now, those Title I funds might have been used for something else, and so you have to maybe make some tough choices — and I’m not going to say you should definitely do tutoring. I’m saying you should look at the evidence: What are you getting out of whatever it was you were doing? If you’re already doing tutoring and it’s going well, I’d rather a district keep it and give up something else that’s not working as well.

Ector County, Texas, has kept their tutoring program going to some extent, using Title I funds. Some other districts have done some similar work, even as districts like Guilford County, N.C., are having to scale back. But they are repurposing existing Title I funds, often to do this. One reason it’s really important to continue making the case for tutoring’s impact is that you can convince state legislatures, in some places at least, to fund tutoring. Louisiana put , both for last school year and this current year, into high-impact tutoring. And the funny thing about Louisiana is I didn’t even end up writing about it because it was happening so quickly last year while I was trying to finish the book.

I was like, “Wow, it’s a lot of money. Is this really going to happen?” And this year, 2025-2026, Louisiana is tutoring something like 240,000 kids using $30 million from their state budget, and I think some other district funds too, in a pretty effective model tied to their Science of Reading and their math work. And they have funded a lot of other pieces too, around curriculum, teacher professional development and instructional coaches. So for them, tutoring is that exact thing I said earlier about being a strategy within their broader goal of how to overhaul core instruction — and the state’s put in real money for it.

Connecticut passed to continue some high-impact tutoring work. But then in other states, we aren’t seeing that. Where to look for money? Can you convince your state legislatures to support tutoring because it works? Some places are able to do that.

And also some city budgets: The mayor in D.C. has . And the mayor in Nashville has into tutoring. 

At the end of the book, you lay out these three truisms from your reporting: “1. Public schools are hungry for new ideas that work. 2. Tutoring works. 3. Nothing is perfect.” It sounds like you’re a bit impatient here, and just want us to sort of get on with it. 

I do! Every single day you have kids showing up to school, and those kids either want to learn or it’s our job to help them want to learn, and we need to figure out the tools to do that. If you look, for instance, at continued problems with chronic absenteeism, we flipped a switch during the pandemic, and we thought we could just flip it back on.  That’s not what’s happened. So I believe we have to continue the sense of urgency that we had in 2021 and 2022, because there are kids every day in our schools. But the other thing I really want people to know is that in all of these places I went, people want to do good things for kids, and they’re willing to try new things and implement new programs and make big changes.

That’s not the reputation that K-12 public education has overall. And I want people to believe that that is part of the story of public education in the United States in 2025. I want us to get on with it, because it’s what people want to do. So let’s just do the thing.

As the largest school improvement effort in U.S. history matured, so did the energetic transplants. Wanting kids of their own and more sustainable jobs, many moved back home, bringing their experiences to bear in classrooms in places where life is easier.

Patrick Dobard has been there the whole time. He was born in New Orleans, grew up in the city and cut his teeth there as a teacher. In the years before Hurricane Katrina, he worked for the Louisiana Department of Education, trying to figure out how to address the decay of New Orleans’ schools — beloved but crumbling, scandal-ridden and some of the lowest-performing in the country. 

In 2012, Dobard became head of the Recovery School District, the state agency that took control of most of the city’s public schools in the wake of the flood and steered their overhaul. There, he oversaw the district’s conversion to the nation’s first all-charter school system, as well as the return of the schools to the control of the local school board starting in 2016.

In 2017, he became CEO of New Schools for New Orleans, the district’s nonprofit partner. Today, he is a partner at the City Fund, which helps districts engineer their own school turnarounds. 

What follows is a conversation in which Dobard reflects on the first two decades of the largest — and most controversial — school improvement effort in U.S. history, and outlines his hopes for the next 20 years. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Among education wonks, discussions about public education in New Orleans can feel like a Rorschach Test. Some people are laser-focused on academics, some on policy innovations that might transfer to other school systems and still others on privatization conspiracy theories. Locally, though, one of the most enduring conversations involves popular perceptions of a takeover of a Black-led school system by white outsiders who valued test scores more than the city’s culture. This is true — but also not the capital-T truth. Can we start there?             

I started as a classroom teacher in New Orleans in 1989 at Gregory High School, which was a junior high school, grades 7 through 9, located in what at the time was a pretty middle- to upper-middle-class neighborhood, Gentilly. Most high schools then started at 10th grade. Junior highs were extremely important as athletic and band pipelines. 

The workforce for the most part at Gregory represented how the workforce across the city’s schools looked at that time: predominantly Black middle- to upper-middle-class individuals teaching kids. 

The schools that had really stringent enrollment criteria, like what was then named Lusher [now the Willow School] and Ben Franklin High School, more white students went to those schools. They had majority white staff.

By 1999, the state had created an accountability system under which a large number of the schools in the city — I believe about 60% — were identified as academically unacceptable. At that point, I was working at the state Department of Education. 

There was a lot of corruption in the air in New Orleans. There were conversations about the district being bankrupt. There was a Federal Bureau of Investigations [probe] going on. 

In 2003, the state created an agency called the Recovery School District. In the spring of 2005, the initial plan was for it to take over about three schools in New Orleans. We didn’t really know what that was going to look like. But then Katrina hit Aug. 29, 2005, and all those plans were put on hold. 

We were getting phone calls weeks and months after Katrina from teachers trying to get a hold of their teaching certificates so they could work other places. There was just mass displacement of teachers.

And that’s where I think people’s knowledge of what happened gets told in different ways. The district was bankrupt. There wasn’t a way for it to pay teachers, so it was forced to lay them off. The state didn’t step in to try to offset that. So it was the district that had to fire the teachers and not the state. 

People were setting up the modular trailers and all the things people did after Katrina to get their lives back on track. There were schools — mostly the selective-enrollment schools that I mentioned earlier — where people were able to come back a little bit more quickly. Those schools were bringing teachers back and hiring.

The Recovery School District was trying to recruit back New Orleans teachers, but a lot of the Black middle class didn’t have the ability or the wherewithal to come back to New Orleans those first few years. 

Once the state decided that they were going to try the chartering model, the RSD started to recruit from Teach For America. A large number of TFA folks from all around the country wanted to come help. A number of those individuals were white. They didn’t look like the kids that ultimately were in front of them in schools.

I have no inside knowledge of this, but I don’t think TFA leadership at that time had lots of conversations strategically thinking about race. They were just functioning the way they normally functioned. 

Data shows having kids in front of teachers that are really strong and that look like them helps make for much better educational progress for young people. Once John White came in [as state superintendent in 2012], we were hearing a lot about the lack of diversity in the teaching force. 

John and I talked to TFA leadership about diversifying. While the number of Blacks and other minorities in TFA increased, it didn’t match the number of teachers of color that were there before the storm. 

Seven or eight years ago, I brought that awareness to the teacher work that we were doing at New Schools for New Orleans [where Dobard was then CEO]. We wanted to help schools build a corps of teachers that reflected the kids in the classrooms. Schools just took that on. They owned up to where they fell short, and then they actively recruited to make sure those numbers improved. 

I don’t think anyone had intentional ill will. It was a series of unfortunate circumstances that folks were reacting to after Katrina: the bankruptcy of the district and the uncertainty of people coming back to the city at different times, which was skewed to more white and affluent Blacks coming more quickly than others. 

And yet the narrative persists. 

Yeah, the narrative persists. I think what’s been missing is no one from the Orleans Parish School Board who was part of the decision to lay off the teachers to my knowledge has ever publicly acknowledged the firings. Or apologized for having to do that. Or for what transpired in the years before 2005, with the FBI having to be there and how bad it was. 

There’s no closure. There should be a moment of healing. The times that the district leadership over the years was approached, nobody really wanted to acknowledge it that way. Some felt like it was on the state for not stepping in. So maybe the state leadership at that time should apologize.

It feels like in terms of the school governance experiment, you’re at an inflection point. There’s continued improvement, but there are also tensions over whether an accountability-driven system is still something the community is lined up behind.

I think the governance contract is working well. Around 2016, I was leading the work on behalf of the Recovery School District. School leaders and advocates like the Urban League, New Schools for New Orleans and a number of other groups were working together on what the unification structure would look like. A number of legislators at the time helped to codify in law the governance construct that was created over the years as Act 91. 

It’s no longer an experiment. It’s really how schools function in New Orleans. The district has fully embraced it, maintained it and actually improved upon it. It’s a different role than any other school board in the country, but it’s also an extremely important one that’s proven to have spurred tremendous gains.

Yes, there are some people who would like to see the district go back to the way it functioned prior to Katrina. But I don’t think those individuals are but a small minority who are for the most part consistent and persistent in their viewpoint. 

When things are working well in New Orleans, you don’t hear from people. Nobody’s going to say, “Hey, the governance structure of this school that my kids have been at for the last 15 years and my grandchildren have gone through is great.” When I was state superintendent, I used to ask kids and parents, “Do you know if this school is run by the Recovery School District or by Orleans Parish?” And they’d just look at me, like, “No.” 

The average citizen, what they want to know is, is my child getting a good education? Do we have good extracurricular activities? Does the transportation work well? 

I’ll tell you one quick story. Dana Peterson, who now is the CEO of New Schools for New Orleans, was involved in some sessions with parents. He had this parent who was just railing against charter schools. Like, “We need to go back to what was before.” 

Dana was like, “Do you realize your kid’s in a charter school?” The parent was at a loss. She was happy with where her child was, but she was indoctrinated that charter schools are bad. I think for some of the critics, that’s what it is. 

If you don’t really know what the governance construct is, at the end of the day it’s all about who’s working with the kids. There’s more proximity when it’s a charter network, with the urge to improve all the time so they can continue to have the privilege to teach kids. Versus a bureaucracy that’s expected to do it but that doesn’t have strong accountability to make sure it’s not year-after-year failure.

And that’s what it was before 2005. 

Reams have been written about the rapid academic improvements, the all-charter model and, more recently, the racial upheaval. What about the fact that you had to rebuild — as in, rebuild the buildings — 85% of the schools?   

Prior to Katrina, the buildings said to our kids and families, “We don’t care about you.” Those dilapidated buildings are no longer there. That’s something worth celebrating. 

Being a young boy that grew up in New Orleans, I’m extremely proud of the facilities. The price tag came to a little over $4 billion, if I’m remembering correctly. About a billion came from the disadvantaged business enterprise program that we started at the Recovery School District.

My first months as superintendent, there was an article in The Times-Picayune where they followed me as I rode the bus the first day of school with some kids to see what their experience was. I met the kids across the street from Dooky Chase’s Restaurant on Orleans Avenue. 

I was talking to the kids and a mom, and I pointed to Dooky Chase and right behind Dooky Chase there was a school. It was [what is now] Phyllis Wheatley Community School. There was a debate whether or not to rebuild it. 

I said, “We’re going to rebuild this school right here. And if we did, would you have your kid come here?” She’s like, “Absolutely I would.” We demolished the building and built new.

I’m extremely proud of that because my father was a part-time electrician and I could remember when I was a young boy, him getting work with one of his friends who was a subcontractor on large jobs. As I got older, I understood how important it was to be able to have subcontractors that were often minorities to work on large construction projects.

When I took over the RSD, New Orleans didn’t have a disadvantaged business program. And once I realized what that was, I felt it was important that we try to implement one. I was told that state agencies couldn’t have a DBE component. 

But we had legal take a look into it, and they advised me that the law was silent. It didn’t say whether you could or you couldn’t. I felt like it was important for us to at least try. And if we were challenged in court, we would see what a judge would say.

Once we launched it, I received maybe one or two emails from, like, the carpenters union saying we couldn’t do that. But they never followed up. We generated over $10 billion of revenue for local businesses and I’m extremely proud of that.

To this day, every now and then if I look at the placards on the front of a school I see my name and those of the folks on my team that helped make that happen. It brings me a great sense of pride and joy to know we played a small part in making sure that we have facilities where, when children and families walk in, they say to themselves, “This district really cares about me.” 

Do you have a wish for the next 20 years? 

I wish that we continue to build upon the foundation that’s been laid. I would love for us to eliminate all D-rated schools, to have a true system of good-to-excellent schools. 

That we would have a much more robust early childhood system where 5-year-olds and 6-year-olds are entering kindergarten and first grade on grade level. Today, we still have kids that enter all grades not reading on grade level, so schools have to keep almost starting over with kids. 

The last thing that I would hope for is that the school board in New Orleans more vocally embrace the structure that’s been created. To be unambiguous about its power in being a manager of a system of schools, versus being a traditional school district. That they fully understand and embrace that role and lead the way on that evolution. 

If you had a do-over, what would you change?

I would have intentionally built the next generation of leadership to think more about the system as a whole and to prepare for inevitable transitions — everything that we did 15 or so years ago. We had this rare confluence of strong leadership at almost every level: the schools, the state.

We leveraged everything in our power. For every metric evaluated by external entities, the growth was really powerful. We virtually eliminated F-rated schools. The on-time graduation rate is hovering close to about 80%. It was about 54% around 2005.

I wish we would have started to build that next cadre of leadership in real time. But it’s hard to be in the midst of something so unique and try to think 15, 20 years ahead. I was literally trying to think eight hours, one week, one month ahead. Things were just always coming at us, and we were constantly building and adjusting. 

We get these great leaders, and they do great work — almost like a meteorite or something that comes and then goes away just as quickly. People move on. 

The work is so hard. This is generational work.

Disclosure: The City Fund provides financial support to The 74.

As a young person living in the San Francisco Bay area in the early 2000s, she stumbled into teaching at Stanford University’s experimental , working with Patrick Suppes, an early innovator in ed tech. His work, reaching back to the 1960s, popularized the notion of computers as “automatic tutors,” a vision now playing out with AI tutors from , and others. 

Trumbore openly admits that she “kind of backed into this business,” working in the entertainment field when she landed a summer job teaching writing at Stanford. 

“I didn’t have preconceived notions of what technology could or should do in education,” she said. “The animating question was, ‘How can we use this tool?’”

Trumbore eventually joined the Stanford-led team that launched and ushered in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in the 2010s. 

In her new book , Trumbore calls herself an “ensemble player in the transformation of online education from experimental and low status to ‘innovative’ and ‘disruptive.’ I have also helped make wealthy institutions, venture capitalists, and more than a few professors even wealthier,” she writes.

Trumbore introduces readers to Suppes and to two other key ed tech pioneers of the mid-20th century: MIT’s Seymour Papert and Don Bitzer of the University of Illinois. 

Bitzer created , a groundbreaking, networked course distribution system that could educate up to 1,000 people at once. He and his team developed interactive touch screens and learning management systems, among other innovations. 

Papert, a South Africa-born mathematician who studied with the Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget, applied the latter’s groundbreaking work to education, popularizing the idea that children should learn about computers by programming them. A co-founder of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, he created , a programming language for children that served as an inspiration for the computer language and countless young people’s .

Despite all the hype surrounding new, AI-enhanced products, most can be traced back to these three pioneers and their teams, Trumbore said. “We make the same discoveries about online education decade after decade because we do not acknowledge — or know — the history of the field,” she writes. “There is evidence that this ignorance is not an accident.”

Trumbore, who worked at the University of Pennsylvania and now creates professional certificate and degree classes at the University of Virginia, recently talked with The 74’s Greg Toppo. She warned that 17 years after the first MOOCs appeared, they’ve failed to bring education to many of the students who most need it: low-income, nontraditional students who could use extra help focusing and mastering difficult material. 

Trumbore sees the same dynamic playing out with generative artificial intelligence, warning that universities must be “more clear-eyed about their business partnerships with technology companies, more thoughtful about their motives in distributing education ‘to the masses,’ and ultimately take inspiration from the past’s successes and failures in order to create more equitable educational experiences that provide more returns to learners than to edtech investors.”

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

I want to actually start with talking about Stanford’s Online High School. So you were an actual teacher? 

Yes.

Live classes, obviously projected over many thousands of miles? 

Yes.

Was the original conception that it was a high school that just happened to have students throughout the world? Was everybody there at the same time for class?

It was synchronous. The idea came in 2004. We got a grant from the to start thinking about this. There’s a series of schools still called the Malone Consortium, and they share content because not every private school can have a Chinese literature course. And this idea of providing access, connecting students to great instructors, was something Malone had been thinking about and servicing for a while. And in its model there were similarities to what the Education Program for Gifted Youth [now Stanford’s program] was doing with its calculus courses.That whole unit evolved to provide access to students who couldn’t take a calculus course because they lived on Martha’s Vineyard or in Alaska, or someplace where they didn’t have access to it. And so this just was an extension, in some ways, to see if we could do it. 

You say the technology wasn’t very good at the time.

It was early, and folks didn’t even have broadband. So that was also a really interesting challenge. Actually before we did the Online High School we started teaching synchronous college classes in the summer, and so that was our beta test case, and I did that for a while. The success of those programs became the basis for the grant application to Malone, which became the basis for, “Let’s do a high school.” And then we formed the full high school, and then we went and got accredited, and it’s thriving today.

That led, in short order, to the phenomena of Coursera and edX. And as you say, you were there as it was taking shape. More than a decade later, what does the MOOC space look like to you? Has it fulfilled its purpose, or has it got the same illness as a lot of ed tech, which is that it sort of lost its way?

I think the answer to both questions is “Yes.” 

If you were an idealistic, super empathetic, early proponent and ed tech evangelist, we were opening up the gates of Harvard and Yale and Princeton and Stanford and Penn and all these wonderful places. It is true that today, which was not true 15 years ago, anybody with an Internet connection can log in and see what’s being taught, or a pretty close version of what’s being taught, at some of these schools. And we forget how amazing that was to have access to that. So in that case, the answer is Yes.

The answer is also “Yes” that it’s lost its way, because the business model behind it is a traditional free-market business model: Scale quickly, make profit, follow users, drive engagement. Don’t worry about making it the best learning experience. Worry about making it the biggest, most appealing learning experience and let the customer decide what it is they’re interested in — let the customer drive the content. 

I guess that’s where I’ve ended up: I believe in the promise of ed tech. I don’t think that the promise of ed tech and the free-market business model are compatible.

I’m taking a Coursera course. It seems perfectly fine to me. It sounds like you would make the case that it could be better if there wasn’t a focus on profit?

There’s a lot that gets lost when we focus on frictionless delivery of content and not on an education experience. Education is difficult. It’s expensive to provide. That’s why we invented Coursera. I think that for educated folks, or for super agentic, bright kids, it’s wonderful. You don’t need much else. I think the problem comes when we say that Coursera is sufficient as an education. And the folks at Coursera would say it’s not sufficient as an education.

Early in the book, you say, “Just beneath the shiny surface of the latest ed tech marvel is the work of Suppes, Papert and Bitzer and many people on their teams who’ve worked, sometimes unknowingly, to extend the past of educational technology into the future.” 

I mean, these were, by our standards, primitive forays. The computers, literally you were having to dial into the mainframe on campus. I guess I want to just make sure I understand the lessons those three have to teach us.

It’s two things at the same time. One is that the goals they had are very similar to what we have today. So one, they’re worthy goals. And two, we haven’t invented the technology to achieve those goals. 

We’ve been talking about individual tutors for almost 70 years, 60 years for sure, quite publicly. So this idea that these are necessary pursuits, that this is going to improve education, I think, is a foundation no one questions. No one questions why we would want a computerized tutor. Believe me, I’ve searched. I did find, I think, three articles that are like, “Hey, hold on here.” Folks are all in on this. 

For Bitzer, what was amazing about him — and he was the true engineer among the group — was using, literally, duct tape sometimes, putting together this system. But the vision of that system and what it enabled, that it enabled communication among students who were learning at the same time — that’s how we now measure success. “How many people do you have on the platform?” That did not exist. That was like, “What are you kidding me? In 1962?” Really revolutionary. 

And with Papert, this idea that we shouldn’t let the computer program the child, but the child should program the computer, I think, is probably the most relevant to the tidal wave or avalanche of ChatGPT in education, that we need to train all these kids to have AI skills. I’m not saying we shouldn’t, but what are we teaching them? Why are we teaching them this? And is this really the right thing to do? And are they using it as a tool, or are they being used as a tool? 

I think these questions are highly relevant, but we forget to ask them, because there is this cycle of funding and social capital for being an innovator and all this stuff that gets really exciting if you’re brand new and chasing the bright, shiny object. Nobody wants to hear about the past. 

