It seems like a tale of two school systems.

Washington, D.C., has emerged as the fastest-improving school system in the nation, according to a major new analysis of student test scores released last week by researchers at Stanford, Harvard and Dartmouth.

The Education Scorecard analysis, which compares more than 5,000 school districts across 38 states, finds that most of the country has been stuck in a reading recession — a decade-long slide in achievement that predates the pandemic. Between 2022 and 2025, only five states and the District of Columbia showed meaningful gains in reading. The nation’s capital posted the strongest growth of all and also led in math improvement. 

Related: Kids are in a ‘reading recession,’ as test scores continue to decline

Washington students in both public and charter schools gained roughly two-thirds of a grade level in math and about a third of a grade level in reading over that period, according to the analysis. A grade level represents roughly a year’s worth of learning, which means that eighth graders in 2025 were about six months ahead in math compared with eighth graders in 2022.

But the gains should not obscure a grimmer reality.

In 2025, only 26 percent of Washington students met grade-level standards in math and only 38 percent were proficient in reading, according to a separate report from the D.C. Policy Center, an independent local think tank. Just 16 percent of high school juniors and seniors were considered to be college or career ready.

A school system can improve rapidly and still leave most children behind. The contradiction is fueling an important politically and emotionally charged debate in education: Should schools be judged by how many students are proficient, or by how much students improve each year?

Critics of public schools are seizing upon the low proficiency rates. 

“Gains of any magnitude are a good thing, but when most students — roughly two-thirds to three-quarters in the case of D.C. — are not functioning at grade level, this is nothing to applaud,” said Steven Wilson, a former education policymaker in Massachusetts and charter school leader.  “Most students are still being failed by the system.” (Wilson’s 2025 book, “The Lost Decade,” criticizes recent school reform efforts.) 

Even before last week’s national data release, Washington school leaders were celebrating the gains. Paul Kihn, deputy mayor for education, trumpeted the strength of the schools after 2025 annual tests revealed a whopping 3.6 percent improvement in reading and math, similar to the grade-level increases that the Education Scorecard team calculated. “Our academic achievement is unsurpassed in the country in terms of growth,” Kihn said in a March 2026 blog post. 

Tom Kane, a Harvard economist and one of the authors of the new Education Scorecard report, explained that there is a long-running debate in the field of education about whether to focus on proficiency or growth. In this report, he said, the research team chose growth in order to “combat” what they see as an overly pessimistic narrative about public education. 

“We’re trying to highlight that something good is happening in some of these places,” Kane said. “And hopefully, if we can, rebuild the public sense of agency with respect to public education.”

In addition to highlighting Washington’s growth, the research team also released a list of 108 “districts on the rise”: school districts where math and reading gains exceeded those of similar districts in their state. Washington was not included because there are no comparable districts within the city. But its gains are comparable to many districts on the list. And, like Washington, most of those districts still have large shares of students below grade level.

In theory, if a district’s scores keep growing by outsized amounts each year, students should catch up and eventually reach grade level. But public school critics like Wilson point out that even if a school system improves by one or two percentage points a year, it could take decades for the majority of students to get a decent education. In the meantime, the students who are currently in the system lose out. They can’t wait for that progress. Wilson worries that shining a light on a school system where most kids are far behind grade level can mislead the public and potentially cause school leaders to adopt the wrong policies.

“Let’s take the klieg light and move it to the school systems that are educating nearly all of their students, rather than a third of their students,” said Wilson. 

Wilson points to individual schools or charter school networks, where very high percentages of low-income students are at or exceeding grade level.  It’s much harder to replicate that success with low-income students across an entire large school district.

Income is a big factor in this debate. If the public and policymakers focus only on proficiency, affluent suburbs tend to dominate the results. High-income districts often appear to be the most successful, not necessarily because their schools are more effective, but because students from wealthier families begin far ahead.

That concern has prompted researchers to focus on growth-based measures of school performance over the past couple decades. A widely cited example came from research by Sean Reardon, a Stanford sociologist and co-author of the current report, who a decade ago found that Chicago was running the most effective schools in the country based on student growth, even though many students were behind grade level. (Illinois was not among the 38 states in the latest analysis because of changes to its state assessment, so it’s unclear exactly where Chicago stands right now.)

Still, many parents would probably rather enroll their kids in a school system where most of the students are on grade level, even if annual improvements are small or nonexistent, than a school where only a small share of students are on grade level but the school is turning around and improving.

Harvard’s Kane agreed that getting more students over the proficiency line is important too. For the team’s next Education Scorecard report, researchers are planning to add a new data point showing the share of kids who are proficient compared to other districts with similar demographics. 

The disagreement persists because the two measures answer different questions. Growth captures whether students are learning more than they used to. Proficiency captures whether they have learned enough.

That is what makes Washington such a revealing case. It shows how a school system can post some of the strongest gains in the country and still fall short by the most basic measure of success: whether students can read and do math at grade level.

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

This story about improving schools 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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Chronic absenteeism has become one of the defining challenges facing American schools. Students are missing more school than they did before the pandemic, when absenteeism was already labeled a national crisis. 

The consequences are serious: lower grades, higher dropout rates and long-term economic and social harm.

Districts have responded with better messaging, expanded mental health services and efforts to remove logistical barriers. Yet the share of students missing 10 percent or more of the school year remains stubbornly high.

Part of the problem is that we haven’t had detailed national data on why students are missing school. Until now. Our Understanding America Study helps fill that gap.

In the survey, we asked parents and teens to account for each missed day during the 2024-25 school year, choosing from 23 specific reasons. In interviews, we discussed the contexts that led to absences and family attitudes toward absences in general — for example, when is it OK to miss school and why? Our findings suggest that if we want to reduce absenteeism, we must rethink which causes we target for intervention, and how. We must understand — and intervene in — the specific factors driving students’ attendance problems.

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

Illness is universal, but it is not the whole story. Nearly all students miss school at least occasionally for physical health reasons — this is simply the reality of schooling. But illness alone isn’t a major driver of chronic absenteeism.

When we look at students who miss many days of school, it’s the less common reasons that contribute the most — such as suspensions, taking care of family members, transportation barriers, mental health struggles and “just didn’t want to go.”

In some cases, these causes produce two to three times as many missed days per student as routine illnesses. These are what we might call high-impact, low-prevalence drivers. They affect a smaller number of students, but for those students, the absences accumulate.

We can’t ignore mental health either. Mental health challenges are deeply intertwined with engagement, school climate and family stress. The data shows that teens who report struggling with emotional or psychological well-being miss an average of 12 more days than peers who do not. Behind those numbers are students who, in our interviews, described mornings when attendance feels impossible.

“Yeah, like if I really . . . like I don’t want to get out of bed. I will just stay home because I don’t want to have a bad day trying to force myself to push through,” one teen explained to us. 

Another described how anxiety builds before school: “There’s times when it’s, like, really hard for me to even get ready, and I can already kind of tell that I’m really anxious . . . and I know that I wouldn’t be able to handle it if I went to school.”

Students are also clear about what might help. “I think maybe they could provide more therapy or counseling, or more mental health days on campus . . . so students get a break,” one shared with us.

We can’t treat mental health as a marginal issue when it comes to solving the absenteeism problem. Investments in counseling, calmer school environments and proactive supports are not add-ons. They are strategies to improve attendance.

Perhaps the most striking finding from our survey is how strongly student engagement predicts attendance. Teens who say they care “a lot” about how they do in school miss about 10 fewer days per year than peers who say they care less.

