On a cold, drizzly morning in early May, I visited an outdoor preschool program in Baltimore, Maryland, to learn about the state’s recent efforts to expand such schools. For several hours, I traipsed around the woods with the children there, watching as they methodically built miniature mudslides and waterfalls, splashed bravely into streams and inspected mushrooms growing on mossy logs. (The full story on outdoor preschool access was published in partnership with The Washington Post.)

While it may seem like children are simply enjoying carefree play time, serious learning is happening when they are outside, educators and experts say. Spending time outdoors in a safe green space can support healthy development, according to a new report by Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child, which looks at how physical environments affect child development and health. Conversely, the lack of such opportunity can be detrimental to children, the report states.

Other research shows spending time in nature can improve academic performance, reduce symptoms of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, improve mental health and promote physical activity and the development of motor skills.

Despite the benefits, nature and outdoor learning remain largely out of reach for most children. Across the country, a third of families with young children spend time in nature just once or twice a month, at most. Nationwide, access to green spaces varies, and low-income households and neighborhoods where most residents are Black, Hispanic or Asian American are less likely to have parks with amenities like playgrounds and bathrooms. Air pollution and water pollution is more concentrated near communities where Black and Latino families live. Even as outdoor preschool programs have expanded over the past five years — from 250 in 2017 to more than 800 in 2022, according to the nonprofit Natural Start Alliance — the programs still mostly serve white children and most run as private, part-time schools.

In the wake of the pandemic, child development experts and outdoor learning advocates have called for more outdoor play time for young children to help mitigate some of the effects of the pandemic, as well as to address a decline in play and recess in schools.

“Many of us have been concerned … we’re seeing less recess, were seeing less gym, were seeing less art and things like that where kids are kind of naturally moving, touching, seeing, smelling,” said Cathrine Aasen Floyd, director of ideal learning initiatives at the nonprofit Trust for Learning, which recently released a report on the benefits of learning through nature. “We have become a nation that is so worried about the ABCs and 1-2-3s that we lost sight of the fact that children who enjoy a learning environment are going to have better cognitive outcomes,” she added. With nature-based learning, “there is an opportunity to make to bring back the joy.”

Maryland, the home of the preschool I visited, joins a small but growing number of states that are trying to capitalize on that opportunity and license outdoor preschool programs, which could expand access to more children. In the meantime, experts and advocates of outdoor learning say there are ways to bring more nature to young children in a variety of early learning settings, including in states that do not yet support formal outdoor programs:

1. Make any available outdoor space child-friendly: While few child care programs receive funding specifically to improve outdoor settings, there are low-cost ways to invest in outdoor play spaces, according to a recent report by New America. That could mean adding some “permanent centers in response to the children’s interests” outside, like a play kitchen to use with dirt, water and mud, a music wall made from kitchen items or a sand and water area. Such efforts could encourage more exploration, movement and creative thinking during the time children are spending outdoors.

2. Make the outdoors a regular part of the classroom: Current child care licensing systems are “built upon a framework where learning happens indoors and outdoors is a break area,” said Christy Merrick, director of the Natural Start Alliance, which supports nature and outdoor learning programs. “The system never really considers what happens if we learn outside.” Taking indoor materials like books and art supplies outside could be an easy way for programs to incorporate nature into their days, according to officials from New America. Schools could also look for opportunities to teach lessons outdoors or incorporate nature-based topics, like growing plants or the life cycle of butterflies, into the curriculum. Aasen Floyd, of Trust for Learning, said allowing children to move freely between the indoor and outdoor space — as long as staffing allows for such movement — could be another way to give children more time in nature.

3. Bring natural materials into the classroom: Some programs built in “concrete jungles” may not have access to lush, outdoor areas, said Aasen Floyd. Instead, such programs can bring nature into the classroom, including boxes of gardening materials so children can plant or dig, and “loose parts” like acorns and pine branches. This allows children to explore natural materials and compare the textures, appearances and smells of materials that they would typically encounter outdoors. “What we’ve been focused on is this idea of small but significant changes,” said Aasen Floyd. “Not everybody’s going to have an opportunity to completely tear out their playground and turn it into this natural wonderland, but there are things we can do to teach children about nature.”

This story about kids in nature was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

The post Early Childhood: How to bring more nature into preschool appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

BOSTON, Mass.– Después de que el hijo de María Mejía fuera diagnosticado con un trastorno del espectro autista en el preescolar, el tema de a cuál kínder debería ir se centró completamente en sus necesidades de educación especial.

Mejía y su esposo, inmigrantes hispanohablantes de la República Dominicana, supieron más tarde que Joangel, quien ahora tiene 7 años, habría sido un candidato ideal para una de las cuatro escuelas primarias de Boston que enseñan a los estudiantes tanto en inglés como en español, el idioma materno de Joangel. Los expertos dicen que tales programas ofrecen a los estudiantes de inglés la mejor oportunidad de éxito académico y las Escuelas Públicas de Boston (BPS, por sus siglas en inglés) se han comprometido a comenzar unas docenas más.

Pero los niños como Joangel a menudo quedan fuera. Sus familias, sin saberlo, se ven obligadas a participar en programas de educación especial únicamente en inglés para recibir servicios de sus programas de educación individualizados (IEP, por sus siglas en inglés) que ayuden a satisfacer sus necesidades de aprendizaje. Mejía dijo que se sorprendió cuando supo que había una alternativa.

“No me dijeron que era una escuela bilingüe”, dijo Mejía, “simplemente una escuela que aceptaron a un niño que tiene IEP”.

Los datos de inscripción del distrito, obtenidos por The Hechinger Report a través de una solicitud de registros públicos, muestran que los estudiantes con discapacidades —que representan el 22 por ciento de la población — están claramente subrepresentados en los siete programas de lenguaje dual del distrito. Representan entre el 8 y el 14 por ciento de la inscripción en los cinco programas de español e inglés. Ninguno está inscrito en el programa vietnamita-inglés de dos años en la Escuela Primaria Mather. Y en el programa de creole haitiano-inglés, hay tan pocos estudiantes con discapacidades inscritos que el distrito no puede revelar el total sin poner en riesgo la privacidad de los estudiantes.

Los expertos y defensores dicen que las disparidades se deben en parte a un problema de personal — simplemente no hay suficientes maestros de educación especial bilingüe — pero también son el resultado de una discriminación abierta y de conceptos culturales erróneos sobre si los estudiantes con discapacidades pueden manejar la educación bilingüe. El distrito se ha comprometido a agregar 25 programas bilingües más en los próximos dos años. Pero tanto los defensores como los funcionarios estatales cuestionan si BPS puede avanzar tan rápido, y las primeras señales sugieren que el distrito puede tener dificultades para incluir a los estudiantes con discapacidades a medida que abre nuevos programas: el programa bilingüe en la escuela Mather, ahora en su segundo año, solo estará listo para atender a estudiantes con discapacidades en su cuarto año, según el director.

BPS juega un papel importante en la determinación de la ubicación de los estudiantes de inglés, que constituyen casi un tercio del distrito, así como de los estudiantes con discapacidades. Las familias en Boston seleccionan sus escuelas preferidas, pero si necesitan servicios de inglés o educación especial, sus inscripciones están mandados al Centro de Evaluación y Orientación para los Recién Llegados o el Departamento de Educación Especial. Asesores de lenguaje hace recomendaciones basadas en el dominio del inglés y personal del departamento de educación especial identifica escuelas específicas para niños con IEP.

El portavoz de BPS, Max Baker, dijo en un comunicado que el distrito está “dedicado a convertirse en uno totalmente inclusivo, brindando acceso completo a una serie de servicios para todos los estudiantes”, pero se negó a responder a preguntas sobre por qué los estudiantes con discapacidades están subrepresentados en los programas de lenguaje dual o qué va a hacer para cambiar eso.

Los expertos de educación especial bilingüe dicen que la subrepresentación de los estudiantes con discapacidades es más que una oportunidad perdida: es discriminación. Dicen que no hay razón para que las escuelas no puedan atender a estudiantes con discapacidades. Y la ley de igualdad de oportunidades sugiere que tienen que hacerlo.

María Serpa, una pionera en el campo y miembro de la Fuerza Especial para Aprendices de Inglés del distrito, dijo que los datos de inscripción son increíbles.

“Los niños con discapacidades necesitan educación bilingüe más que nadie”.

María Serpa, miembro de la Fuerza Especial para Aprendices de Inglés de BPS

“Los niños con discapacidades necesitan educación bilingüe más que nadie”, dijo Serpa en inglés.

BPS ha sido criticado durante mucho tiempo por reprobar a sus estudiantes con discapacidades y a aquellos que no dominan el inglés — evitando una toma de control del estado el año pasado en parte al comprometerse a mejorar los servicios para estos dos grupos. Una piedra angular de su plan es la ambiciosa expansión de los programas bilingües.

Los programas de “lenguaje dual”, cuyos se unen los aprendices de inglés y los hablantes nativos intentando dominar los dos idiomas a nivel académico, se consideran una de las únicas vías para cerrar la brecha de rendimiento entre los dos grupos. Aprendices de inglés que toman estas clases superan a sus compañeros que también están aprendiendo el inglés en las pruebas de lectura y matemáticas y a graduarse en tasas más altas.

Por qué funcionan tan bien se debe a varias razones. La investigación ha encontrado que es mejor para los niños cuyo idioma dominante es el español, por ejemplo, pasar parte del día recibiendo instrucción académica en su idioma nativo. Los investigadores y educadores también destacan los beneficios para la autoestima y la pertenencia cuando los niños que tradicionalmente se consideran deficientes debido a su origen lingüístico se convierten en “expertos” frente a sus pares. Y a medida que las familias de habla inglesa de todo el espectro socioeconómico acuden en masa a los programas de lenguaje dual, también han sido anunciados como un método de integración escolar.

Hasta ahora, BPS no ha seguido esa lógica.

Más de 14.600 estudiantes de BPS son aprendices de inglés. Uno de cada cuatro de ellos tiene una discapacidad. Sin embargo, solo el 6 por ciento de ellos asisten a una escuela bilingüe.

Dania Vázquez, directora de la Academia Margarita Muñiz, la comenzó su carrera en educación especial bilingüe en la década de 1980 justo cuando las especialidades se fusionaron en un solo campo. En su escuela, casi el 14 por ciento de los estudiantes reciben servicios de educación especial, más que en otros programas bilingües de Boston, pero todavía por debajo del promedio del distrito.

Vázquez dijo que no sabe exactamente por qué su escuela inscribe a estudiantes con discapacidades a tasas más altas, pero señaló que la escuela hace un esfuerzo coordinado para informar a todas las familias acerca de su programa.

“No estamos eligiendo estudiantes”, dijo en inglés. “Los estudiantes nos eligen a nosotros”.

En la Academia Muñiz, Vázquez contó que los maestros de educación especial pasan tiempo en los salones de clases apoyando a los estudiantes con discapacidades mientras estos aprenden de los maestros de las materias en español o inglés.* También brindan apoyo en grupos pequeños en la “sala de recursos” de la escuela.

Históricamente, pocos aprendices de inglés con discapacidades en BPS han tenido estas oportunidades.

“No veo en ellos la urgencia de servir a estos niños”.

Suleika Soto, una madre y organizadora con la Alianza de Justicia Educativa de Boston

“No veo en ellos la urgencia de servir a estos niños”, dijo Suleika Soto, una madre en BPS y organizadora con la Alianza de Justicia Educativa de Boston. Soto trató de que su hija ingresara a una escuela bilingüe pero la niña no estaba elegida para ninguno de los dos programas que clasificó en la parte superior de su lista.

Soto se mudó a Boston desde la República Dominicana cuando tenía 7 años y tomó clases bilingües hasta que aprendió inglés con fluidez. Cuando se graduó de la escuela secundaria, el estado había prohibido la educación bilingüe para estudiantes inmigrantes.

Esa prohibición, que duró de 2002 a 2017 — cuando la legislatura estatal ofreció a los distritos una flexibilidad renovada en los programas de adquisición de inglés a través de la Ley LOOK — continúa afectando a las escuelas, tanto en desafíos de dotación de personal como en las percepciones culturales en torno a la educación bilingüe.

María Serpa dijo que tanto los administradores distritales como las familias inmigrantes deben ser educados sobre el potencial de los programas bilingües.

“BPS les ha dicho a muchas familias que lo mejor para sus hijos es aprender solo inglés”, dijo Serpa en inglés.

Hai Son, director de la Escuela Primaria Mather, lamenta la interrupción en el flujo de educadores bilingües. Toda una generación de estudiantes bilingües y jóvenes maestros que podrían haber ingresado a la educación bilingüe nunca lo hicieron.

Los estudiantes en las aulas bilingües de Mather no pueden recibir servicios de educación especial, según Son, quien dijo que su equipo ya está al límite creando un plan de estudios en idioma vietnamita. Son dijo que el distrito apresuró la apertura del programa el año pasado, lo que anuló el tiempo de planificación adecuado, obligando a que su equipo tuviera que diseñar un programa a medida que lo implementaban.

Son dijo que espera presentar un plan para atender a estudiantes con discapacidades en sus aulas bilingües el próximo año. Si se aprueba, la escuela podría comenzar a inscribir a esos estudiantes en 2024, dijo.

Sin embargo, la forma en que dotará de personal a esas aulas es una pregunta abierta.

En una amplia evaluación de 2022, el Consejo de Escuelas de Grandes Ciudades, una coalición de los 78 sistemas escolares más grandes del país, criticó a BPS por depender de maestros con múltiples certificaciones para atender a estudiantes con discapacidades y aquellos que aún están aprendiendo inglés. Si bien la licencia dual técnicamente cumple con las leyes estatales y federales, los críticos dicen que fuerza la capacidad de los maestros. En el último contrato de maestros del distrito, se hizo el compromiso de reducir la práctica.

Los expertos de educación especial bilingüe dicen que el distrito puede buscar maestros de otros países o crear canales dentro de las comunidades de inmigrantes de la ciudad.

Mientras tanto, padres, maestros y defensores comunitarios dicen que se aconseja a las familias que abandonen los programas bilingües cuando queda claro que sus hijos necesitan apoyo de educación especial, o se les dice que se inscriban en otro lugar desde el principio.

En el caso de Mejía, después de que Joangel ingresó a la primaria y comenzó a pasar la mayor parte de su tiempo en un salón de clases en el que solo se hablaba inglés, rápidamente comenzó a perder la capacidad de comunicarse con su familia en su español nativo.

“Hay padres que pagan para que sus hijos aprendan otro idioma”, dijo Mejía. Mientras tanto, ella ve cómo se desvanece la oportunidad de su hijo de ser bilingüe.

Aunque el distrito se ha comprometido a abrir más programas bilingües, muchos siguen siendo escépticos. Para cumplir con su objetivo de abrir 25 nuevos programas bilingües para el otoño de 2024, se supone que el distrito abrirá 10 el próximo año escolar, pero aún tiene que anunciar dónde se ubicarán esos programas.