I want to drill down on Papert. I think he’s the most interesting of the three in a lot of ways, mostly because he had this fascinating background, studying with Piaget. Explain to me how his thinking about “the child programming the computer” is playing out now with things like ChatGPT. 

It’s different, obviously, school to school. In some schools, students are using ChatGPT as a tool to create things that are useful to them, not to create an assignment: “Hey, you guys need to get together and design a water pump.” Or “Design a Pixar character and build it with our 3D printer.” And it’s a group of kids working together in a team. And they use ChatGPT to come up with some models. They do that, then they send it to the 3D printer. I think that’s a great use of these tools. And there’s someone guiding them. That’s the children using it as a tool. “Kids, today we’re going to do Lesson 4 of OpenAI Academy,” that’s less good. That’s not using it as a tool.

I firmly believe in what Papert was saying, and I think technology is used best when you use it to empower a learner to be more human and to unlock creativity, and that is very possible with these tools. It really isn’t how we deploy them. The way they’re being marketed, sold and consumed, it’s faster to just say, “Watch out: You’re not going to get a job if you can’t master these tools. You’ve got to get ahold of these tools and watch some videos and learn some stuff.” Rather than the more time-consuming, “Hey, try this thing. Try this thing. Use it to make this. Use it to make that.”

It strikes me that the public conversation around ed tech has a weird format. It’s binary, which maybe is appropriate: People want to talk about things like MOOCs and such as either the most amazing thing ever or a total failure. I’m curious if you have a thought on why that is, and how we can emerge from that?

That dialogue, which always cracked me up as well, part of it is innovation, “the violence of forgetting.” I love that phrase, and I end with it in the book. In order for this to have been brand new and amazing, there’s this narrative that’s fueled by cash and investment and people’s eyeballs and all this stuff, that it was a huge success, and then the binary of that, to your point, is that it was a huge failure. Once you add that much money and power into these things, people are not interested in a more nuanced answer, I would argue, to anything. But it’s especially true here. 

Again, I think MOOCs have done a lot of good. It’s amazing that they exist. It’s awesome. But they didn’t cure cancer. They didn’t lift the continent of Africa out of the educational attainment that it currently has. At the time, when people were layering on these hopes for MOOCs, we were like, “This is hilarious.” I mean, we were more stunned and like, “Oh my God, more work.” But in retrospect, it was like, “This is kind of nuts that these folks are flocking to Coursera’s offices, and we’re having lunch with Tom Friedman, and he’s , and you’re so busy making it.” This label gets attached to it, it’s like, “Is this what we’re doing?” And it’s intoxicating to believe that.

I have to apologize, maybe not on behalf of Tom Friedman, but on behalf of journalism. I think we’re part of the problem. I take your point that, on the one hand, it’s amazing that these things exist, but on the other hand, they didn’t cure all these ills. What was the accomplishment? I think there was a lot of hope during the pandemic that this was a world that was going to save us from that catastrophe, and it didn’t turn out to be true, mostly.

So two parts: One, I do think certainly in America we really love to give our power away to technology. We just love it. It’s over and over and over again, starting with the camera. You can look back to anything: the washing machine, cake mix — any of these efficiency-solving technologies that come out, particularly during the course of the 20th century and into the 21st. We tend to take a pretty passive stance toward them and imbue them with all these characteristics that they’re almost God-like. They’re going to save us from ___. And that’s great marketing copy. And those two things are interlinked. But we love doing it, because look at any article about ChatGPT on any given day, and it’s the same idea. So there’s something in our national consciousness that really wants to believe that there’s this amazing technological solution just around the corner that is going to cure everything. Twitter was supposed to democratize democracy. So I think that’s part of the problem. 

But what MOOCs did, and why they’re great, is that if I want to know about something, and I want to know more than just asking ChatGPT or doing a Google search or looking at Wikipedia, I can log on and for free, or for a relatively modest fee, I can learn about this stuff. I mean, just even seeing the modules mapped out, if you’ve never taken Python, and you’re like, “I don’t even know what Python is,” and then you look at Chuck’s [University of Michigan professor Charles Russell Severance’s] , and you see, “Oh, now I kind of know what a computer science course looks like.” 

Right.

That’s amazing. And I think the nearness of it is also really interesting, that people feel like it’s so much more approachable now, and not as exclusive. I think that was some of the good that came out of it; and the fact that companies are offering these to employees so that they can learn how to do things better or use them for their own self-actualization or to make themselves better at work, I think is great. 

And then from some work I did when I was at Penn: People were something like 600% more likely to say “I think I’m going to apply to a higher ed program” after completing one of these courses. People’s conception of themselves changed after they were able to complete a course.

I don’t want to rain on that parade, but I do want to bring up a point you make in the book, which is that a lot of times the people who take advantage of this or benefit from it are people with a lot of agency already.

One hundred percent. They give additional agency to those who have it.

How do we solve that?

I think that providing education in a format that worked for people at the top, say 20% of intellectual distribution and access to higher education — I mean, the first MOOCs were modeled on courses at Princeton, on courses at Stanford — that is not, by definition, accessible education to everyone. Letting everyone into the classroom doesn’t mean they’re going to get it or understand it. And that, I think, underlies that idea, because the inventors, the funders, many of the initial employees, are all part of that group. They all went to the same collection of colleges. They all know people who know people from there. So this is a way of education that works. It’s great to scale that. 

So maybe you catch some people who truly are excluded only because of geography or finances, but they know how to learn that way. That doesn’t begin to address the vast number of people who don’t learn that way, who by the time they’re in the third video, they’re texting or asleep or bored or checked out. It can’t possibly solve the problem. One thing I often say in talks is that if access to education were to solve the world’s education problems, we wouldn’t have all these institutions of higher education, because libraries would have solved everything. Andrew Carnegie .

That includes examining the intellectual and cultural foundations of the holiday: the people, places and events that often get overlooked or erased in social studies curriculums.

Juneteenth, the federal holiday in American history, holds special significance for many educators as it was championed by one of their own. , a former teacher — well into her nineties — led the charge for national recognition. While many schools across the country are off on June 19 in observance, the reason why is not as often taught, says Knowles.

Knowles, CEO and founder of the educational consulting firm Teach Heal Build, focuses on creating culturally affirming classrooms and communities. In April, he published the latest installment in the BOLDLY BLACK workbook series “Mathematics and Science in Ancient Africa.” The set was designed for third graders to explore topical principles and practices tied to Black culture — offering lessons they may not encounter in a traditional school setting.

Ahead of this year’s Juneteenth holiday, The 74’s Trinity Alicia spoke with Knowles about what’s shifting in social studies instruction — particularly in Florida, the power of culturally responsive curriculums in today’s political climate and what motivates him in today’s sociopolitical climate.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

The 74: This year marks the 160th anniversary of Juneteenth, but it’s only been recognized as a federal holiday since 2021. Why is it so important, from an educator’s perspective, that Juneteenth became a national holiday?  

Juneteenth allows both teachers and students to explore some of the deeper, more despondent areas of American history that are often avoided. It helps us step outside traditional narratives and unpack the multiple perspectives and experiences that different people, particularly within the African-American and African diaspora communities, have had throughout American history. In this way, it gives students a chance to better understand the ongoing process of freedom.   

For example, Juneteenth is often seen as the definitive end of slavery, but that’s an oversimplification. In reality, it represents a moment in a much longer and more complex journey toward emancipation. This perspective encourages both teachers and students to engage with history in a more nuanced and meaningful way. 

It was also, for almost as many years, largely left untaught in schools. What impact does that have on America’s students and our society as a whole?  

Having been in education for almost two decades, I’ve seen that when we don’t talk about important historical events — like those highlighted and signified by Juneteenth — we miss the opportunity to open up meaningful conversations in the classroom.   

I’ve witnessed how this silence can lead to the creation of a generation of students who are apathetic, especially when it comes to social justice and socio-economic issues that disproportionately impact marginalized communities. However, when we engage with authentic stories and histories, it gives students the chance to develop empathy, compassion and a broader understanding of others’ experiences. This helps create more open-minded individuals who are better equipped to contribute positively to the diverse society we live in today. 

An educator named Opal Lee, known to be “the grandmother of Juneteenth” was a key advocate for the national recognition of the holiday. What significance does this hold for you knowing a fellow teacher led that charge?

Within the framework of American capitalism, we often fail to give educators the honor, respect and homage they truly deserve. Educators are the ones who mold the minds of our children — they have the power and potential to shape not only students’ academic paths but also their overall life trajectories. When educators are empowered to lead conversations about topics like Juneteenth — and when we recognize that the push to make Juneteenth a national holiday was led by an educator — it highlights the strength and influence we possess as a profession.   

It shows that our impact extends far beyond the walls of the classroom and can resonate throughout society as a whole. We have the ability to unlock the minds of the next generation and to use our knowledge, especially historical knowledge, as a powerful tool for change. By doing so, we not only inspire other educators but also challenge our country to examine all aspects of its past — even the ones that don’t neatly fit the traditional narrative of American history.  

Ilyasah Shabazz, daughter of human and civil rights activist Malcolm X, over 10 years ago on Juneteenth, “We’re in denial of the African holocaust.” Malcolm X would’ve been 100 years old last month, and we’re also 60 years from his assassination. On this Juneteenth, what do you want students to remember most about Malcolm X that they might not get from learning about other civil rights activists?  

As we celebrate Juneteenth this year, we must also reflect on civil rights activists beyond the immediate historical context of the holiday — especially when you think about figures like Malcolm X, who are usually misunderstood. His ideals and philosophy were labeled radical when taking a look at what he’s done overall for American history and the Black community in terms of uncovering darker truths as well as the denial of the American government and the experiences of African-Americans.

We live in a landscape right now and we’re told to move on and forget about those things we’re literally still dealing with as a community, but Malcolm X would want us to continue to advocate for our people and our students to be able to share our authentic experiences. And some of those experiences weren’t happy and joyous. But they have perpetrated so much psychological violence, which continues to happen in the classroom. And it was Malcolm X who stated that “only a fool would allow his oppressors to educate his children.”  

What Juneteenth does within Black communities forces us to step up based on the sentiments that Malcolm X expressed within that quote to be able to affirm and be able to become more self-reliant when it comes to our economic issues and social issues. But when it comes to educational issues and being more responsible and more accountable for teaching our history, we’re no longer contingent on systems to be able to teach the truth and history in the United States. 

From the bans on AP African American History courses to the pushback against DEI policies in schools nationwide, how have you navigated this climate as an educator in Florida?

Florida is one of the most prominent hotspots for controversy in education and arguably an epicenter of these debates. We’ve seen significant pushback against inclusive and truthful historical narratives, and it forces educators in schools to sanitize history and continue to perpetuate a fairytale traditional narrative of American history. This sort of censorship disproportionately impacts social studies instruction, which creates a sense of frustration and a disconnect, which leads to a disengagement with students.   

Throughout my work in public education, I have continued to push back and resist by looking at some of our state standards and benchmarks when it comes specifically to social studies and ensuring that I can tie in our stories and tie in those things that people label “controversial” or “political.” I have weaponized the language itself and weaponized some of the state standards so we can continue to tell our stories unredacted. 

Why is it important that Black parents, teachers and administrators are well represented in the decision-making process for schools?

One of the aspects of American history I don’t think that we unpack enough as a community is just some of the deleterious impacts that integration had within the Black community. A lot of the institutions, specifically the educational institution after integration, was absorbed by the dominant, more prevalent society. 

It is important, even within the current state of the system we’re in, that our voices are heard, our perspectives are heard especially when it comes to policies, processes, practices and procedures in education. Those who live in the community can have better, more viable solutions to some of the issues that we contend with within a community. I’ve seen processes within education when people outside of our community are making decisions, and those decisions are not necessarily meeting or accommodating the needs of the community. 

It is beyond critical that Black educators and educational leaders are given space to represent the issues and also the authentic, lived experiences and even some of the cultural norms that exist within those communities so they can be in a position to represent and also advocate for the things that are needed within the Black community.

In your years as an educator and advocate, what surprises you the most about trends and interests among Black students now versus when you were a kid in America? Do Black students and educators come into school — and specifically social studies classes — thinking, “What’s the point?”

Many children, especially those who are informed, are becoming activists around current events tied to identity. Students who are becoming outspoken, specifically a lot of our student-led organizations such as like Black Student Unions, for example, are able to take charge against the racism and bigotry here in Florida and amplify their voices around some of the injustice that is taking place in curriculum, which essentially violates our First Amendment.

You just a new workbook for students, “BOLDLY BLACK: Science and Mathematics in Ancient Africa.” What do you hope to achieve by releasing this series?

Information is widely more available than it was during my high school era in the 1990s simply due to the digital age we live in today. Sometimes we look at technology as being a destructive force, but it influences me to maintain a working knowledge of it in order to effectively show students how to access the information that we couldn’t when we were their ages.

Part of my activism and my solution-based approaches to things we’re dealing with within the Black community, specifically regarding American history that focuses on our experiences, is creating [this] Afro-centric workbook series that is geared towards students from grades three through 12. My third grade title is “Mathematics and Science in Ancient Africa,” and my goal is creating a curriculum that is concise and also digestible within the hands of parents and also community members.

In states where legislation is trying to restrict what we can say and do within the classroom, communities — and specifically Black communities — need to start building their own infrastructures and using some of the space within the Black communities. For example, community centers and also churches are safe, liberating spaces that can be found in Black communities that teach our history. 

Community members and those who may not be experts in pedagogy and pedagogical approaches can pick this up and share this information with their children. Some of those gaps and things that may be missing within the public educational system are now within the hands of the community to be able to educate and affirm all our children.

Thinking about classrooms and curriculums across the country — what keeps you up at night, and what are you most hopeful for?

In this current climate, I have such hope and optimism. I understand that Black communities have gone through far worse. Our whole experience within just the United States even before it became the United States and colonial America has been turmoil. 

But us as Black people have had agency and power to resist the oppression and repression of our voices and our experiences as well as our humanity in this country in the most profound ways. We’ve found ways to resist, push back and also provide for ourselves in order to achieve self-sufficiency in many points within our history. 

I feel hopeful moving forward that even if a public educational space is under attack, we will start to create those liberating spaces in solidarity like we’ve done throughout history in order to rebuild those institutions and infrastructures that were either destabilized or lost through integration. 

Considering all of those variables, there is very little pessimism within me around the things that have taken place and very little fear because, as Kendrick Lamar , “we gon’ be alright.”

A trained doctor, he spent 26 years working in pediatric infectious disease and studying the rotaviruses before ultimately creating the strain that became the RotaTeq vaccine. That breakthrough saves 165,000 lives globally each year, he said, and has essentially eliminated the 70,000 annual U.S. hospitalizations caused by the contagious diarrhoeal virus common in young kids.

Now the director of the and an attending physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Offit also serves as a member of the Food and Drug Administration’s . And about 20 years ago, he spent half a decade on the committee responsible for making recommendations on the safety, efficacy and clinical need for vaccines to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

That committee, also known as the , or ACIP, experienced an unprecedented upheaval earlier this month when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired all 17 advisory members via a Wall Street Journal — after promising he would leave the committee’s recommendations intact.

“The committee has been plagued with persistent conflicts of interest and has become little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine,” wrote Kennedy, the head of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services and a longtime vaccine skeptic.

In a statement released by HHS, Kennedy said he was “prioritizing the restoration of public trust above any specific pro- or anti-vaccine agenda,” and later promised via that none of the replacement members would be “ideological anti-vaxxers.” Public health experts are now disputing that claim in light of his eight recent appointments.

“This is a slate that lacks a balanced viewpoint,” said Richard Hughes, a George Washington University law professor and leading vaccine law expert. “And it’s deeply concerning that many of them are outright anti-vaccine and have their own very concerning conflicts of interest, despite the fact that the secretary claims that he’s trying to avoid conflicts of interest on the committee.”

This could be particularly dangerous for children, some warn, as the committee’s recommendations often dictate which vaccines are covered by insurance and which are mandated for school-aged kids. Programs that provide free vaccines for kids could also see their funding cut.

The 74’s Amanda Geduld recently spoke with Offit to better understand the implications of the mass firing, what kids and their families can expect moving forward and how future administrations might work to rebuild trust in the public health vaccine system. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

The 74: Are you in touch with any of the folks who were fired from ACIP? If so, how did they receive that news and what was the mood among the members?

Offit: Well, they found out about it, typically, from reading the newspaper and learning that they had been fired from that position. The mood was one of sadness, because obviously there was no good reason to do it. 

The reason given by Robert F Kennedy Jr. was that all the members were horribly conflicted with pharmaceutical companies [and] that their financial ties to pharmaceutical companies made it such that they couldn’t give advice that would be beneficial to the American public, and that wasn’t true.

I mean, they have very strict conflict of interest rules at the ACIP whereby you have to make it very clear that you have no association with the pharmaceutical industry and no association with the government, which then allows you to be an independent advisor. And should there be a conflict … then you can’t vote on that company’s product, and you can’t vote on any product that that company makes. That’s very clear. That’s been clear ever since I was on the committee back 25 years ago.

So it sounds like there was confusion, disappointment and a feeling that the reasons given for the firing weren’t based in reality? 

They were angry. They were angry that they felt that they’d been dismissed for no good reason and that their willingness to serve the American public had been set aside. I mean, it’s not like you’re paid to do this. It’s just a voluntary position for the most part.

In your knowledge, has anything like this ever happened before?

No, but we’ve never had a secretary of Health and Human Services that was an anti-vaccine activist, science denialist and conspiracy theorist before.

Zooming out a little bit, what’s the significance of these firings? And what impacts can we anticipate?

I think we can anticipate that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will put people on that committee who are like minded to him. We’re already seeing evidence of that with the first eight people that he picked. 

So I think what’s going to happen is that there are going to be groups that look elsewhere from the ACIP to try and get information that they think is reliable and up to date and informative. 

What I imagine is that, for example, the American Academy of Pediatrics has its so-called Red Book committee, or . I would imagine that that committee will start to speak with insurance companies to make sure that their recommendations would then have kind of the force of law … Because I can’t imagine the insurance companies are going to be looking to ACIP, given its current members.

My understanding is, up until this point, insurance companies and states — when they’re trying to determine school vaccination policies — have looked to ACIP for guidance. You’re saying that maybe insurance companies will look elsewhere for that information, but is there any concern that this will just mean vaccines are no longer covered by insurance, or that school-age vaccine policies are undermined altogether?

Yes, there’s concern, but it is to the financial advantage of insurance companies to pay for vaccines. I mean, you’d much rather pay for an HPV vaccine than to pay for the care of a woman who has cervical cancer. You’d much rather pay for a measles-containing vaccine than to pay for measles hospitalization.

So there isn’t necessarily concern here that suddenly these vaccines won’t be accessible to families from lower-income backgrounds?

I don’t know. I mean, I think it’s a frantic, chaotic time, and it’s really hard to know. Everything that you sort of counted on to make sense doesn’t make sense anymore. 

It used to be that solid, good science was how we made decisions, and that’s not true anymore with the ACIP. You can tell when Robert F Kennedy Jr. says we want gold standard science, that’s not what he means. What he really means is he wants quote, unquote scientific studies that support his fixed, immutable belief that vaccines cause more harm than good.

In a post on recently Kennedy wrote, “The most outrageous example of ACIP’s malevolent malpractice has been its stubborn unwillingness to demand adequate safety trials before recommending new vaccines for our children.” Has there been an unwillingness to demand adequate safety trials for new vaccines for children in America?

The opposite is true. I had the fortune of working with a team that created the rotavirus vaccine. Before that vaccine was put on the infant immunization schedule, it was tested in a prospective, placebo-controlled trial of more than 70,000 infants. It was done over four years in 11 countries to prove that that vaccine was safe and effective. That was a 70,000- person prospective, placebo-controlled trial that probably cost $350 million. 

I don’t know what he’s talking about. Name the vaccine. Name a new vaccine that hasn’t been tested in a large, prospective, placebo-controlled trial. They all are. 

The problem is that when they’re shown to work and they’re safe, he doesn’t believe it, because he’s a science denialist. That’s what he really means.

Are there any other ways this could impact school-aged kids in particular?

Now what worries me is, I think if RFK Jr. really wants to bring down vaccines, he can do it through the What he could do is he could hold up a paper and say, “Look, aluminum adjuvants cause autism or multiple sclerosis or diabetes or asthma, and now I’m going to add that to the list of compensable injuries.”