Students themselves recognize the role of motivation. “I feel like the students just got to motivate themselves,” one teen said. “People just want to stay at home, watch YouTube and do whatever they want, instead of go to school.”

But engagement is not just about individual grit. Relationships matter.

“Sometimes knowing that a teacher cares about where you are or what’s happening in your life means a lot,” one student told us. Following up makes a big difference. “Teachers who are like, ‘Hey, I saw you having a hard time. Let me know if you need anything . . .’ for me, it makes me want to put in more effort.”

Related: PROOF POINTS: The chronic absenteeism puzzle

In other words, our survey and interview results tell us that students who feel seen and supported are more likely to show up. But to make that happen, schools need better data. Most current attendance systems focus on whether absences are “excused” or “unexcused.” That distinction may satisfy state or other reporting requirements, but it does little to illuminate root causes. 

First, schools need to gather systematic, specific information about why students are missing school, whether it’s anxiety, caregiving responsibilities, transportation barriers or disengagement, and then aim policies and interventions at what’s really most impactful. 

Second, districts should target high-impact, low-prevalence causes with precision supports. A relatively small group of students may be caring for siblings, lacking reliable transportation or getting repeatedly suspended. But for those students, these factors drive chronic absence. Targeted interventions can yield outsized returns.

Third, and most importantly, we must rebuild engagement and expectations.

Improving engagement should not be an afterthought. Students who feel connected to school, who believe adults care about them, who hear from those adults about the importance of attending school and who see value in what they are learning show dramatically better attendance patterns.

If we focus only on what is most common, we will miss what is most consequential. Our results highlight the importance of tracking absences from different root causes and the urgency for making school a place students want, and feel able, to attend. 

Amie Rapaport is co-director of the Center for Applied Research in Education at USC. Morgan Polikoff is a professor of education at USC Rossier School of Education. Anna Saavedra, co-director of Center for Applied Research in Education, contributed to this opinion piece.

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.

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MIDLAND, Texas — Dylan Ruiz sat in front of a nearly 6-foot-tall structure, a jumble of pumps and valves that simulate the flow of liquids and pressure changes. He was working through a training scenario on preventing oil leaks during his class on pumps, compressors and mechanical drives at Midland College in Texas. In the oil and gas industry, even minor errors can have major consequences. 

Ruiz, a 17-year-old senior at Legacy High School in Midland, is one of about 100 students earning dual high school and college credits by taking free courses on the basics of oil and gas production through Midland College’s Petroleum Energy Program. 

“It’s a boom-and-bust economy, but you can see the profits undeniably,” said Ruiz, who wants to be a petroleum engineer to provide for his family. As a kid, he and his family felt the bust: His dad, who entered the industry without a college degree, was laid off a few times. But they’re betting on Donald Trump to help usher in a boom.

For more than a decade, as many oil and gas workers near retirement age, the industry has poured millions of dollars into Texas K-12 education to create programs designed to train students on the basics of the industry. The investment in recruiting and educating younger people was in danger of slowing as the country moved toward clean energy production. But some educators in Texas say the programs have been reinvigorated by the Trump administration’s pledge to ramp up fossil fuel extraction. 

Oil and natural gas jobs pay among the highest wages in Texas, averaging about $86,298 in 2024, according to the latest figures from the Texas Workforce Commission. The Petroleum Energy Program primarily trains students for roles as technicians, supporting scientists and engineers in finding and extracting oil and gas. 

“We need those workers,” said Kathy Shannon, a prominent oil and gas education advocate who retired in 2023 as the longtime executive director of the Permian Basin Petroleum Museum in Midland, which works with the school district to promote STEM education and jobs in the industry. It’s necessary, she said, to “entice these kiddos and teach them about the industry and why it’s a great living.” 

Texas is among a handful of states — including California, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania — that offer courses in the oil and gas industry for high school students. It’s part of a larger trend of companies working more closely with school districts to ensure the skills that students are learning line up with business needs. Critics worry about the oil and gas industry’s influence over students, though, as evidence mounts of its environmental harms.  

“The oil and gas industry definitely wants voters and policymakers in the next generation to be sympathetic to the concerns of the fossil fuel industry,” said Glenn Branch, deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit that advocates for accurate and effective science instruction. “The industry has a long history of making a push into public schools” going back to as early as the 1940s.

Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter featuring the most important stories in education. 

Midland lies in the heart of the Permian Basin, a flat, largely dry landscape in West Texas, where the nearest natural body of water is more than an hour’s drive away. Residents here speak emotionally about their connection to the pumpjacks, symbols of prosperity for the town, that bow their bulky heads and pull oil from the earth. 

In 2015, Midland Independent School District and Midland College worked with local oil and gas companies to create the Petroleum Energy Program, then known as the Petroleum Academy. Erick Gutierrez, a department chair at Midland College who helps lead the program, said the idea is to prepare the next generation of oil and gas workers who can be hired right after high school. 

The program was founded after Texas lawmakers passed legislation in 2013 to expand career-oriented classes in high school and encourage students to pursue industry certifications. Since then state officials have passed two more bills, in 2023 and 2025, that further expand students’ access to career training programs and to classes that allow students to earn dual high school and college credit, while reducing the number of state standardized tests students are required to take to graduate.  

Midland College has recorded 1,098 enrollments by high school students in its Petroleum Energy Program’s dual credit courses since 2018. The number of enrolled high school students peaked at 211 in 2020-21 and has since fallen to 93 this academic year; college administrators hope the renewed federal push around oil and gas will help boost the numbers. 

Using a $1.4 billion bond approved by taxpayers, the Midland school district is building a new high school, set to open in August 2028, and has plans to expand STEM education on that campus through a partnership with Chevron. The company provided $145,000 to expand coursework and training to allow students more opportunities to work in the oil and gas industry.   

The hallways at Midland College are lined with banners featuring Diamondback Energy, an oil and gas company headquartered in the city. Industry representatives also sit on the energy education program’s board, as well as hosting job fairs, workshops, field trips and presentations related to the field. Most faculty and staff of the Petroleum Energy Program are current or former oil and gas industry employees, said Gutierrez, who worked in Midland’s oil patch in the early 2000s before joining the school in 2012. 

Industry representatives help to shape the school’s curriculum, designed to prepare students for entry-level oil and gas industry positions, such as lease operator, lease manager and general field service technician. Students learn how to maintain, repair and troubleshoot equipment using training simulators to prepare them for the high-risk environment of the oil and gas industry.  

For students who want to continue their education in energy and gas production beyond high school, preparing for jobs as petroleum engineers, geologists, surveyors or other positions that require bachelor’s degrees, companies like Chevron help provide scholarships to cover costs. 

Gutierrez said when he first started teaching at the school, many of the students dreamed of leaving Midland because of the challenging job market. But now, with Trump’s pledge to “drill, baby, drill,” more are deciding to stay. 

“You don’t see as much of a boom and bust anymore, you see consistency,” he said. “Companies will run very lean in order to prevent layoffs.”

Gutierrez acknowledged that some students have expressed concerns about working for an industry that harms the environment. He added that some of the program’s classes do discuss the ways the industry is making an effort to reduce its carbon footprint.

Under the Biden administration, jobs in renewable energy grew faster than the rest of the economy, while oil and gas employment fell. Federal green energy tax credits created a surge of new work and enticed young people to take part in the country’s energy transition. That boom has slowed with Trump’s deep cuts to those Biden-era clean energy incentives, although the growth in clean energy jobs is still outpacing the general economy.  