Cada año de retraso significa que una nueva clase de niños de kínder se perderá la educación bilingüe, comenzando sus carreras en la escuela primaria en un entorno monolingüe. Sin más programas ni un cálculo de por qué los estudiantes con discapacidades están subrepresentados en los que existen, las familias seguirán enfrentándose a la frustración y al arrepentimiento.

Sonia Medina es madre de dos niños: Luis, de 13 años y Michael, de 15 años. Ambos tienen IEP: Luis para desorden de déficit de atención y Michael para el autismo y desorden hiperactivo y déficit de atención. Cuando Medina, una inmigrante de la República Dominicana, estaba escogiendo un kínder, quería que su hijo mayor ingresara al programa de lenguaje dual del Hurley, pero el distrito lo colocó en otra escuela sin la educación bilingüe.

Ella desearía que las cosas hubieran sido de otra manera. Ambos niños entienden bien el español, pero su hijo menor, en particular, habla con menos fluidez. En Santo Domingo, en familia, las barreras del idioma impiden que las conversaciones fluyan. Incluso cuando pueden expresar su punto de vista, Medina sabe que hablar es solo una parte de conocer un idioma.

“Una cosa es tu hablarlo”, dijo Medina. “Otra cosa escribirlo, y otra cosa es leerlo”. En ese aspecto, Medina dijo que sus hijos se han perdido. “El daño está hecho”.

*Aclaración: Este artículo se actualizó para aclarar como funcionan los servicios de educación especial en la Academia Muñiz.

Este artículo acerca de la educación especial bilingüe fue producido por The Hechinger Report, una organización de noticias independiente sin fines de lucro enfocada en la desigualdad y la innovación en la educación. Lee sus artículos en español.

The post Estudiantes con discapacidades a menudo son excluidos de populares programas de ‘lenguaje dual’ appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

BOSTON — After María Mejía’s son was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder in preschool, the question of where he should go to kindergarten focused entirely on his special education needs.

Mejía and her husband, Spanish-speaking immigrants from the Dominican Republic, only later learned that Joangel, now 7, would have been an ideal candidate for one of the four elementary schools in Boston that teach students in both English and Spanish, Joangel’s first language. Experts say such programs offer English learners the best chance at academic success. BPS has pledged to start dozens more.

But kids like Joangel, who have individualized education plans, are often left out,their families unwittingly forced to place them into English-only special education programs to help meet their learning needs. Mejía said she was shocked when she learned there was an alternative.

“They didn’t tell me there was a bilingual school,” Mejía said in Spanish, “only a school that would take a child with an IEP.”

District enrollment data obtained by The Hechinger Report through a public records request shows students with disabilities — who make up 22 percent of the student population —are starkly underrepresented in the district’s seven dual-language programs. They make up between 8 and 14 percent of the enrollment in each of the district’s five Spanish-English programs. None are enrolled in the two-year-old Vietnamese-English program at Mather Elementary School. And in the district’s Haitian Creole-English program, so few students with disabilities are enrolled, the district can’t reveal the total without risking student privacy.

Related: Rising popularity of dual-language education could leave Latinos behind

Experts and advocates say the disparities stem partly from a staffing issue — there are simply not enough bilingual special education teachers — but are also the result of overt discrimination and cultural misconceptions about whether students with disabilities can handle bilingual education. The district has pledged to add 25 more bilingual programs in the next two years. But both advocates and state officials question whether BPS can move that quickly, and early signs suggest the district may struggle to include students with disabilities as it opens new programs: The bilingual program at Mather Elementary, now in its second year, will only be ready to serve students with disabilities in its fourth year, according to the principal.

BPS plays a large role in determining placement for English Learners, who make up nearly a third of the district, as well as students with disabilities. Families in Boston get to select their preferred schools, but if students need English language or special education services, their registrations are routed through the Newcomers Assessment and Counseling Center or the Special Education department. Language testers make school recommendations based on students’ English proficiency, and special education department staff identify specific schools for kids with IEPs.

BPS spokesman Max Baker said in a statement the district is “devoted to becoming a fully inclusive district, providing full access to a continuum of services to all students,” but declined to answer questions about the reasons students with disabilities might be underrepresented in the dual-language programs, or state what specific steps the district intends to take to remedy the lack of representation.

Bilingual special education experts say the underrepresentation of students with disabilities is more than a missed opportunity — it’s discrimination. They say there’s no reason schools can’t serve students with disabilities. And equal opportunity law suggests they have to.

“Kids with disabilities need dual-language education more than anyone else.”

Maria Serpa, BPS English Language Learner Task Force member

Maria Serpa, a pioneer in the field and a member of the district’s English Language Learner Task Force, said the enrollment data is shocking. “Kids with disabilities need dual-language education more than anyone else,” Serpa said.

BPS has long been criticized for failing its students with disabilities and those who don’t speak English fluently — only narrowly avoiding a state takeover last year in part by pledging to improve services to these two groups. A cornerstone of its plan is an ambitious expansion of dual-language programs.

These programs, which bring together students who are learning English and native English speakers in a joint quest to become academically proficient in both languages, are considered one of the only ways to close the achievement gap between the two groups. English learners who go through these programs outperform their English learner peers on reading and math tests and graduate at higher rates.

Why dual-language instruction works so well is multifaceted. Research has found it’s better for kids whose dominant language is Spanish, for example, to spend part of their day getting academic instruction in their native language. Researchers and educators also highlight the benefits to self-esteem and belonging when kids who are traditionally seen as lacking because of their language background get to be the “experts” in front of their peers. And as English-speaking families across the socioeconomic spectrum flock to these programs, dual-language education has also been heralded as a method of school integration.

Related: A Spanish-English high school proves learning in two languages can boost graduation rates

Because students with disabilities and those dubbed English learners have among the lowest test scores and graduation rates in the district, advocates like Serpa believe they could benefit the most from a “gold standard” program.

Yet, so far, BPS has not followed that logic.

More than 14,600 BPS students are English learners. One in four has a disability. Yet just 6 percent of these students attend a dual-language school.

Dania Vázquez, headmaster of the Margarita Muñiz Academy dual-language high school, started her career in bilingual special education in the 1980s just as the twin specialties coalesced into a field. At her school, nearly 14 percent of students receive special education services, more than in Boston’s other dual-language programs, yet still below the district average.

She doesn’t know exactly why her school enrolls students with disabilities at higher rates than other dual language schools but noted the school coordinates its outreach to inform all families about its program.

“We are not choosing students,” Vázquez said. “Students are choosing us.”

At the Muñiz Academy, Vázquez said special education teachers spend time in classrooms supporting students with disabilities as they learn from core subject teachers.* The teachers also provide small group support in the school’s “resource room.”

“I don’t see the urgency for them to serve these kids.”

Suleika Soto, BPS mother and director of the Boston Education Justice Alliance

Historically, few English learners with disabilities in BPS have had access to both bilingual and special education.

“I don’t see the urgency for them to serve these kids,” said Suleika Soto, a BPS mother and director of the Boston Education Justice Alliance. Soto ranked two of the district’s dual-language programs at the top of her list of schools when she was registering her daughter for kindergarten but her child didn’t get into either program.

Soto enrolled in BPS after moving from the Dominican Republic when she was 7 and took bilingual classes until she became fluent in English. By the time she graduated, the state had banned bilingual education for immigrant students.

That ban, which lasted from 2002 to 2017, when the state Legislature offered districts renewed flexibility in language acquisition programs through the LOOK Act, continues to affect schools, both in staffing challenges and cultural perceptions around bilingual education.

Serpa said both English-speaking district administrators and non-English-speaking families need to be educated about the potential of dual-language programs.

“BPS has told a lot of families that the best thing for their kids is to learn only English,” Serpa said.

Related: How can being bilingual be an asset for white students and a deficit for immigrants?

Hai Son, principal of Mather Elementary School, sees the state ban’s continued impact on the teacher pipeline. A whole generation of bilingual students and young teachers who might have gone into bilingual education never did.

Students in Mather Elementary’s dual-language classrooms cannot receive special education services, according to Son, who said his team is already stretched thin creating a Vietnamese-language curriculum. Son said the district rushed the program’s opening last year, which pre-empted adequate planning time, leaving his team to design the program as they implement it.

Son said he expects to submit a plan for serving students with disabilities in his bilingual classrooms next year. If it is approved, the school could begin enrolling such students in 2024, he said.

How he will staff those classrooms, however, is an open question.

In a sweeping 2022 evaluation, the Council of Great City Schools, a coalition of the nation’s 78 largest school systems, criticized BPS for relying on teachers with multiple certifications to serve students with disabilities and those still learning English. While dual licensing technically complies with state and federal laws, critics say it stretches teacher capacity. In the district’s latest teacher contract, BPS committed to decreasing the practice.

Bilingual special education experts say the district can find more teachers by looking abroad or creating pipelines within the city’s immigrant communities.

Meanwhile, parents, teachers and community advocates report families are counseled to leave dual-language programs when it becomes clear their children need special education supports, or they’re told to enroll elsewhere from the start.

And mothers like Mejía see the high price of going down such a path. After Joangel entered elementary school and began spending the majority of his waking hours in an English-only classroom, Mejía said he quickly started losing his ability to communicate with his family in his native Spanish.

“There are parents paying so their children can learn another language,” Mejía said. Meanwhile, she is watching her son’s bilingualism slip away.

Although the district has pledged to open more bilingual programs, many remain skeptical. To meet its goal of opening 25 new bilingual programs by fall 2024, the district said it will start 10 next school year, but it has yet to announce where those programs will be located.

Every year’s delay means a new class of kindergartners misses out on bilingual education, starting off their elementary school careers on a monolingual track. If the district cannot provide more dual-language programs and address why students with disabilities are underrepresented in those that are offered, families will continue to face frustration and regret.

Sonia Medina is the mother of two boys, 13-year-old Luis and 15-year-old Michael. Both have IEPs: Luis for ADD and Michael for ADHD and autism. When Medina, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, was considering kindergartens, she wanted her eldest son to enter the dual-language program at the Hurley K-8 School but the district placed him in an English-only program elsewhere.

She wishes things had gone differently. Both children understand a decent amount of Spanish, but her younger son, in particular, speaks less fluently. In Santo Domingo, with family, language barriers prevent flowing conversations. And even when the boys can get their point across, Medina knows speaking is only part of the battle.

“It is one thing to speak [the language],” Medina said. “It’s another thing to write it, and another thing to read it.” In this aspect, Medina said her sons lost out. “The damage is done.”

* Clarification: This story was updated to clarify the nature of the Muñiz Academy’s services for kids with disabilities.

This story about bilingual special education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post Students with disabilities often left out of popular ‘dual-language’ programs appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

SARASOTA COUNTY, Fla. — On a Sunday afternoon in late May 2022, Zander Moricz, then class president of Sarasota County’s Pine View School, spent the moments before his graduation speech sitting outside the auditorium, on the phone with his lawyers. Over the previous month, the question of what he’d say when he stepped to the podium had become national news. That March, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis had signed the Parental Rights in Education Act, quickly dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law for its ban on all mention of gender identity and sexuality in K–3 classrooms and restriction of those discussions in higher grades as well. Moricz, a student LGBTQ+ activist, had led several protests against the act that spring and joined a high-profile lawsuit against the state. In early May, he charged on Twitter that Pine View’s administration had warned that if he mentioned his activism or the lawsuit at graduation, his microphone would be cut. (In a statement released last year, the school district confirmed that students are told not to express political views in their speeches.)

In the tumultuous weeks leading up to the ceremony, Pine View — Sarasota’s “gifted” magnet institution, consistently ranked one of the top 25 public high schools in the country — was besieged with angry calls and news coverage. Moricz stayed home for three weeks, he said, thanks to the volume of death threats he received, and people showed up at his parents’ work. When a rumor started that Pine View’s principal would have to wear a bulletproof vest to graduation, he recalled, “the entire campus lost their minds,” thinking “everyone’s going to die” and warning relatives not to come. His parents worried he’d be killed. 

But after all the controversy, graduation day was a success. Moricz, now 19, delivered a pointedly coded speech about the travails of being born with curly hair in Florida’s humid climate: how he worried about the “thousands of curly-haired kids who are going to be forced to speak like this” — like he was, in code — “for their entire lives as students.” Videos of the speech went viral. Donations poured into Moricz’s youth-led nonprofit. That summer, he left to study government at Harvard. 

Half-a-year later though, when Moricz came home, Sarasota felt darker. 

“I’m wearing this hat for a reason,” he said when we met for coffee in a strip mall near his alma mater in early March. “Two years ago, if I was bullied due to my queerness, the school would have rallied around me and shut it down. If it happened today, I believe everyone would act like it wasn’t happening.”

These days, he said, queer kids sit in the back of class and don’t tell teachers they’re being harassed. A student at Pine View was told, Moricz said, that he couldn’t finish his senior thesis researching other states’ copycat “Don’t Say Gay” laws. (The school did not respond to a request for comment through a district spokesperson.) When Moricz’s nonprofit found a building to house a new youth LGBTQ+ center — since schools were emphatically no longer safe spaces — they budgeted for bulletproof glass. 

“The culture of fear that’s being created is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do,” he said. And much of it was thanks to the Sarasota County School Board. 

Over the last two years, education culture wars have become the engine of Republican politics nationwide, with DeSantis’s Florida serving as the vanguard of the movement. But within the state, Sarasota is more central still. 

Its school board chair, Bridget Ziegler, cofounded the conservative activist group Moms for Liberty and helped lay the groundwork for “Don’t Say Gay.” After a uniquely ugly school board race last summer, conservatives flipped the board and promptly forced out the district’s popular superintendent. In early January, when DeSantis appointed a series of right-wing activists to transform Florida’s progressive New College into a “Hillsdale of the South” — emulating the private Christian college in Michigan that has become a trendsetting force on the right — that was in Sarasota too. In February, DeSantis sat alongside Ziegler’s husband and Moms for Liberty’s other cofounders to announce a list of 14 school board members he intends to help oust in 2024—Sarasota’s sole remaining Democrat and LGBTQ+ board member, Tom Edwards, among them. The next month, Ziegler proposed that the board hire a newly created education consultancy group with ties to Hillsdale College for what she later called a “‘WOKE’ Audit.” (Ziegler did not respond to interview requests for this article.)

The dizzying number of attacks has led to staffing and hiring challenges, the cancelation of a class, a budding exodus of liberals from the county, and fears that destroying public education is the ultimate endgame. In January, Ziegler’s husband, Christian — who chairs the Florida Republican Party — tweeted a celebratory declaration: “SARASOTA IS GROUND ZERO FOR CONSERVATIVE EDUCATION.” 

It wasn’t hyperbole, said Moricz. “We say that Sarasota is Florida’s underground lab, and we’re its non-consenting lab rats.” 

