PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Quinn McDonald planned to spend the typical four years working toward a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice. Then he heard about a place where he could get the same degree in three.

“It was the idea of being able to save a year” that grabbed his attention, said McDonald — a savings of not only time, but tuition. And he could start earning a salary faster than if he spent four years in college.

So, last fall, McDonald joined the inaugural class of one of the nation’s first in-person programs approved to award bachelor’s degrees with fewer than the usual 120 credits, at Johnson & Wales University. He’ll need only 90 credits, putting him on track to graduate in 2028, after three years  instead of the usual four or more.

That’s an option being made available by colleges and universities with astonishing speed — especially in the notoriously slow-moving world of higher education: an entirely new kind of bachelor’s degree muscling into the space between the traditional four-year version and the two-year associate degree. Three-year degrees have existed, but they simply jammed those 120 credits into fewer semesters.

At least one school, Ensign College in Utah, will convert all of its bachelor’s degrees into the new, reduced-credit, three-year kind, it announced in February. Nearly 60 other universities and colleges are planning, considering or have already launched them in some disciplines. States including Indiana have required or are considering requiring their public universities to add reduced-credit bachelor’s degrees. Even graduate and professional schools are being pressed to shorten the duration of degrees. 

Much of this activity has occurred in just the last few months. Yet precisely because it’s come so quickly, and at a time when political controversies have dominated the wider conversation about higher education, the dramatic implications of this reimagining of bachelor’s degrees have gotten surprisingly little attention.

Behind the scenes, however, “There are small groups of institutions saying that the old game doesn’t work and has to change,” said Bob Zemsky, an emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education who has long campaigned for three-year degrees and co-founded a group of universities experimenting with them called College-in-3.

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

Now the accrediting agencies that oversee universities and colleges are approving bachelor’s degrees that require fewer credits. It’s an idea almost all of them previously rejected, but accreditors today are under political scrutiny themselves, and being prodded to encourage innovation.

Several states whose permission is also needed for these shorter-term degrees, from North Dakota to Massachusetts, are quickly providing it, too, often under pressure from businesses that need workers.

Even more than employers, consumers have lost patience with the time and expense it takes to get a four-year bachelor’s degree, according to the advocates and politicians pushing schools to offer them. More than half of students who start down the conventional four-year path today take even longer than four years, according to the Department of Education.

Related: After years of quietly falling, college tuition is on the rise again

Many colleges, meanwhile, are struggling to fill seats and hope three-year degrees will appeal to students who wouldn’t otherwise come. 

These include Johnson & Wales, which lost a third of its enrollment in the 10 years ending 2024, the most recent available federal data show, and has been forced to close several satellite campuses. Last year, it laid off 91 faculty and staff. 

The idea of getting a degree more quickly appeals to a broader group of prospective students, said Mim Runey, chancellor at the university, where 94 students signed up for three-year degrees when they were offered in the fall, according to a spokesman. “There is a market that will think about a three-year degree that maybe wouldn’t think about a four-year degree.”

Samuel Antonio, who is in the accelerated criminal justice major at Johnson & Wales, thinks three years “is an adequate amount of time to be in college.” His friends in conventional four-year programs are almost a year in, and “they’re still taking gen ed and other courses they don’t even care about,” Antonio said, using the abbreviation for general education.

Interest among college-bound high school students in three-year degrees has been climbing since 2019, though it remains relatively small, according to a survey by the higher education consulting firm Eduventures. It might be higher if there were greater awareness that the newest form of these degrees require fewer credits, analysts there said.

Related: Getting in to college is getting easier

“It’s still a little early,” said Richard Garrett, chief research officer at Eduventures. “We’re not sure what the demand is or what subjects are right. But it’s a change that’s coming.” 

The work of trimming down four-year bachelor’s degrees to fit within three years has prompted nothing less than a rethinking of the purpose of a college education. Universities and colleges are asking themselves “What are we doing, why are we doing it and what do students really need?” said Johnson & Wales provost Richard Wiscott. 

Most of those debuting three-year bachelor’s degrees have stripped out elective courses from what students have traditionally been required to take. 

McDonald doesn’t feel like he’s missing out on anything. He still has to take humanities courses, math, psychology and political science. He plays on the lacrosse team, lives in a dorm and is so woven into campus life that he knows what day and time to nab the free leftovers from the pastry classes that are part of Johnson & Wales’s top-ranked culinary program. 

But he didn’t want to spend more time in college than he had to.

In his speeded-up program, “You can focus on what you’re interested in and want to learn about instead of taking classes you don’t care about,” he said.

The three-year bachelor’s degrees at colleges and universities that have so far offered or announced them are almost all in disciplines that lead straight to jobs. In addition to criminal justice, Johnson & Wales introduced three-year degrees last semester in computer science, hospitality management and design.

“There are certain career paths where, at least for the foreseeable future, a four-year degree is still going to be a requirement,” said Nate Bowditch, provost at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire, which added 96-credit, three-year degrees in the fall in robotics, outdoor adventure leadership and other fields. “If you want to go to medical school or be a rocket scientist at NASA, you’re going to need a four-year degree.”

Related: Students worried about getting jobs are adding extra majors

At the insistence of accreditors, the new degrees are differentiated from their four-year counterparts by being called “applied” or (as at Johnson & Wales) “career-focused” bachelor’s degrees.

That leads to a critical unanswered question: whether employers, graduate schools and licensing agencies will consider three-year degrees to be as good as the four-year kind. 

Because no students have completed these new reduced-credit programs, that’s hard to know. But most employers in a survey by Johnson & Wales said they liked the idea, and that they’d consider three-year degrees just as good as conventional four-year ones.

On the other hand, graduate school admissions officers in a small, separate survey released in January by College-in-3 said almost unanimously that they wouldn’t take domestic applicants with bachelor’s degrees of fewer than 120 credits, though most said they were reconsidering this as more reduced-credit undergraduate degrees are being introduced. 

Letting students graduate with bachelor’s degrees in three instead of four years, of course, means less revenue for colleges and universities. But in addition to pulling in more customers, boosters said, those programs will appeal to results-oriented students who are less likely to drop out. Already, the reduced-credit, three-year bachelor’s degree candidates at Johnson & Wales have had lower dropout rates between their first and second semesters than their classmates on the conventional track, the university said. And three-year-degree recipients might be persuaded to stick around for graduate school on the same campuses, which are more likely to accept the shorter-term degrees conferred by their undergraduate faculty counterparts. 

“We’re hoping it’s attracting a really engaged, focused student, and hopefully they stay for that master’s degree as well,” said Stephen Smith, interim associate vice president of academic and strategic operations at the University of Lynchburg in Virginia, which got approval in December to offer 96-credit bachelor’s degrees in public health and educational studies — both fields in which the university also offers graduate programs.

Related: Their value attacked and funding cut, universities and colleges start fighting back

Still, some faculty and even students have raised objections. 

Accelerated bachelor’s degrees will create a two-tiered system in which the most affluent students will have the luxury of spending four years in college, the president of the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties has contended. 

Shorter-term programs with fewer electives won’t do as good a job of teaching such important skills as critical thinking, ethical reasoning or “how to form and answer questions using a variety of intellectual approaches that different disciplines require,” the North Dakota Student Association argued in a resolution against shorter-term degrees.

North Dakota’s State Board of Higher Education voted anyway, in February, to let public universities in that state test “bachelor of applied science” degrees of less than 120 credits. 

“We’re trying to be responsive to the needs of employers and, frankly, the desire of students who do want to work their way through school as quickly as possible,” said Kevin Black, who chairs the board, which voted to reassess the move in four years. 

Just a few days later, the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education invited proposals for reduced-credit degrees. 

A bill under consideration in the Iowa legislature would direct that state’s public universities to develop reduced-credit, three-year bachelor’s degrees. An Indiana law passed in 2024 already requires the same thing. 

In Utah, addition to Ensign, Weber State and Utah Valley universities are adding three-year bachelor’s degrees after Utah approved reduced-credit “bachelor of applied studies” degrees. 