Related: The greening of career education: Students learn new skills they’ll need as climate change advances

Eight hours by car from Midland, at Houston’s Energy Institute High School, students can choose courses in engineering and alternative energy. Here, though, the focus goes beyond fossil fuel extraction to include nuclear power and renewable energy. The magnet school opened its doors in 2013 during an oil boom; donations from Phillips 66, BP and other energy companies supplement state funding for the high costs associated with the school’s required technology and teacher training.

Initially, Energy Institute was funded by a federal program that supports magnet schools and worked with the education arm of the lobbying group Independent Petroleum Association of America to create curriculum that prepares students to work with the energy industry as engineers, lobbyists, scientists and lawyers.

For Energy Institute principal Lori Lambropoulos, contributions from the oil and gas industry are key to providing high-quality, hands-on education. While she said competition for these donations has gotten tougher in recent years as more Houston public schools have opened STEM programs, BP is still a major funder of the school and sponsors its student lounge. The company’s logo is emblazoned on a wall near the school’s entrance. 

That kind of money unlocks educational opportunities, regardless of what field students enter. Alexander Hernandez graduated from the high school in 2024. He was drawn to it not because he wanted to work in the oil and gas industry but because it was the best high school in the city’s Third Ward, where he lived. 

“We do have a lot of those oil and gas very high up people that are just willing to spend money to build a new classroom or donate laptops,” he said in a 2023 interview. He’s now enrolled at Harvard University, where he is studying neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s.

This past fall, a group of students in teacher Calvin Mark’s senior capstone class at Energy Institute were in the early stages of designing a prototype of a flood protection system for Cheniere Energy. The liquefied natural gas company’s facility is near the Gulf Coast in Louisiana and routinely floods, Energy Institute senior Ramon Khattar Hatem explained. 

“They’re really worried about the facility flooding, and they wanted teams at Energy to make and design a flood protection system,” Hatem said. Mark added that Cheniere Energy contacted him on LinkedIn to express interest in having students from the high school as interns.  

Hatem, like many of the school’s students, wants to go to college to study engineering, maybe even environmental engineering. 

Even as the oil and gas industry is pouring millions into efforts to expose students to job opportunities in the sector, opportunities are narrowing for students to learn in school about its environmental harms. The Republican-controlled Texas State Board of Education voted in 2023 to remove climate science lessons from most of its proposed textbooks for eighth graders. Board members expressed concern about how publishers depicted climate change, with some arguing that textbooks offered unfair portrayals of the oil and gas industry. 

The state’s more than 1,000 public school districts are not required to use the board’s approved textbooks, but many do to ensure they’re in compliance with state curriculum standards.

Related: Teaching about global warming in a charged political climate

More than a dozen oil and gas companies, lobbying groups for the industry and professional organizations also try to shape students’ career plans by funding statewide networks that support scholarships, pro-fossil-fuel curriculum and learning opportunities at museums and other institutions.

For example, one network, the Dallas-based nonprofit Texas Energy Council, offers college scholarships to students interested in energy-related fields. It also partners with industry-related museums across the state, including the Permian Basin Petroleum Museum, on industry job fairs, classroom speakers and other outreach. 

Shannon, the museum’s former executive director, said these programs help children become interested in STEM at an early age — and develop positive associations with oil and gas that could lead them to enter the industry. “We have to have the dreamers, but we have to have the workers,” she said.

In 2025, the museum received a $50,000 grant from Exxon to provide free admission to local students. It also hosts free Family Science Nights four times a year that are staffed by volunteers from Chevron.  

A Houston-based nonprofit, the Energy Education Foundation, offers free traveling exhibits designed to educate students in grades 5-8 about careers in oil and gas. Teachers can sign up online to bring the nonprofit to their schools. During its events, students receive a tablet with learning modules on what it’s like to work in the oil and gas industry. The foundation, which in 1997 opened an offshore drilling rig museum aimed at kids in nearby Galveston, has plans to further expand the exhibits. 

“The east, west, north, wherever we can,” said Fernando Hinojosa, the foundation’s director of education and museum operations until late last year. “Energy is an international topic, so, yeah, maybe going international one day.”

Ruiz, the high school senior in Midland, has heard the industry is dangerous, but is confident that the safety classes he’s taken at the Petroleum Energy Program have prepared him for a job in the industry. He may stay on at Midland College and earn an associate’s degree (there are scholarships available) or enter the workforce right after graduation, maybe at Diamondback. 

“I see them around campus a lot, both here and in Legacy, because they sponsor the equipment, the computers and whatnot,” he said. 

Regardless of the company, Ruiz said, he wants to find a job with purpose. 

“My dad, he’s always telling me, ‘Go to college, get a good degree, get a good job,’ and, ‘You could do better than me,’” said Ruiz. “He sees that I want to go into oil and gas around here, and he thinks it’s a good path.”

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

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DANIELSON, Conn. — Inside the carpentry classroom at Harvard H. Ellis Technical High School in eastern Connecticut, three dozen sophomores and juniors are building cabinets and framing walls. Saws buzz, hammers clank and sandpaper scratches. It’s hard to converse without yelling. 

But Julian Lawrence, 16, doesn’t mind the noise. A mediocre student in middle school, he’s now earning straight A’s and says he’s excited to come to class each day. 

“In middle school, I hated sitting at a desk every day,” Lawrence said. “This gets my mind moving more.”  

Only two of the 36 students in the classroom are girls, a ratio that mirrors the carpentry workforce. While a couple of the other trades taught at Ellis Tech skew female — hairdressing and health care technology, in particular — its overall enrollment is 70 percent male. Statewide, more than 60 percent of the roughly 11,000 students attending technical high schools are boys. 

Boys seem to be getting a bigger boost from the schools, too. In one frequently cited study, boys accepted into Connecticut’s technical schools were found to have better attendance and test scores, and higher graduation rates and earnings than peers who just missed the cutoff for admission. Girls who got into the schools did just fine — but were no better off than their rejected peers. 

Yet many boys who might thrive in a technical high school are missing out, due to a systemwide shortage of seats. This year, only 44 percent of the 7,850 applicants to the state’s 17 technical schools got in. Those schools enrolled 11,700 students this year. 

The popularity of the programs has led to fights in both Connecticut and neighboring Massachusetts over who gets into the schools. Both states recently switched from competitive admissions to a lottery, amid allegations that their systems were shutting out at-risk students.   

Others say the solution lies not in reassigning the limited seats, but in adding more of them. Nationally, boys lag behind girls on multiple measures of educational achievement, from kindergarten readiness to college completion. If technical high schools can help narrow that gap, advocates reason, why not build more of them? 

“We could add 1,000 more and it would be good for boys, not bad for girls, and give parents more choices,” said Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, a nonprofit research and policy group. (Rise Together, a fund established by Reeves, is one of the many donors to The Hechinger Report and Big Local News, which together produced this story.)    

There were 400 vocational or career and technical high schools in the 2024-2025 school year that, like Ellis High, enrolled significant numbers of students as their primary institution, according to a Big Local News/Hechinger Report analysis of U.S. Department of Education data. That was an increase from 254 a decade ago. Counting all vocational high schools, regardless of whether they enroll students full- or part-time, the figure was higher, some 1,400. The data is also complicated: While many states focus on part-time vocational programs, others appear to operate full-time programs like Connecticut’s but don’t classify them as such in federal data sets.