For as long as Florida has been grading schools and school districts — a late 1990s innovation that helped spark the “school reform” movement — Sarasota, with its 62 schools and nearly 43,000 students, has enjoyed an “A” rating. Perched on the Gulf Coast just south of Tampa, the county’s mix of powder-soft beaches and high-culture amenities — including an opera house, ballet and museums — have made it a destination for vacationers and retirees. And that influx has made Sarasota one of the richest counties in the state. 

Since many of those retirees, dating back to the 1950s, have been white Midwestern transplants, it’s also made Sarasota a Republican stronghold and top fundraising destination for would-be presidential candidates. Both the last and current chairs of the state GOP — first State Senator Joe Gruters and now Christian Ziegler — live in the county. Sarasota arguably launched Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign, thanks to Gruters’s early support. These days, though, Sarasota isn’t just conservative, but at the leading edge of Florida’s turn to the hard right.  

Partly that’s thanks to the Zieglers, who have become one of Florida’s premier power couples, with close ties to both Trump world and the DeSantis administration and a trio of daughters enrolled in local private schools. As founder of the digital marketing company Microtargeted Media, Christian did hundreds of thousands of dollars of work for pro-Trump PACs in 2021, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported. After being elected state GOP chair this February, he announced his goal was “to crush these leftist in-state Democrats” so thoroughly that “no Democrat considers running for office.” Although Bridget stepped down from Moms for Liberty shortly after its founding, she subsequently helped draft Florida’s Parents’ Bill of Rights, which helped pave the way for DeSantis’s 2021 ban on mask mandates and ultimately last year’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. In 2022, the right-wing Leadership Institute hired her as director of school board programs, and built a 6,000-square-foot headquarters in Sarasota to serve as a national hub for conservative education activism. This winter, DeSantis also appointed her to a new board designed to punish the Disney Company for criticizing his anti-LGBTQ laws. 

“I’m telling you right now, whether I’m here or not, you have to get the politics out of this school district.”

Brennan Asplen, former superintendent, Sarasota County schools

But it wasn’t just them. After Trump lost reelection in 2020, leaders across the far right, from Steve Bannon to the Proud Boys, called for a “precinct by precinct” battle to take control of both the Republican Party and local government. Many making that call were from Sarasota, dubbed the “right-wing capital” of the country last year by Sarasota Magazine, for the flood of far-right figures relocating there. They included former Trump national security advisor and QAnon hero General Michael Flynn; Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk; and Publix grocery chain heiress Julie Fancelli, who helped bankroll both the January 6 rallies and Moms for Liberty. Then there’s the Hollow, a 10-acre wedding venue/shooting range/children’s playland that has become the center of a far-right network led by Flynn, targeting local institutions from the county GOP to a local hospital to the district’s public schools. 

Related: Florida just expanded school vouchers—again. What does that really mean?

Over the last three years, the school district has experienced waves of chaotic unrest, beginning in mid-2020. That August, amid the tumult of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement and the presidential election, Tom Edwards, a silver-haired former New York businessman, won an upset race for school board on a platform of public health precautions and fighting school privatization. Already that year, two sitting board members had left the Republican Party in disgust over its far-right shift. The election of Edwards — a self-described moderate Democrat who’d moved to Sarasota shortly after selling his second business and had quickly grown restless with retirement — meant the board suddenly had a 3-2 moderate majority. 

The day before the board next met, Bridget Ziegler — originally appointed to her position by then Governor Rick Scott in 2014 — posted to Facebook an educational cartoon about BLM, created by a company whose products the district licensed. Although the video was never shown in Sarasota classes, Ziegler’s post — ending with the admonition, “Our job is to educate, not indoctrinate” — triggered a movement. The following day, and for months to come, the board meeting was packed with angry speakers, including local Proud Boys, charging the district was indoctrinating children. 

“They were vicious,” recalled Nora Mitchell, now a senior at Booker High, Sarasota’s most racially diverse high school, who spoke at her first board meeting during the controversy when she was just 15. Afterward, she said, she was followed into the parking lot, with one man demanding to know whether she considered him racist because he was white and a woman calling her a Marxist. Online, conservative activists argued that she couldn’t have written the speech herself. 

“The insinuation,” said Mitchell, “was that I’m Black, I go to Booker, so obviously I’m some sort of plant for my white teachers.” (This August, Mitchell leaves for Harvard too.)

That battle “was the first, pre-CRT thing, before that became a buzzword,” said Carol Lerner, a retired public school social worker and researcher who cofounded the progressive advocacy group Support Our Schools. “That’s how the whole thing started nationwide.” 

Last year, when Ziegler was up for reelection and two other board members were terming out, she ran as a unified slate with former school resource officer Tim Enos and retired district employee Robyn Marinelli. The candidates drew support from both DeSantis’s administration — which unprecedentedly endorsed dozens of school board candidates across the state — and local members of the far-right. A PAC partially funded by The Hollow’s owner campaigned for the “ZEM” slate (a shorthand for the candidates’ surnames) by driving a mobile billboard around the county, calling one of their opponents a “LIAR” and “BABY KILLER” because she’d once worked for Planned Parenthood. Proud Boys hoisted ZEM signs on county streets and a mailer was sent out, castigating the liberal candidates as “BLM/PSL [Party of Socialism and Liberation]/ANTIFA RIOTERS, PLANNED PARENTHOOD BABY KILLERS, [who] WANT GROOMING AND PORNOGRAPHY IN OUR SCHOOLS.” (Enos and Marinelli did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)

“I got, of course, that I’m BLM, I’m PSL, I’m an Antifa rioter,” said then candidate Dawnyelle Singleton, a Sarasota native who’d worked for years as administrator of a boys’ charter school that primarily serves Black and Latino students. If she’d won her race against Ziegler, she’d have become the first-ever Black school board member in the district. When then Democratic gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist offered her and the other liberal candidates his endorsement, they refused, reasoning that such an alignment “is not getting the politics out of school.” But in right-wing online circles, she and the other candidates were attacked — including by the husband of the school board’s other conservative member, Karen Rose. He shared a meme of her and the other candidates as the Three Stooges and called Singleton “a incompetent” “childless secretary.” (Rose did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)

Although Tom Edwards wasn’t up for reelection, Christian Ziegler shared a video of him at a public event reassuring teachers that there were still so-called “woke” school board members “working from the inside” to protect them. After the video climbed from Twitter to Fox News, Edwards was besieged with slurs like “groomer.” 

Even some Republicans seemed embarrassed by the excesses of the campaign. The local GOP disavowed the pro-ZEM PAC to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and two of the conservative candidates — Enos and Marinelli — denounced its mobile billboards. Marinelli was compelled to withdraw from a campaign event hosted by a member of the Proud Boys. But after DeSantis held an election-eve rally for ZEM, all three won; at the victory party, Ziegler and Marinelli were photographed alongside the activists who’d brought them there, Proud Boys and all. 

The new board, with Ziegler as chair, was seated just before Thanksgiving. Within its first 10 minutes of business, Rose called for a special meeting to discuss firing district Superintendent Brennan Asplen. Although, as he’d later declare, he was a conservative Republican, Asplen had become a target for agreeing to implement the previous board’s mask mandate and was subsequently declared a “woke” puppet of “LGBT groups.” (Asplen declined an interview request.) When the meeting was held the following week, members of the public spoke for nearly three hours, overwhelmingly demanding to keep Asplen on. An anonymous survey conducted by the district teachers’ union found that more than 97 percent of staff wanted him to stay. But the board still voted, 4-1, to let him go. Then they asked his wife, who also worked in the district, to resign as well. 

“I’m telling you right now, whether I’m here or not, you have to get the politics out of this school district,” Asplen warned. 

Related: Lessons about Native American history are at risk of disappearing from classrooms

But since then, nearly every board meeting has brought a new battle. In early February, the board held a hearing to ban a book about antiracism (ultimately voting to keep the book but requiring parental permission before students can check it out). Two weeks later, it revised a safety policy enacted after the Parkland shooting to allow parents to walk their children into class — something 93 percent of local teachers’ union members opposed, with some suspecting the demand was a means for conservative parents to inspect classrooms for evidence of liberal politics. On March 7, the board banned a character education program, Character Strong, that had come under fire for containing elements of “social emotional learning” (SEL), which conservatives have declared a “Trojan horse” for CRT. 

The same day, during public comment, a former member of Moms for Liberty called Edwards an “LGBTQ groomer.” She went on to ask whether a background check was performed before he’d recently read to a third grade class and demanded the district send letters to all those students’ parents, telling them Edwards had participated in “LGBTQ grooming events” (by which she meant his attendance at a conference for student Gay-Straight Alliance clubs). She also called on DeSantis to unseat Edwards as “a threat to the innocence of our children and the rule of law in Florida.” When a local right-wing Facebook page posted a poll on whether DeSantis should in fact remove Edwards, Robyn Marinelli voted yes, as did Ziegler’s and Rose’s husbands. (Marinelli appears to have since rescinded her vote.)

Two weeks later, on March 21, Ziegler proposed that Character Strong be replaced by a character training program from Vermilion Education, a three-month-old consultancy business founded by a former Hillsdale College staffer, Jordan Adams, who in 2022 was hired by Florida’s Department of Education to scour math textbooks for CRT and SEL. (Adams says his company has no formal relationship with Hillsdale.) The week after that, Ziegler proposed hiring Vermilion for two consulting projects, one of indefinite duration and expense. They included advising the school system on hiring decisions and undertaking a sweeping “District Improvement Study” to review all the district’s curricula, teacher training programs, union contracts and policies. 

“We say that Sarasota is Florida’s underground lab, and we’re its non-consenting lab rats.” 

Zander Moricz, 2022 graduate of Pine View High School, Sarasota County, Florida

The scope of the contracts, charged Support Our Schools, was “so broad and expansive, it in effect turns over the keys to the school district to the company.” 

But that, they said, was the point. In 2021, when the district was at war with itself over masking, Carol Lerner, Lisa Schurr and a handful of other local parents and educators founded Support Our Schools to counter the conservative education movement. At first, Schurr told me, they’d been baffled “that anybody could have an issue with wearing a mask to protect the lives of other people. But we quickly learned that these issues were in many ways a distraction, and the real issue is the destruction through privatization of public education.” 

Indeed, the same day Edwards was verbally attacked in Sarasota, five hours north, in Tallahassee, the state opened its legislative session with an array of new bills to transform public education further still: to expand “Don’t Say Gay” through 12th grade, decertify teachers’ unions, make school board races partisan, and much more. Then there was the big one: HB1, a universal “school choice” proposal quickly passed into law that made all Florida families eligible for $8,000 vouchers, no matter their income or whether their children had ever attended public school. Public education advocates warned the bill would cost anywhere from $2 to 4 billion per year — enough to bankrupt the system.

“It’s been an incremental and long game,” said Edwards when we met for breakfast two days later, just after he’d read a book about a polar bear to another third grade class. “They used ‘parental rights’ to get people to the polls to vote their agenda, and it creates chaos at public schools. And that chaos creates doubt in the efficacy of public education. So it’s a win-win: they got people to the polls and they get to destroy the good faith in public education.” 

“Trying to get a job as a teacher in Sarasota County used to be impossible,” said Theoni Soublis, a teacher education professor at the University of Tampa who grew up in and started her own career in Sarasota’s public schools. “That’s why we pay the taxes we pay — because our schools are so good.” But these days, she said, Sarasota principals call her all the time, searching for new staff. 

Across the state, low teacher pay and the constant attacks on educators have helped create some 5,300 teacher vacancies — an increase of nearly 140 percent since DeSantis took office, and the worst school staffing crisis the state’s ever seen. Sarasota, with some 120 teacher vacancies, is no longer exempt from those trends. “We’ve seen a deterioration of the desire to stay in Sarasota schools,” said Soublis, “and I would attribute that directly to the chaos that’s been created in our community.” (In an email, Kelsey Whealy, media relations specialist for the Sarasota district, wrote that “All school districts across the country have been impacted by the national teacher shortage,” and that “Sarasota County Schools remains one of our area’s leading employers.”)

When I met with Lerner and Schurr at a restaurant near the school district offices, a woman eating at the next table interjected to say that she, an assistant principal in the district, was hoping to leave herself, sending out résumés anywhere but Sarasota County. At another board meeting in March, Mary Holmes, a 30-year veteran teacher, declared she was there “to discuss S.H.I.T.: Sarasota Helicopter parents Interfering with Teaching.” Citing the recent controversy over some parents’ demand to walk their children to class, Holmes said the board’s approval had just created more anxiety among her special education students. “Just what were you hoping for?” she asked. “That teachers would be caught teaching an indoctrination pledge?” In April, a “Climate Survey” conducted by the district’s teachers’ union found that 83 percent of teachers in Sarasota County felt unsupported by the current school board majority, and nearly 68 percent feared retaliation if they complained. 

Holmes wasn’t alone. “We’ve had a complete right-wing takeover and it’s been very well-orchestrated,” said Liz Ballard, a history teacher at Pine View who is a lesbian and was the first person Zander Moricz came out to. “They have all these pressure talking points — like ‘groomer,’ ‘pedophiles,’ CRT — to package a message that teachers are doing these bad things. And it worked. It got people to the polls and they voted in these right-wing Christians who think Hillsdale College is what we ought to be following.” 

“It scares me to think that we’re going backwards 50 years or more. Public education is going to cease.”

Gail Foreman, history teacher, Booker High School, Sarasota County, Florida

When we spoke in March, Ballard’s class had just concluded a unit on early US history, including, she said, “all our dark history.” Sometimes, she said, she’ll introduce a topic by joking to her students about the constraints she’s working under: “This will probably get me fired, but slavery was bad. It happened, it was bad.” Some students laugh, others seem concerned; some, she can tell, are following what’s going on in their district. When administrators alerted Pine View teachers, two days after the board banned Character Strong, that they could also no longer use videos from Flocabulary — a gentle, corny series of educational rap videos — Ballard said her students were dismayed. 

More hurtful to her is knowing that some of their parents voted for this. “That’s the thing that’s most upsetting: that smart people are falling for stupid lies, letting Libs of TikTok dictate the narrative,” Ballard said. “I keep saying I’m going to stick it out and fight the good fight, that I need to model not letting the bullies win. Or at least go down swinging, if that’s what I want the next generation to do.” 

Related: In the wake of ‘Don’t Say Gay,’ LGBTQ+ students won’t be silenced

Across the district, at Booker High School — which before desegregation finally came to Sarasota, was a proud Black institution — history teacher Gail Foreman is equally frustrated. 

“We have high school kids that are working 40 hours a week. There are needs in our district that our board’s not willing to examine, because they’re too busy worrying about ‘Is this woke?’” Foreman said. 

Foreman and her wife were the first lesbian couple married in Sarasota County in 2015, soon after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. For years, LGBTQ+ students knew they could talk to her. But since last year, those conversations have become tortured, she said. In one recent class, one of her students started crying, and asked Foreman to step outside. She’d just been dumped by her first girlfriend, in the middle of the school day, via text.