Mount Mary University in Wisconsin is adding 95-credit, three-year bachelor’s degrees in cybersecurity and digital marketing; Manchester University in Indiana, 90-credit, three-year bachelor’s degrees in accounting, pre-athletic training and pre-physical therapy. Upper Iowa University said in January that it would launch a 90-credit, three-year online bachelor’s degree in business administration. And Loma Linda University in California has added a three-year degree in global health.

Now there’s talk of shortening graduate and professional programs such as medical school — which some educators argue should be three years instead of four — to speed up the production of new doctors and others and reduce the price, especially with limits on federal graduate student loans set to take effect. More than half of current and aspiring medical students said in a survey they’d prefer a three-year over a four-year medical degree, mostly to save money.

As she neared the end of high school, Jazmin Cuello was impatient to get on with life. But when she looked around for bachelor’s degree programs in the subjects she wanted to study, they required four more years of classes.

“A lot of people, if they do want to go to college, just want to get it over with,” Cuello said.

She, too, signed up for the three-year criminal justice program at Johnson & Wales.

Now, said Cuello, sitting in the university’s criminal justice lab and smiling, “I’m almost a third of the way done. And I’m saving a ton of money.”

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

This story about three-year bachelor’s degrees 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. Listen to our higher education podcast.

The post Faster, thinner: Colleges are swiftly trimming a B.A. degree to three years appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

It’s rare in an era of partisan division to hear a veteran of the Clinton and Obama presidencies agreeing with a right-leaning economist who worked for George W. Bush.

Yet these prominent voices from opposite ends of the political spectrum teamed up to mostly praise a law passed by the Republican Congress and signed by President Donald Trump.

The purpose of the law: to protect college students from borrowing federal money to enroll in programs that give them little or no financial payoff when they graduate.

This new rule is “the greatest step forward in increased accountability” for colleges since the creation more than a decade ago of the federal College Scorecard website, which discloses graduates’ earnings by institution. That was the conclusion of Bob Shireman, a senior fellow at the progressive Century Foundation, and Beth Akers, who holds the same title at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, or AEI. 

The new accountability rule is among a series of measures that the left-leaning advocacy group EdTrust calls the most dramatic changes to higher education policy in nearly two decades. Many were part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or OBBBA, and will become effective this year. And several could improve protections and lower costs for families and students. 

It may seem a surprise to hear bipartisan acclaim for laws affecting higher education passed by this White House and its congressional allies. After all, such reforms come against the backdrop of bans on diversity policies, restrictions on international students, cuts to research funding, huge fines on elite universities and Trump’s relentless rhetorical attacks on “radical,” “woke” campuses.

But “there are definitely some positive steps that have been taken,” too, said Catherine Brown, senior director for policy and advocacy at the National College Attainment Network, or NCAN, who particularly likes an “earnings indicator” added to the FAFSA, or Free Application for Federal Student Aid. That tool warns college applicants if graduates from a particular school with the majors they’re considering have historically earned no more than people with only high school diplomas.

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

“A lot of times the big headlines — like, ‘We want to cut funding for higher education’ — create a culture where it’s not easy to see improvements that are being made,” Brown said.

Other changes include the overhaul of an accreditation system that has long failed to improve poor graduation rates at many colleges and universities; limits on borrowing for graduate school, which experts say could help drive down the price; and the expansion of federal Pell Grant eligibility — previously available only to degree-seeking college students — to shorter-term job training, including in the trades. 

Many of the same steps were proposed by earlier presidents and lawmakers from both parties, but largely resisted by universities and colleges themselves. 

“Policymakers from both sides of the aisle and of all political stripes have wanted some of these things for a long time now,” said Ed Venit, managing director at the higher education consulting firm EAB. 

Even some of the more controversial moves have the potential for positive change, some analysts and advocates argue. While taxing college and university endowments is contentious, for example, they say it could drive top institutions to extend the benefits they offer to more students. 

To be sure, the Trump administration appears to have supported some of these reforms for ideological and even punitive purposes, rather than the reasons earlier administrations tried to get them passed. 

Related: 5 big questions to help you understand the current state of student loans

Taxing endowments, for example, mostly hurts the wealthy, selective universities and colleges the administration has targeted for such things as having diversity policies. And transforming accreditation — the de facto quality-control system that governs whether colleges and universities can be paid with federal grants and loans — also appears designed to punish accreditors that push diversity and sanction the teaching of subjects conservatives oppose, according to the president himself. 

Accreditation is “our secret weapon,” Trump has said, to get rid of what he called “Marxist maniacs and lunatics” at American universities. His administration has fast-tracked the process of adding new accreditors that he said will promote “the American tradition and western civilization.” 

That worries academics and others concerned with new and prospective restrictions on classroom and campus speech.

But it is also true that existing accreditation agencies have continued to accredit colleges and universities that were defrauding students or have abysmal graduation rates. Nearly four in 10 accredited institutions graduate fewer than half of their students while being allowed to collect billions of dollars in federal taxpayer money, research shows. 

“These are supposed to be the watchdogs of higher education, and some of them have not been doing a very good job,” said Preston Cooper, a senior fellow at AEI. 

Related: Trump’s attacks on DEI may hurt men in college admission

Democratic and Republican administrations have tried over decades to make the accreditation system more accountable for poor outcomes. 

Even advocates who like some of the fast-moving changes under way are raising concerns about the fine print.

While Shireman and Akers generally welcomed that new rule blocking federal student loans from being used for majors and programs with low financial returns, for instance — it’s called AHEAD, for Accountability in Higher Education and Access Through Demand-driven Workforce Pell — they noted that the calculation will be based on how much graduates from these programs earn and not how much they paid for their degrees. That means students will still have access to loans to pay for majors whose graduates make what look like good wages, but not enough to cover what they borrowed. 

Still, it’s a step toward accountability that policymakers have been seeking since the Obama administration, which tried to end eligibility for federal financial aid for university and college programs whose graduates’ student loan debt exceeded a given percentage of their earnings — the so-called gainful employment rule. 

“One of the things everybody agrees on is we should raise individual economic mobility for students,” EAB’s Venit said. “They should come out better than they went in, and certainly no worse. This is something everybody wants.”

Related: Their value attacked and funding cut, universities and colleges start fighting back

AHEAD, which is scheduled to take effect in July, will affect programs enrolling more than 2 percent of students, the Department of Education estimates, most of them at for-profit colleges and universities. That’s about a third of the proportion that would have failed the most recent gainful employment regulation pushed by the Biden administration, according to an analysis by the center-left advocacy organization Third Way.

“Maybe neither side gets everything they want. But we’ve landed on something that can make the accountability advocates on both sides content,” said Cooper, who served on the committee that finalized the rule. 

Americans from both parties, by wide margins, support cutting off tax dollars to programs with poor financial payoffs, a survey by the left-leaning New America Foundation found. 

Two-thirds, in a separate survey by the student loan provider Sallie Mae, said they were also in favor of limits on student borrowing.

Undergraduate student loans are already capped. But limits were removed for graduate students by an earlier Republican-controlled Congress in 2006. Graduate schools took advantage of this larger pool of money by raising their listed prices $1 for every dollar students borrowed, according to researchers at the universities of Texas and Chicago. Graduate student debt exploded.

Advocates on both the left and right have called since at least 2023 for caps on graduate borrowing to be restored, which the current Congress has now ordered. Beginning in July, most graduate students will be limited to a maximum of $20,500 a year in federal loans, for a total of $100,000; the top amount for professional programs such as medicine and law will be $50,000, or a total of $200,000.

The change will affect about a third of graduate students and half of students in professional schools who currently borrow more than that, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, which predicts that many will be forced to turn to private lenders to make up the difference. This set off a national firestorm as nursing and other professions were denied professional status.

But there are indications that the caps may force graduate programs to slow tuition increases and shut down high-priced programs. The Santa Clara University School of Law in California has already promised $16,000 scholarships to entering students to “offset the impact” of these new loan limits and bring its $63,280 annual tuition into line with them. 

“This has been the most controversial plank of the reforms, but it’s a major step forward to cost control and trimming government subsidies to programs that cost too much and may not be delivering value,” Cooper said. 

