High school came with more responsibility and less accountability for Josiah Ulukita. Courses were much harder, teachers were less strict about attendance, and it was easier to skip school with friends or go on his phone during class, said 16-year-old Ulukita, who attends Kaimuki High School in Honolulu. 

He went from easily passing middle school to failing freshman English and social studies. After missing roughly half of his freshman year due to poor attendance, he found out he needed to repeat ninth grade. Ashamed, he began to skip more school, he said — until his counselor warned him that he may not graduate on time. 

“I was acing all my classes, and then I hit freshman year,” Ulukita said. “I thought it was going to be easy.”

Throughout the country, states and school districts approach retention — often considered a last resort to catch students up academically — in very different ways. In some states, like Hawaii, schools often wait until ninth grade or later to retain, or hold back, students. Other states, like Mississippi and Florida, tend to retain students at much younger ages, between kindergarten through third grade, according to numbers from 2021-22, the most recent year for which national data was available. 

As concern about student performance nationally intensifies, a growing number of states are mandating this approach: More than two dozen states now have laws requiring or allowing schools to retain third grade students who are not reading at grade level, according to an analysis from the Education Commission of the States, a nonprofit that tracks state legislation in the U.S. 

Despite these laws, the rate of students who were retained in school fell across the U.S. from the 2011-12 to 2021-22 school years, according to data from the federal Office for Civil Rights compiled by the journalism organization Big Local News in partnership with The Hechinger Report. Overall, very few students are held back each year: Less than 2 percent of students in the U.S. repeated a grade level in 2021-22, down from about 3 percent of students a decade prior. (The Office for Civil Rights, the only source for consistent data across all states, is now eight months behind in releasing new data.) 

The research on retention is mixed — there’s little consensus on whether retention can catch students up to grade level. Historically, most studies indicated that students who had to repeat a grade often benefited very little and had long-term negative consequences. Research from the past decade complicates that picture: Younger students may see some positive effects from retention if schools are also combining it with high-intensity tutoring and support, some studies have shown.

“If the retention happens in earlier grades and is combined with help — not just a threat, but some kind of positive intervention — the results, at least in the short-run, tend to be good,” said Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Education Data and Research at the University of Washington.

There is less proof that students in middle and high school, like Ulukita, ultimately benefit from repeating a grade.

“The evidence suggests that it leads to higher rates of student disengagement from schooling, it leads to higher rates of high school dropouts, less likelihood of high school graduations, and it leads to lower likelihood of enrolling in college. Basically, worse outcomes,” said Umut Ozek, a researcher and senior economist at the policy think tank Rand Corp., who has studied retention.

In every year measured, schools in the South held students back more than any other region, according to the data. Boys were held back more than girls, and Black boys were retained at nearly three times the rate of white boys — a gap that did not narrow over the decade even as retention fell. 

Related: A lot goes on in classrooms from kindergarten to high school. Keep up with our free weekly newsletter on K-12 education.

In Hawaii, roughly 1 in 10 freshmen in public high schools had to repeat ninth grade in the 2021-22 school year. That was more than double the national rate for this group of students.   

In the state, freshmen must earn five credits — the equivalent of five year-long classes — to move on to 10th grade. Students and teachers attribute the spike in ninth grade retention to those strict credit requirements, along with more difficult coursework and increased peer pressure to skip class and dodge assignments.

Schools work to avoid holding students back by offering summer school, counseling, personalized learning plans and other resources, Hawaii Department of Education Deputy Superintendent Heidi Armstrong said in a statement. Students may be held back when they’re struggling to make academic progress and earn enough credits to advance to the next grade, she said. 

“The Department’s goal is to ensure students are prepared for continued academic success and remain on track toward earning a high school diploma,” Armstrong said, adding that schools decide to hold students back on a case-by-case basis. 

Mississippi has taken a markedly different approach. In 2013, as part of an overhaul of literacy instruction, the state introduced a policy to retain third graders if they couldn’t pass the reading portion of the state’s English Language Arts assessment.

Rachel Canter, an education policy expert who helped craft the 2013 Literacy-Based Promotion Act, said Mississippi lawmakers looked to Florida in particular, where former Gov. Jeb Bush made ending “social promotion” — the practice of passing students because of their age — one of his signature policies.

“The Legislature was desperate,” Canter said. “The argument that won was, ‘We have to do something, and we know how harmful it is when kids pass with no skills.’”

The state’s third grade retention policy has had a trickle-down effect: Retentions in Mississippi are concentrated in kindergarten through second grade, too. 

Researchers such as Canter say that’s because the literacy legislation established more monitoring and higher standards in those grades as well.

That holds true at Western Line School District, a small district with schools on the banks of the Mississippi River. Western Line held back 68 students in kindergarten through third grade during the 2021-22 school year, compared to 56 students in all other grades combined, according to the Big Local News/Hechinger analysis. 

Not all of those retentions are tied to reading, Superintendent Lawrence Hudson said, but the policy raised the bar for students in early grades.

“We want to make sure kids are successful for the rest of their life,” he said. “We know if children have deficits at younger grades, they’ll get to third grade with those deficits.” He added: “The longer you wait, the harder it is to clear those deficiencies.”

But Canter said students don’t automatically improve when they’re retained. To help students, schools have to get them the academic support they need in that year they repeat. The decision to retain a student is difficult, she said, but combined with intervention, it can pay dividends. 

“Any time a child is retained, it is a signal that we have not done what we needed to do as adults,” Canter said. But the retention policy paired with additional support has “done great things for kids,” she said. 

Related: Why are so many kindergartners chronically absent?

Yet some educators worry that, even in relatively well-funded school districts, resources to provide that support are falling away. Shana Richards has been a school counselor for 19 years in North Carolina, which holds back more students in ninth grade than in any other grade. 

“You used to have teachers that would stay after school, provide tutoring,” said Richards, who now works at A&T Four Middle College, an all-boys public high school on the campus of North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro. “But now those people are having to leave to go to another job when the school day ends.”

The stipends for educators to provide after-school programming dried up years ago, she said, and the buses that used to carry students home from their after-school activities no longer run, either.

Richards helped design a program for her school’s incoming ninth graders that she hoped would help reduce the need for supports that are now harder to come by. She applied for a grant from the NEA Foundation to help fund the program, an expanded version of the summer orientation the school was already doing. 

The program, which just completed its second year, is called “Welcome to the Brotherhood” and primarily serves the population with the highest retention rates: Black boys. Students learn study skills and hear about academic expectations from their English and math teachers. They also have time to make friends and tour the college campus that surrounds their school.

Richards meets with every student before the program begins to get a sense of their anxieties and where they might need extra support, and she meets with them again in the first month of the school year to get a sense of any emerging problems.

“We know if we can get them to and through ninth grade,” Richards said, “then they have a higher chance of actually staying until graduation.” 

Related: Many boys aren’t interested in school. Can opening more career-focused high schools help? 

In Washington state, more students were held back just before graduation, in 12th grade, than at any other grade, according to the data from 2011-12 to 2021-22. That’s not because of any state policy though; decisions are made at a district level. 

Still, Liz Trautman, the executive director of the Washington affiliate of Stand for Children, an advocacy organization that works to boost high school graduation rates, said she was not surprised by the trend.

“I would argue and suggest that when we see those high rates of retention in senior year, we’re actually seeing a cumulative effect of missed opportunities to intervene and to support students that started much, much earlier,” Trautman said.  

Washington officials say retained students include those who were behind in credits for a variety of reasons, including from absences related to medical issues or involvement in the juvenile justice system. Many are also enrolled in transition programs for students who receive special education services and are counted as 12th graders until they’re 22 years old or exit the program, officials said.

Daniel Lee, who has spent 14 years as a counselor at Garfield High School in Seattle, said a high student-to-counselor ratio means counselors aren’t able to work with students and parents as closely as they would like to ensure students have everything they need to meet requirements before 12th grade.

The American School Counselor Association recommends a 250:1 ratio. Washington’s was 364:1 in the 2024-25 school year. 

“In order for us to be effective in all facets of our job, not just interventions, but every aspect of our job — whether it’s college and career-readiness or social-emotional health — all of that hinges on the 250:1 ratio,” he said.

But, he said, counselors check in every quarter with students who are struggling to find out what’s hindering them. That could include finding ways to help them attend regularly or setting up mental health support if that’s the barrier, he said.

Tutoring and summer classes are available for those who aren’t grasping the material or need to recover credits, he said, though access to them is uneven.

“They do have an incentive to finish,” Lee said. “It’s pretty rare to say, ‘I am not doing it.’”

Ulukita, the high schooler in Hawaii who repeated ninth grade, is on track to graduate with the rest of his peers in 2028. Now a junior, he was able to earn the credits he needed to complete both his freshman and sophomore years through additional courses, after-school work and a better attendance record. 

Said Ulukita: “You’ve got to lock in more, do all your classes, make sure you get all your credits — and graduate on time.”

Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at preston@hechingerreport.org.

This story about being held back was produced by Big Local News at Stanford University and The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, in collaboration with The Assembly in North Carolina, Honolulu Civil Beat, Mississippi Today and The Seattle Times. 

The data analysis was conducted by Eric Sagara, senior data journalist with Big Local News. Reporting was contributed by Megan Tagami, Ariel Gilreath, Devna Bose, Carli Brosseau and Denisa R. Superville. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter. Learn more about Big Local News and how it supports local journalists.

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Artificial intelligence makes many tasks faster and easier. But a new study suggests that students may learn more when AI makes them slow down.

In an experiment involving more than 6,000 middle schoolers in Tennessee, students learned slightly more math when an AI tutor walked them through their mistakes and then required them to demonstrate the same skill correctly three times in a row before moving on.

Academic researchers tested four approaches to practicing fractions. Students were randomly assigned to receive either conventional computer-based instruction or the same software with an AI tutor. Within each of those groups, half the students had to correctly answer practice questions covering the same skill three times in a row if they made a mistake.

Students used software built by researchers, which was similar to Khan Academy’s videos and exercises, once for 50 minutes during math class. A week later, they took a 15-minute test to measure how much they retained.

The winning combination wasn’t the addition of AI tutoring alone, but AI tutoring plus repetition, with the idea that students needed to stick with the skill to demonstrate some level of mastery. The students who practiced math with this AI-enhanced “mastery learning” approach scored about 3 percentage points higher than students receiving conventional computerized instruction. The advantage was small. 