“I wanted so badly to say to her, ‘It’s ok, honey, there’s going to be others.’ But I can’t. So I just stood there and listened until finally she said, ‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’” Foreman recalled. “I said ‘I can’t. I will violate the parents’ rights law if I do.’” 

Another district teacher, who asked not to use her name because, like many younger educators in Florida, she’s employed on a year-to-year contract, said the same law had recently dissuaded her from buying books for her classroom library since they’d all have to be vetted by a “media specialist” — a process that could take months. Likewise, when she’d recently had a class-planning idea to pair the novel students were reading — Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” — with clips from “Edward Scissorhands,” she’d remembered the law’s dictate that anything not on a class syllabus requires parental permission. Any student who couldn’t get their slip signed — often because their parents work nights — would have to wait in the hall. She abandoned the idea. 

Foreman also instructs college-level sociology and psychology classes at Booker, but perhaps not for long. Earlier this year she and Booker’s coordinator for college-level classes decided not to offer her sociology course next year, because it includes a unit discussing non-traditional families that seems almost certain to invite complaints that the lessons violate Florida’s new laws. “The coordinator and I had a hard conversation about the curriculum and decided we couldn’t take the chance,” said Foreman. (Whealy, the district spokesperson, said that a final decision has not yet been made about whether or not the class will be offered next year.) 

The loss of a college-credit course at Booker — where more than half the student body is Black or Latino — hurts on multiple levels, Foreman said. In the immediate term, it removes an option for college-bound students to save thousands of dollars in future tuition. Further out, the loss of those classes at Booker — which over the past decade had managed to attract a number of wealthier, whiter students with a performing arts program and law academy — could have cascading effects, driving away the families who now opt into the school.

“That school will end up an all-Black school,” Foreman predicted — a reversion to the mid-1960s state of affairs before integration. Then, as historian Daniel Campbell has written, Sarasota underwent a similar convulsion, as a far-right faction aligned with the John Birch Society declared there was a left-wing conspiracy to infiltrate county schools. District and school administrators, as well as teachers, were accused of being communists or homosexuals. One couple snuck into a school’s bathrooms to “collect evidence” about school staff and a superintendent who followed federal desegregation orders was forced to resign. In 1966, a former state legislator declared the right-wing groups had made Sarasota infamous “as a hate center.” 

“It scares me to think that we’re going backwards 50 years or more,” Foreman said. Combined with the impact of the school voucher bill HB1, she warned, “Public education is going to cease.” She worried that more elite schools in the district, like Pine View — which opened amid integration with a bevy of admittance requirements that kept Black students out — would be transformed into private institutions. The rest would revert to de facto segregation. “You’re going to have the haves and the have-nots,” she said. “If you are a parent and can afford private school, your kids will get educated. If you can’t, your kids aren’t going to be; they’re going to be the servants.” 

Everyone knew someone who had left, or was planning to. Lisa Schurr knew of dozens. One was a fellow Support Our Schools cofounder, who recently became one of four Sarasota women who fled the county’s political environment for Maine. 

“I came here for the culture, but it became the culture wars,” said Robin Taub Williams, founder of the Democratic Public Education Caucus of Manasota, who said that at age 71, she’d never personally witnessed antisemitism until the last year. But now, she said, she’s had leaflets left in her driveway by the “Goyim Defense League” and had a bare-chested stranger knock on the door and tell her partner, “I didn’t know we had any Jews left in the neighborhood.” 

“People are leaving Sarasota. We’re all discussing it,” said Carol Lerner. “I don’t want to. I’m here for the fight. But I’m developing some contingency plans.” 

In Brevard County — another district that boasts a Moms for Liberty cofounder and which also ousted its superintendent after flipping its school board last fall — so many people are leaving that a progressive public health group recently had to disband. This April, the LGBTQ+ rights group Equality Florida issued a travel advisory, warning that “Florida may not be a safe place to visit or take up residence.” 

Republicans responded with glee. When The Wall Street Journal published a story about Florida’s hard-right “shift,” quoting a Democrat who said “It feels like the earth is caving in and we can’t breathe,” Christian Ziegler tweeted, “LOVE TO HEAR IT.” After a recent academic survey found that more than half of LGBTQ+ parents were considering leaving Florida, and nearly a fifth were already working to do so, DeSantis spokeswoman Christina Pushaw shared the news on Twitter with an emoji of a hand waving goodbye. In May, when the NAACP issued its own travel advisory about Florida (following yet another from the League of United Latin American Citizens), Christian Ziegler suggested the group’s chairman should leave the state. 

“I’m not scared of these people. But I’m scared for the future of this college, and Florida, and the country, in ways that I don’t think people who aren’t in Florida understand.” 

Madi Markham, a 2023 graduate of New College, Sarasota County, Florida

Partly the reason for the exodus was the sense of continual bombardment. “DeSantis seems to have this media strategy where he’s in the headlines all the time, every single day,” said Liv Coleman, a political science professor at the University of Tampa who researches the right wing. “It’s relentless,” she continued, like the chaotic news cycle of the Trump years, when every morning people had to wonder what new bombshell would land that day. “It’s like that all over again in Florida. But it affects our lives more deeply, because this is state government, these are our schools.” 

“It’s everything, everywhere, all at once,” said former Sarasota school board chair Jane Goodwin, who, before terming out last year, had opposed new policies to out LGBTQ+ students to their parents and cut off public commenters who attacked school board members personally. Since last November, she said, she has watched the new board systematically dismantle everything she’d done. 

“It feels like there’s a million things happening all the time, and there’s only so much you can do,” agreed Madi Markham, a 2023 graduate of New College, who grew up in the area, and felt the district and her college were being dragged along parallel tracks. By early March, after DeSantis’s appointees fired New College’s president, its interim chief, former state education commissioner Richard Corcoran, disbanded the school’s diversity office, fired its head, and proposed that right-wing think tanks establish academic centers on campus. In April, Bridget Ziegler was named to the college’s presidential selection committee. And in May, when DeSantis signed new legislation banning funding for diversity programs at all state universities, he did so at New College.

Related: Teachers, deputized to fight the culture wars, are often reluctant to serve

The sense of onslaught was intentional. In February, a website run by former Trump speechwriter Darren Beattie argued that DeSantis and his New College appointee Christopher Rufo were “putting on a masterclass” of battle strategy by overwhelming their opponents with the sheer number and speed of simultaneous attacks. “It’s all hitting, all at once.” 

“I’m not scared of these people,” Markham said. “But I’m scared for the future of this college, and Florida, and the country, in ways that I don’t think people who aren’t in Florida understand.” 

At the school board, Edwards said Sarasota’s status as “ground zero” for the education wars was impeding the search for a new superintendent. In December, shortly after Brennan Asplen was forced out, Edwards said he’d called seven or eight community leaders, to see if any could serve in an interim role, but was roundly “shot down.” One person said they could do it, but didn’t want their family “persecuted,” Edwards recalled. In March, as the board interviewed head-hunting firms to lead its superintendent search, one company acknowledged that Sarasota’s reputation would scare some applicants away. 

“I don’t think it’s any secret that there’s three or four or five states in the country where there’s been more turnover than other states, and Florida is one of them,” Steve Joel, of the executive recruitment firm McPherson & Jacobson, told the board. Good superintendents want to know they’d “have a fighting chance to be successful,” Joel said. If they didn’t think that was possible, they wouldn’t apply. 

“Here’s how fascism works: we go after the marginalized, we start banning books and we go after education,” Edwards told me. “I’m not afraid to use the word fascism, because I’m watching it. I’m getting the brunt of it. And the bullying the governor is doing silences people, so even parents outraged about what’s happening stay silent, because they’re afraid there’s going to be retaliation from the school board to their child.”

“The public has got to wake up and pay attention,” he continued. “I’m an elected official and I’m not afraid to fight. But to do that I need support from my community, and in numbers.” 

Increasingly, say Lerner and Schurr, the public is answering. On March 21, the next school board meeting after Edwards was called a “groomer,” the room was flooded with public commenters, including a contingent of clergy, there to denounce the “vile” spectacle of the last meeting. Numerous white-haired retirees spoke to the importance of teaching Black history or accepting gender diversity. Forty minutes into public comment, when another conservative school board regular started talking about “what Tom wants to do to our children,” Edwards walked out of the building. Most of the audience applauded, and a number followed him outside. 

“We’ve been saying all along these are red herrings, it’s subterfuge, it’s all the privatization of public education,” said Schurr. “A lot of people thought, ‘You’re crazy.’” But now, when she speaks on panels, even to nonpartisan groups, the destruction of public education always comes up. 

“I’m more hopeful than I’ve been in a while,” said Lerner, “because I see people understanding what’s going on.” 

On April 18, before another school board meeting, a series of groups including the teachers’ union, Women’s Voices of Southwest Florida, and a student coalition rallied to protest the attacks on Edwards, censorship, and the proposal to let Vermilion Education overhaul the district. More than 70 people signed up to speak, and public comment lasted for four hours. When the board voted, two of the new conservative board members, Tim Enos and Robyn Marinelli, sided with Edwards, blocking the contracts (although Marinelli signaled that she might be open to a different, more narrowly-defined contract with the company). Sarasota Herald-Tribune education reporter Steven Walker tweeted that it was “one of the first times I’ve been genuinely shocked in my year on this beat.” 

“Are people waking up now? Are people being energized?” asked Soublis. “Is it enough?” 

On April 21, two simultaneous events punctuated that question: Ziegler welcomed some 300 conservative education activists to the inaugural “Learn Right” training summit of the Leadership Institute’s new Sarasota headquarters, and students across the state joined a massive walkout in protest of Florida’s education policies, led in part by Zander Moricz’s nonprofit. But over the following weeks, three new books were targeted for book bans in the district. Elsewhere in the state, DeSantis’s administration moved to strip another superintendent’s educator certificate after a complaint from Moms for Liberty, and a fifth grade teacher was placed under investigation by the Department of Education for showing a Disney movie with an LGBTQ+ character to her class.  

In April, a “Climate Survey” conducted by the district’s teachers’ union found that 83 percent of teachers in Sarasota County felt unsupported by the current school board majority, and nearly 68 percent feared retaliation if they complained. 

“I unfortunately am less optimistic about the ability to push back against this,” said Coleman. “Sometimes things have to break before people really pay attention.” In the late 1960s, Sarasota’s segregation-era school fever — which included “hit lists” of teachers to be fired and charges that right-wing activists were trying to learn the religious affiliation of every student in the district — only broke when “moderate Republicans got so sick of it that they joined forces with liberals,” she continued. But things could be bad for a while. “I just wonder at what point do people say ‘enough’?”

Back on March 7, Moricz — who’d taken a gap semester from Harvard to attend to his growing nonprofit — was at the school board when Edwards was attacked. He got up to speak, addressing his comments to Tom. “It probably feels very overwhelming to be in the minority, and it probably feels like you can’t do anything,” he said. “But the position you’re in is more important than any position they’re in politically.” Edwards had to keep fighting, Moricz said, even though things would get “so much worse.” 

What he meant, Moricz later explained when we met near his alma mater, was that “Anyone right now who is being bullied by Ron DeSantis has to be an example for future victims.” 

“Tom has to survive this so that other people know they can survive this,” he continued. “And if we know we can survive this, more people will be brave to stand up.”

It was also a declaration that Florida wasn’t yet gone. “The trick of the culture war is to make people feel the fight is already lost,” Moricz said, “so that in one or two years, conservatives will genuinely win the fight. Right now, that fight has not been won. They are simply claiming victory.” 

This story about Sarasota County was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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Back in 2013, as a senior in high school, Michael Wang sent a series of emails to admissions offices at the colleges that had rejected him. He asked how race played into their decisions, specifically for Asian American students like him. With near-perfect test scores, stellar grades and a pages-long resumé of extracurricular activities, he wanted to know why he had been rejected from the nation’s most prestigious universities. Finding their boilerplate responses insufficient, he filed discrimination complaints against three universities with the federal Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.

Unknowingly, Wang helped set in motion the latest movement to end affirmative action on college campuses. Now, he said, “a part of me regrets what I’ve put forward.”

In the 10 years since he sent the emails and filed the complaints, he’s come to feel that the issue is much bigger than just whether he got to attend Harvard College. He’s concluded, he said, that “affirmative action is a Band-Aid to the cancer of systemic racism.”  

Even after more than five decades of affirmative action in college admissions, dramatic inequities by race in college enrollment and degree attainment persist. Between Black and White Americans, the college enrollment gap has been growing wider since 2010, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics and the National Student Clearinghouse.

With the potential end of race-conscious admissions looming, Wang isn’t sure if a world without affirmative action is better or worse than the world we live in now. 

“Where we are now is not great, but I’m scared to see what’s going to happen in the future,” Wang, now 27, said in an interview with The Hechinger Report.

The Supreme Court is expected to rule on two affirmative action cases next month. One alleges discrimination against Asian American applicants at Harvard, and another alleges discrimination against white and Asian American applicants at the University of North Carolina at  Chapel Hill. 

Wang, who graduated from Williams College in 2017, is not named in either lawsuit. And although he became a poster child for opposition to affirmative action, Wang’s concern was always more nuanced.  Yes, he filed those complaints; yes, he met with Edward Blum, the driving force behind opposition to race-based admissions, and agreed to speak publicly about his own situation, over and over and over again. 

Every time Wang spoke out, however, he talked about remedying unfairness to Asian American students – not eliminating all racial considerations in admissions. He believes colleges have unfairly used affirmative action to hold Asian Americans to higher standards than other applicants, and that policies that help some historically marginalized students but disadvantage others aren’t fair. 

“I’m not anti-affirmative action,” he said. “I just want it reformed.”

Yet Wang’s willingness to share his disillusionment at his own college-admissions experience has helped push the already existing movement to where it is today.

Colleges began enacting affirmative action policies in the 1960s and 1970s, aiming to add racial and gender diversity to college campuses, and opponents began challenging them shortly thereafter. In 1978, the Supreme Court ruled that colleges could use race as a factor in admissions, but could not use racial quota systems. Since then, there have been several high-profile lawsuits that have modified the Supreme Court’s position on affirmative action in limited ways.

Related: College admissions is already broken. What will happen if affirmative action is banned?

Proponents of affirmative action say that ending the practice will hurt historically underrepresented people in higher education and will reinforce inequities that left these communities underrepresented in the first place. They also argue that diversity on campuses improves the educational experience of all students.

“The purpose here of these cases before the Supreme Court is to suggest that something like a diverse community isn’t something that’s important and valuable, and that race should not be a part of the kind of conversation we’re having, and that’s the part that is really dangerous,” said Anurima Bhargava, who led federal civil rights enforcement in schools and higher education institutions at the Department of Justice during the Obama administration and now leads the advising and consulting firm Anthem of Us, which promotes equity in schools, workplaces and communities.