There’s also been bipartisan support for pushing selective institutions to accept more students and spend more of their wealth on financial aid. Taxing endowments at the wealthiest schools could drive them to expand, some analysts have argued.

Related: How education changed in one year under Trump

Because the tax is based on enrollment — affecting only universities that have the equivalent of $500,000 in holdings per student — some could avoid it by letting in more applicants, Cooper and others say.

“For institutions that are very close to the cap, increasing your enrollments might not be a bad idea,” he said. “A lot of elite universities are relying on exclusivity to try and show value, and by expanding their enrollment a bit, that might give more students access to whatever the benefits are of going to those schools.”

Brown University, for instance, could avoid the tax by taking about 250 more students per class, a 10 percent increase, an analysis by Cooper found. 

Not all of the changes proposed by Republicans in Congress have passed, and courts have held up others that were the subject of executive orders.

A Trump administration attempt to limit reimbursements for expenses related to the federal research universities conduct, for example — the cost of labs, utilities, supplies and manpower — has been blocked by a federal appeals court, which agreed with a lower court that it was “arbitrary and capricious” and in violation of the required legal process. 

Lawmakers on the left and right have called since the 1980s for containing these costs. After some universities were discovered misusing the money — at Stanford University, for example, on an antique commode and depreciation on a yacht — President Bill Clinton tried to limit federal reimbursements as a proportion of the value of research grants, though not as severe as the 15 percent maximum the Trump administration is attempting to impose.

A proposal dropped from the OBBBA would have made colleges reimburse the government when their students default on federal loans. Another that was cut would have tried to improve completion rates by requiring students receiving federal Pell Grants, which help lower-income families pay for college, to complete at least 30 credits a year — the minimum typically needed to graduate on time with a degree. That’s up from the current 24 credits.

Related: Fear, fatigue, gratitude: Students, parents and educators on the new Trump administration’s first year

Getting federal financial aid in the first place was itself speeded up for many students when the Trump administration rolled out the form required to do it, the FAFSA, in September rather than December, as in past years. The number of submissions in the fall more than doubled over the previous fall, helped also by earlier work by both parties to make the form more simple.

“They’re not the sexiest changes, but some of the FAFSA technical changes have been hugely consequential,” said Brown, at NCAN. “Some of these small things can make a big difference in terms of students ultimately going to college.”

Other long-sought proposals are now gaining traction, including one that would make it easier for students and families to understand what college will actually cost them and compare prices — something institutions now make confoundingly difficult to do. Half of colleges and universities tell prospective students they’ll pay less than they actually will, and more than 40 percent don’t disclose the cost at all, a Government Accountability Office study found.

Related: Colleges provide misleading information about their costs

Bills to change this have been introduced repeatedly since 2017, with broad bipartisan support, including from Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren and Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, who are among the new bill’s sponsors. 

“For as much attention as there always is on how much partisanship exists in Washington, D.C., it’s often overlooked how much bipartisan agreement there is on things like price transparency,” said Justin Draeger, senior vice president for affordability at the Strada Education Foundation. (Strada is among the many funders of The Hechinger Report, which produced this story.)

“As the cost burden has shifted more to students and families, they’re asking questions about what is the payoff going to be,” Draeger said. “And colleges and universities have to be able to answer that for them.”

The new attempt to push this through is part of a package of bills now under consideration, including one that would require reporting the earnings and career outcomes of graduates from various majors, along with their average loan debt. Postgraduate placement rates and incomes provided by colleges and universities today are often misleading and inaccurate.

Growing public skepticism about the value of degrees, more than politics, may, in the end, be what’s accounting for this flurry of new rules, said Cooper, of AEI.

“The thread running through a lot of these changes,” he said, “is a lack of trust in universities to always do the right thing.”

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

This story about higher education reforms 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.

The post Behind ideological attacks on higher ed, surprising bipartisan reforms are happening appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

CROTON-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. — A few months before her daughter started kindergarten, Claire Benoist saw a Facebook post that stunned her. Another family with an incoming kindergartner was wondering if it was true that children in the Croton-Harmon School District, 45 miles north of New York City, receive an iPad when they start school. 

Other parents confirmed this: Kindergartners are often on their own iPads during school, playing games and watching television shows and YouTube videos. “It had never occurred to me that screens would be used in such a way,” Benoist said. 

A few weeks before school started, Benoist told school administrators in the 1,500-student district that she couldn’t believe schools would give devices to kids as young as 4 and 5. Benoist and her husband had followed pediatric guidelines recommending no screen time before age 2. After that, they only allowed occasional episodes of kids’ shows like “Bluey” or “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood.”

School administrators assured Benoist that iPad time would be limited to 15 minutes a day, she said. But once school started, Benoist’s daughter suddenly knew jingles from diaper and car commercials, which Benoist and her husband determined were playing before YouTube videos at school. 

“It feels like too much,” said Benoist, whose daughter has watched videos during snack time, transition time and dismissal.   

“I am just horrified by this,” she added. “I don’t understand how we’ve created a system that fosters this kind of screen time in school.” 

Related: PROOF POINTS: 10,000-student study points to kindergartners who may become heavy screen users

There’s mounting evidence that excessive screen time can harm young children — contributing to anxiety and depression, delaying social and emotional skills, increasing the likelihood of obesity, straining eyes and decreasing attention spans. In response, many parents are reassessing device use and cutting back at home. But some are encountering an unexpected challenge as they try to rein in screen time — their kids’ schools.

Elementary schools and districts that ramped up their use of technology during the pandemic have largely maintained those practices. Eighty-one percent of elementary teachers across the country surveyed by The New York Times in October said that at their school, students receive devices in class by kindergarten. And now too many schools have become reliant on screens to teach, entertain and, in some cases, just keep kids quiet, parents and experts say. 

“Screen time, when it’s purposeful, can augment the work of the teacher and it can be wonderfully complementary,” said Dr. Michael Glazier, chief medical officer of Bluebird Kids Health, which runs a half-dozen pediatric offices across Florida. “The problem is, in many schools, it’s becoming less of a complementary activity and more of a default.”

The Croton-Harmon School District declined to answer specific questions for this story. In a statement, Superintendent Stephen Walker said the district’s schools “are committed to ensuring that technology use is active, intentional, and used to create learning experiences that wouldn’t have been possible without technology.” Late last month, the district announced it would reduce spending on ed tech and end the practice of sending devices home with students in elementary school.

In other parts of the country, parents are pushing school districts to set limits with varying success.

In Evanston, Illinois, a parent-run group, Screen Sense Evanston, organized a petition last year requesting that the district remove non-educational apps and create daily maximum screen time limits for each grade. More than 1,000 parents have signed on. Last year, parent advocacy successfully pushed the district to limit YouTube in classrooms.

Miriam Kendall, a parent of three and the head of Screen Sense Evanston, said one of the group’s main goals is to remove “pure entertainment” activities, like videos and online games at school, and to get districts to set limits for device use.

Kendall, who monitors her daughter’s iPad usage online, said she noticed that the first grader was watching Taylor Swift videos in the middle of a school day.  

“It’s unreasonable to assume that somehow students aren’t going to be distracted and only supposed to use these devices for education,” she said.  “Literally millions of hours of very, very smart people’s time has gone into making these things absolutely irresistible on purpose.”

Similar demands to cut screen time have cropped up among parents and teachers across the country, including in California, North Carolina, Maryland, Texas and elsewhere in Illinois. 

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

Many complaints from parents across the country are about screen time that is not directly related to academics and is nearly impossible to track. That includes children playing board games virtually or watching someone on YouTube read a book to the class, instead of their teacher. In some classrooms, “brain breaks” consist of loud, flashy dance or movement videos that are marketed exactly for that purpose to teachers. Parents say their children are watching movies and television shows during indoor recess, lunch and snack time.  

For the youngest children, experts say, there are additional concerns. In addition to learning academic skills, school is a place to absorb social skills, said Glazier, the pediatrician. “That doesn’t happen if they’re just in front of a screen and they’re not interacting.”