So anybody with asthma who’s gotten a vaccine that contains an — and there are seven different vaccines that contain aluminum adjuvants [an ingredient that helps create a stronger immune response] — is now on the list of compensable injuries. 

Or [he could say] “I’m going to take these vaccines out of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program and then just subject them to civil litigation.” That would really disrupt vaccines in this country. I think companies would then do what they did in the 1980s … They’d leave the market. We had 18 companies that made vaccines in 1980. By the end of the decade, we only had four. 

So does that mean that while this ACIP move might introduce anger and distrust there are no real trickle-down effects that you think we’ll see yet in terms of what vaccines are available or what vaccines are covered?

I think you’ll know a lot when you watch the June [advisory committee] meeting, to hear that discussion, and to hear how pharmaceutical companies react to that discussion and how insurers react to that discussion. I think you’ll learn a lot in the next couple of weeks.

Can you tell me a little bit about the folks who replaced the 17 members? Eight people have been announced so far.

They’re who you would most fear. 

You have people like Robert Malone, in front of Marjorie Taylor Green’s committees … that the mRNA vaccines cause cancer and heart disease and autoimmune disease. Robert Malone has been an expert witness on behalf of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in a lawsuit against the mumps component of the MMR vaccine. 

You have somebody like Martin Kulldorff who has represented — for — Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in a lawsuit against Merck’s Gardasil [HPV] vaccine. 

You have people who have published papers claiming that the mRNA vaccines caused heart attacks and sudden death in healthy, young people. You have Vicky Pebsworth, who is a member of the , which is an anti-vaccine group that has lobbied against state vaccine mandates for years. 

This is exactly the cavalcade of stars that you would expect RFK Jr. to feel comfortable with: people who are — like him — anti-vaccine activists, who are science denialists. 

It’s the worst of all worlds. It’s like a bad Saturday Night Live skit.

During Kennedy’s HHS confirmation hearings back in January, Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy — a former physician — expressed a lot of trepidation around the nomination, but ultimately voted to confirm, citing various commitments he had received from the administration. One of those promises, Cassidy was that “if confirmed [Kennedy] will maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommendations without changes.”’

Critics have since argued that Kennedy’s move to fire all members amounts to a broken promise, a claim Cassidy himself has since disputed. Is this a broken promise?

He’s been breaking promises right from the beginning. I think Cassidy put out a list of 10 or so things [Kennedy] promised he wouldn’t do. And he proceeded to do it.

I’m reading: He has committed that he would work within current vaccine approval on safety monitoring systems. That he hasn’t done. 

He’ll maintain the CDC Advisory Committee Immunization Practices recommendation without changes, and he hasn’t done that either. 

He’s already, for example, changed the recommendation on pregnancy, changed the routine recommendation for young children to get COVID vaccines. And now Cassidy also put out saying that for those of you who think [Kennedy] may just put vaccine skeptics on [the committee], he’s not gonna do that. Then he proceeds to do that. 

What Cassidy does is he draws a line. He says, “Don’t cross this line.” Then Kennedy crosses the line, and he doesn’t do anything — just draws another line. I think he is weak and ineffectual. And I think his legacy will be the harm that’s caused to children and adults in this country because of this massive disruption of the public health vaccine system. I think that will be Sen. Cassidy’s legacy.

Have you spoken to Sen. Cassidy? If you could speak to him today, what would you say to him?

I spoke to him four times before that second confirmation hearing, and once afterwards. I said to him exactly what you would think I would say to him, which is, “Don’t hire this guy. She knows. She told you exactly who he is.”

It’s really frustrating. I was sure [Cassidy] was a “no” vote. He clearly had problems with him. But in the end, politics trump science. I think when you mix politics and science, you always get politics.

My last question is around this idea of trust. Kennedy has said that he removed all these members and is replacing them in response to a “crisis of public trust.” On the other side, there are folks who do not at all trust Kennedy. Looking forward, what will it take to rebuild trust in these systems?

I think there was a tremendous loss of trust in the first two years of the pandemic … I think people saw [many COVID-era policies as] a real impingement on their freedom, and that’s what you’re seeing now. 

I think that RFK Jr. represents the disdain that people ended up having for the CDC and for Dr. Fauci, unfortunately. I think that’s what happened …To the point that there were states that were trying to ban mRNA vaccines. The term “mRNA vaccines” has become a dirty word, even though it probably saved 3 million lives and probably cost more than 250,000 people their lives when they chose not to get the vaccine. But somehow that all got linked with sort of stepping on our medical freedom, and that’s what you’re seeing now. 

So what’s it going to take to get that back? I think slowly, we’re just going to have to make sure that we — as scientists and clinicians and academicians and public health people — explain in careful detail why we do everything.

But public health is also about the public. I mean, you have to care about your neighbor in order to have public health. I think right now, we’re sort of at a point where people go, “Don’t tell me what to do. If I want to catch and transmit a potentially fatal infection, that’s my right.” And I don’t think we used to be like that.

Is there anything else I haven’t asked you that you want readers to understand, specifically through an education- and child-centered lens?

What’s that line from Bette Davis in All About Eve? “Buckle up. It’s going to be a bumpy night” — although everybody says bumpy ride.  …

I think it is going to be a bumpy ride for a while, and then we’ll just see. I believe that the forces of good will prevail. I do. 

I think that there’s a basic feeling among virtually everyone that vaccines are a good thing, and that as people see them erode or maybe become less available or less affordable or more feared that people will rally on behalf of children. I do.

In early 2020, the findings suggested that children were essentially unaffected by the virus and minimally contagious when they caught it. He envisioned a magazine piece arguing for reopening schools, and began pitching it to major outlets. 

No one was interested.

Eventually, WIRED agreed to run it, and as he reported it, the evidence only seemed to build. In New York City, out of more than 14,000 deaths at the time were reported in people under 18. He remembers thinking: “This is a major, major story.” As the magazine took its time with edits, he was in a panic, “waiting to get scooped” by other media. 

It never happened.

He soon realized that most major outlets had little curiosity about the science — or lack of it — underlying COVID remediations. 

His piece, , appeared in mid-May and instantly went viral. But its premise — that the U.S. was following “a divergent path” on reopening — got lost in the larger debate swirling in major media. And Zweig, a former magazine fact-checker who had always entertained the notion that health authorities and journalists in legacy media took science seriously, began to wonder what he’d missed.

A year later, with his two kids still not back to school full time despite mountains of evidence that it could be done safely, his sense of who the “good guys” were had been thoroughly shaken. Social isolation, masking and hybrid schooling were taking an enormous toll on his kids and millions of others nationwide, even as most schools in Europe opened early and stayed open, often without the dogged reliance on masking and distancing that American schools employed.

“The sense that all of this suffering for them and millions of other kids was for naught consumed me,” he writes. “I could not silence the voice in my head that this was gravely stupid.”

By 2021, he was testifying as an expert witness before a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee on reopening schools, as well as a House subcommittee on the pandemic.

Five years after the first school closures, Zweig’s third book, An Abundance of Caution, out Tuesday, looks back on what he considers the questionable deliberations surrounding COVID at almost every level. While it takes the pandemic as its subject, Zweig notes that the book is about something much broader: “a country ill-equipped to act sensibly under duress.”

He finds bad decisions everywhere, with experts basing assertions about the virulence of the virus on that themselves were based essentially on guesswork. Media outlets, he alleges, routinely overhyped the seriousness of the virus, despite that children were not major carriers — and schools .

The media perseverated on the effectiveness of remedies like masking, social distancing and isolation, Zweig finds, despite that any of them made a difference. For months, they credulously transcribed experts’ predictions, often relying on the loudest, most overwrought voices, who often brought questionable credentials to the task. In one instance, an expert quoted on reopening was actually a consultant for smokeless tobacco companies.

Lawmakers dropped the ball as well, he says, prioritizing — perhaps even fetishizing — ”safety” over normalcy, even when there was little evidence for keeping schools closed beyond the few weeks in which public health experts urged Americans to “flatten the curve” of COVID cases.

Zweig has found a receptive audience for his reporting on the center-right — the book this week was excerpted in the conservative online publication — but his work has also bolstered arguments in left-of-center publications, from and to and .

Ahead of the book’s publication, Zweig spoke to The 74’s Greg Toppo, further exploring its themes of a false medical consensus amid America’s “uniquely acrimonious and tribalist political environment.”

Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

By May 2020, schools in The Netherlands, Norway, Finland, France, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, and more than a dozen other nations had reopened, with evidence mounting that COVID wasn’t even a modest risk to children. At a European Union conference, researchers reported that reopening schools there brought no significant increase in infections. Why weren’t we in lockstep with Europe? 

That is a very good question, which I spend 500 pages discussing [Laughs]. I’m saying that jokingly, but I’m not joking. The answer to that is long and complex. A uniquely acrimonious and tribalist political environment in America is one large reason. It’s not the only reason, but it is a significant reason.

You bemoan the politics surrounding the pandemic, but in one instance you quote on mitigation efforts. Early on, in March 2020, he  talked about wanting to act aggressively. DeWine invoked the example of St. Louis, which did so in the and had a death rate of just 358 per 100,000 people, while Philadelphia was slower to respond and suffered 748 deaths per 100,000. “We all want to be St Louis,” he said. Part of me wonders: What’s wrong with that? Motivating people to not be the bad example makes sense, doesn’t it? 

The example that so many politicians and so many media outlets used from the 1918 pandemic, where they often compared St. Louis to Philadelphia, was a deeply flawed misunderstanding of what the data actually showed over time. This was a misrepresentation and misunderstanding about what school closures can actually accomplish over time.

What’s the basic flaw in that approach?

A core flaw in the entire pandemic response, and in particular school closures, was the assumption that everyone was going to remain home and sequestered from each other for a lengthy period of time. While these interventions could be effective for a week or maybe two weeks or so, over time there is no way of effectively stopping the spread of a highly contagious respiratory virus in a free society, and in particular a society as economically and professionally stratified as America.

From the beginning, a significant portion of people in our country continued to move about because they had to. So while the laptop class sat home, and their children were home in a comfortable room, possibly aided by tutors or maybe a pod teacher, or maybe they were in private school, a significant portion of our country were delivering food and goods and other services from warehouses and restaurants and  slaughterhouses to the wealthier Americans who sat at home on Zoom. 

This was one of the most class-based, inequality-thrust decisions in our recent history. And to make matters worse is the idea which was continually perpetuated, that if you didn’t comply, that you were immoral, that there was a tremendous amount of virtue attached to the notion of staying home. Yet a significant portion of society could never comply with that. Beyond professional obligations, there are many millions of children who live in homes that are not safe, that are not conducive to being sequestered in a room for hours upon hours and sitting in front of a screen that they were supposed to learn from.

This whole idea that closing schools was going to have any impact was just manifestly absurd from very early, and there is just an endless amount of evidence, much of which I observed myself as a parent over time: Kids are going to interact with each other no matter what, and particularly when you think about kids whose parents had to work. What happened with them? Did they stay home alone? Some did, but many of them went to a grandparent’s house, a neighbor looked after them, or they went to a daycare or other situation where they were intermixing with children from a whole variety of nearby neighborhoods and towns. What I show is that this whole hybrid model, where schools were only open two days a week for some kids, or less, with the idea that that was going to mitigate transmission, was nonsensical, and there are tons of data that show this. 

You can look at cellular phone data, and you can see the mobility of American citizens began to increase over time. What we can see is that this completely is in line with what scientists had known for many, many years: People’s ability to comply with unpleasant or difficult directives understandably wanes over time, and there was never any inkling that human beings, by and large, were going to all just imprison themselves and be hermetically sealed. Only the most motivated and financially capable people could and would actually achieve that.

It sounds like you’re saying that we were asking schools to do something that virtually no one else could do.

Even if schools were closed, the point is that children were still mixing with people, and the adults themselves were mixing as well. Lockdowns in a free society do not work over time. There’s some evidence that perhaps they could work if they are absolute and total, where every single thing is closed for a very brief period of time. But the idea that children were locked out of a school building while adults could go to restaurants and bars and casinos and offices and stores — the idea that that logically was going to have any impact — was absurd. Yet it continued for more than a year for many children.

Including yours. At a certain point in summer of 2020, it seemed as if schools might reopen in the fall. And then on July 6, President Trump tweeted, all caps, “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL.” As you write, four days later, the American Academy of Pediatrics came out . They had argued “forcefully and unambiguously” for opening schools before this. How much of this disaster was, as you say, Newtonian physics in the political realm? 

The equal and opposite reaction. 

Trump is for it? I’m against it.

It’s quite stark. The example from the American Academy of Pediatrics is quite stunning. The about-face was so obvious that even NPR . But that’s just one example. Throughout the book, I show over and over how people on the left were just reactive against Trump, and even those who wanted to talk about what they thought was wrong often generally didn’t do so. 

I had doctors, many of whom were at prestigious institutions around the country, reaching out to me, talking — always off the record — about how they vehemently disagreed with what was going on in schools: Mask mandates with kids, if the particular schools were open, or quarantines, or barriers on the desks, the six feet of distancing — all of these things that we were told were critical and that there was a consensus, and that this is “what the experts say.”

All these things were a manufactured consensus. This was artificial, and unfortunately, I couldn’t talk about it that much because all of this was off the record. 

Many of these doctors and others, including former CDC officials who would reach out to me, were simply afraid of being cast out amongst their peers. But many of them also were very explicitly told by their administrators, by their bosses at their university hospital or whatever institutions they were with, that they were not allowed to say this. They were not allowed to go against the narrative of the CDC. To me, that’s a far more frightening form of censorship, that the American public was misled in part because there was a false story about a medical consensus. I had access to this information, knowing it was a false narrative, but I was constrained in what I could say. But I will say this: That sort of false narrative continued, not just from doctors who were contacting me and other health experts. 

All we had to do was look at Europe: Tens of millions of children were in school there. But by and large, the media ignored this — not just the media, but our health officials. Or they contrived a variety of reasons that were false about why those kids were in school there.

That actually leads me to my question about journalism: You seem to hold a special disdain for the coverage of the New York Times, which you feel set the tone for fearful, expert-based coverage that largely ignored evidence. What happened, and how did things go wrong so quickly there?

Well, I single out the Times only because they were particularly egregious in their misleading coverage about the pandemic in general and in particular about children in schools. It’s not exclusive, I talk about all sorts of media outlets, but there’s extra focus on the Times because arguably it is the most influential news outlet in the country, certainly amongst the elite decision makers in our culture, whether in politics or other fields. It’s very important for how policy gets made in our country. The framing that The New York Times puts on certain topics is very important. 

If you think about Israel and Palestine, people already have kind of baked-in positions on that largely, so the framing of the Times will probably just anger one group or another, depending on the story. But something like the pandemic, this was new. So people didn’t come at it with a preconceived idea. They came somewhat blank-slate, at least among the broader kind of political left who reads The New York Times. The Times is telling them, “Don’t look over there. Don’t look at what’s happening here,” and if you do look then they give you a about a school in Georgia without providing any context, or a about Israel without providing any context. 

So one of the important things that I hope readers come away with after they finish my book is an understanding about how media can be incredibly misleading without necessarily publishing errors or facts that aren’t true; that you can write something that’s fact checked, and it still can be incredibly misleading by the way the story is framed, by the information that’s left out, by who you choose to interview and quote. All those things are incredibly important regarding how people perceive reality, and you can do all of it without having any errors.

I want to ask about your kids. How are they doing five years later? I guess they’re now in eighth and 10th grade?

That’s right.

How do they see this period of their lives?

They’re like any other teenagers. It’s impossible to have specific correlates for most circumstances, to say, “Pandemic school courses now have led to X in my child.” We, of course, can look at broader data, and rightfully so. There’s a lot of focus on “learning loss” and test scores. And there are a number of studies that clearly show a direct correlation: The less time that kids were in school during the pandemic, the worse their educational outcomes and scores were. We know that it’s directly linked to that. There’s no ambiguity.  

But what I talk about in the book is that there’s so much that happens in life that you can’t quantify. If you just think about what happened to the high school football player who was relying on a scholarship in order to get into college, but the senior year season was terminated. Never happened. What happened to that kid and so many others like him? What happens to the kids who relied on their school theater program or arts programs? 

What happened to the kids who relied on teachers to report abuse at home, because teachers and educators are the No. 1 reporter of child abuse. When schools were closed, those kids had nowhere to go and no one to see what was happening. So a perverse thing happened during the pandemic: Child abuse reports actually went down. But it’s not because there was less abuse. It’s that children lost this important vehicle to actually bring what was happening behind closed doors into the light. Harm is incurred whether there’s a lingering effect or not. 

I’m glad you brought up abuse because that’s one of those things people don’t necessarily see right away.

This was known immediately. In April 2020, they already could see this. The data were already coming in. So to be very clear, health officials knew harm, great harm, was being done to many children, and they continued with the school closures nonetheless. 

A lot of “blue” parents say that COVID radicalized them. And I wonder how you’d describe what it did to you?

I wouldn’t say I’ve been radicalized, but I would say as someone who, generally, for my whole adult life, had positioned myself pretty far on the left, I have always been an independent thinker. I’m not one to go with the crowd. I’ve been independent politically. But observing the way our health authorities behaved in conjunction with legacy media, both of which are predominantly on the political left, and observing the complete disconnect from science, from following evidence, from a clear-eyed, honest view of empirical reality, was incredibly destabilizing. You can never go back from that once you observe that type of behavior. 

These were supposed to be the good guys. I’m not saying this was purposeful, necessarily, or conscious, but people’s hatred for Trump and hatred for Republicans or people on the right so dramatically distorted the lens through which they were seeing the world that they conducted themselves in a fashion that was completely disconnected from reality. One of the great ironies of that era was these lawn signs, “In this house, we believe in science.” These people with the lawn signs generally had absolutely no clue what the science said. They had no clue what they were talking about.

What I’m left with after reading the book is just this kind of sick feeling about what’s going to happen the next time, in the next pandemic. I wonder if you have a sense.

It’s so hard to know. I would just close by saying that I hope my book can do a small part in trying to reveal how the views of society, and in particular, of elite society, spin. My book is essentially one giant case study, composed of a series of case studies, of how health officials and the media operated. And by reading through this narrative of these case studies, you gain a deeper understanding about how things actually work, how individuals and societies make decisions with limited information. Hopefully, people will be armed with that awareness and knowledge. So whatever the next crisis is — it doesn’t need to be a pandemic — you’ll have a more clear-eyed and educated view about what’s actually going on around you. And perhaps that will be able to ultimately change what’s going on around us.

U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon on Tuesday told a crowd of educators, tech executives and investors that public education in America is unsustainable, suggesting that the nation’s low literacy and math scores show it has “gotten to a point that we just can’t keep going along doing what we’re doing.”

Speaking at the annual ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego, McMahon, the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, said, “Let’s shake it up. Let’s do something different. And it’s not through bureaucracy in Washington — that is not where it happens.”

A small group of protesters picketed the appearance, but in the midmorning fireside talk, delivered to a receptive standing-room crowd, McMahon said the Trump administration’s plans to dismantle the education department won’t mean the end of bedrock funding streams like Title I for low-income children or the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act for students with disabilities.

“Title I funding isn’t stopping,” she said, adding that funding for both programs would likely remain at the same levels moving forward, even if they shift to different agencies.

McMahon also said the department, which has fired about half of its staff in the first two-and-a-half months of Trump’s presidency, cancelled millions of dollars in research contracts and gutted in-house research efforts across the board, is studying revamping the Institute of Education Sciences. She also reassured the audience that the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is “something we absolutely need to keep.”

“This is what keeps us honest, because it’s comparing apples to apples” nationwide.” If we don’t, states can … be a little manipulative with their own results and their own testing. But I think it’s a way that we keep everybody honest.”

But McMahon avoided talking about campus antisemitism and transgender athletes’ participation in women’s sports — two areas that the department is aggressively investigating.

Afterwards, McMahon sat for a brief interview with The 74’s Greg Toppo, where she expanded on her thoughts about NAEP, immigrant students and how her background rebuilding companies in the corporate world has prepared her to revamp the department.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

In order to dismantle the department, you have to convince seven Democrats in the Senate to get this done. What’s the plan? 

The plan is to help be partners. In fact, I had about a dozen Democrats in my office last week. I wanted to hear what they had to say. They wanted to share with me what their concerns were. I have said all along, and the President totally understands, that in order to close the Department of Education, it is an act of Congress. By the time we get to this point, hopefully they will see the benefits of education operating differently in our country. 