She added, “It doesn’t account for the fact that so much of the way in which our education systems are set up is privileging some to the detriment of many others.”

Affirmative action critics believe that if colleges give preference to Black and Latino students, that will raise the bar for Asian and white students, who will then be fighting for a reduced number of seats.

“You can’t preference someone into a class without preferencing someone out,” said Gail L. Heriot, a law professor at the University of San Diego and a member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, who opposes affirmative action policies. 

That’s what Wang felt had happened when he was denied entry to Harvard, despite the resumé he had spent years working tirelessly to build.

The responses to his emails and to the discrimination complaints Wang filed with the Department of Education didn’t prompt the action he’d hoped for. He got in touch with Blum, who was then representing a white student, Abigail Fisher, who had been rejected from the University of Texas in an affirmative action case before the Supreme Court. (The court ultimately ruled against her.)

Blum, who is white, founded the nonprofit Students for Fair Admissions, the group that brought both cases now before the Supreme Court. Because Blum was looking for plaintiffs who were still in the college application process, it was too late for Wang to join either case. But he said he solved a significant problem for Blum: None of the students the lawyer was then representing was willing to speak out or be named, fearing retaliation. And so Wang became the public face of his campaign.

Back in the fall of 2013, Wang had moved to Massachusetts to start classes at Williams, a prestigious liberal arts school where about 10 percent of students were Asian, 7 percent were Black, 12 percent were Hispanic and 42 percent were white.

“How can we contribute to the leadership of tomorrow? That leadership has got to be diverse.”

Natasha Warikoo, sociology professor, Tufts University

When he found himself one of two Asian American students in a political science class, it was difficult to keep the affirmative action questions out of his head, he said, and he began to wonder what the lack of racial diversity meant for the diversity of opinion.

“Diversity is still crucially important to the learning experience, but at what cost do we achieve that diversity?” he wondered.

Being part of this movement for a decade has prompted Wang to think deeply about how college applicants are judged, he said. 

“Let’s say you have an African American student whose family is barely above the poverty line, but has tried hard to go to debate tournaments, attend school, working their butt off trying to get to the end of the day,” Wang said. “A 3.7 GPA. Pretty impressive, solid exam scores, but a really inspiring lifestyle. Compared to an Asian American student who comes in with everything off the charts, A’s in everything, 4-point-whatever GPA, super high test scores.

“How do you decide at that point? I don’t know.” 

In an interview for a documentary film produced by WCNY and Retro Report, in partnership with The Hechinger Report, Wang said, “I think affirmative action is still very necessary in helping minorities who actually need it.”

Related: Colleges that ditched test scores for admissions find it’s harder to be fair in choosing students, researcher says

And he said the pervasive “model minority” myth, which suggests that all Asian American students are high-performing and successful, works to erase the history of discrimination against Asian Americans.

Wang said he did not understand the magnitude of the situation – and the change that could be coming – until the Supreme Court shifted to a conservative majority over the past few years. 

By then, Wang was finishing up his political science degree at Williams, working as a paralegal, and then moving through law school at Santa Clara University in California. He said he was in part inspired to pursue the law because of his experience with college admissions and his belief that the ways race was being considered were unfair. (Though that was his motivation, Wang is now interested in intellectual property law.)

But as he was learning the law, the way the highest court was interpreting the law was changing.

“You can’t preference someone into a class without preferencing someone out.”

Gail L. Heriot, a law professor at the University of San Diego

Wang pointed to two examples: a 2018 Supreme Court ruling in favor of a Colorado baker who refused to make a cake for a same-sex couple’s wedding, and the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which dramatically altered abortion access in the country.

“This Court has done a lot of things that we didn’t think would ever be possible,” Wang said.  “The things I learned in my constitutional law class now don’t matter, just because the recent Supreme Court has overturned them.”

Now more than ever, he said, he has no idea what to expect.

“Affirmative action might get completely tossed and I don’t fully agree with that,” Wang said in the documentary. “Maybe there is a problem with implementation, that doesn’t mean we toss affirmative action out the door. There is a middle ground.”

Related: Why elite colleges won’t give up legacy admissions

But it’s unclear what that middle ground could be, and if there is any chance of finding it this late in the game.

Natasha Warikoo, a sociology professor at Tufts University in Massachusetts who has written several books on race in college admissions, said that lessons can be learned from the eight states that currently ban affirmative action.

Those states often struggle to recruit the same proportions of students from historically marginalized groups, Warikoo said. Instead, those students end up going to “lower status” colleges with lower graduation rates, and therefore become less likely to graduate and reap the benefits of a bachelor’s degree. She said it results in fewer Black, Latino and Asian American leaders.

“How can we contribute to the leadership of tomorrow? That leadership has got to be diverse,” Warikoo said during a recent panel discussion on affirmative action. “We’ve got to get students who are going to go back to their community, contribute to that community and address issues that they can understand.”

Bhargava believes race and ethnicity are a central part of many people’s identity that should not be erased during the college admissions process. In many cases, she said, they also profoundly affect housing location, school district, family earning potential and connections to power – factors that can hold many students back from college success. 

“All I wanted was an answer. Instead of an answer, all I got was 10 years of more questions.”

Michael Wang

“The ways in which a lot of our systems are set up, kids who are Black and brown have a bunch of things stacked against them,” she said.

Bhargava also worries that, whatever the Supreme Court decides on these cases, the blame will extend beyond Michael Wang to Asian American students all over the country.

Wang expects the same thing, which he finds disappointing, but not surprising.

If the court rules against raced-based affirmative action, he said he expects to hear, “Asian Americans probably don’t deserve this. Look at what they’ve done.” And if the court upholds affirmative action, he expects to hear, “There was nothing wrong with this to begin with. What are Asian Americans complaining about? They already get into college.”

“This issue has just become too politicized, and caused so much racial tension, I think it’s just hard not for it to end up that way,” Wang said.

Though he is wary from the decade-long journey he’s been on with this issue, he said he doesn’t regret it. He would encourage his 17-year-old self to send the emails, he said, and to take all of the same steps, if for no other reason than to help future generations of Asian American students.

“All I wanted was an answer,” Wang said of his teenage self. “Instead of an answer, all I got was 10 years of more questions.”

This story about Michael Wang was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.

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Since the onset of the pandemic three years ago, college enrollment has fallen by more than 1 million students. Fewer high school graduates are now going straight to college, and there is growing skepticism across the country about the long-term value of a college education.

As well-founded as concerns about the rising cost of college might be, however, the evidence suggests that a college degree is just as valuable as ever. Higher education remains a gateway to economic opportunity, creating pathways to first jobs, promotions, raises and careers.

To continue to be engines of social mobility for generations to come, colleges must find ways to attract an increasingly diverse population of learners and provide them with the resources they need to pursue their educations.

Those who attend college are significantly more likely to experience upward mobility than those who do not attend. With median earnings of $2.3 million over a lifetime, bachelor’s degree-holders earn 74 percent more than those with only a high school diploma. They account for 36 percent of total employment.

But a college degree doesn’t just change the life of the graduate. When a first-generation college student earns a degree, it’s the beginning of a sprawling domino effect that can transform entire communities. Ensuring that individuals have the support they need to make their way to and through higher education has an impact that spans generations.

Higher education remains a gateway to economic opportunity, creating pathways to first jobs, promotions, raises and careers.

In many ways, my own story is proof of the multigenerational benefits of a college education. When my father’s parents agreed to buy him a one-way plane ticket to the United States from India, they did so with the understanding that he would attend college. When he returned to India three years later to enter an arranged marriage with my mother, he was well on his way to a degree.

My mother had a very different experience with higher education. She already had a college degree from India, but she soon discovered that the credentials she had worked so hard to attain there were not as valuable in the U.S. labor market. So she went back to school, this time to an American community college, where she earned a degree in information technology.

Related: A boost for Chicago’s neediest students

That degree got her an entry-level job at a local company, where she worked for nearly 30 years.

My parents’ college journeys shaped my own in important ways. Knowing the sacrifices they made by leaving their families behind and navigating an unfamiliar system of education and employment instilled in me a deep appreciation of the promises and perils of higher education.

Their hard work also meant that I had access to even greater opportunities than they had.

My sister and I are both examples of the ripple effect of a college education on later generations. Research shows that children of college-educated parents are far more likely to pursue and complete an undergraduate degree than learners whose parents never attended college.

The same goes for older siblings, with a 2019 study finding that when an older brother or sister goes to college, it substantially increases the enrollment rate of their younger siblings. The study described an older sibling’s college journey as a “high-touch intervention” that provides inspiration and guidance.

Of course, being the first in a family to go to college is a daunting task. First-generation students face far too many barriers to their success. The transition can be a lonely and overwhelming experience. They lack institutional knowledge that students whose parents went to college rely on to guide them to and through school.

Not surprisingly, the graduation rate for first-generation students at open-admission schools, where the vast majority of these learners enroll, is just 21 percent. In contrast, the graduation rate for students who have at least one parent with a college degree is 44.1 percent.

Today, one-third of undergraduates — about five million students — are first-generation, and that number is going to increase in the coming years, meaning that the need to better serve these learners will only become more urgent.

The good news is that it is no longer a mystery which resources and interventions have the most impact on helping first-generation students and other nontraditional learners enroll in and graduate from college.

Related: STUDENT VOICES: ‘Dreamers’ like us need our own resource centers on college campuses

Supporting first-generation students requires a holistic approach that combines financial, academic and personal support to guide students to make the right decisions about their educations and ensure they have the resources to reach their goals.

These students often need academic advising, personalized student coaching, mentorship programs, intensive tutoring, career planning and financial assistance.

To combat rising income, housing and food insecurity, a growing number of institutions are providing “one-stop” services to connect students to community and public resources such as transportation assistance, child care centers, legal aid services and housing and other basic needs support.

In an environment where degree skepticism is on the rise and the value of a college education has become a politically polarizing question, it can become all too easy for us to focus on reasons why college might not be worth it. But the data — and our own lived experiences — tell us that college success translates into a positive impact not only in the short term but for generations yet to come.

Aneesh Sohoni is CEO of One Million Degrees in Chicago, a leading provider of wraparound services to community college students

This story about the benefits of a college education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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One of the most hotly contested teaching practices concerns a single minute of math class. 

Should teachers pull out their stopwatches and administer one-page worksheets in addition, subtraction, multiplication and division? Speed drills are such a routine part of the weekly rhythms of many math classrooms that they’re often called Mad Minute Mondays. Critics say these timed drills aren’t useful and instead provoke math anxiety in many children. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics urges teachers to “avoid” timed tests. But advocates insist that these tests, which last one to five minutes, help children memorize math facts, freeing up their brains to tackle more challenging math problems. 

This long-running debate captured my attention again because a group of more than a dozen education researchers, who founded an organization they call the “Science of Math,” declared that the stopwatch skeptics are wrong. The researchers built an entire webpage to set the record straight and devoted a section of a 2022 paper to explaining why it’s a myth that timed tests cause anxiety.  A few readers contacted me after I first wrote about the Science of Math movement earlier in May 2023, urging me to look at the group’s claims about timed tests. After looking at the research, I think the evidence is not quite as clear as the Science of Math group indicates. 

The group argues there is no evidence that timed tests cause math anxiety. They also contend that timed tests improve math performance. Some researchers contest both points.

“Time tests don’t cause math anxiety?” said Jo Boaler, an education professor at Stanford University who is a prominent opponent of timed tests. “I could counter their studies with many more that show the opposite. And yes, you could conclude it’s a contested field, that there’s different evidence. But you can’t conclude that this is a myth.”

Dueling evidence

There isn’t much dispute about the lack of empirical evidence. I interviewed more than a half dozen math experts who confirmed there aren’t well-designed experiments that prove timed tests cause math anxiety. The Science of Math group could find only two experimental studies that have attempted to test the hypothesis and neither concluded that tests produce anxiety. 

Math anxiety is difficult to measure, and even children who enjoy timed drills may experience an elevated heart rate, an aspect of anxiety, as they race through a sheet of sums. Distinguishing productive adrenaline rush from detrimental anxiety isn’t easy. It’s also complicated to disentangle whether timed tests are making matters worse for children who already have math anxiety from other causes. There’s evidence for and against even within studies. 

Ideally, you would need to design a multi-year study — where some children were randomly given speed drills and others not, but were all taught the same way — and see what their math achievement and math anxiety levels were at the end of high school. That study doesn’t exist. 

What does exist are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of studies that document the stories of people who describe how much they hated timed tests. Interview excerpts like this one from a 1999 study of college students who were training to become math teachers are typical:

“If I am timed, I get nervous and forget everything. I do the ones I know, but then I get stressed that I’m not thinking fast enough and forget. I worry about finishing, and I can’t remember it even if I do know it. It is horrible. I get nervous just thinking about it.”

Others explained how they decided they weren’t a “math person” during these time-pressured moments and lost interest in the subject. 

First-person testimonials are sufficient evidence for some that timed tests are harmful. For others, subjective reflections like this, no matter how many and how emotionally compelling, still fall short of scientific proof. At the same time, we also don’t have compelling scientific evidence to prove that timed tests aren’t harming children. I think it remains unknown. 

Citation clash

Several math education experts questioned the Science of Math group’s scientific evidence on their second claim, that “timed tactics improve math performance.” One critic, Rachel Lambert, an associate professor in both special education and mathematics education at University of California Santa Barbara, had one of her classes analyze the group’s citations about timed tests, as an assignment on how to analyze education research. She showed me a spreadsheet of instances where the citations didn’t back their claims. In some cases, the studies contradicted their claims and found that students performed worse under timed conditions. “They’re calling themselves the Science of Math,” said Lambert. “But they’re not being careful in their citations.”

I found several of the citations confusing, too. Corey Peltier, an assistant professor of special education at the University of Oklahoma and one of the founders of the Science of Math group, explained that the primary purpose of the webpage and the article was to dispel the myth that timed tests and other timed activities cause anxiety. “We weren’t writing about how timing affects math performance,” he said via email. “Rather we were writing about whether timing causes math anxiety.”

Confusing citations or not, the more pressing question for math teachers and parents is whether there is evidence in favor of timed tests. The U.S. Department of Education seems to side with the Science of Math folks and against the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. A 2021 guide for teachers on how to assist elementary school students who struggle with math recommends regular timed activities – not necessarily tests – to help children build fluency with addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. The What Works Clearinghouse, a unit of the Department of Education that vets research, and an expert panel found 27 studies to back timed practice and called that a “strong” level of evidence.

Games vs. the stopwatch

These 27 studies suggest that timed activities – not in isolation, but in conjunction with larger interventions – help children learn math. In one 2013 study, struggling first graders received math tutoring three times a week and were split into two groups.  One played untimed games to reinforce the lessons. The other was subjected to speed practice, where the children worked in groups to try to answer as many math flashcards correctly as possible within 60 seconds. Each time they were encouraged to “meet or beat” their previous score. After 16 weeks, the children in the speed practice group had much higher math achievement than the children who had played untimed games.