The American Academy of Pediatrics doesn’t have a set time limit for screen use in schools, but it says screen time should be active and involve critical thinking activities such as coding or media and video production, not passive, like watching content for entertainment. 

Some parents and experts say that even some of these active programs are problematic. They worry that apps that are “gamified,” for example, could encourage early addictions to screens by getting kids hooked on the dopamine rush that comes from mastering new levels and earning digital rewards. 

Richard Culatta, the CEO of the technology nonprofit ISTE+ASCD, agrees that some apps are better than others and that schools should do a better job of vetting them. But, there are benefits to engaging, research-based games, he said.

“When kids hate learning because it’s boring, it will have far more damaging consequences than if they are playing a game that is helping them find learning more interesting,” Culatta said. And rather than a wholesale removal of tech devices, he said schools need to “rebalance.” 

“We do have to be really careful that we don’t actually end up harming kids by taking away tools that are really helpful for them for their future,” Culatta said.

Samantha Harvey, whose daughter attends school in the Croton-Harmon district, didn’t realize how much screen time her daughter was getting at school until the kindergartner began talking about “apps” soon after starting school. 

“I wouldn’t mind if it were once a day after school, or a special thing,” Harvey said. “It just seems like it’s ubiquitous. It’s every day, and it seems to pop up in every room.”

Then one day, Harvey was taking a video of her daughter dancing to send to her grandparents. When the song ended, her daughter finished her dance, looked at the camera and said, “If you like what you saw, click below to subscribe.”

Related: Glued to the screen: A third grade class where kids spend 75% of the day on iPads

In part because of concerns from parents and educators, districts have already begun rolling back technology use. In 2022 in Missouri, Springfield Public Schools cut back on classroom technology for its youngest students. That same year, Santa Barbara Unified School District in California removed 1:1 devices from kindergarten and stopped sending devices home with first, second and third graders.

In 2023, Glastonbury Public Schools in Connecticut reduced technology use. A year later, several Kansas districts scaled back, including Wichita Public Schools, which eliminated screen time from pre-K and kindergarten classrooms. Lawmakers in several states — including Utah, Massachusetts, Vermont and Missouri — have introduced legislation to limit screen time or review ed tech products more closely. Countries like Sweden and Denmark have also transitioned away from digital learning.

In addition to state and district efforts, individual teachers are making changes within their own classrooms to move away from screens.

Jill Anderson, a third grade teacher, has experienced the screen time debate on both sides. Her children attend Croton-Harmon schools, but she teaches just south in the Ossining Union Free School District, which takes a more gradual approach to introducing kids to screens. Kids in Ossining schools don’t take home a device until fifth grade, and, unlike some districts that require students to complete a certain number of lessons on educational apps, Ossining does not mandate screen time.

In Anderson’s classroom, school-issued devices are tucked away in a cart that is often hidden by a large paper easel and barely touched by students. The shelves in the back of her room are overflowing with books, board games and Legos. Break time features games like hopscotch, and students who are not working with Anderson during small-group time play chess or with math cards.

Anderson embraced ed tech when it started rolling out in schools pre-pandemic. But then she started to notice more focus and attention challenges among her students, and she worried that it was the result of their overall use of screens at home and at school.

She started researching screen time and educational technology use and was dismayed by reports showing that few digital learning programs have met federal standards for demonstrating effectiveness. She was surprised to see schools were regularly using digital books, despite evidence that kids read better on paper than on screens. “I used all these interactive math games thinking they were so great,” she said. “Then I realized, ‘I don’t actually think they’re learning any math from asteroid blasting multiples of five.’”

Anderson has since replaced screens with more hands-on activities and writing. Instead of a smart board, Anderson now works through math problems on her paper easel while students follow along on individual dry erase boards. For class rewards, students play board games, get an extra outdoor recess or have a dance party instead of Chromebook time. Plans left for substitute teachers no longer include any technology. 

“I feel like I see students detoxing under my eyes,” Anderson said. 

Related: Technology overuse may be the new digital divide

Michael Hanna, director of technology in Ossining, said while students have more access to technology than before the pandemic, the district is mindful of how it is used.

“I’m not a proponent of using technology with our littlest,” Hanna said. “When they are in school, they should be learning how to make friends. They should be learning how to have empathy. They should be learning how to share. They should be learning how to do all of those things. And by putting them on a device, I think it’s taking away so many opportunities for them to engage with their friends and with their peers.” 

Last year, Anderson formed a community group, now with more than 250 members, aimed at educating and helping families cut down on tech. She also founded Mindful Tech Lessons, a national organization that educates caregivers and educators and provides consulting to parents, teachers and districts on technology usage. In early February, she testified on behalf of a bill in Vermont seeking more oversight over ed tech used in school.

She starts every workshop by telling attendees why she advocates for change. “When I first started teaching 20 years ago, kids wanted to be veterinarians because they loved animals, teachers because they loved helping kids or athletes because they love playing sports,” Anderson said. “Then it changed. Now, the most common answer is, ‘I want to be a YouTuber or influencer,’ and they no longer tell me why.” 

Benoist, the Croton-Harmon parent, joined Anderson’s collective and has also advocated for less screen time in front of the district school board. She said she has heard less about her daughter watching TV shows and ads at school since January. Benoist welcomed the shift away from screens for elementary students, but said she still feels defeated when she thinks about how much screen time her daughter has already been exposed to in school. 

“I’ve done everything I can to shepherd her through this world that’s already so technology-driven, to shield her childhood, to have her have a normal, analog childhood,” she said. “And I just handed her off to a school district and they destroyed that within three months.” 

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

This story about screen time 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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A year ago, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency swept into the Department of Education and devastated its research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES). Nearly 100 contracts for major statistical collections and research studies were canceled. Roughly 90 percent of IES staffers were laid off, stalling many of the agency’s core functions.

IES had been one of the rare parts of the department with bipartisan support. Modeled after the National Institutes of Health, it was established in 2002 during the administration of former President George W. Bush to fund innovations and identify effective teaching practices. Lawmakers in both parties relied on its data to track student achievement and school spending, and on its evaluations of federally funded programs.

If you liked this story and want more, sign up for Jill Barshay’s free weekly newsletter, Proof Points, about what works in education.

The now-gutted agency faces an ever more uncertain future as the Trump administration moves to eliminate the Education Department altogether. Yet some department officials, including Trump political appointees, have been working to preserve it. That effort took a small step forward with the Feb. 27 release of a report on the agency by a senior advisor to Education Secretary Linda McMahon.

The 95-page report, “Reimagining the Institute of Education Sciences,” contains dozens of recommendations to rebuild and improve its core research and statistical functions. (The Education Department hasn’t committed to implementing any of them.) The author, Amber Northern, directs research at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative education policy think tank. Northern told me she was approached by McMahon’s team in March of 2025, immediately after the DOGE cuts, to take on the role of “looking at IES with fresh eyes and giving them some feedback.”

“Everyone was very alarmed,” said Northern. Before accepting the job, she said, she met with McMahon to receive assurances. “I was very frank about, ‘Are you serious? Do you want this agency rebuilt? Do you understand the importance of R&D?’” Northern said in an interview in early March of this year. 

“For all the reorganizing that’s going on, there is an awareness that IES is performing a unique service to the country, and we need to be thoughtful about its next steps,” Northern said.

Related: How Trump 2.0 upended education research and statistics in one year

Northern said she met with 400 people last year and read through more than 200 public comments on reforming IES, many of them from research organizations, advocacy groups and individual researchers. 

Researchers generally applauded the Northern report. Many of the recommendations mirrored the public comments for speeding research and statistical collections and making them more accessible and useful to schools. Indeed, many of the same ideas were also in a 2022 National Academy of Sciences report on the future of education research. 

“From what we can see, not one of the recommendations was a new idea to NCES,” Peggy Carr, former commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, a statistical agency that is housed inside IES, told me in an email. “Many had already been implemented or we were working on when the center was dismantled. Other recommendations were met with implementation challenges, frankly hurdles, that we did not control.” 

Northern did not disagree. “It’s not as if I was trying to reinvent the wheel,” said Northern. “Some of these ideas are not unique or not new, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be doing them.” Northern said she didn’t track the progress that had already been made on some reforms or why others were not implemented.