“I don’t want to jump out and say we’ve demonstrated that AI is going to be the game changer that we hope it is,” said Philip Oreopoulos, lead author of the study and an economist at the University of Toronto. “But it might be the first kind of evidence that shows there’s at least some hints that it has some positive value against no AI at all.”

That’s significant because there’s mounting evidence that AI is often harming learning, spitting out answers for students and short-circuiting the learning process. 

The study, “Making AI Tutoring Productive: Evidence from a Mastery-Based Math Practice Experiment,” was conducted by researchers from the University of Toronto and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. A working paper is scheduled to be circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research on Aug. 17 and has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. The authors provided The Hechinger Report with a draft.

Making students slow down

The researchers think AI helped because it walked students through their mistakes instead of simply showing them a solution.

Without AI, students could see a step-by-step example after getting a problem wrong. But a student can easily skim through the steps to a solution and move on, without figuring out what went wrong.

Numi, an AI tutor, guides students step by step

Source: Appendix of Oreopoulos et al., “Making AI Tutoring Productive: Evidence from a Mastery-Based Math Practice Experiment.”

The AI tutor, by contrast, could respond directly to a student’s work and guide the student through the mistake.

The students who used AI combined with mastery learning spent more time per question than students in any of the other groups — a sign that they were engaging more with the material. These students were also more likely to get the next question right after making a mistake. 

That’s important because requiring students to answer three questions correctly in a row is common in educational software. But hitting a short mastery threshold doesn’t necessarily mean a student has developed a deep understanding. Students can guess their way to three correct answers or succeed from repeated exposure without really learning the skill.

There was a limit to the benefits for students in this study. Students in the AI-plus-mastery group performed better primarily on the easiest fraction questions — the ones most similar to what they had practiced. The advantage did not extend to more challenging problems.

In this study, AI didn’t produce a deeper or more transferable understanding of fractions. Then again, it was only a 50-minute intervention and it’s unknown how this combination of AI plus mastery learning might improve student learning over the course of many months. 

Oreopoulos cautions against concluding that mastery learning is the best way to use AI in learning math. The researchers tested only the four combinations in their study; there could be better ways to enhance computer-assisted learning and make practice work more effective. His larger ambition is to keep testing different features against one another, continually improving the software.

For now, he said, the goal was more modest: to show that AI “has a little bit of benefit, and talk about its potential.”

Part of that potential may lie not in helping kids learn math faster, but in helping them slow down.

Kristin Fasiang is a graduate student in computer science and learning sciences at Northwestern University. Fasiang reported and wrote this story with The Hechinger Report’s Jill Barshay.

Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or barshay@hechingerreport.org.

This story about AI and mastery learning was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

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SYRACUSE, N.Y. — During the first year and a half of her son’s life, Valerie Gregory did everything she could to help him thrive: She read to him, talked to him, showed up for wellness checks, and whenever possible took him to a weekly playgroup, where both mother and son had the chance to socialize with peers.

At one of these gatherings, organizers brought along a standardized developmental questionnaire that helps gauge if children are hitting rough milestones for their age, like making eye contact, sitting up and waving goodbye.  

Despite regular visits to the pediatrician’s office, Gregory had never before seen the screener. What she ultimately learned caught her off guard.

“He was behind on walking, and he was way behind on speech,” she recalled.   

Gregory credits that brief encounter — the screener took less than 20 minutes to complete — with leading to therapies for her son that gave him a much stronger start in school, and life. “I have told people, ‘Get checked out. It’s free, and they figure out things you might not realize,’” she said. 

Twenty-five years ago, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that parents of young children complete developmental screeners at regular visits to the pediatrician — often a crucial first step in diagnosing a child’s disability or delay. But a generation later, implementation remains spotty, with just over 36 percent of parents of young children nationally reporting having filled out a screener in the previous 12 months, according to the latest National Survey of Children’s Health by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. New York lags behind most states, with about 28 percent of parents saying they had been screened recently. Only Nevada, Florida, Arkansas and Missouri come in lower.

The last set of federal survey results is from 2024. Many experts say it provides the most comprehensive state- and national-level data on screening rates, but some note that it can also underestimate screening numbers since some parents might not remember filling out a form or know what it was for. “If you ask pediatricians if they are screening, you might get a different number,” said Dr. Liz Isakson, executive director of Docs for Tots on Long Island, which advocates for children through age 5. (One 2020 study focused on pediatricians, for instance, found that nearly two-thirds of them reported doing some developmental screening.) “But I think parents are always right,” Dr. Isakson added. “If they are getting screened and don’t know it, that’s a problem.”

Related: Young children have unique needs and providing the right care can be a challenge. Our free early childhood education newsletter tracks the issues. 

In an effort to boost screening rates, a growing number of communities are taking a new approach: bringing the tool outside of doctor’s offices to libraries, zoos, farmer’s markets and other gatherings where parents with young kids congregate, like Gregory’s son’s playgroup. In New York and 29 other states, much of this work is supported by Help Me Grow, a national network of local organizations that promotes healthy child development, including by making screenings more accessible. Help Me Grow operates in six different parts of New York state, from Long Island to the Finger Lakes communities and cities like Buffalo and Syracuse. 

In Onondaga County, where Syracuse is located, the number of annual screenings documented by the group has jumped thirtyfold — from about 150 to more than 4,600 — since the campaign began in 2019, and organizers see greater parent engagement with children’s development.

“It’s been 25 years of us trying to mandate people to do it,” said Isakson, whose organization oversees Help Me Grow on Long Island. “Oftentimes the best way to get to change is to have people ask for it.” 

Doctors routinely screen kids in all kinds of ways — measuring and weighing them, and testing their vision and hearing. But a 2006 American Academy of Pediatrics recommendation following the earlier statement was for a standardized developmental screener to be administered to caregivers when children are 9, 18 and 30 months old. The academy has issued recommendations for autism and social-emotional screens as well.

There are different versions of the screeners, but a typical one might ask questions like (of an 18-month-old): Does your child say two or three words that represent different ideas together, such as ‘See dog,’ ‘Mommy come home,’ or ‘Kitty gone’? or: Does your child walk well and seldom fall?

A flag on a screener is not a diagnosis, and the hope is that families like Gregory’s will get further evaluation and follow up, whether through the medical or early intervention system. The latter provides federally mandated help for children with developmental delays and disabilities up to age 3. One study released earlier this year found that children in New York City who had received the services through age 3 outperformed similar peers on third grade reading and math tests. 

When it comes to screenings, “it’s exceptionally important to do them early and often,” said Kate Ryan, who directs the Adirondack Birth to Three Alliance. Funding challenges are a big reason why pediatric clinics don’t, though: The electronic tablets that parents often use to complete the questionnaires cost money, as do trainings for staff in how to interpret and explain the results. And some physicians say it can be difficult to get reimbursed by insurance and Medicaid for the cost. 

“Pediatric clinics often lose money on screening,” said Noelle Hause, senior manager of infant and early childhood mental health at the national child development advocacy organization Zero to Three. “We’re all wondering why we don’t identify conditions early — it’s not because it’s not recommended, it’s because it’s not getting reimbursed.” 

Related: Parents of premature infants struggle to get the help their children are entitled to

New York officials recently acknowledged that the state needs to improve its numbers. The State Health Department this month issued a memo to pediatricians, social workers and other providers who work with young children citing the low screening rate. “We are missing critical opportunities to identify developmental concerns early, educate families about developmental milestones, support their children’s individual growth, and learn what to do if they have questions or concerns,” the memo stated.

It also announced a new campaign to address the issue, called “Be Their Biggest Champion.” Screening “might be happening more than is being reported,” said Vanessa Threatte, executive director of the New York Council on Children and Families, which is spearheading the campaign. “But if parents don’t understand it…there’s still a challenge there that needs attention.”

New York did not allow clinics to receive separate Medicaid payment for developmental screenings until a few years ago, one reason for the state’s lower participation rate, Dr. Isakson said. Even now, the payment rate, at less than $20 per screening, does not always offset clinics’ cost. 

While provider participation has historically been the biggest obstacle to universal screening, experts say parent hesitancy and disconnect also play a role. 

When parents have to seek out screenings proactively, the families that get them end up being disproportionately “those who are well resourced and know about child development and want reinforcement that their child is developing as hoped,” said Ryan. “You don’t see those who are in generational poverty and maybe have had negative experiences with child development.” 

Even at pediatricians who routinely screen, parents from underrepresented groups can still face barriers. “You have, say, a parent with low literacy who can’t complete” the questionnaire, said Dr. Katharine Zuckerman, a professor and associate division head of general pediatrics at Oregon Health & Science University who researches disparities in access to screening and early intervention. Or, she said, you might have a parent “who speaks Armenian, and the survey isn’t available in Armenian.” 

For immigrant families, especially, early childhood advocates worry that President Trump’s immigration crackdown presents a big new barrier. Families who are nervous about citizenship status “are avoiding ‘well child’ checks, period,” said Hause. This makes efforts to bring screenings out of the doctor’s office and into the community all the more urgent.

Early one spring evening, a group of caregivers, including parents and grandparents, brought their babes to the Betts Branch Library in Syracuse’s Valley neighborhood. The children, mostly older infants and toddlers, tossed balls, shook shakers and frolicked in play tunnels while the adults mingled and chatted with representatives from the Early Childhood Alliance Onondaga, which encompasses the local Help Me Grow affiliate. At some of these gatherings, called “Books, Balls, and Blocks” and funded through Help Me Grow, parents fill out a developmental screener at the event. But on this night, they left with a QR code to complete the screener later at home if they wanted. Beyond the screening, organizers say events like this one provide an opportunity to learn about child development, celebrate growth and raise any concerns.

Edythe Smith, one of the mothers, told organizers that she worried about whether her then-9-month-old was getting enough engagement during long days when she works from home. “I play with her whenever I can,” Smith said. “But is it enough?” 

“If you’re playing with her, try not to second-guess yourself,” replied Bethany Creaser, the coalition’s executive director. “It’s easy to have mom guilt, especially when you are juggling different things.”  

Smith said she has struggled to know what to ask her daughter’s pediatrician about developmental progress, so she appreciated the event putting the topic front and center. “The doctor seemed to only address development if there was a concern,” she said, adding that she didn’t know what questions to ask or how to gauge where her daughter should be.

Another mother, Caroline Webster, agreed that it’s easy for parents to feel confused amid sometimes conflicting messages from doctors, friends and social media about what’s “normal” child development — and what’s not. She worried at one point, for instance, that her now 3-year-old son didn’t clap until he was 14 months. “It’s hard to figure out what’s true,” she said, adding that it turned out her son was just slower than some others to clap.