Children in the speed group answered more math facts correctly each day, the researchers found. The sheer volume of correct responses helped the children commit more math facts to long-term memory, according to Lynn Fuchs, who led the study. Cognitive scientists call that spaced retrieval practice, a proven way of building long-term memories, and children in the speed group got more of it. 

“That gives children an advantage as they progress through the math curriculum,” said Fuchs, a professor of education at Vanderbilt University. “A lot of kids will develop fluency on their own without any fluency building practice. But to say we can’t do that in classrooms is to deny the opportunity to develop fluency for a significant portion of children.”

Fuchs and other advocates question why timed practice is so controversial in math when it’s common in other fields. Musicians repeat scales by the rapid tick of a metronome and athletes do speed drills to build muscle memory. “In all walks of life, the strongest musicians, the most skillful athletes, they do drills and practice, drill and practice,” said Fuchs.

Opponents of timed tests also want children to automatically know that seven times eight is 56 instead of conceptually thinking it out each time (7+7+7+7+7+7+7+7), but they say that there are games and other less stressful ways to do it. Fuchs’s study is one of the few to directly test timed versus untimed conditions and we need more studies to replicate her findings before we can conclude that speed is considerably more effective and harmless to children.

Both sides of this debate are concerned with working memory, the ability to temporarily hold information in your head in order to process it, think and solve. One side worries that timed tests can produce so much anxiety that it overwhelms the working memory and prevents a child from learning. The other side wants to free up working memory to handle more complicated math problems by making basic arithmetic calculations automatic, and it believes the most effective road to automaticity is through speed drills. While the causes of math anxiety are debated and mysterious, many in the pro-drill camp suspect that children might feel less math anxiety if they became more proficient in the subject, which is something that drills might help accomplish.

Advice for math teachers

What can classroom teachers take away from this debate? I turned to a veteran researcher, Art Baroody, professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who spent his career studying the best ways to teach counting, numbers and arithmetic concepts to young children.

He agrees that timed tests can be used effectively, but he is apprehensive about a blanket recommendation for teachers to use them. “Timed tests are an educational tool and like any tool can be used to good, no, or bad effect,” he said. “Unfortunately, the tool is often misused with poor or even devastating results. I have seen the damage timed tests can do to some children.”

Baroody thinks it’s critical that children first understand conceptually what addition and subtraction mean and develop number sense before they are given timed tests. Too often students are taught mathematical operations through rote memorization, like random numbers, he said, and arithmetic learned this way is easily forgotten, no matter how much it’s drilled.

But once a child understands the math, he believes that timed worksheets are beneficial. Baroody said that if he were teaching in an elementary school classroom, he would administer timed tests at least once a week, and even more often depending on the topic and how much children have learned.

Fuchs is even more circumspect in her advice to teachers on how to use timed tests effectively without harming children in the process. Not only should students first master concepts, they should have already demonstrated that they know the correct answers in an untimed setting. “You don’t want to give students a page full of problems and they’re kind of lost,” said Fuchs. 

Immediate feedback is important too. “When you make an error, your teacher or your partner can say, ‘Hey, let’s fix that’,” said Fuchs. “You want to stop a student when they make an error because what you’re trying to do is practice correct responses. You don’t want students to practice incorrect responses.”

Advocates of timed practice disagree about the details. Some say students should be given long lists of calculations so that no one can finish in time and slam their pencils down, which leaves slower children feeling bad about themselves. However, Fuchs favors flashcards because she fears the sight of a long list of problems overwhelms some children. This is an area that needs more research to guide teachers on best practices.

The Science of Math group concurs that not all timed practice is good, and says the research shows that timed activities or tests shouldn’t start until after a child can calculate accurately. They also say that teachers should never count these tests toward students’ grades; the tests should be low-stakes practice.

“Much like any instructional activity, if it is used inappropriately, it will yield minimal benefits and in some cases could be harmful,” said Peltier. Timing students on “a skill they don’t know – not only is this a waste of time, it also can be demoralizing and harmful. Imagine being timed to parallel park a car at the age of 16!” 

This story about math drills was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters. 

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BOSSIER PARISH, La. — After more than a decade living out of state, Jennifer Russell and her husband decided it was time to return home to northwest Louisiana. The couple, both in their early thirties at the time, wanted their two children to get to know their grandparents and to benefit from good public schools. In early 2015, lured by inexpensive rental housing on the Air Force base in the area, the family moved to a town in Bossier Parish, across the Red River from Shreveport, where they’d both grown up. Russell’s daughter started kindergarten that fall; her one-year-old son began day care. At first, her daughter adjusted well to the move and made friends. “It was what every parent wants,” Russell told me.

She had no inkling that her family’s religious identity would prove to be a complication. Russell and her husband both grew up Southern Baptist, a conservative, evangelical Protestant denomination that dominates this area of the Bible Belt. They went to the same church, in fact, and had met because their parents became friends. But she’d abandoned the Baptist church as a young adult, after studying world religions in college and starting to doubt what her faith promoted. Following graduate school and during her first years working as a psychologist, her skepticism grew. It seemed to her, she told me, that believers felt they had a “monopoly on truth, that their way was the only way.” Her husband, too, wanted a more progressive form of Christianity. After moving from Wichita Falls, Texas, the family joined a Unitarian church in Shreveport, a progressive house of worship with Christian roots that incorporates the traditions of many religions.

The first signs of trouble began a few years after the family’s move. Russell’s daughter, who did not want her name used to maintain her privacy, came home from school one day with the report that some boys on the school bus had interrogated her and other children about their religion. They asked each student, “Are you a believer in God?” The girl, who liked attending her Unitarian church but did not believe in God, recalled that she told her questioners, “‘No.’ And they said, ‘You’re going to hell.’”

“It was all flatly unconstitutional.”

Richard Katskee, the former legal director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, who represented the plaintiffs in their lawsuit against Bossier Parish schools

Russell was dismayed, but she wanted her daughter to respect others’ views. She told her, “There are kids who believe that…. You want to be respectful, but it doesn’t mean he’s necessarily right, either.” Russell and her husband, who did not want to be interviewed for fear of backlash in the workplace, advised their daughter that if someone started talking to her about her faith, to change the subject, put on headphones, or read.

Russell felt it was harder to ignore teachers. In fourth grade, at least twice a week, the girl’s teacher said a prayer aloud in class. Following their teacher’s lead, some children clasped their hands and bowed their heads. “It was a lot about Jesus and God and help us through the day and stuff like that,” said Russell’s daughter, who sat in the back of the class and tried to tune it out.

Related: How the federal government abandoned the Brown v. Board of Education decision

Increasingly incensed, Russell felt her daughter’s experiences were symptomatic of the school system’s extensive promotion of evangelical Christianity, also evident in routine prayers at school board meetings, graduations and sporting events. “Teachers, administrators, other staff of the schools — they set the temperature in terms of what was accepted,” she told me. Worried that her daughter would become more of a target for her peers, however, she did not complain directly to Bossier Parish schools. Instead, Russell and her husband began to contemplate moving away.

Other families, however, did complain. In 2018, four parents from three families, listed as Does 1–4, sued Bossier Parish schools for promoting religion and coercing students to participate in prayer. They argued that the prayer was a violation of the First Amendment’s establishment clause, which calls for a separation of church and state. The lawsuit listed more than 100 church/state violations, including teacher-led prayer in classrooms, prayer at sporting events and faculty- and administrator-led prayer at graduations. “It was all flatly unconstitutional,” said Richard Katskee, the former legal director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, who represented the Bossier Parish plaintiffs.

“I want the Supreme Court of the United States to rule very similar to how they ruled in the recent coach deal, that those coaches, teachers, or educators, or anyone in the school do have a right to pray and to talk about God.”

Rex Moncrief, co-host, Bossier Watch, a Youtube program primarily about local news  

The school system acknowledged most of the incidents, but denied that all of the schools’ actions were unlawful. The following year, a federal court in Louisiana sided with the plaintiffs, and ordered the nearly-23,000-student school district to stop promoting religion.

As Bossier Parish school district was ordered to change, however, the legal landscape was changing, too. A different lawsuit was winding its way through the courts, backed by organizations that had long supported school prayer, over the right of a high school football coach to pray on the field after games. Last June, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 in favor of the coach, Joe Kennedy, who sued the Bremerton, Washington, school district after it disciplined him when he refused to end the practice of praying at the 50-yard line following games. The majority opinion in Kennedy v. Bremerton stated that the coach had a right to freely exercise his religion because he was praying outside his coaching duties. The decision described Kennedy’s prayer as a quiet, personal act. But Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a dissent, noted that for years the coach had led students in locker-room prayers. Often, students from both teams joined him on the field in his prayers. Katskee, who represented the Bremerton school district, told me that students who declined to participate “got harassed and harangued.”

In Bossier Parish schools, parents, teachers, and students told me, the court order stalled, but didn’t entirely stop, Christian prayer. Now, with a Supreme Court friendly to school prayer, educators and state lawmakers around the country are testing the limits of the strict separation of church and state written into the Constitution. In a handful of states, including Kentucky, Montana and Texas, lawmakers have recently proposed or passed measures attempting to promote faith in schools. In Kentucky, for example, the legislature passed a law in March that would allow teachers to share their religious beliefs in school. A Kentucky lawmaker who sponsored the House bill told local television station Lex 18 that he hoped the measure would “embolden these Christian teachers” who may have been afraid to express themselves in public schools.

Meanwhile, attorneys from organizations that often handle complaints about school prayer told me they are receiving word that the Kennedy ruling is leading to more open proselytizing by teachers. In some states, one attorney said, teachers have set up prayer clubs for students and delivered sermons in class. In at least one case, a school district cited the Kennedy ruling as the reason for prayer at school board meetings.

The Christian conservatives advocating for more religion in the schools are doing so in the name of religious freedom. The way they define that freedom could lead to prayer becoming commonplace at public schools all over the country. Over time, advocates of the separation of church and state fear, long-standing protections for young atheists, people who belong to no religion and religious minorities will be eroded — until, perhaps, these protections disappear altogether. As Christianity is held up as the only acceptable way to believe and to live, non-Christian children, who may already feel different, could find themselves all the more sidelined, ostracized or bullied. “This isn’t a legal fight to some of these people,” Jeb Baugh, one of the Bossier parents who sued, told me. “This is a religious war. This is a fight for the heart and soul of the country.”

The United States has a long history of fights about what place, if any, religion should have in its public schools. The First Amendment prohibited Congress from establishing a religion or denying people the free exercise of their religion. Nevertheless, when public schools as we know them today began to open in the United States in the 1840s, students often learned from readers that used Protestant Scripture, and Bible readings and Protestant prayer were commonplace, said James Fraser, a professor of history and education at New York University. Roman Catholic leaders in Boston encouraged students to resist, and street fights broke out over the issue. Protestants argued that Catholics were trying to ban Bibles from school; Catholics wanted the right to use their own. By the start of the 1890s, after similar clashes in other cities, many states had passed laws specifically prohibiting school prayer.

Conflicts continued into the twentieth century, when the U.S. Supreme Court decided to take up cases on religion and public schools. In 1948, in response to an atheist mother’s complaint on behalf of her child, the nation’s highest court, in an 8–1 vote, banned outside religious instruction on school property during school hours, citing the First Amendment’s separation of church and state. In two landmark cases in the early 1960s, the court ruled against mandatory prayer and Bible readings in schools. Between 1962 and last year, the court ruled at least three more times against allowing school prayer: at graduations, football games and as part of moments of silence.

But in Bossier Parish, 60 years of Supreme Court rulings went largely ignored. The area has many contradictions. Baptist churches crowd a landscape dotted with casinos. In Bossier City, remnants of the Bossier Strip persist; gambling and prostitution flourished there during the 1960s. A nearly 200-foot cross rises in nearby Haughton, JESUS SAVES signs cover buses, and a billboard proclaims, SHAKEN BY LUST? JESUS SETS YOU FREE. The gold dome of Bossier City’s sole mosque is visible just beyond the restaurants and bars of the popular East Bank District, but other signs of religious minorities in the area are scant. Bossier Parish has nearly 130,000 residents, and the houses of worship serving minority faiths are small, with no more than 100 to 300 members or families each.

Before the court order, some Bossier teachers often led children in a prayer to start the day, according to the lawsuit. Airline High, one of the district’s seven high schools, was cited for putting “prayer boxes” — into which students could deposit prayer requests — around the building. Some teachers taught lessons on Creationism. Kindergarten students at one school were required to memorize and recite a prayer before lunch. Bossier Parish also had an official prayer policy, set by the school board, that allowed students and teachers to observe silent prayer or meditation during the school day. The families who participated in the lawsuit against Bossier Parish schools didn’t want to sue, Katskee told me. But despite numerous letters and complaints his group sent on their behalf to the school district, Bossier schools refused to stop.

In late 2017, as the lawsuit was imminent, the superintendent at the time, Scott Smith, defended prayer at football games on a local radio station. Asked by the radio host if the school district would stop prayer over loudspeakers at football games because it violated a 2000 Supreme Court ruling, Smith said it would not. “There are creative ways that we can break out in spontaneous prayer,” he said, foreshadowing his district’s response to the court order, “and still follow the law.” (In its response to the lawsuit, the district denied any wrongdoing by Smith or other employees.)

Statements like that one angered some of the plaintiffs and reinforced their belief that district leaders did not care about the effect on their children. One plaintiff, who agreed to be interviewed only if she could remain anonymous, told me that all four of her children complained to her about a teacher or other school official leading prayer or forcing religion on them in some way. She and her husband are of different faiths. (To keep anonymity, she asked that I not reveal their religions.)

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When her youngest son came home from elementary school with a prayer to Jesus in his folder and instructions to memorize it, she complained to his teacher, but the practice continued. “His teacher told him he was going to hell if he wasn’t a Christian,” she remembered. “He had nightmares.” At first, she was fearful about joining the suit because she did not want her children to suffer more. “Kids were like, ‘If you don’t love Jesus, you can’t be my friend,’ ” she said.

“I didn’t feel like I had any allies. They are getting away with it. People are scared to speak up because of retaliation.”

Jennifer Russell, mother and former parent of a Bossier Parish school student, on the culture of fear among those who don’t support school prayer

Jeb Baugh, another plaintiff, and his son, Hayden, agreed to speak with me on the record because Hayden is 19 and no longer in the school system. Baugh, a software engineer who grew up Southern Baptist, describes himself now as atheist. He prides himself on falling outside of the mainstream in his conservative area. When we met, he wore a t-shirt that poked fun at conservatives’ “don’t tread on me” slogan. It read: “no one’s treading on you, sweetie.” Over Zoom from a college dorm room, Hayden, a freshman studying mechanical engineering, told me that he remembered seeing crosses and Bible verses on the wall in one of his middle school teacher’s classrooms. She wasn’t the only one promoting Christianity. “There were teachers who did pray [in the classroom], leading [it] with the children,” Hayden, who identifies with no religion, told me. “I was always like, ‘I don’t want to do this.’”