Not radical change

It’s notable that the Northern report did not recommend radical changes, such as bringing statistical work in-house, as opposed to its costly practice of relying on outside contractors. That could save money but would require hiring more federal employees, an unpopular idea in Congress. (Earlier in her career, Northern worked at Westat, one of the primary contractors that IES relies on to conduct research, produce statistics and administer assessments.) Nor did Northern suggest sending federal research dollars directly to the states, which the Trump administration has proposed for all federal education spending. Northern mentioned this possibility only in an appendix, noting that it would require congressional authorization.

“But I’m not holding my breath. I decided to live in the real world,” Northern said, explaining that she focused on changes that IES could make under existing legislation.  

Publicly, however, she and her supporters say her report represents big shifts, which will perhaps be more appealing to the Trump administration which doesn’t want to be seen as reproducing an exact replica of what DOGE dismantled. “These are not nips and tucks,” Northern wrote in her report.  

Some of Northern’s recommendations are technical changes about things like Application Programming Interfaces, or API’s, that allow software to communicate with each other. But others are strategic ideas, such as focusing federal research on a handful of topics rather than scattershot studies in a variety of areas. She does not suggest what those big topics should be. Northern wants federally funded research to be more responsive to states’ education priorities, and not to researchers’ agendas, but didn’t specify exactly how to accomplish that. And she wants states to coordinate and test similar approaches in different settings to see which students benefit. 

The Education Department did not respond to my questions about which recommendations it might adopt and when. An Education Department press statement announcing the report’s release was guarded. Acting IES director Matthew Soldner was more enthusiastic in a lengthy blog post, but he’ll need a greenlight from political appointees to proceed.  

Northern expressed optimism that IES will be saved, but wouldn’t speculate on specifics. “None of this stuff can happen until there’s a restaffing and there’s a plan first,” said Northern. “I’m confident this is going to happen. But how quickly? All those are questions that haven’t been answered yet.”

Mixed signals

The public release of the Northern report was itself seen as a positive sign by research advocates. Three people familiar with the report said it took more than two months to review because of concerns inside the administration, reflecting tensions between rebuilding parts of the department and the political priority to shut it down. During the delay, a senior Education Department official, Lindsey Burke, described IES as the department’s “gem in the crown” during an online event in January hosted by the news organization Chalkbeat. (Burke, previously a Heritage Foundation fellow who wrote the education chapter of Project 2025, said in that blueprint for the Trump administration that IES’s statistical role should be preserved but potentially split between the Census Bureau and the Department of Labor, with education research going to the National Science Foundation.)

Related: Trump’s admissions data collection strains college administrators

Other signals from the administration point in many different directions. President Trump’s 2026 budget proposed cutting IES’s roughly $800 million budget by two-thirds. Then, the administration ordered the largest expansion of a higher-education data collection in history: a new college admissions survey to enforce the ban on affirmative action. “They’re relying on IES in a lot of ways,” said Diane Cheng, vice president of policy at the Institute for Higher Education Policy, a nonprofit organization that advocates for increasing college access and improving graduation rates. “They seem to recognize that the data are essential for the field and for their priorities.”

Congress ultimately rejected the proposed cuts and largely maintained IES funding. However, the Education Department still hasn’t spent the funds that Congress appropriated to IES in fiscal 2025. A Democratic congressional aide said there is “a lot” of unspent money at IES and that the department has not shared a plan for spending it.  

Congress begins a push

Congress is pushing to rebuild. A committee report accompanying the 2026 appropriations bill directs the Education Department to rehire staff at IES. Even so, staffing remains far below the previous level of roughly 200 employees and now stands at 31, according to researchers. The headcount had dropped to as low as 23 after the mass firings but began rising again in the fall, largely to administer the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the Nation’s Report Card. Northern’s report does not address the canceled projects or the staffing shortages. 

At least one influential observer believes last year’s destruction is creating an opportunity for real reform at IES. Mark Schneider, IES director from 2018 to 2024, said it has been difficult in the past to pursue incremental reforms like those proposed in the Northern report because of bureaucratic resistance. Still, Schneider knows that any rebuilding will be a political challenge. “It’s going to require a lot of pressure,” he said.

As the debate continues, the patient may be slipping away. In a blog post last week, Chester E. Finn, Jr., a former Education Department official in the 1980s and president emeritus at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, warned the loss of veteran statisticians is already degrading education data.

Without that expertise, we may never get an accurate picture of what is going on in the classroom.

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

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

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When Texas A&M ended its women’s studies program and overhauled its race and gender classes last month, its actions joined a long line of recent institutional rollbacks of women’s rights and autonomy in Texas and across the nation, from eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion programs to cutting access to legal abortions. 

With this closure and overhaul, Texas A&M — one of the largest public schools in the country — reveals that it is not, as the home page of its website announces, “a force for good,” but rather that it is willing to capitulate to save little and hurt a lot.  

Shuttering a women’s studies program, overhauling a gender studies program and cancelling courses focused on race and gender are attacks on all feminist movements and women everywhere. They send a message that the study of women and gender is a waste of time and resources. The cancellations also illuminate the troubling reality that rather than supporting the mission of public higher education, state and federal policies are increasingly functioning as instruments of censorship.  

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

Amid this turmoil, we cannot forget that students are unwittingly caught in the middle of this political game. Cancelling classes that students count on for degree progression is damaging; it leaves them scrambling to adjust their schedules and grappling with the revelation that, despite oft-spoken platitudes, their university does not actually care about their particular intellectual pursuits, or at least not enough to stand up to censorious policies. 

Such cancellations disrupt all students, even those not interested in women’s and gender studies. Students whose schedules are not upended by this shift are witnesses to the disruption; they may see their friends struggle, they may experience more crowded classes because of the overflow of students from the shift, and they may justifiably fear that their own programs of study are next. 

This results in a chilling effect and message to Texans that is clear: Pursue studies of a safe topic in a docile manner.  

The decision in favor of the cuts was made by interim president Tommy Williams, who maintained there was no way to support the programs as they were, given the need to comply with “new system policies” that aim to eliminate courses and programs centering on women and historically underrepresented groups. It was an oblique reference to federal changes under President Donald Trump, who uses funding and the threat of federal investigations as a stick to force academic institutions to eliminate DEI policies and subjects.  

In what can clearly now be understood to be a preview of this women’s studies closure, Texas A&M cancelled its LGBTQ studies minor and popular culture and performing social activism certificates in 2024, with the university citing low enrollment and State Rep. Brian Harrison calling the courses an “outrageous abuse of tax money.” 

Whatever the fallout of these cuts, chances are it will be shouldered not by Williams but by his successor. Williams’ compliance communicates the current power dynamic to any candidate interested in taking the helm: The state legislature is in complete control and any expectation of academic freedom will be strictly rhetorical. 

Most frightening is that these cuts reveal how higher education, specifically university personnel at the executive level, can be complicit in perpetuating the patriarchy’s manipulative control.  

Shuttering a women’s studies program signals to women everywhere that they will be silenced.  

The cuts send a clear message to public institutions everywhere, in red and blue states alike, that “You could be next.” 

They also send a message to students that these fields are a waste of time. Ending the formal, university-supported study of women means that fewer stories about women will be told, which will slowly but surely render women less visible and less valued. 

What is really happening here? Why shut down a popular course of study? I believe it is because the resilience, influence and power of women is so strong and is perceived as a threat.  

Related: How education changed in one year under Trump 

Women have proven, over the generations, and most recently in Minnesota, that they will put their bodies on the line to protect not just other women, but whole communities.  

Mothers in Minneapolis have gathered to protect their children’s teachers from ICE raids. Women survivors of physical and sexual abuse have recognized the tactics ICE used to kill and to justify the killing of Renee Nicole Good and are swiftly making those connections clear to others. Stella Carlson, formerly known as “the woman in the pink coat,” captured and released the first video of the murder of Alex Pretti by ICE agents. Kayla Schultz, another woman who recorded the murder of Pretti, says it is time to “make some noise” in order to protect our communities. 