Related: Black and Latino infants and toddlers often miss out on early therapies they need

Since 2019, the coalition has worked with doctor’s offices, childcares, libraries, public schools and the county government to boost screening rates. In 2022, the county executive sponsored a screening challenge, which included texting reminders to all families receiving WIC benefits. In its early years, the campaign struggled to crack 1,000 annual recorded screens across its partners. But in 2025, the number approached 5,000.  

Just north of Syracuse, in more rural Oswego County, Help Me Grow brings “Books, Balls, and Blocks” to places like libraries and the local children’s museum — “anywhere family-friendly,” said Brandy Koproski, the executive director of the county effort’s umbrella group, Integrated Community Planning of Oswego County.

Since spring of 2024, Help Me Grow and its partners have screened more than 1,000 children — over 15 percent of the kids under the age of six in the county — which doesn’t include those families who filled out the questionnaire in two pediatric clinics that also collaborate with the effort.

Help Me Grow initiatives typically work in tandem with other early childhood services in a region, so a family that desperately needs diapers and formula, for instance, can get help with that first. In Oswego County, Help Me Grow is also connected to an in-house diaper bank.

“One of the barriers to screening is that we have such a high population that is homeless and can’t see past immediate need to developmental questions,” said Koproski. “We need to reduce those barriers.”

Boosting screening rates does not guarantee that every child with a disability or delay will get flagged or eventually helped. Pediatrician’s offices vary in terms of how well they read the results and communicate with parents about them. And even when there’s a demonstrated need for early intervention, waitlists can be long in some places, especially rural parts of New York. The state ranks low not just in screening rates, but also timely delivery of early intervention. 

Julia Day, a parent and school psychologist in Saranac in northeastern New York, said she watched from her son’s earliest days as he fell behind on milestone after milestone: sitting up independently, babbling, walking, saying his first word. But although she reliably filled out screeners at the doctor’s office, her pediatrician never expressed concerns. “I don’t know what his score was on those or what they did with the information,” Day said. 

On her own, Day sought out an evaluation for her son before his first birthday, and learned he qualified for both physical and speech therapy. But because of a shortage of in-person providers, it took months for early intervention to start. She briefly tried virtual therapy for speech from her phone, but the 1-year-old kept trying to grab the phone and suck on it. “It really didn’t work out,” she said.

Related: Six ideas to ease the early intervention staffing crisis 

Other families have found screening to be more effective — even if their children didn’t ultimately need therapy.

A few weeks after the “Books, Balls, and Blocks” event at the Syracuse library, Edythe Smith received an email with the screening results. She learned that her daughter was hitting her milestones but could use a little more support with communication. The Help Me Grow team sent over books, cards and age-appropriate games for Smith to help nurture her daughter’s speech. “The irony is that I studied linguistic anthropology, and language and communication mean a great deal to me,” Smith said. “But when you are essentially a first-time parent, you don’t know what tools to use.” 

Whenever possible, Smith now tries to narrate routine actions for her daughter, such as changing a diaper, putting on shoes and combing hair. In the last couple of months the extra effort seems to be paying off: Her daughter has shifted from babbling to saying several recognizable words: foot, ball, cat.   

After completing the screening at the playgroup, Valerie Gregory knew almost immediately that there would be more follow-up. A woman from early intervention came to the house to do a full evaluation. “She was like, ‘He’s behind on this and this and that,’” Gregory recalled. When her son walked out of the kitchen during the session drinking from an open cup — unexpected for his age — the visitor looked surprised. “I take it that is the only thing he is ahead on,” Gregory remembered quipping. “She laughed so hard.”

Once the therapies started, a speech specialist got her child to communicate through hand gestures first, then used motivational strategies to coax the boy to start saying words. (“More” was an early one, enticed by his love of food.) If not for that early support, Gregory said, her son might have arrived at prekindergarten with few, if any, words.

Today, at the age of 10, he knows thousands of words and may be ready to graduate out of speech therapy next year. Without that timely screen, his mother says, “He would probably be a lot harder to understand.”

Contact Sarah Carr at carr@hechingerreport.org 

This story about developmental screening 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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The nation was distracted by other things when a quiet warning sounded: Support was diminishing for American academic research that had led to breakthroughs and innovation.

That familiar-sounding worry came not this year, but near the end of World War II, in a pivotal government study by the wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development. 

The response then: infusions of government cash that would propel the U.S. higher education system into international preeminence over the subsequent decades.

American colleges and universities rose to the ranks of the best in the world. They attracted top scholars who won a disproportionate number of Nobel Prizes. They helped drive the innovation economy. As trade deficits beset other industries, education became the sixth-largest U.S. services export. At their peak enrollment, international students brought in more than $40 billion a year.

Now, as a new academic year begins, American dominance in higher education globally is incontrovertibly in decline, according to data, international rankings and independent experts. 

The slide has been accelerated by a year and a half of funding cuts, restrictions on international students and curbs on what can be said or taught. But it began before those political challenges, with enrollment declines, lackluster returns on ever-rising prices and public mistrust. 

“It takes a while for all of these problems to trickle down, but they are beginning to trickle down,” said Eric Mlyn, a faculty fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University who studies academic freedom.

Related: Interested in innovations in higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter.

Top scholars are leaving. Fewer international students are coming. U.S. universities are slipping in international rankings. And American universities have failed to keep pace as other countries pour resources into their higher education systems. 

Chinese institutions, for example, have increased their production of graduates with doctoral degrees much faster than American ones in the critical fields of science, technology, engineering and math. Rather than expanding, U.S. doctoral programs are now admitting fewer candidates or have stopped accepting new applicants altogether.

This has myriad impacts on all Americans. Falling behind in research imperils the nation’s economic competitiveness, for instance. And attracting fewer international learners — and the subsidies they represent to universities’ bottom lines — is already affecting the services and majors available to domestic students, and could increase the cost.

So dire has the situation become that the American Academy of Arts and Sciences hosted a discussion about it in June. The title: “Is the U.S. Losing Its Edge as a Global Education Leader?” 

The answer is yes, said Mlyn, who was one of the panelists. “There are so many issues threatening America’s global standing,” he said.

The number of U.S. universities in the top 100 of the QS World University Rankings has fallen from 31 to 26 in the past 10 years, while Chinese universities are moving up. The Times Higher Education World University Rankings still puts seven U.S. universities among the top 10. But the smallest number ever made the top 500, while Asian universities rose. 

Related: As international enrollment falls, U.S. students face program cuts and higher prices

International standings like these “are the global symbol for geopolitical strength on the world stage, and they’re very influential in people’s decision about where to study,” said Phil Baty, the Times Higher’s chief global affairs officer. “If you start seeing the slow diminution of rankings, that means you’re becoming less attractive to that talent. Then it could be a really serious downward spiral.”

In the next Times Higher rankings — due out Sept. 30 — U.S. institutions continue to fall in comparative measures of reputation and research quality, Baty said.

“It does feel like a tipping point,” he said. 

Universities in China annually turn out nearly 50 percent more Ph.D. graduates in science, technology, engineering and math than U.S. universities do, according to the National Science Foundation, or NSF. That’s partly a reflection of China’s larger population. But the pace of STEM Ph.D. production is also rising much more quickly in China than in the United States. It doubled in the 15 years ending in 2022, while the number of U.S. Ph.D. graduates in STEM rose two-fifths as fast, or by 41 percent, an analysis by fDi Intelligence found.

Chinese universities now hold seven of the top 10 places in the Leiden Rankings from the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University, which ranks institutions based on the number of journal articles published by their faculties — a seemingly arcane but consequential measure of academic productivity in which Harvard has fallen from first in the world to third. 

Researchers in China produced 28 percent of English language articles about artificial intelligence, worldwide, between 2018 and 2023, compared with 16 percent by scholars in the United States, according to the Emerging Technology Observatory at Georgetown University. 

While they may have produced less research during that period than their Chinese counterparts, American scholars still ranked higher on how often their work was cited by others, the NSF noted — an important indication of its relative quality. And some of the most prestigious U.S. universities were still holding their own at the top of those most recent international rankings.

Related: Threats of more closings have colleges and students worrying about how to save themselves

But the Trump administration has since cut billions of dollars in research funding, resulting in layoffs and uncertainty. And while many of those initial cuts were restored by courts, federal agencies have slowed the awarding of new grants. 

The administration’s 2027 budget request would reduce spending on the NSF and National Institutes of Health by 55 percent and 13 percent, respectively, according to the nonpartisan law and policy organization the Brennan Center for Justice, and shift some of what money remains away from universities. 

“We have the success of the postwar period to show that the current model works pretty well,” said Steven Durlauf, an economist at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, referring to the historic role of the federal government in supporting academic research. Today, with funding uncertainty at least and cuts at worst, said Durlauf, “we’re on a suicidal trajectory.”

Related: More than a quarter of private colleges are at risk of closing, new projection shows

Blaming the interruptions in funding that have already occurred, top research universities have admitted 15 percent fewer doctoral students for the coming fall, including in fields such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing, according to the Association of American Universities, or AAU. Many didn’t take any new doctoral students at all. 

Doctoral programs train scientists to teach and conduct research in fields including technology and treatments for medical problems.

“America faces the alarming prospect of losing an entire generation of scientific talent,” the AAU says. 

Just after the start of the second Trump administration, about half of Ph.D. students and postdoctoral researchers in bioengineering said they were likely to leave academia, according to a survey by researchers at Harvard, MIT and elsewhere. The proportion who said they’d likely leave the United States was also up.

Three in four U.S.-based researchers overall have considered leaving the country, according to another survey, by the journal Nature, conducted before some of the Trump administration’s harshest actions against universities and colleges. 

Forty-five percent of faculty in yet another survey, by researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said they had considered jobs outside of higher education in the last three years, and a third that they had considered opportunities outside of the United States. Most said changes in state or federal policy were instrumental in their job searches.

At least 85 scholars have moved to China since the start of 2024, CNN reporting found, including several at the top of their fields — most recently, Nobel Prize-winning chemist Omar Yaghi, who is leaving the University of California, Berkeley, for Tsinghua University in China to help establish an institute that will use AI to speed up the development of new materials. 

American scientists collectively submitted 32 percent more applications for jobs abroad in the first quarter of last year than in the same period the year before, according to a separate analysis by Nature.