Reeves’ proposal isn’t cheap. He puts the cost of running the new schools at an estimated $4 billion annually, a figure he based on Connecticut’s $5,000 per-student supplement for technical school students. And that doesn’t include construction costs. 

Considering the financial challenges many districts are facing, skeptics question whether there are less expensive ways of expanding technical education to more boys. That might include renting space so existing programs can expand, or opening up vocational classrooms to students who attend traditional schools at night or on the weekends. 

Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter featuring the most important stories in education.  

Once treated as a dumping ground for students who were failing in traditional schools, career and technical education is now viewed by many students and families as a debt-free pathway into family-sustaining careers. Policymakers and business leaders tout the programs as a way to grow the skilled workforce and increase the nation’s economic competitiveness, especially at a time when artificial intelligence is automating some white-collar jobs. 

While stand-alone, full-time vocational schools are less common than other career and technical models, such as “school within a school” programs or classes at local colleges, they have been been studied the most, largely because they allow researchers to create matched control groups of similar students who didn’t get in, says Shaun Dougherty, a professor of education and policy at Boston College and one of the authors of the Connecticut study. It’s harder to compare students who choose to take technical courses in comprehensive high schools with their peers because the groups may differ in important ways. 

Still, the case for constructing more technical schools is hardly airtight. There have only been a handful of rigorous studies of the schools, and none has followed students long term. And there is little to no research comparing outcomes for students in different models of career education, so it’s difficult to say whether spending millions on new schools is worth the cost.  

Yet Reeves and other advocates argue that the existing evidence for technical schools is encouraging. They point to the Connecticut research, as well as a recent evaluation of New York City’s P-TECH schools that found that males who attended the vocationally oriented schools were 10 percentage points more likely to have completed an associate degree seven years after enrolling than peers who weren’t admitted to the schools. That study, like the Connecticut one, found no significant gains for females. 

A Big Local News/Hechinger Report analysis of overall graduation rates found that students graduated from CTE high schools in Connecticut and Massachusetts at higher rates than regular high schools, regardless of their gender. But the differences were bigger for boys than they are for girls.

Researchers aren’t sure why boys get a bigger boost from attending technical high schools, but they have some theories. A prominent one is that boys simply have more room to grow than girls, who tend to do pretty well in traditional high schools, Dougherty says.  

As to why boys at technical schools outperform their peers at traditional high schools, one possibility is that boys find the work-based learning that takes place at technical high schools to be more relevant than traditional classroom instruction and are more motivated to excel in such a setting.  

“They see the purpose in what they’re doing,” said Michael Crocco, superintendent of the Connecticut Technical Education and Career System. “They can take what they learn in the classroom and put it into practice immediately.”  

Smaller class sizes and more time with teachers may also play a role. When students spend all day with a single trade instructor, “that teacher gets to know you on a different level,” Crocco noted.  

Eric Brunner, a professor of economics and policy at the University of Connecticut and Doherty’s co-author on the Connecticut study, suspects that peers matter, too. At technical high schools, students are surrounded by classmates who are interested in the same thing they are and excited to learn. “I can’t imagine that not helping,” he said.  

James Gallow, the head of the carpentry department at Ellis Tech, said he’s seen both boys and girls thrive in his school. Success, he said, “really comes down to the individual student’s motivation and willingness to learn.”

“Where vocational education can be particularly powerful — perhaps for some boys — is in its hands-on, applied approach,” Gallow said. “Students who may not feel as engaged in a traditional academic setting often respond well to learning by doing.”

Related: How career and technical education shuts out Black and Latino students from high-paying professions 

Calls to build more technical high schools come against a backdrop of long-standing — and only modestly successful — efforts to convince more girls to enter high-wage, male-dominated trades, like plumbing, electrical work and HVAC.  

Though more girls are pursuing nontraditional trades today than a decade or two ago, a majority still choose lower-paying jobs in education and health care — a decision driven by a mixture of societal expectations, personal preference and fears of harassment in male-dominated professions, surveys show. Federal law requires states to devote a portion of their career and technical funds to tackling such gender imbalances. 

At the same time, many vocational schools have tried to attract more girls by adding programs outside the traditional trades. In both Connecticut and Massachusetts, girls make up a larger share of the student body than they used to, with Massachusetts approaching gender parity in enrollment. 

But Reeves argues it may be time to stop chasing gender balance in technical education. Given the fact that boys perform worse in traditional schools than girls do and given the evidence that vocational education benefits boys more than girls, perhaps it’s a good thing that the schools skew male, he suggests.  

While Reeves wouldn’t exclude females from the new schools he envisions, he would market them primarily to males.  

The biggest barrier to that vision, of course, is money. Technical schools are costly to build and maintain, requiring expensive equipment and low student-faculty ratios, said Alisha Hyslop, chief policy, research and content officer at the Association for Career and Technical Education.  

Though the Trump administration has voiced support for vocational education, and recently committed funds to expand apprenticeship, it has also canceled grants for career-oriented high schools, arguing they were “not in the best interest of the federal government.”  

Teacher shortages are another hurdle. In one federal survey, nearly a third of public schools hiring for at least one CTE position said it was difficult or impossible to fill the role. Thirty-five states report critical teacher shortages in high-demand fields like manufacturing, IT and health sciences.

There’s no national data on how many vocational schools have waitlists. But in southern New England, where many schools are oversubscribed, the competition for seats has spurred heated arguments over how they should be allocated. At the heart of those fights are questions about the mission of vocational schools: Should they admit only the highest-performing students — or prioritize those less likely to be college-bound? 

Until very recently, both Connecticut and Massachusetts ranked applicants using selective criteria such as grades, attendance and disciplinary records, accepting those with the highest scores. For years, critics of that approach complained that it discriminated against low-income students, students of color and students with disabilities.  

In 2023, an advocacy organization filed a civil rights complaint against Massachusetts over its vocational school admission policy. An analysis by The Boston Globe found that students from low-income schools were more likely to apply to the state’s technical schools, but 30 percent less likely to be accepted. 

In Connecticut, a state investigation launched in 2024 found that “safety review panels” used in vocational school admissions were disproportionately shutting out students with disabilities, sometimes for minor infractions.  

The state eliminated the panels and switched to a lottery-based system last year; Massachusetts followed suit this year. 

Not everyone is a fan of the changes. Elliott Hayden, the head of the masonry department at Ellis Tech, said he preferred the old system, which judged applicants, in part, on their response to a question asking why they wanted to attend a trade school. While that question didn’t carry as much weight as quantitative factors, like grades, Hayden believes it helped schools screen for students who were committed to pursuing a trade.

Switching to a lottery, he said, has “led to many great prospective trade school kids not getting a chance, while allowing lots of students that don’t really fit the mold to get in. It does not seem fair.” (While applicants still submit a statement of interest, it’s no longer a factor in admissions.)

Meanwhile, the shifts didn’t do anything to increase the schools’ capacity, leaving both Connecticut and Massachusetts searching for new ways to bring technical education to more of their students.  

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

One potential solution can be seen in a renovated warehouse in Fitchburg, a former mill town in central Massachusetts. 

A few years ago, this building was vacant, a 16,000-square-foot shell with cinder block walls that had most recently been used as storage space for a local brewery.   

But Katy Whitaker, development coordinator for Montachusett Regional Vocational Technical School — or Monty Tech, as it’s known here — saw its potential. The school, which had a waitlist of several hundred students, leased the building in early 2023, and began dividing it into three shops with space for 126 carpentry, electrical and plumbing students.   