Despite all that Texas and the nation overall are doing to whitewash history (rolling back human rights and civil liberties, censoring thought and attempting to control bodies they feel threatened by), these Minnesotan women are evidence that it will not work.  

Women will not be relegated to obscurity and will not stand down. Women’s and gender studies programs may be silenced, but women never will be. 

Allison T. Butler teaches in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of the forthcoming “The Judgment of Gender: How Women Are Centered and Silenced in Pop Culture.”  

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org. 

This story about cuts to women’s studies and gender studies programs 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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Conservative politicians warn of “woke” college campuses, where liberal professors teach their opinions and stifle any dissent. Their concerns have led them to get involved in the day-to-day operations of public colleges and universities as never before, including through the creation of taxpayer-funded, right-leaning civic centers. 

But most college students don’t share those concerns, our recent reporting found. And a new poll by Gallup echoes what students told us. 

The poll, which included responses from nearly 4,000 college students, found that about two-thirds of all students — including two-thirds of Republican students — said that their professors encouraged students to share their views “even if it makes others uncomfortable.” Just 3 percent of Republican students said they felt they didn’t belong at their college because of their political leanings. (The survey was conducted in partnership with the Lumina Foundation, one of The Hechinger Report’s many funders.)

That’s in line with what we found when we traveled to Ohio State University to visit the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society. Ohio is at the center of the civic center movement, with five now up and running. 

Eight other states have similar centers or schools at public universities that are generally able to circumvent typical university hiring processes. They are designed to teach about civics and American history by emphasizing what makes the nation great.

As in the Gallup poll, OSU students agree that professors welcome different opinions.

We talked to several students taking Chase Center classes. They said they didn’t feel that any of their professors, in any classes, tried to push their personal beliefs. 

“I would challenge anyone to find left-wing indoctrination,” at Ohio State, one student said. “Professors want you to challenge them, they want you to disagree.”

Civic centers get conservative professors and ideas in front of students. 

Most of the students we talked to in Chase Center classes said those professors and course materials were right-leaning. As another student put it: “It is very Republican and very patriotic. If you come in with a blank slate, you’ll probably come out a Republican.”

Chase Center leaders said that there was no political litmus test to join the staff there and that the goal was not to establish a conservative faculty, but one that respects intellectual diversity. When we took a closer look and spoke with faculty members, it was clear that the center was hiring almost exclusively conservatives. And the academic council that has oversight of Chase has several prominent conservatives and no notable liberal scholars.

Ohio’s centers are part of a larger national movement to focus on civics education.

These civic centers represent a convergence of two top priorities for Republicans: to counteract what they see as a “woke,” left-wing bent at universities and to improve and promote civics education. The Trump administration backs both goals and has talked about the importance of promoting patriotic versions of American history, allocating more than $150 million to this effort.

Four of Ohio’s centers have received federal grants totaling more than $8 million to train the state’s K-12 teachers in civics education. Chase was one of several centers chosen to receive additional funding through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities — $5 million for more faculty hiring, scholarships and curriculum development.

State lawmakers are taking action as well. Last year, Ohio lawmakers passed a bill that will require all bachelor’s degree candidates to take an American civics class. The course must teach some of the nation’s foundational texts as well as lessons about capitalism. Chase and the state’s other civic centers will play a key role in teaching these classes.

Contact senior investigative reporter Meredith Kolodner at kolodner@hechingerreport.org or on Signal: @merkolodner.04.

Contact investigations editor Sarah Butrymowicz at butrymowicz@hechingerreport.org or on Signal: @sbutry.04.

This story about conservative college programs 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. Listen to our higher education podcast.

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It’s becoming markedly more expensive to run a child care business. And as public funding fails to keep up with inflation, those costs are getting passed on to families that in many cases can’t afford to pay more. 

Those are some of the main findings of a new report by the National Association for the Education of Young Children, which earlier this year surveyed more than 7,000 early childhood educators from a variety of early learning programs across the country. 

The cost for food and supplies has increased the most, providers say, followed by maintenance for facilities and liability insurance. Child care programs have long reported challenges obtaining and affording liability insurance, which is required for child care centers in many states.

In an attempt to stabilize their businesses, 65 percent of the center-based providers and 31 percent of the home-based providers reported increasing tuition over the past year. Many families cannot afford to pay more, however. A study released in January by LendingTree found the average annual cost of child care for an infant and a 4-year-old is more than $28,000 a year, meaning a family with two children would need to earn more than $400,000 to have child care account for 7 percent of less of their household income, a federal metric for affordability.

“There is a significant gap between what parents can afford and what early childhood educators need to live,” NAEYC CEO Michelle Kang said in a statement. “As public funding stagnates and costs keep rising, more early childhood educators will leave the field, and more programs will close—with lasting consequences for children, communities, and our economy.”

These findings add to growing concerns around the stability of the child care industry post-pandemic. In anticipation of federal funding cuts to programs such as Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps, some states are making up for a budget shortfall by slashing state funding for child care. 

More than half of program leaders who were surveyed by NAEYC said they have seen consequences from raising tuition, including an increase in families leaving their programs. Sixty-one percent of respondents said their programs are underenrolled because so few families can afford to pay.

In Philadelphia, Mary Graham, executive director of the early learning program Children’s Village, said liability insurance has skyrocketed over the past few years, from $45,000 in 2024 to $62,000 this year. “I almost had a heart attack,” Graham said. 

Costs for food, health insurance and worker’s compensation have also increased for the program, which opened in 1976, leading to a deficit of $200,000 this year.

It’s the first time the program has had a deficit in more than three decades. Graham prides herself on offering a living wage and benefits to her 76 full-time staff members, who care for children from infancy through school age. This year, however, she had to cut back on substitutes as well as the amount of money she was planning to put toward raising salaries. Despite an increase in children identified with disabilities in her program, she is unable to put an extra teacher in those classrooms to provide support. “Kids need it, but we can’t,” Graham said.

“It means we have to be more creative,” she added. “We do what we can.”

This story about the cost of child care programs 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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GREENFIELD, Ind. — Seventh grader Taitym Lynch plans most of her school day herself, mapping out a schedule each morning on her school laptop. She typically starts with math when her brain is sharpest, logging into an online platform her school uses for math lessons. Next she often tackles science with her “class guide,” a teaching assistant who walks her though topics like animal food chains. Lynch chooses to have lunch around noon, and finds time to take breaks in the woods that surround her school, Nature’s Gift. 

Lynch, 13, came to Nature’s Gift this fall after years in a traditional public school. She kept trying to adapt, but her anxiety made it difficult. “Honestly, I had problems with school,” Lynch said. “I didn’t feel like going every day.” She also had a brief stint in virtual school. 

So far, Lynch is happy at Nature’s Gift. She feels comfortable asking questions of teachers and likes the small size. There are just 64 kids in grades kindergarten through 12th, taught by three licensed teachers and several class guides who provide extra support.

Lynch is the sort of student George Philhower had in mind when he helped start Nature’s Gift — one of a small but growing number of public “microschools” across the country.

Philhower is the superintendent of Eastern Hancock Community Schools, a rural district of 1,200 students about 30 miles east of Indianapolis. He’d worried for years about the district’s financial health as more families whose kids didn’t thrive in public school considered homeschooling. 

Around the same time, the concept of microschooling was gaining traction nationally. Microschools offer multiage learning environments that focus on personalized, often less-regulated instruction. Popularity grew during the pandemic when families sought learning alternatives in online, hybrid and pod options; an estimated 750,000 to 2 million students now attend the schools. 

The schools are typically privately run, but Philhower saw a role for them in his small district. Last year, he won approval from the state’s charter school board to establish the Indiana Microschool Collaborative, which he says will incubate a network of microschools statewide. They will operate as charter schools, meaning they are public but have more flexibility in terms of curricula and other operations than traditional public schools.

Nature’s Gift, the first such school, received so many applications for its original 50 spots that it twice added additional seats and still has a waiting list. Philhower hopes that by 2030, the network will add at least 10 more schools and enroll some 6,000 students statewide. Word is spreading: He said he’s received inquiries about the model from school district leaders and education organizations from elsewhere in the state and beyond.  