U.S. universities “have been magnets for talent because they have provided an exchange: ‘Come build your research lab at our university — you’ll get all these talented students, we have labs, we have government funding,’ ” said Kumar Garg, a science and technology adviser in the Obama administration and now president of Renaissance Philanthropy, which helps channel private funds to research. “If that bundle starts unraveling, this no longer works.”

Meanwhile, the flow of international students coming to the United States has slowed dramatically, with as much as a 22 percent decline in the number who arrived last summer compared with the summer before. 

Nearly six in 10 universities and colleges say the number of applications they received from international students fell again for the academic year about to start, a survey by the Institute of International Education found. More than 40 percent reported a “substantial” decline in applications for graduate study. NAFSA: Association of International Educators and the education technology company JB International project a drop of 111,000 international students this fall, costing the economy $3.4 billion.

“The U.S. has thrived because the world’s smartest people flock to the United States, and that is definitely stalling,” said Baty, of the Times Higher. 

This slide follows federal delays in issuing new student visas, the detentions and deportations of international students for their political activism and screenings of international student applicants’ social media posts. 

Even before those steps, however — as the price of U.S. higher education continued to rise — “cost was a larger reason” for international students reconsidering coming to the United States, said Rona Aydin, who works with them as founder of the international college admissions counseling company Oriel Admissions.

Now, said Aydin, prospective applicants who previously would have only considered American universities “are also thinking about backup countries. That’s a shift.”

Yet another rule, restricting international students to four years in the United States, takes effect Sept. 15. Four years is less time than is needed to complete many Ph.D. and other academic programs, and the new limit is likely to further reduce the supply of international students coming to the country.

Related: Facing political attack and falling enrollment, colleges take the fight to … each other

Also, while it’s still too early to see their effects, new limits on federal loans for graduate study will leave about one-fourth of domestic graduate-school borrowers unable to continue to pay for their educations, projections suggest.

In some states, faculty have faced constraints on what they can teach and threats to protections such as tenure. 

Institutional autonomy at U.S. universities has eroded by 50 percent in the decade ending in 2025, and especially since the first Trump administration, according to the Academic Freedom Index produced by researchers at Germany’s University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. 

“The decline in institutional autonomy in the United States stands out as a case of fast and steep deterioration,” the researchers wrote in March.

Tenure can keep scientists from leaving academia for better-paying jobs in private industry, as more may now do, said Kenan Sahin, author of “American Educational Excellence,” a book about the strengths of the U.S. education system, and a life member of the governing board at MIT, which he attended as an international student before founding what would become a multibillion-dollar tech company.

Those researchers without tenure who remain at universities may stick to “safe” ideas rather than seek out potential breakthroughs and risk failure, Sahin said.

Seventy percent of Americans now say higher education in the United States is going in the wrong direction, up from 56 percent in 2020, according to Pew. Adults who went to college are more likely to say this than those who didn’t. 

That falloff in confidence began before the current political attacks and is largely because of people’s skepticism about what they’re getting for their money, Pew’s and other surveys show.

The United States spends among the most in the world on higher education, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD. But it ranks 15th and 17th, respectively, in the proportion of 25- to 34-year-olds who have degrees, depending on whether their parents did or didn’t go to college. That’s down from second overall 20 years ago.

Related: As college graduates fret over finding jobs, a record shortage of workers is projected

The impact of these many intersecting trends is already underway. 

There have been more than 320 instances of college and university layoffs, program cuts, department eliminations and closings since January 2024, according to the database CollegeCuts, which tracks this. Even Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences is running a $350 million deficit, which it attributes partly to an increased federal tax on its endowment.

“Universities went through a multidecade period where they existed in a bipartisan halo, where people might disagree about lots of things, but having cutting-edge universities was a thing everybody could agree on and was willing to invest in,” Garg said.

U.S. higher education institutions “really are deep wells of talent. Their strengths are real,” he said. But “we should not sleep on the fact that if we don’t adapt and navigate this moment, we’re going to wake up and all of the premier universities won’t be in the United States, and we’ll wonder how that happened.”

Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556, jmarcus@hechingerreport.org or jpm.82 on Signal.

This story about threats to U.S. higher education 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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Morgan County, Tennessee, is a rural community shaped by strong relationships, deep attachment to place and a shared commitment to its future. Its public lands and tourism economy are part of that story, as are the intergenerational ties, civic commitment and local institutions that hold the community together.

Like many rural areas, Morgan County also faces real economic challenges: More than half of its population struggles to afford basic household necessities, and 15 percent of its residents live below the poverty line. 

That’s why the efforts of Roane State Community College to reshape what student success means are so important. Helping individual students earn credentials is not enough: The school also aims to strengthen the long-term economic vitality of the entire region. 

In many areas, community colleges are the main driver of economic mobility. By expanding access to postsecondary education, creating clearer pathways into sustainable local careers and working alongside employers, schools and community organizations, they help ensure that residents can build stable futures close to home. They need more support.

Related: Interested in innovations in higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter.

Rural higher education has never been a high national priority, even though these institutions are not only educators but also employers, workforce hubs and cultural centers. Now, America’s roughly 1,000 rural colleges and regional universities are facing distinct challenges, including declining enrollment and, among their students, persistent poverty, long travel distances, limited choice in local industries and uneven broadband access that restricts educational opportunities. 

Economic pressures are already shaping what institutions can offer, causing reductions in programs and constraints on capacity.

At the same time, these schools must stretch every dollar to address not only the academic needs of their students but also their basic needs: food and housing security, child care, transportation and more; there is a great need to learn and share what is working to help these schools achieve their missions. 

Successful rural community colleges are building pathways to help students find work that leads to sustainable careers at a time of significant economic change. They are redesigning programs to align with emerging industries, from advanced manufacturing to information technology. They are partnering with business and community organizations to identify opportunities for future local jobs and are reaching beyond their walls to support out-of-school learners. They are creating dual-enrollment opportunities for high school students and are supporting adult learners looking for sustainable careers close to home.

Roane State embodies this approach by working in partnership with mayors, school leaders, local companies and community groups to bolster the economic prospects of the entire region, from emerging industry and digital jobs to health care and computer technology. 

Elsewhere, rural colleges are taking similar initiatives: At Louisiana State University at Eunice, digital skills badges and a health care partnership are linking coursework to local careers. Columbia-Greene Community College in New York offers stronger student supports and microcredentials tied to labor market demand. Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College has expanded training through partnerships with workforce agencies and community organizations.

Although rural students complete high school at a higher rate than the national average, reports show that only 29 percent of young adults (18- to 24-year-olds) in rural areas enroll in college compared to 42 percent of those in suburban areas and 48 percent in urban areas. Research also shows a 12-percentage-point gap between bachelor’s degree attainment in rural areas and urban communities.

At the same time, rural employers struggle to fill critical roles in teaching, health care and other skilled fields like accounting. Many rural communities lose college-educated residents to larger cities, making long-term economic development more difficult. 

Related: OPINION: Rural community colleges are uniquely positioned to tackle complex regional challenges and drive community transformation. Here’s how

And yet there is little evidence about what strategies are most effective in supporting institutions as they attempt to meet the challenges of declining enrollment, slowing population growth, workforce needs and persistent poverty, and no readily accessible national data source that reports annual college attendance or completion rates among rural high school students by state.

Ultimately, we don’t know which homegrown innovations are making a difference for rural students. Too often, policymakers leave rural practitioners and policymakers to guess what works best. 

That’s why we welcome a historic investment in the National Rural Higher Education Research Center, which will evaluate “what works” for rural students and colleges. By partnering with colleges, state agencies and rural communities across the country over the next five years, it will identify and evaluate strategies that build on rural strengths to expand opportunity, increase credential completion and strengthen local economies.

The Center’s research will explore how rural students transition from high school, choose institutions, persist and enter the workforce, while recognizing that different rural regions face different challenges and opportunities. All studies are designed to suggest timely best practices that educators can bring to their own campuses. 

Achieving the Dream is a Center affiliate organization. With a network of more than 300 community colleges, including a large percentage of rural and Tribal Colleges, we will create information-sharing channels between colleges, strengthen partnerships and help find practical solutions that work for students and communities.

The goal is practical, actionable research that helps institutions understand what is likely to work for their students and regions — not simply what worked somewhere else.

Meredith Archer Hatch is director of network relations for Achieving the Dream. Alyssa Ratledge is senior research associate in MDRC’s postsecondary education policy area and leads MDRC’s rural higher education work.

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.

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

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Stepping into the schoolyard at the Adolph S. Ochs public school in Manhattan’s bustling Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, you’re greeted by a canopy of trees. Painted sea turtles and birds adorn the pavement. Summer school kids run along the track encircling the green turf field, tossing balls back and forth. Other kids shoot hoops or decompress in the shade. After walking down nearby Ninth Avenue in the blistering heat, one finds it noticeably cooler here. 

This schoolyard wasn’t always like this. Eleven years ago, it resembled many other city playgrounds: an open, unshaded expanse of black asphalt. 

Now, it’s among 420 schoolyards across 26 states that the nonprofit Trust for Public Land says it is helping to transform from barren blacktop into welcoming oases for schoolchildren and local residents. 

In late July, TPL hosted a two-day summit in New York City, bringing together school district leaders, landscape architects and environmental advocates from across the country to learn more about reinvigorating schoolyards. Keynote speakers extolled the benefits of nature-based play and keeping schoolyards open to the public when school isn’t in session. 

A core part of TPL’s mission is ensuring that everyone in the country has access to a quality park within a 10-minute walk of their home. 

Reinventing schoolyards starts with a thoughtfully rendered design. Students at a participating school survey classmates to learn more about their favorite park features and what their schoolyard really needs. From there, they work alongside landscape architects to help shape the design. Administrators, custodians, recess monitors and afterschool caretakers also take part. 

“The users are the designers,” said Mary Alice Lee, who directs TPL’s NYC Playgrounds Program. 

Designs include the classic staples — basketball hoops and jungle gyms — but reimagined: drab courts are repainted with colorful geometric designs. Structures include features inspired by natural elements, like artificial climbing boulders and tree stumps. Playful mosaics and murals grace building walls, giving life to once lackluster schoolyards. 

But these designs aren’t driven just by aesthetics and opportunities for play. Climate change is exacerbating dangerous heat waves and increasing the frequency of downpours in some cities. Green-roofed gazebos and rain gardens to catch storm runoff can let schools help their neighborhoods mitigate difficult weather conditions. 