In your session earlier, you said NAEP is “something we absolutely need to keep.” But the administration has cut the research division of the department. Is NAEP ready for some sort of radical reset? Are you going to have to pull back on what NAEP does? 

We need to re-look at NAEP. Is there a better way to do NAEP? We now do it in fourth and eighth grade every other year. Is that the best thing? It’s interesting how you just keep doing something over and over again, and until you start questioning, “Is this the best way to do it?” you don’t know if there is a better way. This may be the ultimate way to do it, but I do believe that people who are in this industry, there are those who can look at this and determine whether or not this is the right course to continue to take.

We may keep it the very same way that it is for a while, but we’re looking at it. How can you decide if you need to make change if you don’t investigate it a bit?

Last NAEP question: At this point, April 8, have we made any decisions about tests or lines of testing that are not going to be continued?

No. I mean, I think I just finished my fourth week on the job, or this is the fourth week on the job. So it’s a lot in motion at this particular time. But I just want to make clear, though, that we are doing things thoughtfully. Quickly, but thoughtfully.

I think the feeling that a lot of people have watching what’s happened with DOGE is that, yes, it’s been quick, but not so thoughtful. How do you reassure people that you’re doing things thoughtfully?

I’ve restructured companies before, a couple of times, and you do try to cut out fat and not muscle. Sometimes you have to cut some muscle. Sometimes you cut a little deeper into the muscle than you intended, and you realize, “That was too deep.” So you bring a couple of people back. I don’t think that’s necessarily chaotic. I think that is thoughtful. Who would have thought that you could actually bring in a really smart, innovative group to audit the federal government? 

I can only speak to the group I’ve worked with at the Department of Education. I have found them to be very savvy, very bright about how to look at the systems that they are looking at and determine where we could make cuts. I don’t find it to be chaotic, but I think whenever you’re acting swiftly and making announcements, it can seem chaotic. But it’ll settle.

I want to change gears a little bit, and ask about immigration. What role should schools play in enforcing federal immigration policy? 

Well, that’s not something that I’ve really delved into at Education. It’s so interesting. People ask me about the Department of Education. It doesn’t educate anyone. It doesn’t set curriculum. It doesn’t decide what books you’re going to use or hire teachers or administrators or any of that. But I think that schools have to obey the law.

Should undocumented children be entitled to free and appropriate public education? 

I think we have to follow the law with that.

But the law says, “Yes.”

Until the laws change, then we’re following the law, or the schools in those states are following the law. I’m certainly not instituting any of that.

In terms of civil rights, the regional offices have been cut back quite a bit. And just considering that you’re really aggressively pursuing anti-semitism and Title IX cases, how are you going to do this effectively with so many fewer people in the actual regions? 

If you notice, it’s a joint task force. We’re doing it with the Attorney General. We’re doing it with HHS [the Department of Health and Human Services) and we’re doing it with GSA [the General Services Administration]. It’s a joint task force combining resources to do some of this.

So you feel like that’s essentially making up for the fewer people you have in Civil Rights?

To some extent, yes.  

If all goes according to plan, if you are the dog that catches the bus, as they say… 

If I fire myself?

If Congress approves dismantling the department, do you see yourself out of a job in a year?

I’m not really set on a timeline right now. Clearly the President would like to see this accomplished as efficiently and quickly as possible. But we want to make sure that everything is in place, that there’s nothing that’s going to slip through the cracks. All of the funding will stay in place for Title I, and for our special ed and our handicapped special needs students, and to make sure that we have our Office of Civil Rights working with other offices. Or it could be totally melded into another agency.

And also, one of the biggest areas, about a third of the budget at the Department of Education, is management of student loans. And the President’s already talked about some role for SBA [the Small Business Administration], or a pretty large role by Treasury. 

So a year?

I’m not going to guess on a timeframe.

What would be appropriate?

When we get the job done. 

So there’s no timeline at all?

As efficient and as quickly as we can get it done.

Anything I haven’t asked you that you wanted to talk about?

There is a bottom line here, and that is to make sure — this is the President’s wish — that we give children equal access to quality education. The test scores that we’ve seen on NAEP are totally unacceptable. What we’ve been doing isn’t working. We have to do something different. We have to do it better. And his expectation is that we put in place what can help it be the best it can be. 

And you have a plan for that?

We’re working on the plan for that.

But while some of the cuts are, in his words, “dumb,” and show a lack of experience among the cost-cutters, Schneider has also pushed against many critics’ assertions that the Trump administration will effectively destroy the agency. In his view, the cuts offer an opportunity “to clean out the attic” of old, dusty policies and revitalize essential research functions. Those include the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which he maintains has lost its way and grown prohibitively expensive while in some cases duplicating the work of independent researchers.

A conservative who has held top roles in both of the last two Republican administrations, as well as the most recent Democratic one, he’s the ultimate education insider — Schneider’s conversations often invoke an alphabet soup of government agencies, contractors and think tanks. Yet he’s unusually candid about his time in government, especially now that he is no longer there.

A political scientist by training, Schneider has spent nearly two decades in education research. He served three years as commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics under President George W. Bush, then spent a decade as a vice president at the non-profit American Institutes for Research. He returned to government in 2018, appointed by President Trump to lead the Institute of Education Sciences, and stayed on until 2024 under President Biden.

Through it all, he has remained an independent voice even while in office, telling The 74 in 2023, for instance, that the reason Biden hadn’t fired him along with other Trump appointees was that education research wasn’t considered important enough for the president to bother. 

Over the course of six years at IES, he tried — mostly unsuccessfully, he admits — to reform the department into “a modern science and statistics agency.” He’s honest about his limitations, saying he “tried really hard to modernize the place” without much success. While Musk and his cost-cutters last month took a chainsaw to IES, he observes, when he led it, “I didn’t even have a scalpel. I had a dull butter knife.”

While many education advocates are decrying Trump’s bid to eliminate the Education Department, Schneider has said carefully breaking it up could actually produce “a more efficient, dynamic and responsive school system — all things the Department of Education has been hard-pressed to do.”

Schneider sat down for a wide-ranging conversation last week with The 74’s Greg Toppo. They discussed the difficulties of reforming what he considers a hidebound agency, the opportunities of starting over and what the future might hold for NAEP, also known as the Nation’s Report Card. 

Now a non-resident senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, he is cagey when pressed about returning to IES in a second Trump term. Schneider notes that the deep cuts have left no actual agency to run. “Who wants to go in there and head a 20-person unit?” But leading a revamped IES, he admits, would present “a wonderful challenge.”

At the end of the day, though, he says it remains an open question whether the next step in the Trump administration’s plans is rebuilding or neglect.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: I wanted to start with something you said about Musk’s crew a couple of weeks ago — namely that given your work to reform IES, you were “a little envious” they could “do it all in one day.” Let’s drill down. Is that what you had in mind when you were there? Or did this go further?

Schneider: [Laughs.] Let me try to figure out the best way of putting this. The issue, of course, is that IES was a 23-year-old institution. A lot of stuff got locked in. None of this is surprising: Institutions get locked down and they keep doing the same thing over and over again. I tried hard to change things. It was almost impossible. I tried to get Congress to create ARPA Ed — [National Center for Advanced Development in Education, an agency to develop and scale innovative, cutting-edge practices and tools]. A lot of people worked really hard, but we were never able to get it through Congress.

Whether Congress will ever do anything is a different question. But the fact of the matter is that even though people were in favor of it and we had a lot of political support, we still couldn’t get it across the finish line. Well, now the National Center for Education Research doesn’t exist anymore. There’s one person left there. So whether or not this is naive, we don’t need NCADE anymore. We should rebuild NCER to look like ARPA Ed. We don’t need any legislation for that, because it’s in the purview of the director to do that. That’s an amazing opportunity. We can just create a modern research funding organization with no need for congressional action.

My colleague Kevin Mahnken recently talked to Doug Harris from Tulane. He said IES is “being knocked over by these cuts.” I think beneath a lot of this is people like Doug worried that this administration is simply anti-science. It sounds like you are saying the opposite. Should this give people like Doug a little hope?

As of right now, we have no indication except every once in a while some words bubble out: “Oh, we are going to rebuild IES. We are looking for a future direction for IES.” But there is no concrete plan. So the proof is going to happen in the next several months. If the department says, “Yes, we are redoing NCER, we are redoing NCES,” which are the two biggest units that are most in need of repair, and they announce plans to rebuild them in a modern way, then we’re fine. But if nothing ever happens and we end up with three people at NCES and one person at NCER, we’ve got a problem.

You have no sense one way or another?

You probably hear the same things I do. I have no concrete information about any plans to rebuild. I hear rumors. But until concrete plans are announced and actions are undertaken, then we should maintain a healthy skepticism. That said, I still believe that if this administration wants to modernize IES, they have an opportunity that no one’s ever had before — since 2002.

Since they created it.

Congress created IES in 2002, and it was a brand new, innovative organization that radically changed the way education research was done. Well, 23 years later, that opportunity repeats itself. So my hope, and maybe this is naive, is that we grab that opportunity. We know a lot more about education research. We know a lot more about modern statistical data collections — and we learned a lot from NCES. For example, the lack of timeliness hurt them endlessly. So now it’s like an open field. Let’s build a better edifice now than what we had a year ago.

Let’s talk about the nuts and bolts of this vision. One of the first shocks to the system we got was in February when DOGE canceled all those federal contracts. And one of the hardest hit was AIR, where you spent 10 years. I wonder to what extent your views have been shaped by being an insider there. Is this a sector that needs a shock to the system?

There are at least two parts of that question. So there’s the question of the quality of the work. AIR does good work. I don’t think there’s any question. The big contract houses are capable of doing quite good work. However, people are really pissed off about the overhead rate [also known as indirect costs covering expenses] that these contract houses and universities charge. The overhead rate is just too high. When I was at IES after the pandemic, AIR got rid of their building on Thomas Jefferson St. [in affluent Georgetown] — a huge, expensive building. Many, many people ended up working at home, and the rest went with much less — and much cheaper — office space.

So after AIR shed that big office space, I called up [Contracts and Acquisition Management], the contracts management people in the department, and I said, “You know, the overhead is based on many factors, but office space and parking are major components. They’ve reduced the cost of their offices — they didn’t get rid of them, but they downsized and went to cheaper places. So let’s renegotiate their overhead rate.” [He imitates CAM officers]: “No, no, no, no, no, no.” I couldn’t get CAM to even consider reducing the overhead rate to reflect the lower cost.

Just to be clear: You couldn’t get the department to lower the cost?

The department had to reopen the negotiations. And they would not. I’m not sure what the right word is. It’s laziness, corruption. This was wrong. Why were we paying such high overhead rates when their costs went down? And you know as well as I do that many, many, many organizations got rid of office space and reduced their costs. So why wasn’t CAM renegotiating overhead rates? I never was able to get a good answer. 

But that’s a department problem, not an AIR or Mathematica problem.

Yes and no. Clearly the department had within its authority to reopen those negotiations. But the problem, of course, is that the agencies end up getting captured by the people they’re supposed to regulate, the people they’re supposed to monitor. [Test developer] ETS and NAEP are an even clearer example: How much money went to ETS to do things that they weren’t capable of doing? 

Such as?

Such as building the platform for NAEP. The software. This is not firsthand, so it could be hearsay, but the people from DOGE looked at the platform that ETS had built for NAEP, and they just said, “What is this? This is not the way modern software is built.” And I believe that’s because we used ETS, which is a testing company, not a tech company, to build the platform. And again, that has to do with the overly close relationship between NCES and ETS.

This is not just an Ed and contractor issue. We know this exists in other places besides education: the close relationship between the contractors and the agencies that are supposed to be supervising them. This is a well-known problem. The companies capture the government agency. [Editors Note: Asked to respond to Schneider’s comments, Christine Betaneli, an associate vice president at ETS, released the following statement Tuesday: “ETS delivers nearly 50 million tests every year across the US and around the world on robust technology platforms. We have consistently delivered innovations on NAEP suited to the specific requests of NCES. We’re incredibly proud of the unmatched quality we have provided to the American people in supporting the Nation’s Report Card. We will continue to innovate on behalf of America’s teachers, parents and children who rely on this critical data to improve access to quality education nationwide.”]

How do you prevent that from happening in the next iteration of this department? Is it just by bringing in totally new people? Is it by changing the contours of the contracts? Is it by doing things totally differently?

There are a couple of things. First of all, there’s a serious cultural issue. That’s clear. I will tell you another story, and this will give you some more depth to how bad this can be. When I first showed up at IES, we brought in [consulting firm] McKinsey & Co. to do an analysis of how to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the organization. They went around and interviewed people — staffers, program officers — to try to get some idea of what was going on. And remember, this is an outside consulting company we hired. They interviewed one of the program officers who said to this outside consultant, “I’m never giving up this contract. You will have to pry it out of my dead hands.” I mean, that’s a stupid thing to say, but it’s also illegal. This is a long-term project officer who admitted to an outside person that they had been totally captured, totally in bed with the contract shop. That a veteran project officer would say this to an outside consultant says there’s something really, really wrong.

So the culture is a problem. Is the scope of what the department does a problem as well? 

Yeah. 

Is a breakup necessary to change the culture?

Do we need to break up IES and move all these pieces around? If the goal is to shrink the department, or make the department go away, then we have to find homes for these activities. But when I wrote that last summer, I was not envisioning the disappearance of 90% of the workforce.

I believe if we don’t get congressional approval to end the department, it’s going to be around. But I keep thinking about both NCES and NCER, the two largest units, and there’s now an open field. I’ve always had problems with NCES. As a major federal statistical agency, like many other federal statistical agencies, they just kept falling further and further behind. But we can now imagine, we can actually execute, rebuilding NCES as a modern, lean and mean statistical agency.

For example, the state longitudinal data systems. I’ve written about a different vision of how to build that. The [Trial Urban District Assessments, NAEP tests given in 27 urban school systems] are incredibly expensive. Nobody can tell me how much they cost. I’ve asked many, many times how much they are, and the fact of the matter is, we don’t need them anymore, because we have other ways of getting estimates for these large cities. I’m talking about Tom Kane and Sean Reardon [who have developed an detailing achievement nationwide]. They compute the exact same statistics that TUDA does.

So that actually leads me to my next question: What is your vision for something like NAEP? Can a lot of it go away?

For me, the most important thing about NAEP is the state-by-state comparisons. They’re important because governors hold the keys to so much education reform, and they care about the comparisons. When NAEP came out several months ago, Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, they all cared about these things. Virginia had a 50-minute release event with the governor, [Virginia Education Secretary] Aimee Guidera and the Superintendent of Schools [Lisa Coons]. That’s three of the heaviest hitters in the world of education, all lined up, talking about the importance of the state-by-state comparisons and what they were doing to address Virginia’s on NAEP. 

That alone is an amazing demonstration of the power of the state-by-state comparisons. Do we need a $185 million-a-year NAEP to generate the trend line and the state-by-state comparisons? 

I’ll give you another example: There are at least three different sub-domains in NAEP math. I’ve never seen anybody talk about those sub-scores. How much does that cost? Why do we keep doing it? We just need to bring some sanity to what we’ve built over 50 years that have grown up over time, the cost of those things, the backwardness of many of those things, and say, “Hey, we don’t have to keep doing this.” And part of the reason we don’t have to keep doing this — I mean, it’s a sad thing to say — is because the people in NCES who were committed to this are gone. 

I don’t want to leave that point without addressing institutional memory and knowledge. A lot of the people who are gone know how these things work. Getting rid of those people might have changed the culture, but it also might have hollowed out the agency’s ability to get the next NAEP report out. Does that keep you up at night? 

Clearly, that’s the horns of a dilemma. But where is the time, where’s the energy, where are the people to rethink this stuff? Part of the problem was that there was not sufficient rethinking. The machine worked. It got out on time. Many problems were solved by just raising more money. I attended NAGB [National Assessment Governing Board] meetings for 10 years. Every time there was a budget presentation, inevitably, the budget was in the red. And so then we have to cut this, and we have to cut that. And it was never like, “What is it that we need to preserve, instead of going to Congress and asking for another $30 million and getting $10 million?” That wasn’t the thought process.

So I went to OMB [the Office of Management and Budget], and asked them to take the appropriation that Congress gave for NAEP and put 10% aside in a separate fund for R&D. I asked Congress to do this, and then OMB, because there was no commitment by the leadership of NCES and NAEP to spend that kind of money on R&D. Instead, it was always, “We need this money for the operations. We need money to do this other task.” As a result, NAEP lost its leading edge. The demands of running the operation are real. But if you never stop to think about what you’re doing, then you’re going to end up behind.

But to many, the way these agencies were trimmed doesn’t seem any smarter. There was a lot of cutting with a chainsaw rather than a scalpel. My sense is that’s going to require a great deal of work just to bring back basic functions. Am I right?

The years that I was at IES, I didn’t even have a scalpel. I had a dull butter knife. There are so many quotes about this: “Breaking things is easy, rebuilding things is hard.” From Hamilton: “Winning is easy, governing is hard.” All of that is true. And it’s just so much easier to just say, “No, no, no, no, no,” than to start rebuilding. Mancur Olson, a brilliant economist, wrote a book called . He had his finger right on the pulse. Over time, what happens is that you start accumulating all these lobbyists and all these interest groups and all this stasis, and it just builds up and builds up and nothing can get done, because you end up with this incredible superstructure of groups and people who are totally vested in the status quo. And he says, every once in a while, you just need to just blow the shit up and rebuild.

There’s a lot of concern about the rebuilding. How do you calm people’s fears that there is no rebuilding coming?

Look, there’s nothing we can do right now except wait and lobby Congress and the department that the rebuild is important. And I hope they know that the rebuild is important. Again, you can just give things away: Give NCES to BLS [the Bureau of Labor and Statistics] etc., but some of that stuff is going to require congressional action. Good luck on that. In some ways, again, we have an open field. Let’s take the opportunity to build that back in a much more modern, efficient way.

It seems like a lot of people, especially on the right, are talking in terms of the department reaching its sell-by date. But if you can change the culture and remove the barnacles, or whatever you want to call them, what’s the point of breaking it up?

As they say, that’s above my pay grade. [Laughs.] I’m writing a whole series of papers about what can be done and I think they’re all reasonable and in the realm of the possible. I have not had any contact with anybody in the department about any of my visions or plans. But there are ways to rebuild this so it looks like a modern science and statistics agency.

Would you like to lead it at some point?

If there’s anything there. [Laughs.] There’s nothing there. What do we have, 20 people left in that whole organization? NAGB is moving into [the Lyndon Baines Johnson Building, the department’s headquarters in Washington, D.C.] because it’s pretty much empty. And I assume IES will also end up moving into LBJ, but the fact of the matter is all of these places are ghost towns now.

Before the pandemic, we were trying to argue, incredibly, about creating 10 more desks for the growth of IES. And then, of course, after the pandemic, there was nobody left. Nobody came back to the office. The place was pretty much empty already. And then the executive order had everybody coming back to the office — and then everybody got fired. I don’t know what happened in between “You must be back in the office five days a week,” and “By the way, you’re fired.” I don’t know what it was like. I know from friends it was not a fun place to be.

If I’m reading between the lines correctly here, it sounds like you’d like to lead IES, but you’d like someone to rebuild it first.

First of all, I’m not answering that question. Many people have asked me if I would go back. But I have a lovely life. I live an eight-minute walk from AEI. AEI is a very generous organization. They’ve never said no to any reasonable request I’ve had, so it’s extremely pleasant, extremely easy. But I spent six years at IES. I tried really hard to modernize the place. For someone who wants to create the next version of IES, there are incredible challenges, but the rewards of doing it would be amazing. But they’ve already eviscerated the unit. Who wants to go in there and head a 20-person unit? But if there is a taste to rebuild IES to look like a modern organization, that’s a wonderful challenge. 

Could what you’re describing just as easily be done privately?

A lot of people are talking about that: How can philanthropy stand up and take over the role that IES used to have? Even the biggest foundations don’t have the kind of money IES had. IES spent over $100 million a year supporting education research, just from NCER. There’s no foundation that has that kind of money, and I’m not even sure if there’s a coalition of foundations that could come up with anywhere near that kind of money for research.