“The interest has been higher than we ever imagined,” Philhower said. 

While some government and education leaders praise the public microschool model as an innovative way to allow more personalized approaches to learning, it’s far too soon to know the extent to which they can succeed in effectively educating students or stemming falling enrollment. Some experts also worry that the innovation that has defined microschools may be lost as the model expands. 

“American education is populated with fads and failed reforms and that type of thing, things that don’t work out, and it’s hard to start a school and sustain it,” said Christopher Lubienski, director of the Center for Evaluation and Education Policy at Indiana University. Still, he said the collaborative model in Indiana could give the schools a strong shot at succeeding.  

Related: Public school kids were already going missing. Now schools are poised to see even sharper declines 

Don Soifer, CEO of the National Microschooling Center, an industry nonprofit that works to grow the microschool movement, estimates that only about 5 percent of the country’s microschools are public charter schools. But his organization hears from public school superintendents in states with school choice who are curious about the model, he said. “They’re losing some of their best teachers and families to microschools, and they want to get out in front of that.”

According to a 2025 analysis of more than 800 microschools his group conducted, more than 40 percent of students previously attended district-operated schools or were homeschooled before enrolling in a microschool. 

Indiana’s public schools, meanwhile, have been losing enrollment since 2008. Just over 1 million students attend them, while about 70,000 students receive school vouchers for private schools through the state’s voucher program, started in 2011. An estimated 8 percent homeschool, above the national average.

Scott Bess, a board member for the Indiana Microschool Collaborative, said he thinks Philhower has found a middle ground for some rural families who chose to homeschool only because they didn’t have other non-public options such as nearby private schools. “It’s going to feel like a small private school, but it’s public,” Bess said.

Philhower said he understands that some people might question why a public school superintendent is embracing and growing charter schools, but that’s what his community asked of him. “School choice isn’t going anywhere, especially in Indiana,” he said.  

Indeed, the state’s Republican governor, Mike Braun, is an advocate of choice and microschools, and promoted them during a July visit to the state from Education Secretary Linda McMahon. Indiana is going to offer microschool options to parents so “they can educate their kids in a way that they think makes sense,” he has said.

Related: How one state revamped high school to reflect reality that not all kids go to college

At Nature’s Gift — located at a 12-acre youth camp surrounded by woods that includes four barn-red cabins and a main building leased by the school — learning is personalized, with many of the middle and high schoolers managing parts of their daily schedule. Students advance by displaying ability or showing interest in a subject, not by grade level, testing or age alone. 

Most students also participate in hybrid learning and are homeschooled half the time. 

Erin Wolski, lead educator of Nature’s Gift, helps with classes for elementary through high school students, while running day-to-day operations. At any given time, she might be leading group math work, hopping on a walkie-talkie to answer a teacher’s question or taking kids on a nature hike. 

Before joining Nature’s Gift, Wolski spent more than 16 years in traditional public schools, most recently in the Eastern Hancock district, her alma mater. In early 2025, she approached Philhower about wanting a change, and he told her about his plans for Nature’s Gift. Together, they started the school. Most of its budget revenue comes from state per-pupil spending and some state grants, like one for qualifying charter schools that funds up to $1,400 per student. 

Another Nature’s Gift teacher, Christina Grandstaff, also taught in traditional public schools for years. She said she prefers how responsive Nature’s Gift can be to individual students’ needs. “We’re still doing all the things that you need to do for public school, but we have the flexibility,” she said. “We’re outside more, or we can learn outside, or we have kids that move from that group up to this level.”

The school has a very different relationship with parents than traditional public schools. 

Danielle Maroska enrolled her daughter, Kinzie, in Nature’s Gift after homeschooling her for years. She initially chose homeschooling in part to accommodate Kinzie’s athletic schedule: The 11-year-old is a gymnast who spends 16 hours a week practicing. 

“Covid really opened the doors for homeschooling to be enough,” Maroska said. “Most of her gymnast friends are homeschooled, so we went that route, and we did that for a couple years.”

But Kinzie began to miss having a sense of community. This fall, she began attending Nature’s Gift full days on Mondays and half days the rest of the week. Her mother homeschools her those afternoons when she’s not at the gym. Maroska describes herself as a “co-captain” in her daughter’s education, with Wolski being the captain.

Since attending Nature’s Gift, Maroska said she’s noticed her daughter’s approach to learning change. She used to hate reading, Maroska said, but now she regularly curls up with a book, even ahead of pickup time in early December. 

“I feel like this is kind of how college is, in a sense,” Maroska said. “It’s making them take initiative to guide their own learning.” 

Still, Maroska said Nature’s Gift isn’t right for all kids. Her two sons, in the second and eighth grades, are thriving at a traditional public school in Eastern Hancock, she said, and she would never pull them from that school unless something changed.

By contrast, mother Jen Shipley said she was initially skeptical of Nature’s Gift, never having seriously considered public education for her homeschooled 9-year-old. But like Maroska, she appreciates the flexibility and close relationships with teachers. Her daughter, Elliana, attends the school roughly three days a week and is homeschooled the other two.  

“We feel like partners in her education, versus I’m just handing her over and I just have to deal,” Shipley said. 

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

As a public charter school, Nature’s Gift must take state tests, unlike private microschools that do not. So far, the results have been mixed. On state benchmark tests in November, the majority of students, 70 percent, scored below proficient in math while only 10 students, or 30 percent, scored below proficient in English and language arts, according to Wolski.  

She said it’s too soon to use student test scores to evaluate the school since it’s been open less than a year. She noted too that her students were educated in a variety of settings before joining the school. 

Only one-third of microschools affiliated with the National Microschooling Center take state tests, according to the Las Vegas-based nonprofit, so data on their performance overall is limited.

Some microschool researchers worry that as public microschools are increasingly evaluated based on state tests, they could become more beholden to that accountability framework and some of what makes them innovative could disappear. “If that high-stakes accountability piece is there, it is inevitable that schools will have to change their operations to lean more towards performing on those metrics,” said Lauren Covelli, an associate policy researcher at Rand, a research organization, who studies microschools.

She added: “With so many school choice options in Indiana, specifically, if families don’t want their child to be taking a standardized test, it’s probably not the choice for them.” 

For families and educators who have chosen Nature’s Gift, the future seems encouraging. “This is sustainable, because so many parents are seeking something different,” said Wolski, the teacher and co-founder. “They have more access to things now than they ever did before.”

As 3 p.m. neared on a recent weekday, Grandstaff wrapped up a lesson and sent some students to the main building for pickup, then checked on a student who was studying at his laptop outside in the 20-degree weather. “He prefers it,” the teacher said.

Wolski said she doesn’t want to be part of undoing what’s happening in traditional schools but, rather, building more options into the public school system. “Families want different things,” she said. “Kids want different things.”

Nature’s Gift still has a long way to go, she said, but she is motivated to keep building it.

“Parents are happy. Kids are happy,” Wolski said. “So we’re going to keep going.”

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

This story about microschools 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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For 23 years, I’ve taught high school math. And for 23 years, I’ve been told by people that they either are a “math person” or they are not. 

I get it: Math isn’t easy. Movies and TV shows make it look effortless for a select few. But math is hard work. If you don’t do the work, and if you don’t have a teacher who can help you build the math skills you need, you may struggle with math. Then you might internalize these challenges into the idea that you’re not a “math person.”  

Research shows, however, that the idea of “math people” is a myth. In his book “How We Learn,” the neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene refutes the notion that some brains are uniquely “wired” for math. He writes that all people have “the same initial brain structure, the same core knowledge, and the same learning algorithms” for reading, science and math. All people can learn to do math.  

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

Where people differ is their mindset. Some people have what Stanford professor Carol Dweck refers to as a “fixed mindset,” or a belief that intelligence or talent is set in stone. When they fail, they see it as proof they lack ability, so they often avoid challenges or give up easily. Other people have a “growth mindset,” or a belief that intelligence and ability can develop through effort, feedback and learning. People with this mindset view mistakes as part of the process. Challenges are chances to improve. The growth mindset is how most people approach a video game. You don’t know what you are getting into, you try your best and if you fail, you know more and try again.  