At schoolyards such as the one at Adolph S. Ochs, asphalt playgrounds can worsen flooding and overwhelm the city’s drainage systems. Switching out blacktop for porous pavement allows rain to seep through rather than pool on the surface. A green gazebo roof, acting as a sponge, absorbs rainwater and reduces the flooding risk. On 90-degree days, unshaded asphalt surfaces can surpass 140 degrees, but shaded surfaces have been found to be at least 30 degrees cooler than those without protection from the sun.

TPL also wants these playgrounds to serve as vital community spaces outside of school hours, particularly in low-income areas that lack green spaces. 

“When the school year is open to the community after hours, you’re fostering this great sense of care and sense of ownership,” said Danielle Denk, TPL’s community schoolyards initiative director. “There’s more people looking out for what happens there, and it just reinforces that positive use.”

New York City’s Schoolyards to Playgrounds program, a collaboration between city agencies and TPL, renovates public school yards and opens them to local neighborhoods outside of school hours. Other cities in the country also have shared use agreements — between two separate government entities, such as a school district and city — that allow the public to access schoolyards and other facilities outside of school hours. But because these agreements are not universal, access to safe, green spaces remains inconsistent across communities. 

Close to 75 percent of U.S. residents who live in areas that have experienced the most nature loss are Black, Hispanic, Asian or Native American, according to an analysis by the Center for American Progress, a think tank. 

These communities often bear the brunt of hazardous weather and experience worse health conditions. Research has linked proximity to tree canopies to lower cardiovascular disease and mortality rates. 

Yet in cities like New York, green space is not distributed equitably. 

Near Bayside, Queens, each resident has an average of more than 141 square feet of park space within a one-mile walk. But in Jackson Heights, Queens, which is majority Latino and Asian, the community has access to just 2 square feet per person.

At the summit, New York City councilmember Shekar Krishnan emphasized the need for community schoolyards within his Queens district, which includes Jackson Heights.

Schoolyards are “one of the few spaces we have — quite literally the only open spaces we have — where our children can play, and our community can come together,” said Krishnan. “It’s not that park space and green space is a luxury or privilege for some. It’s a right for all of us.”

Creating community schoolyards has its obstacles. Finding funding to start a project remains a challenge. TPL works with communities to obtain funding through public and private grants, but securing funds varies from city to city.  

“The pros outweigh the cons, but we’re a cash-strapped city and district,” said Emma Melvin, green infrastructure program manager at the School District of Philadelphia. 

Philadelphia has improved playgrounds with green infrastructure through nonprofit partnerships and grants, but covering long-term maintenance costs is challenging. Vandalism can also add to the expense, Melvin said. 

“Sometimes a system can be easier to design but harder to maintain,” said Megan Garner, director of sustainability and green schools for the Philadelphia school district, during a summit workshop on building climate-resilient schoolyards. 

As the summit drew to a close, rising ninth grader Nazarian Lopez spoke about being part of the process to redesign his schoolyard at MS 343 in the Bronx.

“Today, when I see teachers, staff, students and families using that space, I feel proud because I know something I helped imagine has become a part of everyday life,” he said. 

Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at preston@hechingerreport.org.

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

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School purchasing can seem like an administrative backwater, far removed from the heart of teaching and learning. But the way schools buy products and services like educational software or tutoring programs can influence whether students actually learn, some policymakers argue.

Instead of paying vendors simply for delivering these tools, school districts are experimenting with a new approach to purchasing, called outcomes-based contracting, in which part of a vendor’s payment depends on whether students actually use the service and meet agreed-upon academic goals. The idea is to share risk between schools and vendors — and create incentives for both sides to pay closer attention to whether an intervention is working.

Outcomes-based contracts have long been used in the healthcare industry. For example, insurers often pay drug companies less if patients don’t improve. Since the pandemic, the method has spread rapidly in education, particularly for tutoring and educational technology. A new Michigan law requires schools to use this type of contract to tap into a $50 million fund for online or virtual tutoring. School districts in Florida, Texas, California and more than 20 other states are also experimenting with the approach, according to the Center for Outcomes Based Contracting, a nonprofit organization that promotes the practice.

Related: We have tried paying teachers based on how much students learn. Now schools are expanding that idea to contractors and vendors

The first independent evaluation of outcomes-based contracts offers reasons for optimism, but also for caution. Researchers from WestEd, a San Francisco-based nonprofit research organization, studied tutoring and educational technology programs in eight early-adopter districts in California, Florida, Mississippi and Texas between August 2024 and March 2026. Three of the interventions produced measurable academic gains for students. But the study stops short of proving that the contracts themselves deserve the credit.

Researchers faced a common challenge in education: How to determine whether a particular intervention actually caused students to learn more. Student achievement depends on so many things, from classroom instruction and curriculum to family circumstances. To isolate the effect of tutoring or educational software delivered under an outcomes-based contract, WestEd compared students who had scored just below an eligibility cutoff and received the intervention with statistically similar students who had scored just above the cutoff and did not.

Of the 10 interventions the researchers hoped to evaluate, only four could be analyzed using this rigorous approach. Three showed positive academic effects. The fourth, an online tutoring program, was intended to run for most of the school year but lasted only about two months, too short to expect measurable gains. 

Student performance improved in three interventions covered by outcomes-based contracts

For the other six interventions, researchers couldn’t make clean comparisons between similar students because schools did what schools often do: They filled empty tutoring seats with higher achieving students who weren’t supposed to get tutoring, or they failed to get eligible students to attend after-school tutoring programs, for example. One district allowed all its first graders to use reading software if they posted anything less than a perfect score on a kindergarten assessment.

Targeting interventions to the right students

One of the more intriguing results involved instructional reading software powered by artificial intelligence. Second graders who used the AI tutor were substantially more likely to reach proficiency on the state’s reading assessment than similar students who did not. The same program, however, did not produce benefits for older elementary students. 

“That’s a really important finding,” said Brittany Miller, executive director of the Center for Outcomes Based Contracting, which commissioned the WestEd study. “Because that tells us what’s working for whom and under what conditions.” 

Most schools, Miller said, were “paying for services, and we have no idea whether or not they were working for kids, or even if kids got the services.”

The mixed results that outcomes-based contracts can produce — good, bad or neutral — are equally important, Miller argues, so that schools can more precisely target the right interventions to the right kids. 

“Because guess what? Not every kid needs 30 minutes of every ed tech product every week,” she said. 

Attending to implementation

WestEd researchers said they observed notable changes in day-to-day implementation. Schools and vendors met regularly to review data, monitored whether students were actually attending tutoring sessions and tracked their progress toward goals. Teachers and school leaders put more energy into making sure students showed up.

But there’s a caveat. The evaluation cannot determine whether those implementation improvements stemmed from the financial incentives built into the contracts or from the extensive support the districts received from the Center for Outcomes Based Contracting. Each participating district got roughly $80,000 worth of coaching and technical assistance from the center to help design the contracts, establish outcome measures, monitor progress and troubleshoot implementation problems.

In other words, the evaluation tested outcomes-based contracting plus intensive implementation support — not the contracts in isolation. It’s possible that the coaching and technical assistance alone could have prompted schools to monitor tutoring attendance more closely, hold regular data meetings and make mid-course corrections. 

Cutting costs

The center is now experimenting with less expensive models that reduce the assistance to under $10,000 per district. Researchers hope future evaluations will help determine whether districts can achieve similar results with far less outside support — and whether the contracts themselves are driving the improvements.

Researchers also observed unexpected spillover effects. Once districts built data systems to monitor tutoring attendance and student progress for outcomes-based contracts, they began using those same systems to track other interventions that weren’t covered by the contracts.

“Certain interventions are not going to work with or without an outcomes-based contract,” said Sean Tanner, a researcher at WestEd on the evaluation team. “What’s really important for continual improvement is that the districts can learn really rigorously whether something is working. As a researcher, I find the OBC [outcomes-based contracting] model really compelling because it builds natural experiments into the process.”

Outcomes-based contracting can’t replace academic research. But it could help schools understand better which interventions are working in real time, instead of waiting for a multi-year randomized controlled trial to be conducted. 

The evaluation didn’t find that outcomes-based contracting saved schools money. WestEd did not conduct a formal cost-effectiveness analysis, but its interviews with participating districts suggested that overall spending was similar to traditional contracts. Some districts absorbed costs when they failed to meet their own responsibilities, such as making sure students attended tutoring sessions. At the same time, some vendors reported losing money.

Whether outcomes-based contracting ultimately fulfills its promise remains an open question. Resource-strained districts are likely to have a much harder time doing it, the WestEd researchers observed. And while the researchers found positive academic results in three interventions, they still cannot determine whether those gains stemmed from the contracts themselves, the intensive coaching districts received or both. What the study does point to is that contracts can do more than enforce payments. They can change how districts monitor, manage and learn from the programs they buy.

Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or barshay@hechingerreport.org.

This story about an evaluation of outcomes-based contracting was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

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How do kids learn how to kick a ball?

If you think that’s a silly question — kids just kick things, don’t they? — you are thinking like me: Old school.

Recently Ginny Yurich, host of the “1000 Hours Outside” podcast, sent me some pages from a pre-K curriculum she’d seen at a conference last year. Kicking is just one of the skills it offers instructions for. And it’s not just, “Give ’em a ball and get out of the way.”

No, the guidance is much more granular. Teachers facing the complex and detailed task of teaching kids to kick are told to first “invite” kids outside, earnestly discuss safety issues (kids must stand far apart!) and then “Demonstrate how to kick the ball, and talk through each step as you complete it: ‘Now that I’ve looked around to make sure it’s safe, I’ll run up and kick the ball. I’m going to keep my foot under the ball when I kick.’ ”

Then, “Tell the child to place the ball on the ground and take at least four large steps back.” How far back? That, too, must be prescribed: 8 to 10 feet. Next: “Have the child move quickly up to the ball and place the nonkicking foot next to the ball. Help him or her swing the kicking leg forward so the foot hits the ball below its center. …”

The instructions keep going! But if someone told four-year-old me to kick a ball by moving quickly up to it and being sure not to use my “nonkicking foot” — surely a popular phrase among preschoolers — I think I’d have kicked something else. 

And I wouldn’t need an adult’s “help” swinging my other leg forward, thank you very much.

Related: Young children have unique needs and providing the right care can be a challenge. Our free early childhood education newsletter tracks the issues. 