The satellite campus, dubbed MVP Academy, cost considerably less to construct than a new building, and is providing a second chance to juniors and seniors like Noah Couillard, who didn’t get in as eighth graders.  

Couillard, who was practicing setting up a fire alarm system on a recent school day, divides his time between the comprehensive high school where he remains enrolled and MVP, where he spends every other week learning the fundamentals of electrical work.  

The arrangement ensures that comprehensive high schools can keep their per-student assessment, while Monty Tech gets the supplement that the state pays schools for educating vocational students.  

Couillard, who says he has ADHD and has always been a hands-on learner, appreciates the change of environment. “It’s a lot better than sitting in class all day, doing paperwork,” he said. 

When he graduates this spring, he plans to continue his training in night school and become an electrician, earning $70,000 to $80,000 a year.  

While MVP can’t accommodate every waitlisted student, it may be a more scalable approach than new school construction, says state Sen. John Cronin, whose district includes Monty Tech. He helped secure $15 million in a recent state spending bill for the creation of similar “annexes” in other communities.  

“We don’t need more cafeterias and gyms,” said Cronin. “We need more shops where kids can get relevant workforce training.” 

Massachusetts has also invested millions over the past few years in programs that allow students enrolled in traditional high schools to take classes at technical high schools after regular school hours, and on weekends.  

In Connecticut, a nonprofit organization, The Justice Education Center, runs after-school and summer programs at the state’s technical schools, offering pre-apprenticeship training and certification to hundreds of at-risk young adults each year.  

Ultimately, though, the answer to gender gaps in education may lie less in expanding access to technical schools, and more in bringing elements of the schools — like career exploration and hands-on, project-based learning — into traditional classrooms. After all, even if Reeves realizes his dream of building 1,000 more schools, the vast majority of boys will still attend traditional high schools. 

That might mean expanding programs like Massachusetts’ Innovation Career Pathways, which offer students in comprehensive high schools 100 hours or more of work experience in a high demand field, or programs in New Haven and Bridgeport, Connecticut, that provide technical training during the school day through union partnerships.

“I don’t think we necessarily have to build brand new technical high schools,” said Hyslop, of the Association for Career and Technical Education. “But how can we increase opportunities for these types of in-depth career experiences?”

Rosie Cima, senior data journalist with Big Local News, contributed reporting. 

Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965 or preston@hechingerreport.org.

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

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AMHERST, Mass. — Crowding around a fire pit outside the Amherst College campus center, earnest-looking high school seniors offered fire-building suggestions as intently as if they were taking a final exam.

“This is our test of how rural you are, is how good you are at making a fire,” the college’s assistant dean of admissions, Nathan Grove, joked before he finally got the neatly stacked logs to ignite so the group could make s’mores.

The occasion was a two-day visit to encourage admitted applicants to enroll — including this particular group of them, from rural places nationwide where top-ranked private colleges like Amherst rarely previously recruited, and for whom this gathering around the fire pit was organized. 

“I was frankly sort of shocked that they cared about rural students,” said Jack Hancock, a high school senior from rural Milford, Pennsylvania, who had overcome the steep one-in-13 odds of getting into Amherst and was there with his parents to decide if he’d sign up, which he ultimately did.

Coaxing rural high school graduates to enroll at some of the nation’s most selective colleges is the next step in a campaign that started three years ago with a push to get them simply to apply. 

Called the STARS College Network, for Small Town and Rural Students, the recruiting effort was primed with $20 million from a wealthy Missouri-born alumnus and trustee of the University of Chicago, Byron Trott, who was concerned that too few rural students were going to college. While nearly a quarter of the American population is rural, as he was when he’d gone to college, Trott learned, only 3 percent of the students at his alma mater were.

That disparity is not unique. Ninety percent of rural students graduate from high school, more than their counterparts in cities or suburbs, according to the U.S. Department of Education. But only a little more than half go straight to college, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reports — down since 2016 and lower than the nearly 60 percent of urban and 63 percent of suburban high school graduates who go.

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Trott’s foundation has since injected another $150 million into STARS, which has expanded from an initial 16 member schools to 32, including Brown, the California Institute of Technology, Columbia, Dartmouth, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, the University of California, Berkeley and Yale. With support from that fund, each has agreed to recruit at rural high schools seldom visited by university admissions officers, who a 2019 study found were more likely to show up at higher-income public and private high schools in cities and suburbs. 

As STARS has built momentum, more than 90,000 rural students applied to its member institutions last year, up 15 percent over the year before, the organization says. 

Now the work has turned to getting these students to enroll in and graduate from college.

“This process is moving into not just the ‘to college’ part but the ‘through college’ part,” said Marjorie Betley, deputy director of admissions at the University of Chicago and STARS’ executive director.

Related: MIT, Yale and other elite colleges are finally reaching out to rural students 

That may not be easy. Rural Americans are less likely than those in cities or suburbs to think college actually benefits students and more likely to believe it has a negative effect on political views and personal values, a new Quinnipiac University poll finds. 

“A lot of people don’t think it’s worth it,” Hancock said of his classmates and their parents. Most who do choose to continue their education go to a community college or the local branch of the state university, he said — not to selective institutions.

So deep is this conviction that, when Hancock’s brother went off to a private college last year, his mother, Jodi, ordered the smallest-sized car window decal of the logo, so as not to draw attention. “That’s a rural cultural idea, that you don’t want to put yourself better than anybody,” she said. “We certainly didn’t want to put on airs.”

Private colleges can also be hard to afford for rural households, whose median income the U.S. Department of Agriculture calculates is 12 percent lower than the national average, even after accounting for a lower cost of living.

“You can sort of tell it immediately when you’re on these tours” of university and college campuses, said the younger Hancock, who drove with his parents to several of them. (He has never flown on an airplane, he said.) “Certain ones would have a lot more higher-wealth suburban people. Maybe they went to private school. They dressed in designer fashions.”

Other things that discourage rural high school graduates from going on to college are harder to quantify, said experts, including homesickness and a sense that they don’t belong. Rural students who do end up enrolling are more likely to drop out than their urban and suburban classmates and less likely to make it to graduation than suburban students, National Student Clearinghouse figures show.

Olivia Meier has seen two things hold back friends in Chugiak, Alaska, where she’s a college-bound high school senior: “The first is cost, and the second is not knowing what we’re capable of.”

Although her school has a 91 percent graduation rate, which is higher than the national average, only 48 percent of its graduates go on to college, state figures show.

“A lot of people, they just don’t see it in the cards for them,” said Meier. They think “the schools are too selective for us to be able to get into.” 

She shared that self-doubt, Meier said — until she heard that someone in the class ahead of hers had been admitted to the University of Chicago.

“I was absolutely shocked, because for me those schools were always something far out that wouldn’t necessarily be available to me. It’s really easy to doubt yourself when applying to schools like this,” said Meier, who ended up being accepted to Amherst through early decision.

Related: College admissions offices take on a new role: Coaxing accepted students to show up

A selective college campus “is a pretty rarefied environment,” said Mara Tieken, a professor of education at Bates College in Maine and the author of “Educated Out: How Rural Students Navigate Elite Colleges — and What It Costs Them,” who began her own career as a teacher in rural New Hampshire and Tennessee. 

“No one hunts. No one shops at Walmart. No one listens to country music. So some of the things that would have seemed so familiar to my students would be totally foreign,” Tieken said. 