So there’s an indispensable role for research funded by IES or the Department of Education or some part of the federal government. But the return on that investment was not sufficient. I don’t know if part of the suspicion of IES was just a gut-level reaction to “Too big, too big, too big,” and how much of it was, “Hey, we have spent all these billions of dollars over the last 20 years and what have we got to show? We have declining NAEP scores. We don’t have any evidence of increasing achievement, etc, etc.” I’m not sure if the antagonism towards education research was because it wasn’t working or because it’s just that we were anti-science. I truly don’t know.

Years ago, we looked at how many math interventions have any evidence of success. It turned out to be about 15%. This was a very depressing number, until you start looking around at what the success rate is in any science: 10% of clinical trials work, 90% fail. And then of course, we’re learning that even among the 10% that work, there’s an incredible amount of dishonesty, lying, cheating. The “replication crisis” — we’ve glommed onto that term — says there’s a lot of stuff going on in the sciences that are not kosher. So at one level, the antipathy towards the Department of Education is, “This is not a function that the federal government should be involved in. This is all state and local.” O.K., I got that, and I believe a lot of that is true. But even in the most extreme form of federalism, there is a role for government support of research. There is a government role for statistics. And the question then is: How do we focus that to help states and local governments, parents, teachers, students achieve more? A lot of what happened was that that tight focal point just disappeared.  

If I’m translating what you’re saying correctly, you don’t know how we got to this point in terms of the mechanisms of the cuts, and you don’t know what people were thinking. But in a way, you’re saying it’s not really important, because we needed to get this done.

We needed to get this done. A lot of what was done was incredibly important and was needed. There’s no question about it. But we’re going to come back to the same theme over and over again: For six years I had a butter knife, and then these guys show up in a day with a chainsaw and they cleared out all the detritus and all the underbrush. But what do we do now? That’s what matters.

Bane, an English teacher at Alliance Susan & Eric Smidt Technology High School, drew from her deep belief in the power of reading to help students and teachers reclaim a sense of stability by launching a book drive to rebuild classroom and home libraries lost in the fires. 

Since her initial call for book donations on and only days after the wildfires started to spread, more than 14,000 new and gently used books have poured in from donors across the world. 

Teachers, parents and students can books with no set deadline or expiration date. 

The book initiative has also drawn widespread recognition, including from Congressman Jimmy Gomez, who Bane for her dedication to rebuilding affected classrooms. Gomez even joined volunteers in sorting and distributing books to impacted families at one of the local events. 

A longtime educator with nearly 20 years of experience, Bane has also been part of the literary world since 2019, first as a ghostwriter and now as a debut author with a YA novel, “,” set to release this summer. The writing community, which has long supported Bane’s work, quickly rallied behind her mission. Notable writers, including Veronica Roth, Emily A. Craig, Dahlia Adler and Julian Winters, contributed books and advanced copies to help restore classroom collections. 

Bane spoke with digital producer Trinity Alicia about the book drive initiative, the role of reading in times of natural disaster and how books can serve as powerful tools for healing and restoration.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

How did the book drive idea come to life? I’m curious about some of the conversations you may have had with others and even yourself — and how they shaped the idea.

My husband and I dropped off some necessities at different donation sites, and once those core essentials were taken care of, my mind immediately went to the teachers. I saw all these pictures of schools that had burned down … and now, those libraries are gone. I thought about my students, especially the kids who come into my classroom at lunch to read. Their books are their prized possessions, and I couldn’t help but wonder how they would feel if those sources of comfort were suddenly taken away.

While others were doing an amazing job meeting essential needs, I realized this could be a place where I could make a difference. I was about 2.8 miles from the nearest evacuation zone so beyond being nervous for our own home — there was a tense night where we thought we might need to evacuate — I knew that this was something I could do right now.

I posted my first initial post on Threads and Bluesky shortly after the wildfires started and said if anyone had lost books, we would get them books and to not worry because the offer didn’t expire. It started gaining some initial traction, and someone suggested creating a Google form. I thought, “as a teacher teacher, I love a Google form!” So, I made one and when I woke up, it had around 100,000 views. 

I nudged my husband and said, “Hey, so our house is about to become box city,” and he’s honestly been my first recruit in this process, helping me make deliveries, sort the books and even going with me to the post office to get book donations. 

When I needed a classroom library, I created a project on Donors Choose and the first person to donate was a young adult author. The writing and author community has been incredibly supportive of me … sending advance copies of books and whatever extra books they had around. It allowed me to build out a library for my students, giving them the resources they desperately needed. I knew that if I reached out this time, this community would show up for these teachers and readers, just as they have for me and my students for years.

How has the process been since receiving book donations?

The response has been quite a far reach, much farther than I was expecting. I’ve gotten multiple books and boxes from overseas like Australia, so that’s been really cool. It’s been quite a far reach, way farther than I was expecting. I thought only a handful of LA authors I knew would show up, but they came in a big way. I didn’t expect my P.O. box to be literally overrun, but I’m very happy that it is. I’ve been trying to manage the volume as best as I can.

Some teachers … have told me they’re retiring in June and asked if they could give their classroom libraries to someone when they retire. So far, we’ve distributed over 14,000 book donations.

We’ve been accepting books for all ages. For example, there was a preschool that burned down, and we dropped off three big boxes just to get them started, with plans to bring more. Those boxes primarily contained picture books and early chapter books. 

I believe so strongly in literacy and in getting kids a variety of books — whether it’s a portal into a different world or a character going through tough times like they are. 

When I first started teaching, I’d get boxes of classic literature, and while I love the classics, I know that handing a kid a book like “War and Peace” won’t help them love reading. I wanted students to have books that made them say, “Yeah, this is something I can do.” This was the same route I took with curating donations for teachers and classrooms across LA.

In your experience, how do books and reading provide stability and normalcy during chaotic times, especially for young people who may feel displaced due to the fires?

I remember looking at the books I read when my mom passed away. I’ve held onto some of the books in my personal library because there are memories attached to books. A book is a small yet significant thing that serve as anchors of what your life had before then you get to then rebuild around. It’s not going to feel normal for a long time, but I hope we’re giving people those anchors through these books. It’s not about the material things; it’s about giving them that comfort and sense of normalcy.

What has been the most rewarding part of running this book drive? Have you connected with any specific individuals or families that made this experience feel particularly impactful?

One of the best things has been seeing how many people are willing to come together and support each other … I knew I wouldn’t fully understand the grief that others were experiencing … I hadn’t lost my home or my school, but I knew I could be there for them … to help them get through it. Whether I’m sending one book for comfort or three boxes of books, I just want them to know this is one thing they don’t have to worry about and that we’ll take care of it.

There was one teacher I dropped off boxes for, and she just asked if she could hug me. Then she gave me cookies, and I thought, “That’s such a teacher thing to do.” She was taking the cookies to families in the neighborhood, and it made me feel grateful to be a teacher and to be in education. 

The idea of “resilience” often comes up in disaster recovery. How do you see literacy and books playing a role in building resilience for young readers in these communities? 

I teach in an area where over 90% of my students qualify for free or reduced lunch, and many of them are going to be the first in their families to go to college. The topic of resilience comes up a lot, and I’ve often been asked how I teach my students resilience and grit. The truth is, my students don’t need to be taught resilience. They have been resilient their entire lives and have faced challenges I can’t even imagine. 

If anything, they’ve taught me resilience, and I’m in awe of how they continue to persevere. When this situation happened I thought of the students in my classroom reading books after everything they’ve gone through, finding an escape. Some of my kids don’t get enough sleep because they don’t have a bedroom, and some work multiple jobs late into the night before coming to a full school schedule. These are the kids who disappear into books. 

Congratulations on your debut novel coming out! How do you balance civic duties as an author and a teacher?

Everything that had seemed so important with the book just didn’t feel as important anymore in light of everything else going on. It’s not that the book isn’t important to me — I’m incredibly excited and proud of it, but it’s had to take a backseat to this work because … this is the most vital and urgent. I’m so grateful for the way people have been responding, and it’s been overwhelming in the best way.

What does teaching reading in Los Angeles mean to you? 

One of my proudest moments came when a former student messaged me after seeing someone post about the book drive. They wanted to donate, saying, “Your class is the one that made me love reading, so I want to pass this on.” I was so happy. But I know that wouldn’t have happened without a library, without books to choose from. If they don’t have access to those books, they don’t build that confidence. 

The director of the Institute for Education Policy at Johns Hopkins University, she thinks that language presumes too much about how education should be delivered in a free country. Sure, it seems to suggest, there are options out there — Catholic schools, charter schools, Montessori schools, take your pick — but the default is the local public school into which families are zoned. Anything else is just an anomaly.

Many other nations, including some that have been operating schools for much longer than the United States, don’t see it that way.

Just 30 percent of Dutch children attend their equivalent of district schools, with the rest enrolled in a variety of secular and parochial academies that all receive support from the state. Australia’s federal government is the most significant funder of private education, helping to subsidize the tuition of a huge number of economically disadvantaged students. Singapore, perhaps the most famous academic powerhouse in the world, directly funds private and religious schools attended by a diverse mix of pupils.

The overarching concept is one Berner calls “educational pluralism”: Governments don’t favor one system or model, but all are held to common academic standards. Parents can send their kids to an Islamic school, but they must learn the tenets of Christianity and Judaism as well; similarly, students at creationist-minded institutions have to demonstrate knowledge of the processes of evolution in their biology classes.

The idea is unfamiliar to most Americans, who grew up in school communities that all straddled a central divide of private versus public. Those favoring secular instruction have recoiled at the thought of public aid flowing to religious institutions since the end of the 19th century. Meanwhile, many critics of the ubiquitous district public school also seek independence from state control and accountability, even if it comes with funding attached.

The last few years have seen an explosion in school choice systems, including the streak of red states establishing education savings accounts, which grant families money to spend on schooling costs, including private tuition. This spring, in the ultimate clash of public authority and private conscience, the U.S. Supreme Court will rule on the constitutionality of a proposed Catholic charter school in Oklahoma.

Donald Trump’s return to the presidency seems likely to escalate the tension between warring camps. But in her 2024 book, Educational Pluralism and Democracy, Berner argues that a considered embrace of diverse worldviews can actually be a salve to cultural conflict by separating two key functions of schooling. No matter where they attend class, all children receive academic instruction in core subjects like math, literacy, science, geography, and languages. But the work of imparting ideals and moral values can differ according to the preferences of families. At the heart of pluralism, she says, is the acknowledgment that schools are character-forming institutions by necessity.

“Education cannot be neutral,” Berner said. “It’s going to inculcate some values in children, however thin.

In an extended conversation with The 74’s Kevin Mahnken, the author and academic spoke about the possibilities for more pluralism in the wake of the national ESA wave, the unexpected consequences of the end of school prayer, and why she feels schools get it wrong by trying to build students’ skills instead of knowledge.

You’ve been writing about the idea of educational pluralism for some time now. What led you to it?

Ashley Rogers Berner: I came to educational pluralism because of the shock of living in another country and realizing that their framework for education was entirely different from ours.

I went to Oxford to get my doctorate when my children were in elementary school. When it came time to enroll them in schools, I was confronted with a panoply of state-funded options. And it didn’t take long to realize that this division we’re so familiar with in the States, public versus private, just didn’t apply. The Anglican Church was the top local provider of elementary education, but there was a state-funded Jewish school down the street. There was a Montessori school, all kinds of secular schools.

At the same time, my doctoral research allowed me to learn a lot about how schools were funded in the 19th century. That’s how I discovered that the U.K. has funded educational pluralism since 1833, and they were taking their cues from Prussia, and the Netherlands has been on a similar journey since the time of the American Revolution.

I realized, “This could change our whole conversation.” This zero-sum game of pitting sectors against each other is not only dysfunctional, it’s actually rare. We’re the outliers.

You say something similar in one of the book’s early chapters, describing pluralism as “countercultural” to what we do in the United States. Why is that?

It’s countercultural in two respects.

First, a plural system assumes a certain level of diversity by design. It assumes that the government should not dictate students’ beliefs and values, so you need to support a variety of institutions. The fact that that is taken for granted is totally countercultural to what we expect of education, including the binary of public versus private. Even the language of “school choice” derives from an expectation that the district school is the only carrier of public education, and any departure is basically asking for an exception from that. I don’t tend to use the word “choice,” even though it’s the American terminology, because it just reinforces those assumptions.

And just as important, it’s countercultural because of the importance of shared content taught in schools. At its very best, a plural system is one in which the ethos of each school should be distinctive — but there is also some kind of shared academic material across all kinds of schools. That’s how you fulfill the civic mission of public funding for education, by having some basic content in common in order to teach kids to exercise effective citizenship. Some examples would be historical documents, the geography of the country and the world, the markers of history, comparative religion and ethics, basic literary references, etc.

That second aspect goes against the grain of what we do in the United States because our teaching profession has opted in favor of skills and process over content for 100 years. Many of our teachers have come up in a system that says that learning something specific is less important than learning how to learn and that setting goals for knowledge-building is somehow oppressive. It’s countercultural to say that building knowledge really, really matters for closing achievement gaps.

I’ve sometimes considered it strange that kids learn very different material depending on where they live. But it sounds like you’re saying that’s only half the picture: Teaching differs a lot across state lines, but our system is also very rigid about only wanting to fund local public schools, plus the occasional charter.

That’s right, and I think it’s a losing proposition to offer children a really uniform structure and really eclectic content. Wealthy kids are going to be better off in any system because their families take them to museums and talk to them about the world all the time. But this is really the worst of all possible worlds for first-generation, low-income families: There’s a rigid structure in which parents do not have agency about where they enroll their children, but also really patchy content where kids miss whole areas in the English curriculum.

The uniform structure was built by design after the Civil War, and it was the product of an unholy alliance between nativist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Republican Party. Up to that point, we had funded all different kinds of schools, but there was suddenly concern that all these Catholic immigrants just couldn’t become competent citizens, and all the variation between schools was going to undermine democratic formation. So lawmakers at the state level decided to defund “sectarian” schools — which meant Catholic schools — and only fund district schools. But those same state legislatures then turned around and required that district schools be, in effect, Protestant institutions with Protestant prayers and Protestant Bibles.

To me, this history makes the core point of pluralism: Education cannot be neutral. It’s going to inculcate some values in children, however thin. And interestingly, one of the big Progressive complaints about district schools is that — because they can’t answer some of the deeper questions with explicit moral frameworks — they unintentionally reinforce the baseline culture of the United States of individualism and utilitarianism. It’s just going to default to whatever the cultural majority is.

Whatever schools do to build character, or civic virtue, or whatever, doesn’t seem to be producing great results. There was a really startling survey in 2023 showing huge declines, among younger adults especially, in the importance attached to patriotism, family formation, hard work, and community involvement. Meanwhile, well over half of Generation Z has said they would choose to be a social media influencer over any other career.

I’d make two points. One is that the civic outcomes we care about, whether it’s volunteering or civic participation or affirming others’ right to disagree with your views, are learned behaviors that have to be explicitly taught. And we’re not doing that; classrooms aren’t really places marked by a lot of deliberation and debate.

But it’s also true that those outcomes are the byproducts of deeper sets of belief and moral frameworks about what it means to be human. For a long time, Catholic high schools have been great at producing graduates who give back to their communities. It’s very difficult to analyze what about that is coming from the direct influence of schools, but eminent researchers like James Coleman and Tony Bryk have looked at the data and said, “There’s something about this organic community that forms a certain kind of person.”

You can’t control people’s beliefs, and you can’t control outcomes. But in the aggregate, you can make it more likely that your students have a sense of duty to something outside themselves.

You list a lot of places — England, Australia, the Netherlands, Israel, Hong Kong, Belgium — in which the government directly funds private schools, including parochial schools. But do those countries deal with the same constitutional issues we face in the United States? Things may be changing at the Supreme Court, but my guess is that until very recently, the Establishment Clause would have been a massive obstacle.

That’s a fair question. Obviously, England has a state church. But the Netherlands has had a secular constitution since the end of the 18th century, and they’re the most pluralistic system in the world. They fund 36 different kinds of schools!

The argument for pluralism is not a religious argument. It’s a principled argument about political philosophy and the role of civil society, but not one that gives special pleading to religion. The Anglican Church is a huge provider of elementary education in England, yes. But in another pluralistic country, Sweden, only 3 percent of non-state schools are religious because the population is mostly secular and doesn’t want those schools. It varies quite a bit.

But in a country like the U.S., there would presumably be a huge appetite for direct government funding of Christian schools. And the political opposition to that kind of shift would also be huge, right?

There’s the reality of our separation of church and state, and there’s the mythology of it. When you look at the Supreme Court decisions over the last century, there have consistently been mechanisms that allow state funds to flow to civil society organizations that include religious institutions.

The landmark ruling with respect to schools was Zelman v. Simons-Harris [the 2002 case in which a conservative majority ruled that Ohio’s school voucher program did not violate the Establishment Clause], where the Supreme Court said very clearly that these programs are constitutional as long as the state laws authorizing them are neutral. In other words, if the state law sets out to give low-income kids either state funding or tax credit funds to go to a private school, it’s constitutionally viable even if every school that families choose is religious. It’s robust because it’s the result of private decisions.

There are now lots of state mechanisms that support private schools. Florida has had a tax credit program for 20 years, the outcomes of which have been studied by the Urban Institute. Low-income kids who attended private schools on tax credit support scholarships had higher college-going and college graduation rates than their peers. Indiana has had something similar for a long time. And this isn’t just in conservative states. Illinois had a bipartisan tax credit for a brief episode. D.C. has one. A state as blue as Maryland has one, with a built-in requirement that money can’t go to a school that discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.

So there are a lot of levers that states can use. What you want is for high-quality private schools to participate, but you can’t impose so many regulations that the best schools opt out.

How long have American kids mostly attended public schools that are, as you put it, “uniform” in their outlook? You draw attention to an event that I haven’t thought much about in the context of education policy: the Supreme Court’s 1962 ruling in Engel v. Vitale, which banned school prayer. What was the importance of that decision?

Public education had a particular kind of uniformity from the end of the 19th century. After that, public schools were basically Protestant institutions all the way through 1962, when the Supreme Court effectively secularized them.

Up to that point, they were uniform, vaguely Protestant schools, and if you were Protestant, you probably didn’t notice it. But if you were Catholic, Jewish, atheist, or Jehovah’s Witness, you knew that the schools your children attended were values-laden institutions that reflected the majority culture. Following Engel v. Vitale, schools were still uniform, but now they were secular.

That was when you started to see the evangelical grievance about taking God out of public schools. That cultural animus came from a decision that I think was completely correct, but evangelicals experienced a sense of loss.

It seems like that moment unsettled a lot of families who had unconsciously believed that public schools were meant to embody their own worldview and values. And throughout the 1960s and ’70s, you start seeing the origins of what will become the movement for both school choice and homeschooling.

You’re right that those decisions in the 1960s spawned a whole host of church-based schools to spring up, including evangelical schools. There was some religious homeschooling as well.

But there was also a concurrent movement on the progressive side that was called “deschooling.” When you look at the history of the homeschooling wave, it included evangelical pietists as well as people in the hippie culture, who thought school bureaucracies were oppressive and conformist. I wrote a report last spring that looked at the criticisms of district schools that grew out of the Left during those years, and it was interesting to note the parallels.

The school choice movement has gotten a lot thicker. There’s a whole strain that emerged among progressives who were concerned that district schools weren’t serving African Americans well, and that helped build the charter movement. Even long before that, there were Freedom Schools in the South in the ’60s. Some of the biggest champions of educational pluralism were radicals in that period. Look at Howard Fuller, who eventually launched Milwaukee’s voucher program. He was a civil rights activist, and he’ll still say, “Let this community regulate its own schools.”

You write that the case for educational pluralism is connected to a need for more emphasis on knowledge and content-rich teaching in schools. You’re arguing that knowledge has been crowded out, to an extent, by things that have variously been called “social adjustment” or “21st century skills” or “social-emotional learning.”

In the book, I call it, “anything but the academic curriculum.”

The consequence of that long-term trajectory toward teaching skills, which has been written about by people like E.D. Hirsch and Diane Ravitch and Natalie Wexler, is that we have generations of teachers who haven’t worked in knowledge-building classrooms. When my colleagues at the Institute for Education Policy work with states to help them adopt high-quality curricular materials, we also try to push them to allocate resources toward professional development so that classroom leaders know how to teach it well.