At Parkway High School, Hayden was a member of the fishing team. His coach led the team in prayer before tournaments, Hayden told me, and he went along with it. “I bowed my head. I didn’t want to stand out really. I just wanted to fish,” said Hayden, who described himself as a “go with the flow” kind of person. He chose to speak up now, he explained, because he was concerned about the effect of so much religiosity on children. “Every kid has a right to feel comfortable and safe in their environment,” he told me.

“To the people who take offense, they don’t have to participate.”  

Duke Lowrie, co-host, Bossier Watch, a Youtube program primarily about local news  

After the suit was filed, community reaction was swift. Many residents and some prominent area politicians, including U.S. Representative Mike Johnson of Bossier City, argued that the lawsuit might usurp the rights of Christian students who, they insisted, are entitled to the free exercise of their religion even in school. In March 2018, hundreds of students from Bossier Parish and a neighboring school system, which had also been sued for similar issues the previous year, attended a meeting of a new “Protect Prayer” group to protest an attack on their religious freedom, the local TV station KSLA reported at the time. A month later, according to the Bossier Press-Tribune, hundreds rallied at Bossier Parish Community College to stand “up for student rights to live out their faith no matter the school or city.” Johnson and Jeff Landry, Louisiana’s attorney general, teamed up for a publication encouraging students to freely practice their religion in schools.

Russell, even as she worried about her daughter’s complaints, avoided the topic with other parents. “I didn’t feel like I had any allies,” she explained. She also had no hope that the school system and its teachers would do anything to stop religious harassment or proselytizing. “I don’t see why they have any reason to,” she explained. “They are getting away with it. People are scared to speak up because of retaliation.” In 2022, after finally saving enough money to buy a home, Russell and her husband decided to move to Shreveport, where they enrolled their children in another school system.

Longtime Bossier residents Rex Moncrief and Duke Lowrie, the co-hosts of Bossier Watch, a YouTube show primarily about local politics, sided with school prayer advocates. I met with the pair, who describe themselves as amateur citizen journalists, in Lowrie’s mortgage company office. They talked while sipping coffee from Bossier Watch mugs. “I can recite the Lord’s Prayer right now to you because I did it in every wrestling practice Monday to Friday unless we had a match that day,” said Lowrie, a retired firefighter with two kids.

Neither Moncrief nor Lowrie, both 52, saw why prayer at school events might pose a problem. Moncrief, who runs his own computer business, grew up in Ruston, Louisiana, about an hour’s drive from Bossier City, and said he prayed in school as a kid. “I didn’t feel any coercion, like there was an armed guard standing there forcing me,” Moncrief said. His three sons, who attended home school and Bossier Parish schools, are in their twenties. “To the people who take offense, they don’t have to participate,” Lowrie agreed.

Moncrief said he wished the school system had been able to fight the lawsuit all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. “I want the Supreme Court of the United States to rule very similar to how they ruled in the recent coach deal, that those coaches, teachers, or educators, or anyone in the school do have a right to pray and to talk about God,” he told me.

The Bossier Parish case, however, ended with the Louisiana federal court judge’s decision and a consent decree both sides signed off on. Under the 2019 order, “School Officials are permanently enjoined from promoting, advancing, endorsing, participating, or causing prayers during or in conjunction with School Events for any school.” The decision mandated specific remedies: At the start of each school year, teachers must watch a roughly 14-minute training video about the dos and don’ts regarding religious expression. Jointly created by Katskee, who represented the parents, and Jon Guice, the Bossier Parish school board attorney, the video notes that invocations at sporting events and graduations are impermissible, and that school employees are prohibited from participating in prayer with students at any school event or during instruction.

School district officials referred my requests for comment to Guice. “Bossier implemented the court order,” he told me. “And we’ve had no parental complaints since then. None. Zero.” In an email, the district’s public relations liaison wrote that it was “important to note” that neither the current superintendent, Mitch Downey, nor the school board president were in their present positions when the lawsuit was filed. Downey became superintendent in April 2019, not long after the federal order was issued, and has spent his entire 37-year career in the school system.

My visit to Bossier painted a fuzzier picture. Some teachers still display crosses in classrooms, two residents told me, and prayer has remained a ritual at school board meetings and at least one graduation. School board agendas begin with a “Prayer & Pledge of Allegiance.” At each meeting, the superintendent reads off names of people in need of prayer, and a different board member leads a prayer. At least one board member ended with, “In Jesus’s name, amen.” Prayer has remained a staple at several high schools’ football games.

“A lot of times in a school district of any size, the principal and the administration are unaware that something occurs unless someone says anything,” Guice told me. “If a principal sees a violation, the violation is addressed.”

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On a Friday in early November, I attended a football game at Airline High. As a cloudy sky threatened a downpour, the marching band played the school’s fight song, cheerleaders shook pom-poms, and a dance line sashayed. The Airline Vikings ran onto the field to the clanging of cowbells, and the game announcer, in an enclosed booth, welcomed all, drawing his last words out with a flourish: “It’s time tonight for Viking football at a chance for the district title.” Then, Airline’s senior class president took the mic to ask the crowd to join her in prayer.

For the next few minutes, the school football stadium resembled a church service. Most everyone in the bleachers, and those on the field, stood and bowed their heads. “Dear heavenly Father, thank you so much for the opportunity for us to be here tonight,” the student said.

“Tonight, I pray that you keep everyone here safe, and that the teams on both sides of the field will have good sportsmanship. Lord, most of all, I pray that everything done tonight will honor and glorify you.” Guice told me that prayers like this one are permissible because they are student-led, and speakers are chosen in a neutral way.

Among the court rulings to touch on issues like these was a 2001 federal appeals court decision upholding a Florida school district’s right to allow student speakers to lead audiences in prayer at graduations if those speakers were chosen based on “content-neutral, evenhanded criteria” and the school district didn’t intervene with the message. The ruling applied to some Southern states, but not Louisiana. The Supreme Court declined to weigh in, leaving it unclear what is legal for school districts like Bossier that are outside of the lower court’s jurisdiction.

Charles C. Haynes, a First Amendment expert and a senior fellow for religious liberty at Freedom Forum’s Religious Freedom Center, told me that he thought Bossier Parish schools may essentially be telling students they can “say whatever you want, ‘Wink, wink.’ ”

During the 1960s, as the Supreme Court ruled against school-sponsored prayer, a countervailing “return God to schools” movement began to grow. At first, that movement made minimal progress, given a liberal Supreme Court unlikely to change past rulings. In the 1970s, the first leaders of the movement, including Jesse Helms, a North Carolina U.S. senator, failed at several attempts to pass legislation allowing prayer in schools. But from the 1980s until today, especially during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, who each relied on conservative evangelicals for political support, the movement steadily picked up steam. Today, its supporters see school prayer as a way to “impose conservative Christianity on a captive school audience,” said Andrew Seidel, vice president of strategic communications for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the organization that represented Bremerton schools against Kennedy.

By the 1990s, Pat Robertson, the televangelist, had become a key leader of the movement. He used an organization he founded, the American Center for Law and Justice, to promote prayer led and organized by students at graduations as an alternative to the clergy-led prayer the Supreme Court had banned. Around the same period, religious conservatives created a number of legal firms to fight for their aims, including First Liberty Institute, whose attorneys represented Kennedy in the recent Supreme Court case.

The Kennedy ruling was a huge victory for the movement, which has focused its strategy in recent years on elevating conservative Christian judges, Seidel told me. “The other side is emboldened, and the other side is not individuals,” he said. “It is a group of well-funded Christian nationalist legal outfits looking for these cases and seizing upon them so they can take them to court.” (First Liberty, like some other Christian legal groups, rejects the “Christian nationalist” label, with executive general counsel Hiram Sasser calling it “ridiculous,” and adding, “We represent Muslims, Jewish groups, the Falun Gong, and a Native American sweat lodge.”)

Groups that filed amicus briefs in the Kennedy case included not only legal organizations, but also conservative religious groups such as the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association; state attorneys general, including Louisiana’s Landry; U.S. senators, including Ted Cruz; and congressmen. Landry, in defending Bossier Parish in a 2018 KEEL radio interview, gave the common mantra of the movement: “It’s time for people of faith to recognize that the First Amendment protects them as well, and their faith doesn’t stop at the schoolhouse door.”

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Attorneys from First Liberty and Liberty Counsel, another prominent conservative legal organization, told me the door has opened to bring prayer back to schools across the nation, at least when it comes to school-sponsored events. Their first test of the Kennedy ruling’s impact may be a case now before a federal appeals court. That case deals with prayer broadcast over a loudspeaker at a Florida high school football championship event. The school that sued to allow the prayer, Cambridge Christian School of Tampa, is private and religious, and was playing another private religious school, but the championship was a public one, sponsored by the state athletic association. The ruling in the Kennedy case strengthens Cambridge Christian’s case arguing for prayer at school events, said Keisha Russell, an attorney at First Liberty, which is representing Cambridge Christian. In her view, the Kennedy ruling made it clear that prayer on school property is not necessarily government speech.

“The other side is emboldened, and the other side is not individuals. It is a group of well-funded Christian nationalist legal outfits looking for these cases and seizing upon them so they can take them to court.”

Keisha Russell and Mathew Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel, told me their firms are looking for fresh opportunities to bring cases. In the Kennedy ruling, they noted, the Supreme Court overruled the so-called Lemon test, a three-pronged standard set out in a 1971 ruling that delineated criteria the government must meet in order to comply with the clause defining the separation of church and state. One prong states that the government can assist religion only if there is no “excessive entanglement” between church and state. Justices later generally interpreted this to mean that a public entity cannot endorse religion.

Liberty Counsel’s lawyers recently analyzed court rulings since 1971 and found at least 7,000 citations of the Lemon test. Staver said all of those cases must be reexamined. His firm hopes to reverse the 1992 ruling Lee v. Weisman, for example, which prohibited clergy-led prayer at public school graduations partly on the grounds that the graduates in attendance were coerced to participate because they had to be at the event. Staver said that argument no longer holds. “I think un-comfortability is not unconstitutionality,” Staver told me.

For his firm, the Kennedy ruling is a gold mine, he said. “It’s a win for everybody. It does not give anyone a trump card to censor religion or religious viewpoints.”

In such an environment, Bossier Parish could represent a harbinger of what is to come. It may become much tougher for parents who don’t support school prayer to keep religious promotion out of public schooling, Haynes told me. “The people determined to restore prayer to schools are very good at finding a way.”

Defenders of a separation between church and state say the pro-prayer movement’s version of religious liberty ignores the harm that public school prayer does to others. Holly Hollman, the general counsel of the Baptist Joint Committee on Religious Liberty, an organization of attorneys, ministers and scholars who defend religious freedom for all, including the nonreligious, told me: “Prayer is not going to be inclusive, even if it’s the broadest prayer.”

Ashleigh Joyner, a 2005 alumna of Airline and the parent of a sophomore, agreed. Dressed in blue jeans, a flannel shirt, and a baseball hat, Joyner stayed seated when the student delivered the prayer at Airline that Friday evening. Joyner was raised Southern Baptist and now identifies as nonreligious. She watched the game with a group of other Airline moms near the 50-yard line and told me later that she sensed the stares of people behind her when she did not rise to pray. The prayers’ effect on religious minorities particularly worried her. “I don’t want someone to come to a school event and feel uncomfortable,” she said.

Prayers at football games in Louisiana schools are not uncommon, she said. Bossier just “got caught.” It irked her that the school system hadn’t changed more dramatically, even after the court order. “It seems like they said, ‘Well, we’ll sweep it under the rug because enough people don’t care.’ Nobody complains because who’s going to listen?”

It’s hard to fight tradition in the Bible Belt, Jeb Baugh told me. “This is what they do. Friday night lights, faith, family, football.” At Parkway High, students lead prayers at each game, said a student who attends there. I met the teen, who did not want her name used, at the Bossier City Farmer’s Market, held on Saturdays in a mall parking lot. Nearby, a bearded man in a folding chair strummed his guitar, playing praise music and folk songs. The vendors sold arts and crafts and local delicacies, including gator meat.

The student’s mother, Beth Graham, standing nearby, said the Parkway football game announcer gives a disclaimer over the loudspeaker before the prayer, clarifying “that the thoughts, opinions, and words expressed by the student do not express the views of the school. The student is speaking of their own free will.” The prayer, her daughter said, helps the athletes. “I know a lot of people depend on their faith to do good in games,” the teen said.

Because she grew up in the area, Jennifer Russell isn’t surprised by arguments like these. In nearby Caddo Parish, her own second-grade teacher led the class in a prayer every day before lunchtime. “It didn’t seem weird to me,” she reflected. “Looking back, I see that differently. If a child wants to pray over their lunch, they can do that. It should not be led by the teacher.”

As she explained why she was willing to go public with her family’s story, Russell’s voice cracked, and tears gathered in her eyes. Her daughter patted her arm to comfort her. “We have lots of points of privilege in our family,” she said. “We’re white. We’re not a majority religion, but we’re not one that has faced as much persecution as some others, like Jews, people of the Islamic faith.”

After speaking with Russell and her daughter, I drove to the parish’s mosque, Masjid Alnoor, on a street just beyond Bossier City’s East Bank District. There, I met Waiel Shihadeh, the imam, who has lived in Bossier City since 1992. Of his five children, three have graduated from Bossier Parish schools. His two youngest attend Airline, which he estimates has 100 Muslims among the 1,900 students. Shihadeh has been leading prayer at the nearly 300-member mosque for 18 years. The community would never tolerate prayers at school events if they were led by a Muslim, Shihadeh said. “We are in the minority,” he told me. “At these places, they should keep it off religion-wise. They should concentrate on [studies].”

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Students I met at the mosque told me they often felt alienated by the abundance of Christian activities at area schools, including in Bossier Parish. When prayer, inevitably Christian prayer, happens publicly at a school event, it’s awkward for them. Nourmeen Jamhour, a 16-year-old junior who attends Parkway High, wore a hijab, customary in the prayer space. She does not wear one at school, she told me. Her school routinely promotes Christianity in morning announcements and Facebook posts, she said. She doesn’t hear anything about other religious clubs, and her school doesn’t have a Muslim student club. There are probably too few Muslims to maintain one, she suggested, and she’s not sure they could find a faculty adviser. Jamhour supports the families who sued the school system. “Definitely, state and church should be separated,” she said. “Kids, when they are still young, they do take in a lot of what their trusted adults say. They might … change their beliefs.”