Note that these instructions are for all kids, not kids in early intervention programs. What’s most disturbing is they seem perfect … for a robot.

Kids don’t need to be taught to kick a ball. Put a ball in front of one and see if you can keep them from kicking it. They really don’t need much instruction in having fun. So why does this “curriculum” exist? It has to do with the way we think of education and fun itself.

Universal public schooling has only existed for the blink of an eye, historically speaking. In the U.S., it wasn’t mandated in every state until 1918. For most of human history, kids learned how to become functioning adults with no formal classrooms, lessons or teachers.

But once the modern model of education took hold, “school” gradually became synonymous with “learning.” That connection has become so cemented that it can be hard to think of kids learning anywhere but school, or learning in any way but being taught by a teacher.

Once that’s the case, we forget how much they learn through curiosity and the simple impulse to try things. If you think of kids as basically lying fallow anytime they aren’t being formally instructed, it becomes the adults’ job to make sure that all fallow time is minimized. We rush to fill it with something officially useful.

This explains why kids are so busy today. They are in adult-run classes and activities because the alternative appears to be “sleep mode.” It also explains why adults are so busy: We’re driving kids to and from all those lessons and often staying to watch.

Eventually this leads to the point where we can’t imagine kids developing almost any skills, even how to play, without adult tutelage. So someone draws up instructions to teach kids how to do something every human kid (and probably every primate) has done since the invention of legs: kick.

Related: Want resilient and well-adjusted kids? Let them play

Any teachers forced to follow that curriculum have to act like they believe kids need this, too. They’re just as programmed (and condescended to) as their students.

Here I must quote a little more from the manual, because it is such a perfect example of the adult takeover of childhood. For instance, to “teach” kids to bounce a ball: “Ask the children to hold the ball out in front of their bodies and drop or throw it to the ground. Explain that when you drop or throw down a ball, and it comes back up, it is called bouncing a ball. ‘Watch as the ball hits the ground and then bounces back up!’ ”

Because they otherwise wouldn’t watch?

The teacher is told to turn the ball-dropping (which is not how you bounce) into an even-more-teachable moment by pointing out “how high the ball bounces when it is simply dropped and how hard it bounces when it is thrown to the ground.”

But watch out! the manual warns teachers: Don’t let kids play too long. They are delicate! The manual’s hopping instructions (“Spring off the floor on one foot and land on the same foot”) tell teachers that “hopping can be tiring for many children. This skill is difficult for young children to master; they may lack the strength and balance to hold one leg in the air while hopping on the other.”

So our kids are going to preschools at age 3 or 4 where they are treated as clueless, exhausted, dumb, dull, decrepit near-humans who need boring, didactic and confusing instructions — as do their teachers.

If we really want kids to learn how to kick, bounce, hop or be happy, here’s the best advice: Give ’em a ball. Get out of the way.

Lenore Skenazy is president of Let Grow, the nonprofit promoting childhood independence and resilience, and author of Free-Range Kids.

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.

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

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Listen to the whole series

TRANSCRIPT

Justice Stephen Breyer, a Harvard Law alum with judicial roots in the Boston area, including helping create this federal court.

Bella Ramirez is a high-achieving student who hustles. As an undergrad at Boston University, she worked as a resident assistant on campus.

Boston has very high costs of living, so that was definitely helpful. And I also did a bunch of different paid internships. So I worked actually with NBC for a few years for different semesters, did a different freelance work around Boston since I was a journalism major. Reporting for Good Morning BU, I’m Bella Ramirez. And then I also ran a comedy production startup called Wicked Smock Comedy. That was definitely my lowest paying gig.

This fall, the 23-year-old from Pembroke Pines, Florida, will become the first person in her family to attend graduate school after navigating the law school admissions process largely on her own.

It’s really nerve-racking to be looking at all of these different things and trying to assess everything based on online forums and talking to people and getting secondhand information instead of just, like I really can’t turn to my parents and say, what did you do in this situation? Because they really have, they’re turning to me and asking me questions.

Last summer, Ramirez withdrew from the waitlist at three top-tier law schools after Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Since that legislation called for new federal loan caps that took effect in July, Ramirez decided those limits would make certain schools financially out of reach.

I emailed them and I said, hey, because of these new restrictions, this is no longer seeming like a possibility.

In the end, she chose Cardoza School of Law in New York City, where a scholarship kept her borrowing within the new federal limits.

Had they not given me that package, I almost certainly would not be able to go to law school this fall.

This is College Uncovered, a podcast from GBH News that pulls back the Ivy to reveal how colleges really work. I’m Kirk Carapezza. Today on the show, who should hold power over higher education? On July 1st, the Trump administration’s sweeping overhaul of federal higher ed policy and financing took effect. The changes touched nearly every part of the sector, from who can afford graduate school to who ultimately decides which scientific discoveries receive billions in taxpayer funding. Supporters say Washington is finally bringing accountability to colleges that have driven up costs and pushed ideological agendas. Critics warn the federal government is exerting power over decisions that have long been made by consumers, financial aid institutions, university leaders and independent scientific experts. Today, we’ll look at what those changes mean for students, researchers and the future of American higher education. This fall, low-income students will gain expanded federal support for career and technical training. We’ll explain that in a bit. But for the first time, new graduate students like Bella Ramirez will face strict new limits on how much they can borrow from the federal government. Until now, graduate students could borrow enough in federal loans to cover the full cost of attendance. Beginning this fall, new borrowers in programs like law and medicine will be capped at $50,000 a year, with a lifetime borrowing limit of $200,000.

Amid record low test scores and record high numbers of students buried in debt, Americans want results.

In congressional testimony before the House Education Committee in May, U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said universities have inflated graduate tuition because the government has offered loans with very few limits.

College costs are just exorbitant. Students are burdened with debt. We have $1.7 trillion in debt, 43 million students. Only about 25% of them are repaying their loans. So we really have to do something to bring down the cost of college.

McMahon said the new caps will force institutions to lower their costs, and the department says some schools lowered their prices even before these changes went into effect, including Santa Clara University School of Law, Johns Hopkins University Business School and Lewis and Clark’s Graduate School of Education and Counseling. For students, the big question is whether the new limits will reign in tuition or simply put graduate school out of reach. In Massachusetts, roughly one in three students have previously borrowed more than the new caps allow. Those who welcome the measure say it will force universities to control their costs. Those who oppose it say they fear it will push students toward private loans with higher interest rates or push them out of graduate school altogether.

In the long run, it could be beneficial, but we’re seeing by and far in the short run, it’s affecting a lot of students.

Josh Ferris is a research and policy analyst for Leadership Brainery. It’s a Boston-based nonprofit focused on expanding access to graduate school for low-income students. An online survey of a thousand perspective graduate students found about 60 percent are already factoring federal funding changes into their enrollment decisions. That suggests policy uncertainty is beginning to influence demand in real time. Ferris says Massachusetts could be hit especially hard, because according to US census data, nearly half of the state’s residents hold a bachelor’s degree and about 23 percent of adults over the age of 25 have an advanced degree.

That’s compared to the 13 percent on average nationally. And so our state will be particularly impacted for lots of industries that particularly require graduate degrees.

Industries like biotechnology and education. That’s why Massachusetts is among two dozen states challenging the policy in federal court, arguing the administration’s definition of professional programs is too narrow. And in June, a judge temporarily blocked the administration from enforcing the lower federal student loan limits, though that ruling only applies to people pursuing graduate degrees in nursing and other health care related fields. In a statement, a spokesperson for the education department told me the judge’s order still allows the federal government to enforce, quote, the statutory professional degree definition and loan caps, and the department is reviewing the order and will take appropriate action. Supporters say that the new loan limits will protect some students from taking on excessive debt, and the majority of students don’t currently borrow above the caps.

Most students are going to be just fine, especially if you’re attending a lower cost or public institution, you’re probably going to be able to borrow within the new loan caps.

Preston Cooper is a senior fellow working on higher education policy at the American Enterprise Institute. He argues the answer is for colleges to lower tuition, not for taxpayers, to provide unlimited lending.

Up until this year, institutions had really no incentive to control tuition because they could always just hike their tuition and push students to borrow more from the federal government.

Cooper sees the policy as a common sense way to stop giving blank checks to expensive institutions.

You know, if you’re overcharging your students, the reckoning is coming and you’re going to have to make some tough decisions.

For students like Bella Ramirez, though, the new caps are making their decisions tough and the debate over federal policy is not abstract. She says it determined where she could afford to attend law school and where she couldn’t.

And at this point, it feels very paid to play. And maybe it was always that case, but this seems like a much louder message.

As she gets ready for the fall semester, Ramirez would like to see the government take a different approach. One that expands support for low-income students trying to earn graduate degrees and boost their career prospects. The Trump administration isn’t just reshaping who can afford higher education. It’s also trying to reshape who decides what knowledge gets created. A proposed overhaul of the federal research grant system would give political appointees final authority over billions of dollars in scientific funding, decisions that have traditionally been driven by peer review. The White House says the changes would eliminate what it calls a quote, woke research agenda and better align taxpayer dollars with presidential priorities. Scientists warned they could inject politics into the heart of the scientific process.

This was my lab.

For more than half a century, Susan Gerby built her career inside this Brown University laboratory, once filled with microscopes, centrifuges and other specialized equipment.

So when I retired, I had to clean it out. And Brown said, oh, that’s so simple. You just tell us when and we’ll take everything to the dump. However, scientific equipment is really expensive and supplies are expensive. And so I spent about half a year cajoling my colleagues into realizing that they should want some of my used equipment, even if it was 20 years older.

In Providence, Gerby was the founding chair of Brown’s Department of Molecular Biology, and she spent decades conducting federally funded basic research on ribosomes and chromosomes. Around campus, her research earned her the nickname Lady of the Flies.

Our lab worked with a unique fly, not the common fruit fly, but a distant relative called Cyera. It’s the fungus fly. It eats mushrooms, and it has many unique biological properties of things that it does with its chromosomes that carry the genetic information. And so that gives us a wonderful handle on exploring how cells deal with chromosomes for various processes.

Gherby closed her lab last year when she retired after 51 years on the Brown faculty. But she remains active in the scientific community, advising professors and students. So when she read the Trump administration’s proposal to overhaul how federal research grants are awarded, she says she was aghast.

Instead of having the final decision made by scientists based on scientific merit, which is what currently occurs, the final decisions will be made based on how closely the proposed research aligns with presidential priorities.