Rural students from lower-income families also may not have relatives or friends at home who can help them figure out the complicated application and financial aid process, since the proportion of rural Americans 25 and older with associate degrees or higher is about a third, compared to nearly half in cities and suburbs. 

That’s among the reasons behind such things as the accepted student day at Amherst. Several STARS member schools pick up the tab for rural prospective and admitted applicants to spend a day or two on their campuses. More than 1,000 students took advantage of that opportunity last year, sitting in on classes and meals, attending social events and sleeping over.

Related: Colleges ease the dreaded admissions process as the supply of applicants declines

College-bound high school senior Catherine Colberg was making s’mores at Amherst’s fire pit, comparing notes with other admitted rural applicants about how small their hometowns are. 

“This is kind of huge to me,” said Colberg, after touring the campus of about 1,900 students, including its state-of-the-art science building. In St. Joseph, Minnesota, where she lives, she joked, “my school has, like, one test tube that we all share.”

That’s not just hyperbole, said Grove, the assistant admissions dean, who also has the new role of coordinator of rural outreach. In fact, he said, rural students he’s met “have a lot less access to things that would prepare them for college.” 

Ryan Peipher has seen this even at Amherst, where he’s a junior who was admitted before the college started making a concerted effort to increase its rural student numbers.

“A good portion of Amherst students come from private Northeastern schools, who have been in upper-level chemistry, upper-level classes, and had experiences that rural students haven’t had,” said Peipher, a neuroscience major from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who helped start a rural student support group. 

Many of his classmates have stronger personal and professional networks, he said. “It’s very easy for a student who comes to Amherst from a Philadelphia private school to network with someone who is also in finance who they know from a family friend,” he said. “But for a student from rural America who doesn’t have any family members or any connections to the finance industry, how can they network? How can they get that first leg up?”

Overall, however, increasing the number of rural students in college benefits them — and the colleges they choose to attend, said Amherst’s president, Michael Elliott. 

In a polarized time, “students growing up in rural areas bring perspectives and experiences that students from urban environments don’t have,” Elliott said. “They’ve grown up in different regions where maybe the politics feel different, where the culture feels different, and we are interested in the prospect of bringing students together with a diversity of experiences to learn from one another.”

Last year, after joining STARS, Amherst admitted 96 students from small towns and rural areas, the university said — up from 70 the year before — helped in part by comparatively generous financial aid supported by its $3.9 billion endowment. The proportion of students on the campus who are rural has increased as a result, from 6 percent to 11 percent, a college spokeswoman said. This year, she said, Amherst accepted 119 rural applicants. 

Small though those increases may seem, advocates said, they also are important in the long run for rural areas, where fewer than half of people in their teens and 20s are hopeful they’ll find good jobs, according to a Gallup survey.

Related: Faster, thinner: Colleges are swiftly trimming a B.A. degree to three years

STARS executive director Marjorie Betley said she is beginning to see opinions about college in rural America change. Rather than finding it harder to recruit rural students to higher education at a time when Americans of all geographies are questioning its value — to say nothing of its politics — admissions officers going to those places are finding it easier, she said.

“That may sound counterintuitive. But part of the reason that distrust can grow, especially when we think about distrust in higher education, is that as colleges and universities, we haven’t been there for them,” she said. “We haven’t shown up, and we haven’t shown them that we are people who you can trust.”

For many rural students, however, it’s still true that “going to a selective school like Amherst, or just any school out of state, seems mystical,” said Kara Lewis, an Amherst junior from Mardela Springs, Maryland. “It seems like something from a movie.”

Doing it herself, she said, did something unexpected: It made her appreciate where she came from.

“There’s a very romantic sense that lots of students have coming from rural areas where it’s, like, ‘I wish I could get out of here,’ ” she said. In fact, she said of her hometown, “I realized how unique it was. And I love it, like I never did when I was actually living there.”

Ryan Peipher hopes to go to medical school after Amherst and return to his rural community to work as a doctor.

“Once you do get away, you experience how special it was to grow up in that small town, and also the impact you can have,” he said. “You’re determined to go back and make that change, make that difference.”

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

This story about rural college students 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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OGDEN, Utah — The syllabus in 18-year-old Madelynn Wells’ introductory film studies class assigned “Jaws” first, and then the Spanish dark comedy “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.” She said she watched those, and did the written assignments with no problem. 

Around the third week of the term, the assignment was a film called “Pariah.” She hadn’t heard of it, so she looked it up and found that it was a coming-of-age film about a young woman who turned away from her conservative family to live as a lesbian.

Wells, a freshman at Weber State University who said she’s a devout Catholic and a political conservative, felt uneasy. She didn’t want to watch the film, and the idea of writing a paper on it made her even more uncomfortable. 

“I feel like whenever you put something in writing it just feels more serious,” Wells said. 

She decided to drop the class. 

In Utah, with a large and devout religious population, Wells is not alone in trying to uphold her religious beliefs while getting a college education. 

A new state law offers these students a unique protection: If something in a class conflicts with their strongly held religious or personal beliefs, students can ask their professor for an alternative assignment or exam. And as long as their request doesn’t change the fundamental nature of the course, the professor is now required by law to allow the student to opt out. 

The law has some guardrails that protect against accommodation requests that are universally considered absurd. For example, a student won’t be able to claim a moral objection to math in a college algebra course. And the law requires faculty to make these accommodations only in courses that are part of a college’s general education requirement or are required for the student’s major.

Despite those protections, the law is polarizing. Proponents say that students shouldn’t be required to do assignments or take exams on topics that compromise their morals unless it’s absolutely necessary to advance in their field of study. Opponents argue that engaging with beliefs they don’t hold helps students understand their own views better. 

This Utah law is the first of its kind targeting higher education, but it’s an extension of concerns being expressed at the K-12 level. There have been efforts to emphasize conservative and religious values in public schools, and limit what can be taught about subjects including racial history, gender and sexuality. The Utah law is also reminiscent of a case the Supreme Court took up last year, in which the justices sided with parents of public school students who wanted to take their children out of class during lessons that violate their religious beliefs — such as using books about LGBTQ+ identities. President Donald Trump has said that colleges are “corrupting our youth and society with woke, socialist, and anti-American ideology.” 

And over the past few years, there have been dozens of state-level bills — including one in Utah — banning initiatives or programs that promote diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI. Lawmakers in other states have gone after what’s taught in the classroom and how certain issues, like race and gender identity, are discussed. The legislative approach here is different. Instead of dictating what can or cannot be taught, the new Utah law shifts the power to students who now have the agency to decide when curriculum crosses a line for them. 

Amy Reid, who directs the Freedom to Learn initiative at the free speech advocacy organization PEN America, said it’s the responsibility of faculty to help all students get the most out of what’s being taught. Some accommodations — like those for students with disabilities or religious students who need to reschedule exams for religious holidays — help faculty meet that goal, she said. This one, she said, does not. 

Rather than “encourage students to shut their eyes or plug their ears or throw a book out the window,” she said, “You encourage students to engage with ideas, and you provide them with the support that they need — which can be different for individual students — so that they are able to complete the work.”

“Being exposed to ideas that you disagree with doesn’t mean you’re going to change your mind, but it should make you clearer about what it is that you believe and why,” Reid added.

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Wells, a zoology major, was taking the film course to fulfill a general education arts credit. After dropping it, she had more than two dozen other classes to choose from to earn that credit. She picked photography. 