The great thing about a historically pluralistic system like the U.K. is that they have both a large variety of schools and a knowledge-rich curriculum. The people leading classrooms had to pass serious exit exams to graduate and demonstrate that they actually knew the content they were going to teach, whether it’s history or philosophy or English. So there’s a virtuous cycle where young people learn a certain amount of shared content; they have to pass content-specific exams to graduate; then they get more of the same while preparing to be teachers in university. And by the time they’re in a classroom talking to an eight-year-old about the Greeks and Romans, they’re confident in that knowledge.

In the United States, we haven’t had the same virtuous cycle. So there’s a lot of work to do, including in professional development.

Do you think the way we approach instruction has something to do with the way the teaching profession is thought of in the States? A lot of teacher training seems to prepare them in disciplines like child development and theories of pedagogy, rather than just pushing lots of academic content that they can later teach to kids.

I spent a lot of time studying the history of teacher training institutions in the U.K. Going back many years, they were seen as both cultural and academic institutions that tried to impart cultural experience to teachers — many of whom came from the lower-middle classes in England — as well as knowledge. In the United States, these programs also had these two functions of building up knowledge and expanding access to cultural experiences such as theater or live debate.

But there was a shift within the profession that eventually led to the emphasis of skills over knowledge. In the early 20th century, there were voices within the field of teacher preparation that wanted programs to be based in universities as opposed to local communities. The key lens was essentially meant to be child psychology, so by the ’20s and ’30s, everything became very influenced by the psychoanalytic model, and teachers were supposed to know all about Freud and child development. That kind of thing became the currency of teacher preparation.

England actually also went down that path, but the ministry of education kept the curriculum knowledge-based. So whatever else was going on in the training programs, aspiring teachers had graduated high school with subject-matter expertise. They came back from the brink, but we haven’t here in the States. To this day, our teaching programs are not institutions that really promote knowledge building. Just look at the science of reading.

How do these dynamics influence policy discussions? It’s unclear how this debate involves teachers’ unions, for example.

There’s dogmatism on both the left and the right. On the left, it’s tied into the unions and their claim to sole authority — that only the district schools, which they run, are legitimate. And on the right, you have the argument that parent autonomy is the desired end goal, that it’s sufficient to determine school quality and the government has no legitimate role.

We need to push against both those dogmas because they’re distorting of what healthy school systems need in the long term. That’s why I’m attracted to the pluralist vision: It acknowledges the rightful role for the parent, it acknowledges the rightful role of the state, and it locates the delivery of education in civil society and voluntary associations. No system is perfect, but I think this vision does a good job encompassing all of those realms. It’s a third way.

Do you think it’s a philosophy that is so attractive that most developed countries are just inevitably going to adopt it?

I’m on the board of an NGO [non-governmental organization] that works on educational pluralism and has privileges at the U.N. I’ve learned so much just from the U.N. covenants that affirm the rights of cultural minorities to enroll their children in schools that reflect their values — and the obligation of the state to ensure quality. Both of those things are there, and they’re both practiced in so many countries.

Internationally, the historic practice in many, many countries has been to support nonprofits and religious groups to deliver education. According to UNESCO, 171 out of 204 countries are pluralistic in some fashion. But there is a huge pressure against those funding systems, and it’s coming from both the international teachers’ unions and a number of NGOs that have some animus against religion.

There have been a lot of conversations at UNESCO wrestling with these questions. What do you lose if you say that only the state can deliver education, and how does that comport with the organization’s human rights documents? So these arguments are very much international.

Where are you looking for signs about the future viability of a more pluralistic system? It seems as though there’s still room for growth in state ESA systems, and the Supreme Court has taken up the case of a proposed Catholic charter school in Oklahoma.

I’m not someone who thinks that all school choice systems have to offer religious options, and I don’t think that more state funding for private schools is contingent on that Oklahoma case. The funding is already happening, and there’s a wide array of state policies making it possible.

You’ve got Iowa, where ESAs can be applied to any private school. I’m personally a little more skeptical of the ESA in places like Arizona or Florida, where parents get a lump sum and a huge menu of options. I’m skeptical that that’s sufficient quality control to drive better outcomes. No doubt it’ll work fine for most families, but will it work for a majority of families? Will it actually change academic outcomes? I’m not sure it will.

What I’m hoping will happen is that the momentum to expand options will be met with a reasonable concern for academic quality. That’s where centrist Democrats can come along and be supportive. The teachers’ union was able to kill the school choice legislation that went through in Illinois, but that law was bipartisan. There was support for more funding for district schools, funding for tax credits for low-income kids to go to private schools, and the requirement of an assessment for those students.

I think that’s a reasonable approach. I’m looking for the grand bargains that can sustain education into the future. For me, it’s not just about destroying the situation we have; it’s about making sure that all families can choose among good options.

How would you accomplish that? Should big school choice expansions always be accompanied by a curricular or accountability reform, including testing if necessary?

Texas is actually doing this. They’re starting to change their curriculum, and while they’re unlikely to command all funded schools to use some individual curriculum, there are ways of incentivizing the use of better curricula across the board and testing the knowledge base.

In places like Texas, the horse is out of the barn. It’s going to be a school choice state. The question is, how do you protect quality in the long run? Should all participants have to take a nationally norm-referenced test? Most private schools require their students to do that and report the scores to the state. But if you’ve got a plug-and-play ESA model where parents can buy a trampoline here, a homeschooling curriculum there, it’s pretty hard to ensure that children are getting an appropriate education. So in my view, you have to test outcomes.

We all get attached to things that don’t serve us well, and that’s true of parents and schools along with everything else. Even a miserable school, whether it’s public or private or charter, can win the affection of parents who don’t want to shut it down. So it seems like an appropriate goal of public policy to make sure that bad providers don’t get into the market to begin with.

Look at the Drexel Fund, which helps high-quality, low-cost private schools scale up. Well, if I were expanding access to private schools, I would want those Drexel Fund schools to be able to grow rapidly in my state. We should go where the high performance is, where there’s already attention to detail and quality. We simply don’t have enough good seats right now.

What was so great about Florida is that they built it slowly, and the market responded. There are schools for autistic kids, schools for kids with dyslexia. But it’s taken time. We need stability around high-quality providers, and we need to remember that we’re educating for a purpose: civic preparation, academic capability, and social mobility. If we’re not doing those things, we’re failing.

We have to keep these purposes in mind. There’s confusion around some of these points because of the political dogmas on both sides. To teachers’ unions, I would say that the key question can’t just be how school choice will affect district schools. District schools are a means to the end. I also would say to libertarians that parental choice and autonomy is a means, not the end itself.

A 30-year educator in the Compton Unified School District, Inge is a and . 

He also taught Lamar’s 7th-grade English class at Vanguard Learning Center, where he shape Lamar’s academic foundation, introducing him to poetry, nurturing his ability to think critically and developing his passion for language. Now, Lamar’s an award-winning, internationally renowned hip hop artist.

Back in the classroom, Inge used to talk to Lamar about the importance of using his platform to drive change – an idea that would resonate throughout the rapper’s career. Lamar’s journey from Compton to earning and a reflects values that deeply resonate with Inge’s classroom philosophy: hard work, creativity and ability to balance education and talent. 

Now, joining the list of achievements is Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show performance, which Inge says is “a salute to Black history and an opportunity for millions of people to witness Lamar’s dynamic artistry.” It a bigger audience than the game itself, is officially the most-watched halftime show performance of all time and the first show with a solo rapper to , according to the Apple Music.

Inge spoke with The 74’s Trinity Alicia about how Lamar’s academic foundation laid the groundwork for his storytelling success and how it continues to inspire his students in Compton.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

When it was announced that Kendrick Lamar would perform at the Super Bowl, what was your first emotion?   

I had a great feeling of joy to know someone who has honestly put in the work gets to be at the level he’s at and the stage he was going to be on. The city felt good. My students felt good. It was a circle of joy.   

Everyone was so happy for him because it was a chance for millions of people to see just how dynamic this person really is. It was a perfect example of how putting in hard work gets you great outcomes. It gave me a sense of pride to know he worked hard to be rewarded with this opportunity. He deserved to be there.  

How did you feel when you saw the halftime show?

My initial feeling was that it was a message he was trying to send to both America and to the hip hop culture in itself. There was a lot of thought put into each aspect of the show, and I’m proud of how it all came together because he did exactly what I know he’s supposed to be doing — teaching and sending messages to others. It was an awesome feeling for me as his former English teacher.   

What do you see as the major themes in his performance? Do you think there’s particular significance that those themes were performed at that particular Super Bowl in our current political climate?  

The major theme I saw in the Super Bowl performance was to wake up and understand what’s going on from an African-American perspective and a people of color perspective. The different stages, different colors, different movements, each song and each skit he did — even down to Samuel L. Jackson’s performance — it was so clear that everything was intentional.  

It was a teachable moment for those who wanted to look more deeply at what exactly Lamar was saying. And to me, it all made sense because I know he loves to debate — not so much a matter of right and wrong — but the meaning behind things and why it impacts people. So I feel he went into this wanting people to analyze and discuss the performance.  

Do you see parallels between your role as a Black male educator and what Lamar does with his art?   

Yes! I see one great parallel between what Lamar does and what I do — and it’s something I used to talk to him about — which is using your platform. I have a platform in the classroom and he has a platform on the stage. My platform is to give students wisdom, encouragement and understanding of what the future could look like for them. On stage, Lamar’s platform is to express what it feels like to live in an inner city, for those who have never been to an inner city, and to give people hope. A lot of his music deals with hope. It may not come in the way people expect, the music may have some colorful words every now and then, but at the end of the day, it’s about expression. I’m very happy he’s using his platform to share hope and not expressing negative aspects of hip hop that can sometimes come from the big stage.  

This Black History Month, are there any teachable moments that can be extracted from the halftime performance?  

The art of creativity. African-Americans were historically stripped of their creativity when brought over to this country, and here we are in the present where I feel the renaissance is coming back out and through hip hop — which is a creative outlet on its own — in music.  

When I saw all of the intentional choreography, I felt Lamar used the halftime show performance as a whole to salute Black history and I believe it was presented from the standpoint of how, from the beginning of our existence in this country, our poise and livelihood as Black-Americans flourishes when we are being creative.

Tell us about Lamar as a student. What unique qualities did he exhibit as a student, if any? Was there any indication early on that he had exceptional potential? 

One of the things I remember about him is that he was very quiet, which may be a little strange for others to hear considering this megastar can get on stage in front of hundreds of thousands of people to perform song after song. But when I taught him in the seventh grade, I felt he was academically sound for his age and just needed someone to push him in the right direction. 

I spent a lot of time instilling in Lamar that vocabulary is super important. When my students go out and speak in public, I want them to be prepared to use language comparable to their age group. So for his assignments, I would circle words on his paper he could improve on and give him a thesaurus to identify synonyms for those words to deepen his vocabulary. I told him I wanted him to have a little shock level because there is an understanding that people from Compton are not going to have the best profile. But I remember telling him I wanted him to be able to show people through his speech that he is sharp, strong, an academic … and not someone who is only successful on YouTube and on social media. 

How do you help students connect to their creativity and writing with activism and social justice? How do you think this shaped Lamar as the artist we know today?   

Connection with students is extremely important to me as an educator. I believe in this connection because it helps me understand how my students operate and I’m able to have a plan on how to individually impact each one of their lives both in and out of the classroom.  

It’s also very important for me to understand culture. I need to know what’s going on at home and their environments because I am aware I can’t teach everyone the same. When students believe in you just like you believe in them, you create a family dynamic in the classroom. I have always been a family-oriented teacher and once I have a student in my class, they are family forever. 

In that same dynamic with Lamar, he understands that people are going through things and wants to create music that makes people dance, but also invites listeners to think about their surroundings and to remind them there is a light out of the struggle if they work hard.

In your classroom, how do you encourage students to imagine, create and push boundaries in their own work? How do you believe Lamar’s schooling and upbringing in Compton translate into his character and art in the current political climate?  

One thing I do in my class when we are doing any type of creative writing, I tell students I will take the boundaries off of their assignments. That means if an essay or poem they’re writing causes them to say a word that isn’t deemed appropriate for school — as long as they don’t say it too many times — then it’s okay because I want them to say what they truly feel. Poetry is all about the five senses, and that in particular is not something I need to teach, but I just like to remind them of this so that when they are writing, they can reflect on their experiences and emotions. What I don’t want them to do is mute themselves so that what they’re writing isn’t what they feel.

I encouraged Lamar in the same way. At that time, many of my students were coming to school very angry and if something causes trauma, frustration or an inertia of energy building up, students have to be able to get it out. Expanding the boundaries in class was the thing that helped. 

Lamar’s music, especially in his later albums, has been known to be deeply shaped by themes of social change, inequality, activism and criticism of politicians. Do you think you saw the beginnings of this in his early writings in classroom assignments or discussions? 

I didn’t really see writings of social consciousness from Lamar. When you’re in the seventh grade, you’re typically going off of what the teacher is assigning. But I remember his passion for writing was unique and different from his classmates. Some of his writings were a little more thought-provoking. What happens is when you’re focused on writing and passionate about your writing, as you get older and start to see more outside of your city, surroundings and community, you will start to see gaps. When you start to see gaps, when you start to feel frustration. When you start to feel frustration, you start to express it. 

With Lamar, he expressed his feelings in class through his writing and does the same thing as an artist. Now, we are here today with someone who is expressing a full emotional closet, from his joy to his insecurities to his trauma throughout his music.

Compton Unified has recently been ranked first in reading performance, surpassing pre-pandemic levels in both math and reading, according to the Ed Recovery Scorecard. Given Lamar’s rise from Compton to global recognition, how do you think his journey can inspire students in fostering the art of storytelling? 

One thing I feel that our students of today can be inspired by Lamar’s journey is to understand the art of working hard and being passionate. Even though students are doing well, they need to continue to work hard.

Sometimes social media waters down the art of working hard to achieve goals. Since I know Lamar personally, I have the ability to give students a bird’s eye view of what it takes on a day-to-day basis to earn Grammys and to be the first hip hop artist to be given a Pulitzer Prize winner, which is no small feat. 

I give my students an understanding of how many hours it could take for Lamar and his team to make one song or the amount of songs he writes that fans will never get to hear on the radio. This is about a lifelong journey of trying to do your best in every aspect of your life. 

I use Lamar as a [symbol] of hope because he came from Compton. And while my students may not become a Kendrick Lamar, perform on stage or emerge into a world-renowned artist, I want them to understand what it takes to get to a level of success to be world-renowned in other industries and professions. 

What’s something that most of the world probably doesn’t know about Lamar?  

I’m most proud of the person Lamar is off stage. I love the man he’s become and the person he is striving to be.

When I taught him, he enjoyed being around his friends and sat next to his cousin in my class. Now, I can see the same regard for relationships in his life. He likes to be present with family. He doesn’t mind being vulnerable with himself and others he trusts in order to share about the insecurities he’s working on. It’s why I feel his music is very genuine … it’s debatable, you can talk about it and you can teach it. There are so many emotions that can be translated from his music. 

I don’t know how I would feel if I taught an artist and the nature of music was very negative and went against everything I believed as a person. But I thank God I get the privilege of being associated with someone who is out here, making an impact, making music that gives people hope and encourages them.  

It worked. Reimbursements rose from $1.7 million in state funds to 41 providers in 2017 to to 328 providers in state and Medicaid funds through the Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention benefit in 2023.

Most of those new centers engaged in applied behavior analysis. ABA is an intensive behavior modification technique that aims to make autistic children act more like their typically developing peers by “extinguishing” certain traits through compliance with specific repeated commands. (A 74 investigation last year demonstrated that there is no reliable data to show the treatment works, and that it may actually cause harm to patients.)

Last year, the FBI began investigating whether some of those treatment centers have defrauded Medicaid, billing for services never provided. Though investigators have not said how many for-profit centers they are looking into or who their clients are, many are believed to enroll the children of East African immigrants, who are particularly vulnerable because of the lack of culturally appropriate services. There are also indications the alleged fraudsters may have ties to defendants in the country’s largest , in which nonexistent food distribution sites supposedly created to provide children with meals during COVID-related school closures billed the state for hundreds of millions of dollars.

As the 2025 legislative session gets underway, state lawmakers are holding hearings on proposals to tighten oversight. Most of the testimony has centered on to require services to be provided by licensed professionals in safe settings. But some autism advocates have expressed concern that those standards will entrench ABA as the dominant approach — one that, among other things, is replacing other special education services in schools — instead of supporting alternatives that they say are more effective and humane.     

One of those who testified is Native American Jules Edwards, the autistic parent of three autistic youth, ages 11, 19 and 21, and a member of the Anishinaabe Eagle Clan. After , she told a state Senate committee that ABA is not a therapy, but “a specific methodology that was created by the same people that created gay conversion therapy.”  

Right now, providers are not required to be licensed; are allowed to describe employees who may have only a high school diploma as therapists; and are not held to the same safety standards as even home day care centers, Edwards testified. “Despite the ABA industry lobbying for more power over the autism community, they need their power restricted until they can prove with empirical and independent evidence that they are doing what they claim they are doing” in terms of providing effective, safe services.  

Edwards recently expanded on her testimony in an interview with The 74. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What motivated you to testify?

When my children were diagnosed with autism, I threw myself into research. I learned about autism and I learned about interventions. I learned from professionals, parents and autistic adults that autism is a social, communication and sensory disability, and not a behavioral disorder. I learned that applied behavior analysis is a behavior modification program that requires autistic children to suppress their natural way of being in order to please the adults around them. 

That didn’t make sense to me. Why wouldn’t we want to address any underlying needs first? Typically, autistic kids specifically need to learn the why, because we’re bottom-up learners. We like to gather information about things before taking action. But ABA requires a top-down, authoritative approach, where autistic children are not allowed to ask why. They are required to comply with authority, and that poses a lifelong danger to that child. 

Testifying was an opportunity to highlight the fraud, waste and abuse that happens within the ABA industry. American taxpayers pay billions of dollars per year to enrich private equity investors under the guise of an autism therapy that works. However, ABA isn’t a therapy, and it hasn’t been proven to improve quality of life. 

The Department of Defense’s 2020 reported that 76% of children in ABA showed no improvement after one year, 16% had improved, but 9% were worse after a year of treatment. That really brings into question the cost-effectiveness of ABA. When we’re talking about fraud and waste of Medicaid dollars or taxpayer dollars generally, we need to be honest about the actual outcomes. 

But there’s little oversight. The state doesn’t require health and safety procedures, behavior guidance, standards, first aid, CPR. They aren’t required to have a mental health response, crisis response or suicide intervention plan. They don’t have to provide culturally responsive treatment practices. 

A 5-year-old child was just in a hyperbaric chamber in an unaccredited ABA center in Troy, Michigan. The chamber exploded with the child inside, and he passed away.  We know that hyperbaric chambers aren’t actually a treatment or cure for autism or anything like that. It’s not approved by the FDA. If there was oversight, if there was licensing, if there were safety requirements that prevented this kind of alternative treatment it could have saved that boy’s life. 

The state’s suggests “modern” ABA has largely stopped using punishments to discourage certain behaviors. But I have heard parents and autistic adults who have experienced ABA say it is still coercive. Can you give us an example?

Planned ignoring, which is a technique used in ABA, basically denies the humanity of the child who is subjected to it. When we’re children, whether you’re autistic or not, and you’re hanging out with another kid, and the other kid is pretending you don’t even exist, it’s dehumanizing. But now, within ABA, the adults do that to the children.

Say a child is throwing a toy that they shouldn’t be throwing. They may not be hurting anybody. They might be throwing it because they like the sound. It could be stimming [the term for a repetitive sound or motion an autistic person may use for emotional regulation or to express ]. It could be anything. The adult doesn’t want the child to play with the toy that way. 

They might try other interventions before planned ignoring, but then the child is being ignored completely, whether the child is trying to gain the attention of the behavior tech or not. This can cause increased “behaviors” of the child escalating, trying to gain that attention. But no matter how much the child tries, the adult is not going to give in.

We can see how frustrating that must be, particularly if that’s a child who may be struggling with communication and may not say, ‘Hey, I really want to play ball right now.’ That kid is maybe unable to ask for what they want, or the way that they’re asking is a behavior that the behavior tech doesn’t like.

Is there a danger that as the state creates standards and licensing procedures to protect children, it will further codify this industry as the dominant treatment? 