At stake is far more than who signs off and pushes the paperwork. Since World War II, the United States has largely relied on independent scientists to decide which research proposals deserve federal funding through peer review. The administration wants political appointees to have the final say instead, arguing that elected leaders, not unelected experts, should decide how taxpayer dollars are spent. But scientists like Susan Gerby say it would fundamentally change one of the foundations of American science, allowing politics rather than scientific merit to shape what research gets funded.

Grants that have been awarded to colleges and universities are often full of material that’s clearly ideologically biased.

Jonathan Butcher directs the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation, which says it’s working to put power back in the hands of American taxpayers who voted for government efficiency. Butcher says public trust in experts changed after the COVID-19 pandemic.

There was a flip and a significant constraint on forcing masks on people, closing down schools and then keeping them closed. And I think that made people second guess really what quote, the experts may be telling us either from science or from the media.

The proposal would also limit the use of grant funding for conference travel and scientific publications, potentially restricting how researchers share their findings. Another provision would allow agencies to deny funding based on researchers’ public statements if they’re deemed inconsistent with the administration’s priorities. Those proposals have alarmed many scientists and academic leaders.

I think it’s very important to have those who are engaged in the free pursuit of knowledge be the people who are adjudicators of the free pursuit of knowledge.

Lori Patton is president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She says interference from the government is contrary to how scientific research has worked traditionally. But legitimate oversight is essential.

It’s part of how we became a great scientific powerhouse after World War II. And I think that the power ultimately for that adjudicatory process should rest with the people who are pursuing the knowledge.

Our job is to describe the natural world as it is, and to report on how we best understand how it works.

Andy Ewald is a Johns Hopkins professor studying how cancer cells spread. He also serves on the Executive Committee of the American Society of Cell Biology, and worries the uncertainty surrounding federal research funding could discourage would-be scientists from entering the field because they require years of training.

And young researchers need to feel confident there’s going to be a job at the end of that. Volatility and grant funding also makes it harder for young researchers to complete their research projects and publish their discoveries.

China has now surpassed the US in overall research and development spending, a milestone that the journal Science described as a structural shift in the global research landscape. Back at Brown, Susan Gerby, the Lady of the Flies, worries the uncertainty could accelerate a brain drain.

We’re already seeing scientists move to Canada and to Europe and to Asia.

Gerby has seen tight times before. She launched her career in the early 70s, just as President Richard Nixon froze funding of the National Institutes of Health. In 1972, Nixon railed against the press, the establishment and academics.

Professors are the enemy.

Professors are the enemy. Write that in the blackboard 100 times.

Professors are the enemy, Nixon said.

And so everything was frozen and it was a very hard time for young scientists to get started and you couldn’t get any grants for half a year or more. But if you persist, usually you survive.

Gerbi calls the proposed changes unprecedented and warns that politically driven funding decisions rather than scientific evidence could shape the direction of basic research for years to come. Joining us now in our GBH studio is Jon Marcus from our partners at The Hechinger Report. Jon has been following these and other major changes coming to higher education. Hey Jon, thanks for being here.

Yeah, Kirk, things have been busy on the beat lately.

That’s an understatement. Let’s start though with these new graduate student loan caps. Could these caps force colleges to finally lower tuition, or do you think it will put graduate school even further out of reach for low income kids?

Well, that’s part of the idea, and to answer that question, I need to go back a little bit to 2006 when there were previously caps on student loans. Those caps were removed in 2006, and there’s authoritative research that since then, colleges and universities have increased graduate tuition commensurate with how much money their students could borrow, so for every additional dollar that students could borrow for grad school and professional school, colleges increased tuition by that amount. Graduate school is a very important revenue source for colleges and universities, and they make a lot of money from it. So the idea of capping these loans now is to maybe cool down that level of annual increases. It’s hard to know whether that will work. The problem in particular with law school is that right now they’ve got plenty of applicants. So under the law of supply and demand, they don’t really need to lower their tuition. But the problem for students as a result of that is that they will have to find other ways to cover that gap. Where we might begin to see this eventually is in the MBA market and the master’s degree market, which is hugely dependent in part on international students who aren’t coming anymore. So they’re going to need to do something, and that could be lowering tuition, but it’s a little too early to tell.

At the same time, as we see these caps go into effect, the administration is also expanding federal support for short-term workforce training programs, and that includes opening up Pell Grants to some of these programs. I know that’s generated a lot of excitement. There’s also a lot of confusion. I’ve heard from some community college presidents who say, this is going to be a disaster. What are you hearing?

Yeah. So first, I want to say that we live in this moment of a zero sum game, where if the other side is in power and something is, and they do something, then it must be bad. In fact, Workforce Pell has been a bipartisan idea for many years. So has capping student loans. So have many other reforms that are actually happening now in Congress and to some degree being pushed by the administration. Workforce Pell is one of those. People have been calling for this for a long time. There’s something that’s happened with Workforce Pell that you don’t often see in government programs, which is that it’s happened so quickly, that it’s been really hard to stand it up in time. Technically, it takes effect on July 20th. States can put it into place on July 1st. But there are so many moving parts to this, and they had less than a year to do it, that most states aren’t ready and most institutions aren’t ready. So you have states like Pennsylvania that has, I think, 19 programs approved for this versus, I think it’s North Carolina has 300 some odd programs. In general, however, the idea of having grant money, Pell Grant money, which does not have to be repaid, to pay for something other than a bachelor’s or associate degree, I think gets a lot of bipartisan support, gets a lot of consumer support. What will the ultimate impact of it be? The Congressional Budget Office predicts that 100,000 students a year will take advantage of it. That’s a pretty small number compared to how many people use Pell Grants to get a bachelor’s degree.

Okay, as you know, this is a consumer-facing podcast. If I’m a student or a parent thinking about college or planning to take out loans, what are some of the biggest changes I need to know about right now?

Well, Work for Spell is one good one. You can now get money to go to trade school or for a short-term certificate. You can then stack that credential later if you choose to go back to school. It might even count as an academic credit toward a bachelor’s or an associate degree. So that might be a good first step. And again, still a little bit of a minefield to figure out what’s available and what’s eligible, but maybe worth a look. At the student loan end, there are a lot of changes. The most significant for undergraduates are people that are just considering whether they want to go to college is to the SAVE Act or the SAVE program, which was implemented under the Biden administration. And there’s about seven and a half million people that are repaying loans under the SAVE program that is connected to their income. It limits how much their payments are based on their income. It also gives you the potential for the debt to be forgiven after 10 years. That program has now gone away. And people who are already enrolled in that program have 90 days, and they need to be very alert for the communication from the Department of Education. Within 90 days, they have to choose another plan. If they don’t choose another plan, they could arbitrarily be put into one in which their payments are much higher.

90 days from July 1st?

From July 1st. And those notifications from the Education Department began to go out in cycles on July 1st. So will that affect students that are in the pipeline? I think one of the reasons we’ve seen a big decline in college going among high school graduates is this constant fear of and anxiety about college debt. And so the more we talk about it and the more we see it, I think the more it actually tends to discourage students from going to college.

Jon, you’ve also been reporting on how the administration’s visa and immigration policies are affecting international students who often pay full tuition. What does that mean for colleges and for domestic students in light of these new measures?

Yeah, this is really interesting. For a long time, colleges used to talk about international students as a way to bring diversity and multiculturalism to their campuses. Now, that isn’t true. It was a way to bring money. It was a way to bring revenue, especially in the 2010s when the number of domestic students started falling. Many universities recruited international students quite successfully. International students make up 6% of the total enrollment in this country, but 12% of the revenue. Now, they’re not coming. The number that came last year was already down 22%. We’ve looked at federal data for this spring, and the numbers continue to go down. Really bad news for universities, especially universities that are heavily dependent on international students for revenue. And what they’re doing as a result is that they are cutting programs, cutting services, significantly cutting staffing. More than 300 universities and colleges have made some level of cuts. And a number of them have begun to explicitly connect it to the decline in the number of international students.

And Jon, these schools were already facing public scrutiny, as you and I have reported on. They’ve been trying to enroll more domestic students, especially from rural parts of the country, including veterans. I spoke with Kevin Bay. He’s an Army veteran and retired CIA officer who graduated in 2005 from the Harvard Kennedy School. Today, two-thirds of that school students are from abroad. And granted, that’s part of the mission of the Kennedy School. But Bay says that’s an imbalance that colleges can no longer ignore.

When the numbers get so lopsided that it starts raising questions in terms of who ultimately is our target audience, that’s potentially a valid recalculation that higher ed across the board should be making.

And I’ve heard others say that these schools need to recalibrate because they’ve become, quote, addicted to international students and their tuition dollars. What do you make of that rather conservative assessment?

Yeah, that’s, I can’t argue with it. And that’s part of the conversation that’s going on around why there are restrictions on international students. But the reality of it is, if you’re, you know, as you say, this is a consumer-facing podcast, if you’re a parent or a student, your education is being subsidized by these international students. Eight out of ten international students pay the full tuition. Only, well, fewer than two out of ten American students pay the full listed advertised price. And that is inevitably already having repercussions.

Right. So if you think college is expensive now, wait a minute.

That’s an interesting point that you raise, because colleges are also in a really tough position around increasing tuition. Because American consumers are very price conscious at this stage. They already think college costs too much. They don’t want to pay more for it. We went to a number of colleges where international enrollment is way down, that have increased their tuition, and asked them how much of that tuition increase was a result of international enrollment declines. One hundred percent of them did not want to answer that question. Where I think you’re going to see this is in cuts to programs. So domestic students are going to pay for this one way or another. They’re either going to have less access to services, fewer staff. In some cases, universities have laid off advisors that help students. That’s going to have an impact on retention rates. But they probably also will, to some degree at least, see an increase in tuition.

Stepping back for a moment, Jon, how do all of these changes fit together? Connect the dots for us. Is this a series of disjointed policy changes and trends? Or are we witnessing a fundamental restructuring of American higher education?

All of these things we’re talking about come on top of huge domestic enrollment declines, down almost 2 million since 2011. A decline in the number of 18-year-olds that begins this fall, that will see another 13% decline in the number of 18-year-olds that are typical college freshmen. A decline in the proportion of high school graduates going right to college, from a peak of 70% to about 60% in just 10 years. All of these things are problems for colleges and universities. Add on to that, deferred maintenance, increased labor costs, increased costs of benefits. I wouldn’t want to be a college president right now. Much of this predates some of the culture wars and political division.