But if she had needed the course to graduate, she said she would have had to swallow her discomfort or work up the courage to talk to her professor about an alternative assignment. In the case of the film studies course, perhaps she could have watched a different coming-of-age film, or another film by a Black screenwriter — depending on the goal of that assignment. (Her professor declined to comment.) 

Seth Mulkey, a junior at Utah State University in Logan, said he felt uncomfortable in his general education biology class when the course topic turned to evolution. Mulkey, an evangelical Christian, said he believes that God created the Earth in seven days.

“It can be a bit disheartening to have to learn about something and have something proposed as fact when it’s not something that you’re in agreement with,” Mulkey said. He tries to keep his beliefs to himself and instead, he said, “I’ll do my best to engage from an intellectual standpoint with this idea. So, if this is the assumption we’re making about how this works, we’ll talk about it, we’ll see what conclusions are there.” 

Even if the law had been in effect when he took that biology class, Mulkey said he wouldn’t have asked for an accommodation to get out of uncomfortable group discussions. But writing assignments might have been a different story. 

“If the assignment were to write an essay supporting this view, write an essay about why evolution is correct and why it is the right view of the creation of the world — I think at that point, I would want to step back,” Mulkey said. 

Related: Politicians say left-wing professors push their views. New poll shows students don’t see it that way

Utah appears to be the most religious state in the country. About 76 percent of Utah residents are religious, compared to only about 49 percent nationwide, according to a 2024 report from the Gardner Policy Institute at the University of Utah. Data from the Pew Research Center shows that about 50 percent of all residents are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and another 13 percent identify as members of other Christian denominations. 

Michael J. Petersen, a Republican state representative from Logan, said the idea for the bill came after his daughter was assigned to write a letter to a legislator in support of LGBTQ+ rights as part of a master’s degree program at an out-of-state college. The assignment was in conflict with her beliefs, so she called her dad for help. 

He helped her write “something that was very, very bland.” She moved on — and he began drafting the legislation. 

Had Petersen’s daughter been an undergraduate student at a public college in Utah, the law would have helped her in two ways. It would have prohibited her instructor from requiring that she take a specific public stance (such as sending a letter) on anything that is a “political, social, religious, moral, or community matter.” And it would have allowed her to ask her professor for an alternative assignment.

Petersen said he believes that his daughter’s assignment was to write the letter and also send it. (The Hechinger Report was not able to independently confirm this.)

Most faculty and education advocates, whatever their politics, agree that requiring her to send the letter would be inappropriate.

Mike Gavin, the president and CEO of the Alliance for Higher Education, said it is reasonable for a professor to ask a student to take on other perspectives during an in-class debate or in a written assignment. But it shouldn’t be taken outside the classroom. 

“In no way, shape or form should they be required to publicly sign their names to something. That would be very problematic,” Gavin said. “That, I think, would be a personnel issue that an institution should handle. That is not an academic freedom issue. That is actually using students for things that are political.” 

And, he said, in 30 years in higher education he’s never heard of it happening. 

Gavin said he thinks it’s unnecessary to give students such broad permission to opt out of coursework that conflicts with their beliefs. There are cases in which it’s appropriate, but those already come up and are handled on a case-by-case basis between professors and students, he said. 

“It’s entirely probable — I say this facetiously and also seriously — that a freshman in college doesn’t know everything yet,” Gavin said. “They need to engage with ideas they have not come across. Even if they end up being uncomfortable for a minute, that doesn’t mean that they’re traumatized.” 

Related: Conservative-leaning civic centers now teach courses at public colleges 

Outside of Utah, many people might gawk at the idea of students opting out of coursework that makes them feel uncomfortable, and worry about the broader implications of such a policy. But among Utahns, there seem to be wider-ranging and more nuanced perspectives.

It’s partly because they’ve been down this road before. In 1998, a Mormon theater student at the University of Utah objected to reading a script with profanity. The student sued the university, accusing faculty of essentially pushing her out after she was given the choice to recite the lines as written or leave the program. 

A settlement agreement required the university to write a policy to deal with coursework objections related to sincerely held beliefs. But the policy still requires that students be able to understand and articulate ideas and theories that are important to the course, regardless of whether they agree with or believe them. The new law does away with that requirement. 

Related: High school speech and debate allows students to find common ground 

Sarah Projansky, the vice provost for faculty and academic affairs at the University of Utah and a professor of film and gender studies who has examined the representation of sexual violence in film and media, said she’s had students walk out of class film screenings during intense moments. If a student says they can’t watch a certain film, she says she works with them to find an alternative. 

“It’s not my business why a student can’t be there. Religion, sincerely held belief of conscience, memory, family memory. It doesn’t matter, they can’t be there,” Projansky said. “Anything that’s not pedagogically necessary is very easy to accommodate.”

Nicole Allen, a communications professor at Utah State, said she thought the law was “a solution in search of a problem,” given existing policies at public institutions and the fact that most professors are able to handle these issues on a case-by-case basis. 

Still, she thinks there’s no need for students to experience “gratuitous discomfort” in the name of academia, she said, as long as accommodations wouldn’t take away from the big-picture goals of the course. 

Although the law doesn’t concern what professors are allowed to teach, some worry that it could still influence academic freedom.

Reid, of PEN America, worries that faculty may overcorrect. They might leave controversial reading materials off their syllabuses or dodge subjects that tend to make students feel uncomfortable, in order to avoid consequences. Those range from the extra work of writing new assignments and test questions to the bureaucratic headache that comes with denying a request to, in the worst and least likely scenario, becoming caught up in a public controversy if a student takes issue with something they’re being taught. 

She said it makes sense that professors would not want to end up like Melissa McCoul, who was fired from Texas A&M University after a student recorded her teaching about gender identity, or Mel Curth, the graduate teaching assistant who lost her job at the University of Oklahoma after she failed a student who had turned in a poorly written psychology paper using only the Bible as a source. 

Related: Behind the turmoil of federal attacks on colleges, some states are coming after tenure 

Though students can now choose to opt out of coursework on difficult topics, many Utah public colleges go to great lengths to encourage them to do the opposite outside the classroom. Many institutions host regular forums where students can come together for facilitated conversations on controversial topics and engage with classmates who hold differing opinions. Often, the colleges offer free lunch to incentivize students to dig into tough topics. 

At Weber State, the dialogue programming is run by the Walker Institute of Politics and Public Service. On a recent Wednesday, a group of students, staff, and current and retired professors came together at a long, conference room table to discuss the war in Iran over sub sandwiches and chips. 

Strict rules protect the integrity of conversations: Everyone has to read the same article, there’s to be no use of tech devices and no note-taking, and nothing that is said should be shared outside that space. 

Leah A. Murray, the institute’s director and a professor of political science and philosophy, said the rules exist so that everyone feels comfortable speaking freely. (The group made an exception to the no note-taking rule for the reporter in the room.) 

Sometimes Murray selects the topic, but sometimes the topic comes from a student.

Adam Nichols, a 43-year-old junior who is studying to become a high school teacher, said he proposed the idea to Murray because he wanted to be able to talk about the Iran conflict with people in his life, but he felt he didn’t quite have the language to feel comfortable doing so.

When he’s been forced to reckon with his strongly held beliefs, both in class and in various Walker Institute Talks, he said, “It forces me to reassess other areas where I may have been wrong. And I would much rather be wrong and be corrected than to continue under those false pretenses.” 