Rabbi Jana De Benedetti, who leads the 162-year-old B’nai Zion Congregation of Shreveport, which serves around 170 families, told me that only a handful of Jewish students have attended Bossier schools in recent years. Some of them had troubling experiences involving teachers who promoted Christianity. At interfaith events, the rabbi said as we chatted on the patio of a Shreveport coffee shop, she has tried to teach local pastors to respect religious differences. “Even the ones who are trying to be inclusive will say, ‘We bow our heads in prayer.’ I have to say, ‘I would like to request that you not tell us to do that because I don’t bow my head when I pray. I shouldn’t be asked to. That’s not how I pray.’”

Lee A. Jeter Sr., the pastor of Good Hope Baptist in Bossier City, a predominantly African American church with 50 to 60 members, has a slightly different view. Jeter, who is also president of the Bossier Parish NAACP, told me that school prayer served a particularly important role for Black community members. Jeter had grown up in Bossier Parish on cotton plantations in housing provided by the owner. He had to walk to the local store because his family didn’t own a car, and sometimes people driving by threw stuff out their windows at him and his family, he recalled.

“As an African American, I thought when they took prayer out of the schools, it hurt the African American community more than anybody else,” Jeter told me, referring to Supreme Court decisions in the twentieth century banning prayer in schools. “That’s the only thing we had to hold on to. When all you see around you is hate, and you don’t see opportunities, you have to hold on to something.”

Today, about 70 percent of the area’s residents are white, about a quarter are Black, 7 percent are Hispanic, and 2 percent are Asian American, census data shows.

Still, Jeter said there should be limits. “We can’t force our faith, our denomination, whether it’s Baptist, Jewish, or Catholic, upon someone else,” he said. “It doesn’t mean we have to hide ours.”

When I met with Jeb Baugh at a bubble tea café near the Air Force base, he told me he tries to remain optimistic that Bossier schools will change. Perhaps the training for teachers, he said, will gradually have an impact. “Maybe that makes some of them think twice before they spout off. Maybe it has made a difference.”

The teachers I interviewed gave a mixed report. Some principals at staff meetings discuss what teachers can and can’t say, they explained, while others ask teachers to watch the video on their own. One middle school teacher, who did not want her name used, said teachers can skip the video and just take a quiz on it. She did not know of any teacher at her school who had led children in prayer since the court order. But she also said that she recalled hearing, perhaps at a presentation for teachers, an administrator say that the school could escape scrutiny and maintain prayers at football games if the prayers were led by students picked through a random selection process, such as having their names put in a hat. “The consensus in Bossier Parish then and even now is, ‘We’re going to do whatever we want,’” she said.

Carrie Culpepper, a second-grade teacher at Bellaire Elementary School who has taught for 13 years, told me her principal made sure teachers understand what they can and can’t do. Teachers no longer have crosses in their classrooms, and Bible verses on their desk must face them, not the students. Teachers no longer pray alongside children at the start of the day, either. “We basically cannot share our religion. We can’t say, ‘Oh, you should go to church,’” she said.

“This isn’t a legal fight to some of these people. This is a religious war. This is a fight for the heart and soul of the country.”

Jeb Baugh, one of the plaintiffs in the case against Bossier Parish schools

Culpepper is Methodist, the daughter of a pastor, and the mother of five-year-old triplets. She supports the separation of church and state, and said she understands that not all her students may be Christian. “I don’t want to single out those kids,” she told me. “That’s not fair to them. They need to feel accepted. They don’t need to feel lesser.” But she also has empathy for those who fought to keep the prayers. “That’s the way they’ve grown up. They associate Christianity with morals. They’re trying to raise their kids right.”

After the court order, her school stopped its annual Christmas concert because it only observed one religion’s holiday, she told me. Teachers still put a Christmas tree in the lobby, but Culpepper said the school tries to make it inclusive. “Every teacher can put an ornament of whatever they want on there. So if they were Jewish, and they wanted to put a dreidel on there, they were more than welcome to,” she told me. When I pointed out that Christmas trees aren’t part of Judaism, she said, “I know, but if you wanted something to represent — and it’s not mandatory, of course.”

Russell’s daughter now attends Caddo Parish schools, the same system her mother attended. So far, her children are happy in their new schools, which are more diverse than their old ones in many ways, including religiously. Her daughter, now a seventh grader, said no teacher has tried to lead any of her classes in prayer, and no peer has belittled her beliefs. She’s on her middle school cheer team and recently won an award for reading the most books among the students over a nine-week period. “I’ve learned it doesn’t matter who you are, just be you,” she told me as a bell signaled the start of services at her Unitarian church. “You can have your opinion, and nobody cares.”

This story about prayer in schools was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post Inside the Christian legal campaign to return prayer to public schools appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

For decades schools have been, rightly, accused of too often letting a toxic mix of low expectations and strict discipline policies put kids, mostly Black, Hispanic and Latino young men, on the school-to-prison pipeline. Now, colleges and universities have the chance to build the inverse path — a prison-to-school pipeline — to help people who are incarcerated.

Done right, this could be a pivotal moment for higher education to also revamp the postsecondary experience for other underserved learners, including those coming from underresourced rural areas and environments that lack college preparation programming.

The potential impact of a prison-to-school pipeline is immense. The change would, of course, be biggest for the nearly 700,000 incarcerated adults who will gain access to federal funds this July through the expansion of the Second Chance Pell program, in terms of lower rates of recidivism and increased hope. This pipeline will also save taxpayers’ money and prevent crime. And these benefits are above and beyond the ways that a college degree increases every graduate’s employment and earning potential.

But first we must build it. Today’s colleges aren’t successfully serving many existing students — so how can they serve populations removed from the education system?

The answers lie in a close examination of the current paths to college and how we can change them to better support all learners.

Let’s start with the challenges people convicted of a crime face. People in prison often had negative experiences in academic environments and, because of this, lower education levels. Many left high school before graduation or have no friends or family who have ever enrolled in college-level courses. As a result, this learner population is often unfamiliar with or lacking in confidence in classroom education.

While many aspects of the incarcerated population’s academic experiences are unique, there are barriers they share with a broad segment of other college-level learners: low digital literacy, minimal or no college preparation, uncertainty about the value of a college degree and unfamiliarity with college resources and processes. These shared characteristics of so many students signal that solutions designed for students who are incarcerated can also minimize barriers for all learners.

Related: ‘Revolutionary’ housing: How colleges aim to support formerly incarcerated students

One solution for helping incarcerated learners is designing support services. Strategies include supporting specialized coaching and guidance, instituting competency-based education, making investments in student belonging, hiring dedicated people to help students navigate enrollment and fostering communities of peers with similar histories and ambitions — all of which can help students navigate the next steps in their education and efforts to join the workforce.

Taking these steps has a ripple effect. When we think about the individual needs of students within this population, it becomes easier to adapt those services for students in other groups. However, thoughtful support will mean nothing if we don’t increase access to programs.

Paths to and through today’s college experience aren’t fully serving existing students — so how can they serve a population that is often even further removed from the education system?

Currently, there are few educational options for people convicted of a crime. The latest reports show that only 35 percent of state prisons provide college-level courses. These programs serve just 6 percent of incarcerated individuals nationwide, leaving out the majority of incarcerated people interested in increasing their skills and knowledge through higher education.

The gap is even greater for people in women’s prisons. In Texas, there are three times as many college programs for men as there are for women. When given the opportunity to enroll, women show greater interest than men. But the available programs often reinforce outdated stereotypes by limiting options to female-coded professions, such as cosmetology.

This limited availability is similar to the choice constraints experienced by rural students — another population less likely to attend college. Few rural students have the chance to learn where they live, which forces them to choose between commuting several hours to the nearest college or working extra hours to cover the cost of housing on top of tuition for the program of their choice.

Related: Prisons are training inmates for the next generation of in-demand jobs

Challenges to program expansion are many. Prisons often restrict incarcerated students’ access to educational materials. Prisoners also often lack access to the technology and internet connections needed to take advantage of online learning — as do the 21 million Americans outside the system who lack broadband access.

Prison officials will need to ease restrictions in the pursuit of supporting effective rehabilitation. Fortunately, there are blueprints to follow as state-run and private EdTech companies find new ways to expand prison education.

To increase accessibility, colleges and universities will have to be creative. In many public education programs nationwide, scholarships, employer partnerships, transportation programs and competency-based education are now being adopted to support a diverse set of learners. The same ideas could work for prison education programs.

Building the prison-to-school pipeline is long overdue. The federal government banned the giving of Pell Grants to prisoners for over two decades, then limited access for three more years during the Second Chance Pell Experiment. We’re now starting to see progress in prison education. And it’s happening in parallel with larger efforts in higher education to advance personalized online learning, improve the quality of digital education and close digital equity gaps.

The expansion of Pell Grants represents more than a second chance for students who are incarcerated. The prison-to-school pipeline is higher education’s second chance to ensure more people can get the education they need to live the lives they want.

Jason Levin is executive director of WGU Labs, an EdTech incubation, research and design arm of Western Governors University.

This story about the prison-to-school pipeline was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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Edward Cavaciuti was happy with his old life. For 25 years pre-pandemic, he DJed for a living in Delaware, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and Maryland. He cleared $1,000 a week – at least – doing what he loved. 

“COVID literally ruined my business,” said Cavaciuti, a single father to a 15-year-old son. “I needed something a little more reliable with no college required.” 

Cavaciuti figured why not use the 6’ 2,” 220-pound frame he was blessed with to earn a living doing security. 

He got hired at Securitas USA in 2022. But to secure his job, he needed to complete a course and a licensure exam. In came Delaware Technical Community College via its continuing education/workforce training program. Cavaciuti took one course and passed a test, and his license is good for five years.

“There was no prior experience needed as a guard, and I was just looking for something different,” said Cavaciuti, who admits that he hated school and was never much interested in college.

“COVID literally ruined my business. I needed something a little more reliable with no college required.” 

Edward Cavaciuti

To fill private and public sector job vacancies, a growing trend in community colleges has been for students to take short-term, less expensive certificate programs. These middle-skill positions could help balance labor shortages and keep workers competitive for life-sustaining gainful employment. Politicians including former President Barack Obama and companies like IBM and Google have called for workplaces to eliminate de facto degree requirements, which take years to earn. 

Today, Cavaciuti makes a salary comparable to what he earned as a DJ and can earn overtime, if he wants to work more than 40 hours.

“Our goal in the division that I oversee is to get folks trained, get them credentialed, and then employed,” said Paul Morris, associate vice president for workforce development and community education at Del Tech. 

In 2022, Del Tech awarded 4,500 certificates and credentials. Some of the school’s most popular programs are in fields like health care and nursing, welding, HVAC and construction, and heavy equipment operator, Morris says.

Del Tech, which has partnerships with 650 companies, structures its programs based on job listings in the state and statistics from the Delaware Department of Labor.

Community colleges that offer the most successful certificate programs put in the work to address labor shortages and create opportunities for students to learn marketable skills for in-demand industries, says Joseph Fuller, professor of management practice at Harvard Business School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They hire teachers for certificates and other programs who have prior industry experience. 

These schools, he notes, track graduate progress by checking with employers to validate if their training prepared them for new jobs. 

Fuller is a co-author of the recently published study “The Partnership Imperative: Community Colleges, Employers, and America’s Chronic Skills Gap,” based on surveys of community college and business leaders in 2020. 

The study found that educators and employers don’t see eye to eye on what the other contributes to workforce development. Only 21 percent of community college leaders strongly agreed that their schools were producing work-ready employees that employers needed. Only 26 percent of employers strongly agreed that community colleges were producing the workers that they needed.

Fuller likens the most successful community colleges to major league baseball teams, while less successful schools that never change what they offer, update curriculum, or develop partnerships, are Class A teams.

He says there is “a very real difference” at schools such as San Jacinto College in Houston; Valencia College in Orlando, Florida; or Wake Technical Community College in Raleigh, North Carolina. “The significant majority of schools,” he said, “aren’t as deep or as attuned to employers.”

In 2022, technology giant Intel announced a $20 billion investment to build two chip plants in Ohio, which will create thousands of jobs. It also pledged $100 million toward educational institutions to build employment pipelines. One of those schools was Lorain County Community College in Elyria, Ohio.

One of Fuller’s “major league” schools, LCCC is consistently recognized nationally for student outcomes and successes. It offers 65 free fast-track certificate programs, which can be completed in 16 weeks. More than 1,500 students take a mixture of noncredit and credit offerings, some offered exclusively online. LCCC also offers a one-year Earn and Learn program that combines classroom work and an apprenticeship with a local company. Some of those high-demand industries include automation, cybersecurity, software development, and computer-aided machining. 

“We do a lot of listening and learning from our students, from our graduates, from our employers,” said Marcia Ballinger, president of Lorain County Community College.

Working adults with family commitments and complex lives can’t just enroll in a two-year program, says Ballinger. Some students also have confidence issues: They think they aren’t college material and doubt they can be successful. 

“We thought, ‘What if we break it up differently so that we can engage them where they’re at?’” Ballinger said. 

Forty percent of participants in the 16-week program are students of color, double the demographic makeup of the county, Ballinger says. Recruiting efforts by LCCC have created relationships with local churches; the Urban League; and El Centro, a Latino nonprofit organization. 

The driving question, Ballinger said, is: “How can we reach adult learners where they are, connect them to short-term programming that we’re going to wrap our arms around them for those 16 weeks?”

“Our goal in the division that I oversee is to get folks trained, get them credentialed, and then employed.”

Paul Morris, associate vice president for workforce development and community education at Delaware Technical Community College

After the 16-week program, students can move on to the yearlong Earn and Learn credit program – and then, if they wish, work toward their associate degree and bachelor’s degree. 

One of those students is Joshua Eschke. Now 20, he had a tumultuous first year at the University of Toledo, which included the death of a family member. He went back home to North Ridgeville. He had been offered a scholarship to LCCC after successfully completing college courses there while still in high school.

“I reached out to them and asked if I could get that same scholarship,” Eschke said.

He got it, and he’s not looking back. Eschke initially enrolled in the one-year Earn and Learn certificate program in microelectromechanical systems, which he is still completing.

He took classes his first semester and now combines those with work at Rockwell Automation, an industrial automation Fortune 500 company that partners with the school. He works as a quality process technician in a plant where they make circuit boards. 

“I’m in the one-year program, but I think I’m going to end up doing the bachelor’s,” he said.

Eschke went from nothing to making $23 an hour, which he says he is saving and helping his girlfriend get her degree in early childhood education. His only prior work experience had been making DoorDash deliveries and working as a tour guide.

“For only one semester and a certificate that is pretty amazing,” Mr. Eschke said.

© 2023 The Christian Science Monitor

This story about credential programs was produced by The Christian Science Monitor, as part of the series Saving the College Dream, a collaboration between Hechinger and Education Labs and journalists at The Associated Press, AL.com, The Dallas Morning News, The Seattle Times and The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina, with support from the Solutions Journalism Network. Sign up for Hechinger’s higher education newsletter.

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