It’s easy to blame the Trump administration.

It’s easy to blame the Trump administration. Many of these trends, including the decline in international enrollment, they started before Trump. You can’t blame this administration or Republican Congress for all of these problems. There’s a new estimate, an authoritative estimate, that 442 colleges are now at risk. Private nonprofit colleges, 120 of them at significant risk. That’s a quarter of the total. And so we’re going to see a lot more colleges close.

That’s Jon Marcus, Education Reporter with The Hechinger Report. Jon, thanks so much for your reporting and your analysis.

Thanks for having me.

This is College Uncovered. This episode was produced and written by me, Kirk Carapezza, and it was edited by Azita Ghahramani, Matt Baskin and Adeline Sire. Mixing and sound design by David Goodman and Gary Mott. Our project manager is Isabel Hibbard. Our theme song and original music is by Left Roman out of MIT. Head of GBH podcast is Devin Maverick Robins. College Uncovered is made possible by Lumina Foundation. It’s a production of GBH News and distributed by PRX. Thanks so much for listening.

The post College Uncovered: Who should hold power over higher education? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Soon after Alma Guerrero’s youngest child started Head Start in Washington’s Skagit County, one of his teachers pulled the mother of three aside. 

The boy wasn’t talking, unlike other toddlers his age who are typically using simple words and phrases. Had Guerrero noticed that too? 

That observation ultimately led to speech therapy for her son, now almost 3. Guerrero said she’s amazed at how much his vocabulary has blossomed. “He comes home and he’s got something new to share,” Guerrero said. 

Guerrero credits her son’s progress to his participation in Head Start, the federally funded program for low-income infants, toddlers and preschoolers. In addition to preparing children for school, Head Start programs have also focused on child and family well-being through federal standards that govern how they operate. 

“Those check-ins that teachers do, and their note-taking, are what helps them pinpoint the best way to support the child and our family in our overall success,” Guerrero said. “That little bit of extra time with the teacher, it matters.”

But a new proposal by the Trump administration this week seeks to fundamentally change this uniform approach by eliminating most of those standards and replacing them with significantly pared down versions that shift authority to local and state governments. 

For example, the new rules would remove a ban on expelling children and leave certain hallmarks of Head Start, like low staff-to-child ratios — one staff member is required for every four infants and toddlers and eight to 10 preschoolers — up to states. Programs would no longer be required to provide full-day care. While they would still be required to screen children for developmental disabilities and delays, the proposed rule removes guidance on how and when to do so. The proposal also removes a requirement that programs promote oral health practices, like toothbrushing, in classrooms.

Meanwhile, the administration would create some new requirements: Head Start programs would have to develop a strategy to engage fathers and teach parents about marriage and healthy relationships. They would also need to teach only in English, a shift from Head Start’s previous support for bilingual students. Head Start programs operated by Indian tribes would be exempt from the English-only rules if they are furthering “tribal heritage.” 

Related: Rural Americans rely on Head Start. Federal turmoil has them worried

The proposed rules would fundamentally change what Head Start is, providers say. Head Start could end up looking wildly different depending on the state, flying in the face of the program’s mission. 

“It wouldn’t be Head Start anymore,” said Jen Bailey, executive director of the nonprofit Reach Dane in Madison, Wisconsin, which operates several Head Start programs. Without the national standards, Bailey worries that Head Start will become a “shell of a program.”

But in a call with reporters this week, Alex Adams, an assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services, said the proposal aims to provide flexibility for the 1,600 local organizations that oversee more than 14,000 individual Head Start programs. 

“One-size-fits-all mandates from Washington cannot fully account for the realities facing 1,600 grantees,” he said. 

The proposal comes at a tumultuous time for Head Start, which has faced a series of challenges and federal attacks in recent years. Operated out of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Head Start began in 1965 as one of the signature policies of the War on Poverty. At a budget of around $12 billion, Head Start and Early Head Start have about 716,000 seats for infants, toddlers and preschoolers, according to the most up-to-date figures from the federal government.

In 2024, conservatives with ties to the president published Project 2025, a governing blueprint that called for Head Start’s elimination. Last year, a leaked budget proposal eliminated the program as well, but after outcry from parents and advocates, the program was included in the president’s spending plan. 

Many individual programs were also caught up last year in a federal funding freeze, and around 20 percent of the program’s federal staff was eliminated. Last spring, the government withheld nearly $1 billion in funding from local programs, a move that the Government Accountability Office later called illegal. 

The Trump administration has closed five regional Head Start offices and consolidated all programs under the remaining five regional offices. Last summer, the administration proposed a rule to ban undocumented immigrant children from Head Start, an effort that was later blocked by a federal judge.

Related: Young children have unique needs and providing the right care can be a challenge. Our free early childhood education newsletter tracks the issues.

These changes have led to “chaos and confusion,” said Michelle Haimowitz, executive director of the Massachusetts Head Start Association. “We’ve had programs that have spent nearly a year waiting for a response from the federal government” for program-related questions, she added. “Administratively, it’s absolutely a challenge.”

Providers say that Head Start has a broad purpose that the administration’s efforts would undermine. 

“Simply providing child care is not enough,” said Bailey, with Reach Dane in Wisconsin. “It’s not our mission. It’s not our goal, and it’s not going to lead to the outcomes that we want to see for children and families.”

Studies have shown mixed results for the educational outcomes from Head Start: A government-funded study showed that Head Start children are academically no different from their peers by the time they reach third grade, but some research points to improved long-term educational outcomes for children, and more positive parenting practices.

Studies of social benefits, however, have been more positive. A 2022 study found increased high school graduation and college enrollment rates, reduced teen pregnancy and reduced criminal engagement in the second generation of Head Start attendees, suggesting the program has the potential to affect families over decades.

Opponents of Head Start, however, argue that there is not enough rigorous data showing Head Start leads to long-term positive outcomes. A June report by The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, pointed to federal data that identified safety violations at some Head Start programs as evidence it should be eliminated. 

“To have a federal taxpayer program-funded program that is performing this poorly, there’s every reason for the program to be sunset and turned into something else,” said Jonathan Butcher, acting director of Heritage’s Center for Education Policy. 

Providers say the removal of the ban on expulsion and suspension could limit access to early learning for some children. Jennie Mauer, executive director of the Wisconsin Head Start Association, said she often hears about families whose kids with disabilities were kicked out of child care programs because those programs couldn’t support them. 

“I worry deeply about our kids and families with special needs and behavioral concerns, because that’s a large portion of who Head Start serves,” Mauer said. “When you look at having those really intense fiscal pressures and pressures to serve more children, I worry that means some of our most vulnerable kids will end up being expelled from care.”

The Trump administration also says that ratio and group size mandates are no longer needed because states have evolved to have “more robust licensing and oversight requirements” since the program’s creation. 

In recent years, however, many states have made efforts to deregulate child care by loosening staff-to-child ratios and education requirements in child care programs. In Idaho in 2025, Adams, then the director of the state’s Department of Health and Welfare, proposed eliminating state-mandated ratios for child care programs altogether.

Related: A little-known program could be a model for how to spend billions in federal money on child care

Some argue that eliminating Head Start’s rules about how many teachers are needed per classroom could limit the amount of attention caregivers can provide to children in their care at a critical time for brain development. The early years are when children most need nurturing care and interactions with caregivers, said Shantel Meek, executive director of the Children’s Equity Project, a child policy center at Arizona State University. 

“State child care licensing is the bare minimum,” she added. Head Start standards, on the other hand, are “a much more robust set of standards.” 

Meek recently co-authored a report that found state child-to-teacher ratios vary widely and are often looser than Head Start’s. For example, Head Start requires one adult for a group of four 2-year-olds. Only three states meet that standard. In Mississippi, one adult can be responsible for up to 12 2-year-olds on their own. In Texas, it’s 11 children. 

In Wisconsin, Bailey, of Reach Dane, says the children her staff members serve in Head Start are especially in need of more one-on-one attention. “Having one staff member alone with a large group of preschool children is a health and safety issue waiting to happen,” she said, “particularly when these children are working through trauma, the adversities of growing up in a low-income family. We have kiddos that need and deserve a lot of individualized support.”

On the Thursday press call, Adams said that, regardless of individual state ratios, programs can continue with the prior Head Start standards if they’d like. “If a program likes its ratio, it can keep its ratio. If a program likes its group size, it can keep its group size. This does not require them to do anything different,” he said.

But Head Start leaders say they worry it won’t be that easy. Programs are required to submit their budgets to federal officials for approval. Rhett Cecil, executive director of the Indiana Head Start Association, said once elements of the program become optional, “every program is then going to be left by itself to defend the budget line by line, without the backing of a federal standard.”

While Head Start may end up costing less, it will also do less for kids, he added. “That’s not what our children and our families in our communities need.”

Several program directors disputed the idea that the standards are a burden. “Doing anything really well is hard,” said Lori Pittman, a longtime early childhood educator and chief strategist with the Washington State Association of Head Start and ECEAP. “Yeah, there’s a lot of Head Start standards, but those equal success, quality and a future for children that they wouldn’t have if they didn’t have Head Start.”

Rather than the standards, advocates and Head Start leaders say that the real problem is that funding has not increased enough to account for inflation, the rising costs of running programs and pay increases. 

“It feels like an overwhelmed system right now,” said Brent Cummings, partnership and community outreach coordinator for the Walla Walla Center for Children & Families, which runs Head Start programs in southeast Washington. “If we seek guidance, we’re not getting timely answers or responses that allow us to operate effectively.”

The instability in Head Start has been difficult for families whose only source of child care is Head Start. The program is particularly concentrated in rural areas: About 46 percent of all funded Head Start slots are in rural congressional districts, compared to 22 percent in urban districts. In some states, 1 in 3 rural child care centers are operated by Head Start.

For Melissa Harding, a parent of four in rural Maine, the local Head Start program — a 45-minute drive from her home — was the closest child care option. 

Harding is concerned about the proposed rule’s elimination of the oral hygiene requirement. Currently, Head Start programs must include toothbrushing routines and preventive screenings. That was the only reason her children had dental work, Harding said. With her older children, the closest option is a dental school where students are training to become dentists. That office is a two-hour drive. 

“I think a lot of people don’t think about that benefit when they think about Head Start,” Harding said. “All the things that take place in that classroom are things that most people don’t have access to in their everyday life.”

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

Contact staff writer Jackie Mader at 212-678-3562 or mader@hechingerreport.org.

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