Absolutely. ABA is currently the dominant treatment. They have lobbyists. They absolutely can persuade legislators to further empower the industry. Because they have the most money, they have the most power right now. 

A lot of the research about ABA, claiming it’s the gold standard treatment, etc., is funded by and conducted by the people who profit from it. We need to be sure that decision makers are looking at facts and data and information that isn’t that doesn’t involve a conflict of interest. It’s really important that we refer to outside, independent researchers, like the Department of Defense study.

There was a push at one point for board-certified behavior therapists [credentialed ABA supervisors] in Minnesota to be able to diagnose autism. They would then be able to enroll those children in their services. That is dangerous, because children who need a diagnosis need to go to an actual medical professional and have other conditions ruled out. They need to be evaluated for potential co-occurring conditions, etc. If a behavior therapist is able to diagnose autism, but they can’t diagnose anything else, then all of that child’s underlying conditions or additional conditions may be overlooked. 

If my children didn’t have full-team neuropsych evaluations, I wouldn’t know about their learning disabilities, and I wouldn’t know how to provide support. I wouldn’t know how to advocate for my children in school. My child used to be punished for his writing disability until we learned, through that neuropsych evaluation, there’s a dysgraphia issue. So let’s provide writing prompts. Let’s provide support for writing. Let’s provide adaptations and assistive technology. If he only had an autism diagnosis, that would have been met with behaviorism, he would have been rewarded for doing well, punished for struggling, and he wouldn’t have had access to the tools that he needs. 

There are definitely other treatments that don’t have that same level of influence but may be more effective, may be more humanizing. A lot of those are not as widely available. 

Many kids spend half or or all of their day in an ABA center rather than in a school where their learning would be attended to.

It’s a problem that begins in preschool. Children are often pushed out of public schools when a school or preschool doesn’t have the knowledge or resources to care for the child. They say, “Maybe this isn’t the best fit for you.” That’s something that my family has heard from our local public school. That’s not really a thing that a special education director should be saying to any family, and we should be concerned about the people who are most marginalized in our communities. When those kids are excluded from public schools, parents are often left with very few options. 

ABA centers market themselves as being able to help children to gain skills and become more independent. But if that were so, why isn’t inclusion in public schools the ultimate goal of ABA centers? ABA centers are not schools. They’re not accredited to provide education. There are very few ABA centers that have transition paths or goals for kids to move out of ABA and into mainstream schools. Instead, many children remain in ABA, sometimes throughout high school, deprived of the opportunity to learn what their peers are learning. It’s a form of educational neglect. 

Children in ABA often aren’t allowed to learn the most basic things. For example, [behavior therapists] often dissuade spelling to communicate, which means that they’re not encouraging autistic kids in ABA to even learn the alphabet. They aren’t taught literacy, they aren’t taught math, they aren’t taught history. That’s sad and scary, because then when these children grow up, all they’ve learned how to do is comply with authority.

There was a hearing a couple of days after yours where a number of East African parents testified about the conditions that compelled them to take advantage of ABA. There’s an element of desperation, in terms of a lack of alternatives, that must be clouding the picture.

It’s a sad reality that there’s a history here in Minnesota of people preying on immigrant communities. For example, in 2017 there were 75 cases of measles identified in the Somali population in Hennepin County alone, a result of anti-vaxxers who saw an opportunity to push their narrative that vaccines cause autism. They targeted immigrant communities with fearmongering tactics. 

The ABA industry pushes itself onto parents by claiming to be the only hope for their children. I’m very concerned that marketing targets immigrant communities without sharing balanced information that will help parents make informed decisions for their families. I’m worried about the conditions in which ABA is the only option. 

A lot of the time, parents are in a desperate situation where it’s like, “I have to go to work to pay the bills, and I have to have a place for my child to be that is safe and supervised.” And instead of lobbying for inclusion, for appropriate support and services in schools, we’re saying, “Well, this kid can go to ABA instead.” 

That’s not good for anyone, because inclusion benefits all of us. Inclusion benefits abled and typically developing people just as much as it benefits disabled people. I think we can see that right now in our current political climate, where it’s been so normalized to “other” people. That causes harm to all of us. 

ABA is problematic in your culture.

I’m Anishinabe. ABA could never meet my needs as a Native person. “Culturally responsive” essentially means to adapt services to meet the needs and values of a person’s culture. Some cultures, particularly settler-colonial culture, values assimilation. Settler-colonial culture prefers when people blend in and are agreeable to authority. ABA is rooted in that.

Behaviorism seeks to control a person’s behavior with the carrots-and-sticks analogy. We reward the things we want to see, we punish the things that we don’t want to see. We all do get rewarded for doing certain actions, and we all could potentially be punished by other actions.

But it’s not the same micro-management of behavior — you can only communicate the way I want you to communicate. You can only experience your senses the way I want you to experience your senses. You can only socialize the way that I have determined is a valid way of being. 

There’s the stereotype that autistic people don’t make eye contact, but that eye contact is a cultural phenomenon. Not every culture thinks eye contact is this great thing. Some cultures find it disrespectful, but ABA doesn’t always take that into account. It’s determined by the [therapists], not necessarily the child and their family and their culture. 

We should all have some self-determination with how we use our bodies. If I’m not hurting anyone else, I should be able to stim. If I communicate best by writing, that should be encouraged, and I should be provided support and tools to do that. Rather than what happens often in ABA, where parents are told, “This will help your child speak,” but it’s not speech therapy. 

One of my children didn’t speak until he was a little bit older. Starting when he was about 2, he would use one or two words here and there, but he wouldn’t combine them. It was tough, because at the time, we didn’t have a diagnosis, we didn’t have any sort of speech language therapy. As a parent, I relied on very basic sign language. And I was thrilled because I could communicate with my kid whether he was using mouth words or not. Do I wish that we had speech language pathology at the time? Yes, absolutely, that would have been great. But we didn’t. I think that if we had pushed that particular child into using mouth words, I think it would have built resentment.

Now he can speak, but his preferred language now is music, which is really cool because he’s a musician. Music is a really strong cultural practice that’s traditional for Anishinaabe people or Ojibwe people. It’s healing for us, something that we love. Why don’t we encourage that, rather than the ABA ideal of mouth words?

In this interview, Hydon, who serves as the director of the School and Educational Settings specialization program at USC’s Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, shares insights on the impact of secondary trauma on educators. Hydon, who has also been a consultant for the U.S. Department of Education, served as president of the American Council on School Work, and led the co-development of an on secondary traumatic stress with other experts in the field. He’s traveled across the country and world to train schools on secondary traumatic stress, many of which were impacted by natural disasters. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

What is secondary trauma, and how have you seen it manifest in teachers? 

Secondary traumatic stress is like PTSD, but it’s not your trauma. It’s the trauma of someone that you’re working with. In this case, students. Teachers might hear about neglect, abuse, food insecurity, and they’re exposed to it every day. And so they start to show symptoms that are kind of PTSD symptoms. They can’t sleep, or they avoid certain areas or they’re hyper-vigilant. Sometimes it can make them question whether or not they can stay in the profession.  

I’ve had teachers say to me, “I just don’t think I can do this anymore.”  

What can teachers do to take care of themselves when experiencing secondary trauma?

Self-care is so important, but sometimes it’s hard for teachers because they’re givers. They’re taking care of their students, their families, and sometimes it’s hard to take care of themselves.  

We know that taking care of well-being across life domains — environmental, social, financial, cognitive and spiritual wellbeing can help mitigate the impact of secondary traumatic stress. Taking advantage of vacation, taking your lunch breaks, actually enjoying a good meal, going for a walk outside, making sure you’re checking in–all those things can help remind us that we’re going to be okay. And yes, I might have experienced secondary trauma, but it too will pass.

One thing I’ve seen work really well is groups of teachers coming together for support. In Joppa, Missouri, they had [what they called] The Breakfast Club, where they walked together before school, wore comfortable shoes, and made a rule that they couldn’t talk about work. They’d talk about dinner plans, their weekends—things that weren’t work-related.  

It’s also about finding little moments in the day. Taking a breath. Stepping outside. Even just having a quiet moment to yourself can help. Teachers need to give themselves permission to take a break, even if it’s just for five minutes.  

What can schools do to better support teachers? 

There’s a concept out there called trauma-informed or trauma-responsive schools. It is that everybody in the school is aware of how trauma can impact us. So it’s teachers, it’s bus drivers, coaches. It’s the custodial staff. Everybody in that school knows that trauma can impact all of us in certain ways, and so to be trauma-responsive is to understand that, “Hey, trauma happens. It’s inevitable. It’s going to happen. It’s happened in the past, and it’s going to happen in the future. So let’s be ready. Let’s be understanding. Let’s be gentle. Let’s be aware. Let’s have spaces to bring people together to talk about something.”

Is there anything else you think people should know about secondary trauma among teachers in areas affected by the Palisades, Eaton, and other fires? 

The districts I work with, whether they’re local or regional or national, they’ve been fantastic. When I think of the districts over here—Pasadena, South Pasadena, and LA Unified—I mean, these districts understand crisis response and emergency response and trauma. They’re trained, they’re good at it and they know what they’re doing.  

We should feel safe that our students are going to be taken care of, and that’s important, especially as we see these fires pop up in other places.  

I know that the Santa Monica Malibu School District—it’s a fantastic school district, and the social workers there are awesome. And so we’ve got good people on these grounds and they’re doing good things.

This article is part of a collaboration between The 74 and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

With the exception of an uptick in fourth-grade math scores, virtually every state posted disappointing results compared with 2022, when NAEP was last administered. Only two, Alabama and Louisiana, could boast of achievement in either math or English that exceeded what students enjoyed in 2019. 

Amid the dispiriting national data, Louisiana’s sizable gains in elementary reading were a particular bright spot. After trailing the national average in every prior iteration of the test, local policymakers were eager to celebrate the first time their state managed to pull ahead — the result of both sagging performance elsewhere and real gains at home. 

Cade Brumley, Louisiana’s schools chief for the last half-decade, was among them, in both literacy and math at a press conference Wednesday. A career educator who oversaw impressive gains in rural DeSoto Parish before leading the state’s largest district, he took the statewide job just before the pandemic threw schools across the country into chaos.

Since COVID’s emergence, state lawmakers have also undertaken a long consideration of K–12 policy, passing of literacy instruction in 2021 and establishing a statewide (ESAs) last year. State social studies standards , and Brumley’s Department of Education rolled out an initiative aiming to give teachers more autonomy over their day-to-day tasks. 

The results have been promising thus far, with one research consortium to a significant bounce-back from pandemic-era lows at the beginning of last year. Brumley himself has won a measure of national recognition for his leadership, that he might join the second Trump cabinet. 

In an interview with The 74’s Kevin Mahnken, Louisiana’s superintendent discussed what’s working in his state, the roadblocks he believes prevent teachers from succeeding in the classroom, and how he’s targeting math scores next.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

The 74: A number of previous indicators — among them the scores from the last round of NAEP, but also your own state testing — suggested that Louisiana was likely bouncing back from the COVID experience. Were you anticipating good results on the latest exam?

Cade Brumley: This release corresponds with our internal data. When we look at trends on LEAP [the Louisiana Educational Assessment Program, the state’s standardized test], we’re seeing progress on both reading and math. So the NAEP release was not a surprise.

However, it was affirming in many ways. Most of all, it shows that the comprehensive education reform we’ve implemented over the last five years is working. It’s not simply state-level data, it’s national data that’s indicating the progress.

What are the big policy or governance factors that have allowed Louisiana to see this improvement?

I operate from what I call the BRAVE plan: going back to basics, redesigning systems, accelerating parental rights, valuing teachers, and expanding educational freedom. This department is organized to accomplish those things — that’s the way we push out resources, and it’s what drives our conversations with community members, policymakers, and educators. It’s a comprehensive set of reforms we’ve put in place, and it’s really encouraging to see movement.

Right now, we also have a ton of alignment between our governor’s office, our legislature, our state board, and our agency, and that united front helps with implementation in schools. I also think we execute really well. I’ve had conversations with individuals in other states that have attempted similar reforms, but the execution wasn’t what it needed to be. We’re really intentional about both the initial launch of policies, but also support afterwards. 

There are some famous examples of reforms that fall apart between the legislature and the classroom. Are there specific aspects of implementation you’ve focused on?

One thing that’s helped me is that I have experienced so many roles within the system. I can drive a school bus, I can lead a classroom, I can lead a school, and I can lead either a rural or an urban system. When I’m having conversations about education policy, I can relate it to personal experiences when I’ve led in similar situations.

Our teaching and learning team at the Department does a great job. If we’re making hires for our reading team, we’re not bringing anyone onboard who can’t go into a classroom and teach a child to read. We’re not going to hire a staff member to launch or implement in a field when we’re not confident that they can step into a classroom role and deliver math instruction. Those things are important.

Mississippi has received a lot of plaudits for the gains they’ve made on NAEP over the last decade or so. I’m wondering if you’ve consciously emulated the path they took.

I applaud the effort in Mississippi — they definitely stepped out front, specifically on a number of reforms relating to literacy. We had the benefit of seeing that, so our legislative package included items that were in Mississippi’s years before. We probably were a little more assertive, but we absolutely looked at the legislation and policies adopted in Mississippi. Candidly, given the progress they made, why would you not? 

Our reading strategy is the right one, but now we have to work on accelerating math outcomes. It’s good that people can talk about the science of reading, but is there a similar approach to math that is going to be universally accepted? For me, it’s just teaching foundational math skills. Across the country, and in Louisiana, math outcomes decline pretty universally as students matriculate from fourth grade to eighth grade. We want to be the first state in the country to flip that trajectory.

Everyone is pretty familiar by now with some of the big planks of a science-of-reading approach: LETRS training for teachers, universal dyslexia screening, and coaching provided to struggling struggling students, among other things. Can you identify some effective techniques to lift math performance? 

That’s the big question. It’s one that hasn’t been solved nationally, but we have a commitment to try to change it here.  

This gets fairly technical, but in the same way you mentioned LETRS training, at the University of Texas to build a foundational math training; then we required that all math teachers in grades 4–8 undergo that training. We did something similar for K–3 reading, but our math data tells us that serious regression starts in fourth grade, so to mandate that training. 

We’ve done symbolic things, like shipping old-school flash cards with math facts to every elementary school in the state. We’ve used a few online platforms that we feel comfortable supporting, and we offer high-dosage tutoring in both reading and math. Really, we’re trying to take the approach that is yielding results in reading and make it more applicable in math.

If we can blend high-quality instructional materials with confident teachers who are ready to implement them, that’s where the magic happens — particularly when we can also involve parents in that process.

How far does the old-school vision extend? Are you guys going to bring back slide rules?

We’ve got a very wide range of supports, from very traditional flash cards all the way to students getting additional support from AI programs. 

That transition from elementary to middle school is a key area where student engagement declines and learning slows. For all of your state’s impressive growth in fourth-grade reading, eighth-grade scores have been stuck at their current level since before the pandemic. How can educators move this needle?

I can’t necessarily answer for what’s happening in other places, but it’s definitely concerning. If I were to opine on it, I’d say that in certain ways, schools have moved away from the original purpose of educating students in academic content so they can be successful. 

Many schools and systems and educators across the country have chased shiny things, and sometimes even ideologies, that aren’t necessarily relevant to simply teaching kids to read and do math. At a time when funding is becoming less plentiful, and states need to look at academic returns on investment, it’s a really good time to focus on schooling, particularly in elementary schools.

Can you please be more specific about that? What do you mean when you talk about extraneous elements distracting schools from teaching?

Many systems, schools, and educators are unfortunately focused on pursuits that aren’t teaching kids to read and do math, and they’re not trained to do it. Teachers are not clinically trained to be social workers or nurses, and many schools attempt to put them in those roles. I am not suggesting those supports aren’t needed, but it shouldn’t be teachers who are made responsible.

If we effectively train teachers to deliver their content, I think we’ll see outcomes improve. 

I’m not a certified math teacher, but if I were to give an opinion, I’d say there are a few explanations for the dip in math between fourth grade and eighth grade. One is that there’s not enough investment in building math fluency in elementary school. We need to be talking more about those foundational skills in the early years, but fourth-grade teachers have also not received the support and training in pre-service programs to be as successful as we would like. 

I will frequently talk to math teachers in grades 4–8 who never intended to hold the job they have. It was an open job they were able to secure, and they’re doing the best they can do, but we owe all of those teachers the training, support, and resources to succeed in teaching. The data indicate that, across the country and in the state of Louisiana, that’s where the slide happens.

When you mention teachers being asked to act like social workers and nurses, it sounds like you’re referencing like social-emotional learning. 

I’m trying not to get into cultural issues, but yes, I think schools have taken on many tasks that they were never ordained to do. We’re trying to narrow the scope of that.

We launched an initiative called , which was meant to remove some of the onerous bureaucracy on teachers and teacher trainings. We wanted to put our foot down on disruptions that complicate the classroom. In general, we think teachers are important; it’s a noble profession, and they need to be supported. We’ve launched differentiated compensation so that, on top of base pay, teachers can receive additional compensation for merit or for staffing a discipline that is in high demand. They shouldn’t be distracted by having to take on all these additional tasks — and that even extends to needing to leave the classroom to make copies and so on. 

Smart, responsive school systems are thinking about ways to be more efficient and allow their teachers as much time on task as possible.

Some has indicated that the prestige and desirability of the teaching career path is at a very low ebb right now. What would you say to a novice or pre-service teacher in Louisiana wondering if they’ve chosen the wrong field?

I’d start with a few data points. Our teaching workforce in Louisiana has grown. We’ve seen our retention numbers increase, including for first-year teachers. Our last data review showed that the rate of teachers exiting the system decreased by two percentage points. So we’re seeing positive signs.

But there’s no doubt that the teaching profession has been under attack. That’s one of the primary reasons we put together Let Teachers Teach. We pulled together several dozen teachers from across the state, and I basically said, ‘I want real solutions, not an exercise for a press release.’ We worked over a period of months, and those teachers developed a series of recommendations that we’ve since turned into policy, and we’ve implemented them across the state.

The results and growth we’ve seen are a testament to the teachers of Louisiana, and I’ve been clear since these results came out that my first nod of appreciation goes to our educators. We have a statewide ballot measure that would offer teachers a permanent pay raise, and that will be up for citizens to vote for in March. These are people who deserve an environment where they are free to teach. They deserve to work for a principal who is acceptable to them, and they should be compensated like professionals.

Louisiana received about $4 billion in federal ESSER funds for pandemic-era school initiatives. National assessments have shown that the $190 billion in overall ESSER spending didn’t come close to bringing student outcomes back to pre-pandemic levels, but I’m interested if you think the state was helped by the support. 

I think the criticisms of the national program are warranted, and you can tell by looking at the Nation’s Report Card. I’m not suggesting that Louisiana is immune: Too many of our kids still aren’t reading on grade level, too many of them can’t do foundational math, and we have too many students enrolled in schools that fail them. We have a ton of work to do.

With the funding we made available, we did try our best to get our state locked into a few core tenets, which mostly related to academic recovery and professional learning for teachers. We for the public, so they could have transparency on how each system was spending their money. But I can’t disagree with the suggestion that some of the ESSER funding was excessive and wasn’t used in the most appropriate ways. We tried to do our best in this state to be good stewards of those dollars, and I haven’t heard much criticism on the way we handled it.

While the overall NAEP picture for Louisiana is very positive, some of the divides are very stark. Digging into the state snapshot, I noticed that while about three-quarters of white fourth graders are at or above the Basic level for reading — meaning they grasp the fundamental skills of literacy — fewer than one-half of African American students are. What accounts for that divide, and what is your department doing to rectify it?

It’s a problem. We need to make sure that we’re lifting every child out there. Out on the stump, this is a question I get frequently: What are we doing to attack these gaps? 

I don’t like to approach it from the mindset of pulling one set of students down to advance another group, but I feel really comfortable about two things I believe will help close this disparity. One is that we just passed that is responsive to the needs of growing every individual student. It double-weights the bottom 25 percent of achievers in every school, so schools across the state are going to have to identify those particular students and know that they’ll be held accountable for both the absolute performance and the growth of those students.

We also passed a law offering high-dosage tutoring for students between the kindergarten and grade-five levels. Every student in those grades who is not proficient in reading or math has to receive high-dosage tutoring throughout the week to improve those outcomes. We’re also trying to take tutoring to scale across the state. We did a pretty good job last year beginning that work, but it’s something we have to fine-tune.