I teach geometry in Arkansas, and of all the tests the state administers, students perform most poorly on the geometry exam. My colleagues and I at Rogers High School — plus a bevy of research — are proving that this poor performance is not because some students cannot learn math.  

My four colleagues on the geometry team and I were able to support our students in exceeding their expected growth goals. We attained these results by believing that our students can do geometry and by getting them to believe the same.  

Stanford math professor Jo Boaler proved what’s possible with an innovative study that showed how an online course could change student ideas about learning mathematics and their own potential. 

More than 1,000 students from four schools took the course — and it shifted their ideas about whether intelligence is changeable. Boaler told Frontiers, a science news outlet, that targeting students’ beliefs about math “led to students feeling more positive about math, more engaged during math class, and scoring significantly higher in mathematics assessments.” 

Related: PROOF POINTS: A little parent math talk with kids might really add up, a new body of education research suggests 

While I work as hard as I can for all 178 days of the school year, helping students believe in their capability to do math, especially geometry, also requires support outside of the classroom.  

Parents, we need your help. This idea of some people having a “math brain” comes up often at parent-teacher conferences. Adults will say that they are “not good at math,” or are not a “math person,” which can have a negative effect on how their kids see their own capabilities.  

Parents, you can have a positive effect if you adjust how you talk about math, including your own struggles. Acknowledge challenges in school and what could have helped you view the challenges as opportunities. It is important for kids to hear their parents talk about working through problems instead of giving up. I was fortunate to have parents who owned a small business, because I got to witness them struggle through problems and find solutions. 

Encourage your kids to develop a growth mindset. Talk about and teach the behaviors that can support your kids’ learning and growth. These include investing time in the work and engaging with teachers during class or tutoring to learn how to better understand mathematical concepts. Problem-solving is a learned skill, so point out how math shows up in daily life and that your kids often solve problems without even recognizing it.  

It is imperative that we show dramatic math improvement across the country. Trouble is on the horizon: The American workforce expects an unmet need for over a million employees to fill STEM-related jobs by 2030. Yet student performance is lower today than it was before the pandemic. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the Nation’s Report Card, reported that the achievement gap in 8th grade math last year was the largest in the history of the exam.  

But again, we don’t have a math problem in Arkansas or in the United States. We have a culture problem in that math is viewed negatively and stereotypes abound. The good news is that we can fix it by addressing mindsets.  

As I say to my students every day, thank you for your time. 

Mark Bauer teaches math at Rogers High School in northwest Arkansas. 

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org. 

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About four years ago, Holly Bailey-Hofmann’s English 101 class at West Los Angeles College got a complete makeover. She’d signed up to be part of a pilot program for professors interested in infusing their curriculum with lessons about climate change and community resilience. The program only required her to “climatize” one module of the syllabus, but she loved the work so much she overhauled the whole class. 

The goal for her students remained the same pre- and post-makeover: learning to write effectively and conduct academic research. Now, though, she teaches reading, writing and research by assigning research studies and nonfiction essays about climate change — including pieces about how social norms are often a barrier to addressing climate change, how climate change affects mental health, and how abnormally hot days could affect cognitive skills. She’s found her students love it. 

“We just want to do right by our students. We want to give them the climate literacy they’re going to need later in their lives,” Bailey-Hofmann said. 

The pilot program was run by WLAC’s California Center for Climate Change Education, which was established by the state legislature in 2022 to promote climate change education and infuse sustainability practices at nine Los Angeles-area colleges. Each year since then, roughly 15 WLAC professors have received a stipend from the center to study how climate change intersects with their field and redesign at least a portion of one class to reflect that. The program has since expanded to professors from the other eight colleges. 

The professors span disciplines including art, communication studies, biology, film production, chemistry, paralegal studies and child development, among others. Jo Tavares, director of the California Center for Climate Change Education, said that in the next few years, she hopes to create a virtual library that faculty statewide could draw on to understand how climate intersects with what they’re teaching, and update their courses.  

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Across the country, college leaders are trying to figure out how to best prepare their students for the consequences of climate change. Experts say all careers will in some way intersect with climate change, and that in order to be prepared for the job market, students need a basic understanding of climate science and its social implications. But, as I wrote in my story about the University of California San Diego’s new climate change course requirement, colleges are not necessarily saying that every student should sign up for Climate Change 101. 

UCSD, for example, identified what courses already have at least 30 percent climate change-related material, and now requires that students take at least one of those in order to graduate. Other institutions are also taking the required classes route: Arizona State University requires students to take a sustainability-related course, and San Francisco State University requires a climate justice course. 

Bailey-Hofmann is now part of the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Climate Fellows Program, a group of professors from across the state tasked with various climate and sustainability initiatives. Through the program, she’s researching opportunities to introduce climate change education at each of the state’s 116 community colleges, along with how to make it easier for students to transfer to four-year institutions with climate- or environment-focused degrees. She said many professors she’s talked to who haven’t introduced climate content told her, “Of course I would do it if I had the time.” 

Related: Climate change ‘is the new liberal arts’: Colleges build environmental lessons into degrees 

Bailey-Hofmann says it’s worth the effort. To climatize her curriculum, she first acquainted herself with climate science, then read articles and books on many aspects of climate change. She condensed what she’d learned into a 16-week English course, by designing modules with texts focused on how climate change relates to politics, religion, health and grief, among other topics. Some of the readings come from Bending the Curve, an open-access textbook focused on 10 solutions that could reduce the effects of climate change. Other assignments come from stand-alone texts focused on how climate change affects agriculture, why shrinking glaciers matter, and a New York Times article about how climate change affects Native Americans. 

Another program participant, Los Angeles Harbor College professor Felipe E. Agredano, infused climate into his Chicano studies class by sharing examples from history of how Latinos and specifically Chicanos are connected to the land and have tried to preserve it. He talks about how the Aztecs used trees to create rectangular floating islands for farming, called chinampas, from which present-day hydroponics developed. Students also learn about Chicano farmworkers in the 1960s who fought against pesticides and what he calls “Chicana Latina verde” — the role women have played in environmental preservation and care throughout history. 

San Diego City College art professor Terri Hughes-Oelrich, while not part of a particular program, said she’s been working to climatize her curriculum for years. She encourages her students to experiment with more climate-friendly materials, like bio clay instead of polymer clay (which is a type of plastic), making paint from natural pigments, and collecting items or waste from their everyday lives to use for sculptures. 

She’s also updated her curriculum to encourage students to think about climate change and biodiversity loss: For example, she asks introductory ceramics students to research an endangered animal native to a place where they have ancestors, sculpt an adapted version of that animal that could have a better chance at survival, and present their case to the class. 

Related: ‘Education is the climate solution’ 

After climatizing her English 101 class, Bailey-Hofmann went on to climatize her English 102 class, a literature course. She replaced the previous required readings with climate-related fiction, or “cli-fi,” including a traditional Navajo chant, essays, poetry and novels. Some of the texts she assigned fall under the “solar punk” umbrella, a utopian genre that imagines the potential for a better world. And for English 103, a class traditionally focused on critical thinking and composing written arguments, she swapped the classic readings for nonfiction works related to climate and environmentalism. 

It’s hard to gauge demand for her climatized courses because she doesn’t have access to enrollment data and students are not always aware that they are signing up for a climate-focused class, Bailey-Hofmann said. But she said the high level of student engagement in class discussion and the positive feedback she receives from students suggest the class is resonating. While it may seem like the class’s intensive focus on climate change narrows the scope of the course and readings, Bailey-Hofmann said professors are free to focus their classes around any topic, and students see the wide-ranging implications of climate change all around them. 

“Things are getting hotter here in the Southwest, things are getting drier,” Bailey-Hofmann said. “They need to have a certain level of literacy just to be able to talk about what’s happening to them. But further, they’re also going to need things like flexible thinking, ability to adapt, because a lot of the green jobs that are going to exist don’t exist yet.”

Contact staff writer Olivia Sanchez at 212-678-8402 or osanchez@hechingerreport.org.

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