You’ve cited the expansion of educational freedom as one of your critical goals. I can imagine a lot of state superintendents passionately fighting against the rollout of education savings accounts, which were passed in Louisiana last year. Why do you feel differently?

We believe in a broad portfolio of options. In our state, families overwhelmingly choose their traditional neighborhood schools, but we also have a set of public charter partners. In our state, faith-based schooling actually predates public education, so we have a large percentage of our students in non-public schools. We have a robust homeschool community whose independence we want to protect, and now we have ESAs coming in. So it’s a good mix for parents to choose what makes the most sense for their kids.

Many education advocates would argue, though, that voucher-like programs take resources away from the public system — including charters, which have posted some incredible results in New Orleans. Do you disagree?

I appreciate the question, and it’s certainly something we hear, but you either believe in education freedom, or you don’t. I believe in educational freedom. So I’m going to do everything within my power to make sure we have that portfolio available for families and we do our part to make each of those options as strong as it possibly can be.

How do you plan on celebrating a result like this? Are you headed to a crawfish boil this weekend?

Look, we’re very excited. Our team is excited, teachers are excited, the governor is excited — everyone is happy about the progress. I am thankful too. This is a place we’ve never been as a state.

But too many kids can’t read on grade level. Too many can’t do math. And too many are still stuck in schools that are failing them. We’ve got a ton of work to do.

But a new book argues that the current approach remains deeply flawed. Though phonics instruction has emerged as a key component of reading lessons, stagnant NAEP scores, among other measures, suggest that something is missing — a focus on substantive knowledge, including detail-rich lessons in science and history. 

Author Natalie Wexler, whose 2019 book advocated a greater emphasis on these topics paired with explicit instruction, has said these principles are supported by cognitive science. A content-rich curriculum, she maintains, allows students to go deeper, helping information stick and building an academic foundation that allows them to write more easily, creating a kind of virtuous circle of reinforcement: The more they know, the better they can write; the better they can write, the more they can learn.

Six years later, Wexler is back with a new warning. In her book, , out Feb. 3. (pre-orders open today, Jan. 21), she says the benefits of improved reading instruction will go to waste if we don’t offer students a more vibrant, content-rich set of lessons to go along with it. 

She spoke recently with The 74’s Greg Toppo. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

The 74: Your book The Knowledge Gap came out in 2019. A lot has happened since then, including a pandemic and an explosion of interest in the science of reading, thanks in part, to the work of folks like . Would you say we’re in a better place in the knowledge discussion than we were in 2019?

Natalie Wexler: Yes, definitely. For one thing, there are now a number of knowledge-building curricula available that were not around when I was researching the book. There are more choices than there used to be. And although we don’t have really reliable data on what curricula are really being used, all indications are that more and more districts and schools are using those knowledge-building curricula. That’s been a very promising development. It’s still a minority, but certainly more than in 2019. Emily Hanford and other science of reading advocates have done a great service to the public and to the nation’s children by shining this spotlight on things that are problematic about typical phonics instruction. The risk is that it can lead, and has led in some places, to the assumption that if we just fix the phonics part of reading instruction, everything else is going to be fine. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. 

A lot of people see the science of reading as just “more phonics.” How do you describe this more comprehensive approach?

People outside the education world assume that schools are teaching social studies and science and all of those things. I have to do a lot of explaining when I talk about how we’re not building knowledge in school effectively. With The Knowledge Gap, the publishers expected that the audience would be primarily the general public and parents. But where it’s really taken off is among educators. And it’s because it’s a lot easier, certainly for elementary level and maybe some middle school level educators, to understand the argument, because they’re living what I’m describing: There isn’t much content in the elementary curriculum, and there is a lot of emphasis on teaching reading comprehension skills, making inferences as though they were abstract skills you can teach directly and apply generally. Many of them have seen that that doesn’t really work very well. 

As I was reading your book, it reminded me of some of the conversations I’ve had with Joy Hakim, who wrote the great series, A History of US and . Her books are favorites among people who are enlightened about this topic. One of the things she says is that we’re underestimating how much our kids can understand if they’re exposed to difficult material. Is that the right word, underestimating? 

“Underestimating” is the right word, and I use that a lot myself. But you have to be careful about what we’re underestimating. It is often assumed among educators that young children won’t be interested in history or can’t handle history because it’s just too abstract, too remote from their own experience. There’s no evidence to support that. And in fact, there’s anecdotal evidence that kids can get very interested in history.

I’ve seen this myself: second graders getting fascinated by the War of 1812. But at the same time, we’ve overestimated kids’ abilities sometimes to handle certain abstractions. I open The Knowledge Gap with a teacher who’s trying to teach kids the difference between a subtitle and a caption, which is abstract but not particularly interesting to them. They don’t get it. They want to know what’s going on in the picture. What is that shark eating? But the teacher feels that it’s more important. This is what her training in the curriculum has led her to do, to focus on the abstract difference between a caption and a subtitle.

You and I have both interviewed teacher in Baltimore, and I love what he tells you: He was initially skeptical that his students would like a Dust Bowl novel, , but as the drama unfolds, they’re hooked. I wonder what that tells you, not only about the topic, but about how he was able to approach it and make it come alive.

said that you can teach almost anything to a child of any age if you do it in a way that makes sense. Those weren’t his exact words, but if you engage kids, they will get interested in all sorts of things that have nothing to do with their own experience. If you basically tell them a good story, that’s the way you can teach history, science. This is what Joy Hakim does so beautifully in her work, both in history and science: telling stories that really hook kids, and then they learn a lot, almost effortlessly, along the way. 

There’s a lot of emphasis on having kids “see themselves” in what they’re reading, which is important. But it is at least as important to expand their horizons to other realms of experience. Fiction, novels especially, are a great way to do that. As Kyair said, when they learn that the main character’s little brothers died, they care. They care about this story and these characters. There’s also some evidence to show that this is the way empathy develops, through reading fiction about lives that are very different from our own.

In Chapter 3 of the new book, you talk about teachers colleges, and note that today’s teacher educators — that is, the people working in the colleges — have been shaped by “a system that devalues knowledge and prioritizes engagement.” In a way, you can’t blame teachers for this crisis.

Absolutely. It is no individual’s fault that we are where we are. It’s a systemic problem, so it’s not going to change overnight. It’s difficult, not just for teacher educators to step out of this system, but also the teachers themselves. If you’ve been teaching in a certain way for years in the sincere belief that you are doing a great job, and someone casts doubt on that, it’s a very difficult message to take in.

What really amazes me is how many teachers, despite the painfulness of the message, are nevertheless embracing it because they really care about the success of their kids. With teacher training, it’s going to be hard to change that overnight. We’re really trying to fix a broken system with the products of that system, which is very difficult. I don’t think we can rely on teacher training to change the system. Once teachers are on the job, we also need to continue communicating this message, doing training to undo some of the training they’ve gotten pre-service. 

Historically, teachers also haven’t learned much about cognitive science. Do you get a sense that’s improving?

As I say in the book, there are efforts. is an organization that is doing great work with some institutions of teacher training, but it’s going to be very slow. There are hundreds of programs that train teachers, and just a handful are signing up to bring their curricula in line with principles of cognitive science. Even within those programs, not every teacher is on the bandwagon. You can’t really, at the university level, control what goes on in the classroom. Professors are used to having a lot of autonomy. 

Let’s talk about writing. You’re the co-author of as well. Reading your new book, it seems that writing brings together a lot of your ideas. Can you talk a bit about the importance of writing?

Since I finished writing both of those books years ago, I have continued to think more about the relationship between reading and writing and learning in general. I’ve become more and more convinced that the combination of a content-rich curriculum and explicit, manageable writing instruction embedded in that curriculum can provide all the benefits of cognitive science-informed instruction, and possibly more. Without going into a lot of detail, we have evidence that when you write about what you’re reading or what you’re learning about, it enhances your learning. It enables you to retain the information better, it enables you to understand it better, and it enables you to think about it analytically.

The problem is that writing is really difficult. We have studies, like write-to-learn studies, where they have kids write about the content that they’re learning. Overall there’s a positive effect from that. But in one meta analysis, in 18% of these studies there was . In other words, kids writing about what they were learning actually retained less of it. It’s impossible to know why. But the reason is we sometimes ask kids to just write without giving them enough support, and that is cognitively overwhelming, so they don’t get the potential learning benefits. 

So what’s the key?

The key is to make writing manageable, not cognitively overwhelming, but still requiring some effort. The best way to do that is to start at the sentence level — because if writing is hard, then writing at length is only making it harder — and explicitly teach students how to construct sentences and eventually clear linear outlines for paragraphs and essays that are embedded in the content they’re learning about. If you do that, you’re having them engage in , which we know is a very powerful boost to retention of information. You’re also having them engage in elaboration, explaining what they’re learning about, giving examples, all of that. That has been shown to really help with comprehension. You’re familiarizing them in a powerful way with the complex syntax of written language, which can be a real barrier to reading comprehension.  

You say that content-rich curricula are under fire from both sides, the left and right. I love the anecdote where you visit a small town in Ohio where this group of parents objected to the use of the words “God” and “Goddess” in a second-grade unit on Greek mythology. You note, “It’s hard to imagine how children could truly understand Greek myths or ancient Greek culture without hearing those words.” I have two questions. Number one, how do we get out from underneath this? And number two, is there a way in which this is kind of a red herring? 

This is coming not just from the right and not just from the left. The same curriculum has been attacked, sometimes, from both sides for different reasons. What we need to fundamentally do is realize that compromise is essential, and it’s got to be compromise that doesn’t interfere with kids’ ability to learn. There’s been a lot of opposition from the right to teaching about Greek myths in a curriculum called . Sometimes it’s perceived as trying to proselytize about Greek myths or other religions, Buddhism, Hinduism. When school leaders have explained to the community, “No, this isn’t an attempt to convert kids to these other religions. It’s a part of teaching them about history and other cultures,” sometimes those controversies have been defused — not in every instance.

Another thing to bear in mind, though, is that sometimes the people who are protesting are not representative. They’re maybe a small but very vocal group of parents. You have to ask: Does it really make sense to deprive all students of exposure to some valuable information because a small group is protesting? Maybe there’s another way to handle it, some alternative texts or something for those kids. But fundamentally, everybody needs to realize that the curriculum is not going to align with your individual preferences about what you would like your kids to learn. And we have to find consensus. There’s more consensus than there appears to be, which kind of gets to your second question: The media have kind of elevated these conflicts. In many instances, there isn’t that much conflict.

Is there anything you see in the landscape that gives you hope that we are moving in the right direction?

For one thing, I have gotten many invitations to speak recently. The interest in this, at least from my limited personal perspective, is not dying down. It’s only growing. And that’s encouraging. There are other people taking up this message. I’m seeing the beginnings of a recognition that phonics instruction is important, but we may be overdoing it with all of the focus on it in some places — the one generalization you can make about American education is you can’t generalize, because who knows what’s really going on?

But in some places, schools are spending an hour a day on phonics and giving short shrift to some of these other important components of reading, like building knowledge. That really relates to reading comprehension. Even some of the people who have been in the forefront of the science of reading movement, like , have been saying this: Let’s not overdo it, because there’s an opportunity cost, and one of those opportunities that’s being lost is the chance to build a kind of knowledge that kids will need to read and understand the texts they’ll be expected to read in years to come.

This school year Fremont High has seen security-related lockdowns on a nearly a monthly basis, including an incident at the beginning of the year when .

But Marisol Pérez, who’s taught at Fremont for more than a decade, said students at the school can find their way out of the concrete jungle through the STEM fields of science, tech, engineering and math. 

A retired Coast Guard veteran who served eight years as a technician in active duty before becoming a teacher, Perez knows from her own experience the value of education and the power of following your dreams.  

Now Perez has made it her life’s mission to outfit her students with the tools to succeed in an increasingly tech-driven world.

“The United States is struggling to produce enough qualified individuals for STEM jobs, which often results in these roles being outsourced to other countries,” said Perez, “leading to a loss of opportunities here at home.”

In recognition of her dedication, Pérez in November was named the , earning the honor through a nationwide nomination process for excellence in STEM education.

In an interview with The 74, Pérez discussed the challenges her students face pursuing STEM fields in South Central and how investment in new STEM programs can create a significant impact.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

South Central LA can be a tough place to grow up. How does the environment there impact students’ ability to study in school?

Students come to school saying that they can’t walk home late because these are not the types of areas where it’s safe to walk around.

The demographics here present unique challenges. Our students, as much as we would like them to focus on their homework, their education, often have different and more immediate concerns. Unfortunately Many come from broken homes, and their worries are far removed from those of the average student outside this community. They’re thinking about where their next meal will come from, or they’re rushing home because they have to go to work.

In my opinion, it’s hard for them to focus on academics in the same way students in other demographics might. The dynamics within the Black and Latino communities here are very similar—they face significant hardships they need to overcome. At the same time, they’re trying to pursue an education and push themselves to meet standards. They often have to work three or four times as hard just to meet those expectations. It’s incredibly challenging.

What has teaching in South Central for over a decade taught you about public schools in these communities?

I don’t think we have as many resources as we would like, and that’s where the struggle usually lies. This is a  Because of that, our budgets are really low—not where they need to be. In reality, schools like ours should be receiving the most funding since we lack critical resources. We have a student population of about 1,900, most of whom are at impoverished income levels. This is exactly where additional resources are needed.

However, when funding is distributed, it rarely seems to reach schools like ours. We end up coming up short, with insufficient budgets to maintain resources. Even for programs like this one, I’ve had to spend a lot of my own money to cover the things we need. Running an engineering course is expensive—very expensive—and I’m constantly struggling to find additional funding. I’ve been applying for grants to help cover the cost of consumables the students go through daily.

For this program alone, I’ve had to obtain additional certifications to qualify for grants within the state because the school simply doesn’t have the money to support programs like this. On top of my engineering background, I pursued these certifications so I could apply for state grants and potentially secure the funds to expand the program and open up more engineering opportunities for the students.

Why is STEM so hard for your students to engage with?

I have a background in STEM, and I can tell you right now that as a mechanical engineer working in government, most people don’t look like me. There are very few Latinas or women in this field. I happen to have both under my belt—I’m a female Latina—and engineering is predominantly male-dominated. 

Bringing STEM programs into communities that are predominantly Black and Latino creates an opportunity to introduce something many people might not have known about. These communities may not realize that there are excellent jobs in STEM that they, too, can pursue. When they see someone like me—a female Latina from their area—they can say, “She did it, so why can’t I?” That’s the mentality we try to push here, is that we can do it, then there’s no excuse for you not to do it.

What is the school environment like for students?

When we wrap up our work, we need to ensure that we’re calling parents and making sure they come to the parking lot so our kids can get home safely. If that’s not possible, we’ll arrange transportation for them. Something as simple as this might seem unnecessary to someone outside the situation, but for us, it’s essential. 

 I live just a block away from the school, but even that short distance can feel intimidating because our community can be a little dangerous. However, the school itself is a safe and nurturing environment. It feels like a small oasis for the kids—a place where they feel secure and comfortable. But when they head home, they instinctively know that as the sun sets, they need to hurry and get there quickly.

What’s your teaching philosophy?

I always tell my kids, I don’t ever want a company to hire you just because you’re a female or because you’re a brown female. I want them to hire you because you have the skills, because you bring something valuable to the company that they need.

I do my best here not only to teach them the necessary skills but also to help them understand that this is not how they should expect to be hired—and it’s not how they should want to be hired. You should be hired because you are competitive and capable.

What changes do you think LAUSD should make?

LAUSD needs to focus more on STEM programs and allocate additional funding to them. The entire country acknowledges a problem with STEM education, as we’re falling short compared to other nations. 

We’re coming up short with STEM. As a result, these jobs end up being shipped to another country.

In the 21st century, with advancements like artificial intelligence, automation, electric vehicles, and even potential hydrogen technologies, it’s crucial to prioritize STEM education, especially since that’s where our biggest global competitors are headed.

This article is part of a collaboration between The 74 and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

In partnership with Fresno Pacific University and six school districts throughout Tulare County, the year-long program housed within the county’s California Center on Teaching Careers hopes to curb shortages that have left schools throughout the state with student to counselor ratios at 1:461, nearly double the . 

Since its launch at the start of this school year, the has provided one on one support to a small pilot cohort of twelve counselors and looks to expand statewide. Counselors in training earn a master’s of arts in school counseling and a $45,000 living stipend while being mentored by experienced counselors in their region. 

“Through this pathway, we’re truly able to grow our own, which means preparing individuals of our own communities who grew up here, who know parents … students of our own schools, to then be part of our system,” said Marvin Lopez, the Center’s executive director.

The program is hands-on, requiring 1,200 hours of clinical training and field experience, 400 hours beyond the required amount to obtain a credential. 

Like other residencies to boost teacher pipelines, the model aims to recruit a more representative pool by eliminating the financial barriers and loans professionals often take on to enter the field. 

Graduates of teacher residencies, which the SCR program has been modeled after, stay in their school districts at much higher rates than those who have entered through traditional or other alternative pathways, “stabilizing” the force, according to the . The pools they recruit are also more racially diverse. 

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Why launch this residency now, and what’s at stake without it? 

Marvin Lopez: I’m going to take you back a decade. In 2012, we began looking at residency models, specifically for teachers, across the nation. We spent six years looking at models in California, Chicago, New York City, to see what are best practices and spend time with some universities that have been running teacher residencies for some time. 

We realized we needed to bring a pathway like that to our area – we’re in this central region of the state in California, near Sequoia, Yosemite, Fresno, Bakersfield. It’s very agricultural, rural, low-income with many high needs schools. We realized that not only do we need a model like this for preparing teachers, but also mental health professionals – school-based social workers and school counselors. We tackled the entire ecosystem of our school. 

Through this pathway, we’re truly able to grow our own, which means preparing individuals of our own communities who grew up here, who know their communities, who know parents. The students who were students of our own schools to then be part of our system. 

To your question of why, when you look at the student ratio of school counselors and students in our area, it’s 1 to 460+, which is double what is recommended nationally. There’s a gap that we’re trying to close and bridge. By having this pathway in place, it’s allowing us to not only recruit from local talents, but also prepare them in a way that gives them a full year of clinical experience. The doesn’t lie.

What challenges did you all come up against before launching, and what did you do to overcome them? 

As a new pathway, [it required] a lot of informing and educating school leaders about the benefits, and sharing retention data about residencies. I wouldn’t call it a challenge, it was a learning experience. 

How might this residency impact what you all are seeing with regards to the youth mental health crisis, particularly as you mentioned that this county you’re serving is predominantly high needs, schools that, as you mentioned, have large shortages of mental health support staff? 

We’re looking at the entire ecosystem of our schools and the workload that teachers have, specifically after the pandemic. The silver lining is that a lot of mental wellness issues came to light and the public are more open to conversation. It’s now more important and obvious that we do need more services; school counselors play a big role in that ecosystem as well as social workers. Providing another part of the support that our students need in the classroom, that’s the impact that we see. We’re providing more wrap-around support to our schools and students by preparing teachers, social workers, and school counselors through our residency model. 

I‘m wondering about the scale of this, what’s interest been like since you launched in September and how large of a cohort do you hope to recruit this first year? 

Initially our plan was to have a small pilot cohort of 8. We launched with 12, and now we’re getting requests from districts for next year already. It looks like that might double, and it’s because of the needs of our districts and the value they see added by having residents at their sites and the impact they’re already having with their students. 

Our goal is to actually scale up and expand our program throughout the state. We’re working closely with a couple of county offices around this work, and we are always willing to share best practices as well as guide and provide support to any other regions that are looking to implement a similar program. 

If you had to boil it down, what are three things that you think that folks who are taking on this kind of work should keep in mind? 

First, having a vision that’s student centered. Second, building and nurturing partnerships with your districts and universities. And ultimately, providing quality mentorship for the residents, working alongside district leadership to make sure that those individuals are the right fit for a school. 

Is there anything I haven’t asked you but that’s on your mind or just that you want me to know? 

Beyond the living stipend for residents, we also provide a stipend for the mentors that’s $4,000. That’s unique because they’re spending quite a bit of time throughout the year. It’s important to recognize the efforts that not only the residents are putting into this, but the mentors who play a huge component in this process.