Despite her appreciation for difficult conversations with people she doesn’t necessarily agree with, Murray sees value in making the types of accommodations in the law. Her views are informed by her own experience as a vegan, animal-loving undergraduate who opted to fulfill her science requirement with geology instead of biology to avoid having to dissect a pig.

“I was unwilling to do that,” Murray said. “It was a violation of my conscience at that time.”

She said that experience has also informed the way she handles difficult issues with her students. At the beginning of each term, she says, “If you’re going to go to hell for learning this, please drop this class.”

She delivers it just like that, she said, and her students always laugh. But she’s serious. 

“I don’t want to be responsible for your salvation being denied because you learn something in this class.”

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

This story about religious beliefs and college students 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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Public school is the first place most Americans meet democracy. It is also, for almost all of them, the last place they experience it without a vote. School boards are elected by adults, staffed by adults and run for adults. They make decisions every week about buildings full of young people who get no say.

That is starting to change, and the change is not going well in some places.

Consider what happened last month in Washington County, Tennessee. A student at David Crockett High School had just questioned her superintendent about middle school consolidation, career and technical education and graduation goals when board member Keith Ervin, several decades her senior, pulled her against him on camera.

“God, you’re hot,” he said. “Do you know that?”

The superintendent and the board chair laughed. Nobody intervened. The meeting moved on. Days later, the board unanimously voted to censure Ervin, the second time he has been censured for misconduct toward students. He has not resigned.

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

Tennessee began requiring most districts to seat student members on school boards in an advisory, nonvoting capacity this year. The student who asked those questions was doing exactly what the role was designed to do. The adults around her were not fulfilling their roles.

This is what it looks like when a country adds young people to rooms where decisions get made without first preparing the adults in those rooms to share power.

Student school board members aren’t new. In 1975, a sixteen-year-old named Anthony Arend was among the first student school board members with voting rights in the country, seated in Maryland’s Anne Arundel County Public Schools after lobbying state legislators himself. For decades, the practice spread slowly. That is changing fast.

Currently, more than 33 U.S. states have laws that allow boards to include student members. As my colleagues and I detailed, 14 percent of the 495 largest U.S. school districts have students on school boards, and more than 400 students are currently serving on state advisory councils or boards of education. According to an informal tally kept by the National Student Board Member Association, which one of us co-founded, roughly 1,500 student members now serve on school boards, representing more than 20 million students. New York passed a law in 2024 requiring a student position on every school board with a high school. Minnesota, Nebraska and Vermont have introduced similar legislation.

Related: STUDENT VOICE: School boards are a critical piece of democracy. That’s why students must be on them

This should be quiet good news for anyone worried about American democracy. Granting seats to students treats young people as participants in their own governance, not just its subjects. Self-government must be practiced somewhere, and the school district — the civic institution young people already know best — is a reasonable place to start.

In some districts, student members are treated as colleagues. In others, as props or, worse, as targets.

When a student member of Maryland’s Howard County Board of Education cast a deciding vote on pandemic school closures in 2020, the response was online harassment, a bill to gut the position and a federal lawsuit. He kept his seat. The lesson: When a student’s voice carries real weight, adults push back.

In Alaska’s Mat-Su Borough, a student representative named Ben Kolendo pressed colleagues on how they were hand-picking a library committee. The board stripped him of his title, his vote and most of his speaking rights, reducing his role to a “brief report” at the start of each meeting.

Last month in Hernando County, Florida, board members debated eliminating their student delegate position due to an Islamophobic social media campaign harassing the student board member. The student member disagreed: “As the student representative who was attacked, I do not believe that removing this role would do anything positive.”

These moments are stress tests, revealing how adults respond when students move from symbolic participation to actual governance.

But backlash is not the only story. Mac Duis of the University of Lynchburg studied 68 recorded school board meetings across 12 Virginia districts — six with student members, six without. Boards with a student at the table had fewer confrontational exchanges and more civil ones.

Why does student presence on school boards sometimes provoke a backlash and other times promote civility? We believe it is not only about the student, but also the conditions under which that student exercises power. Too many school boards add students without supporting the role.

Related: COLUMN: How student school board members are driving climate action

Go back to Tennessee. The Washington County board that laughed has four student members on paper. Only one sits on the dais at a time, in an advisory, unpaid, nonvoting role, appointed by the principal, with no required training.

Districts serious about this role know what it requires: student elections, yearlong terms of office, district-funded training, voting power and protections for minors sharing a dais with adults twice their age.

As the Washington County student representative argued, districts with student representatives must adopt policies that require board members to be trained in “sexual assault and appropriate conduct.”

The stakes are bigger than any single district. For most Americans, the school board is the last democratic institution they watch up close before losing interest entirely. If the only lesson we teach young people is that adults will laugh when one of them gets hit on, or that the student vote will be stripped as soon as a student asks a hard question, they will draw the obvious conclusion and stop participating.

Student members will not fix American school governance. But early research suggests that boards that include a student can spend less time fighting among themselves and more time talking about the students they serve.

For years, we have given young people ceremonial titles and asked them to plan dances. It is past time to ask them to help run the institution. If school districts aren’t willing to give student board members real power, they should not create these positions at all. Otherwise, they risk leaving young people even less confident in the democracy we are about to inherit.

A nonvoting seat rotated monthly and handed out by the superintendent is not representation. It is a photo op.

Andrew Brennen is a third-year student at Columbia Law School and holds a master’s degree in education policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is the co-founder of the Kentucky Student Voice Team. Zachary Patterson co-founded the National Student Board Member Association after serving as a student member of the San Diego Unified School District Board of Education. He is a student at Duke University.

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.

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Parents and educators intuitively know the many benefits of singing and music for young children. It’s why children learn the alphabet through song, PBS’ Daniel Tiger sings to teach emotional regulation, and lullabies are used to lull babies to sleep. 

But there is also a growing body of research backing a link between music and brain development  — specifically, reading skills. Studies have found that singing helps children learn vocabulary and identify sounds in words, known as phonological awareness. Listening to music also reduces anxiety and supports bonding between caregivers and children, research shows. Playing instruments has been found to strengthen fine motor control and executive function.   

Experts say making more time for music in early childhood classrooms could be a way to improve child outcomes, especially at a time when reading scores have stalled post-pandemic.  

“Increasingly in early childhood education, if you look at the requirements, we’re urging literacy and mathematical competence,” said Dennie Palmer Wolf, a principal researcher at the research and consultancy group WolfBrown, and author of a recent report with Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute on how music affects child development. “Visual arts, dance, music get pushed to the side.”

When it comes to access to music, opportunities are uneven and limited for many children. In the earliest years, exposure to the arts is largely contingent on the capacity and resources of parents or caregivers. And although almost anyone can sing or chant, many caregivers lack confidence in their musical abilities, Palmer Wolf said. Children’s music classes can be costly, and access to free options, like those at public libraries, varies greatly by community. 

In some states, nonprofits are trying to close the gap by bringing music programs into places already frequented by families and young children. In Minnesota, the MacPhail Center for Music, a music school that serves thousands of students a year in the Twin Cities, has partnered with local health clinics to offer free parent-child music classes.

In Houston, the Prelude Music Foundation offers free music classes in local early childhood programs, with an emphasis on underserved communities. And in New York City, the Weill Music Institute has launched music initiatives in child care programs, public hospitals and correctional facilities to encourage parents to sing and make music with their children.

Another state-funded project in Minnesota provided $600,000 for an intervention called Tune Into Reading. From 2016-2021, children in 25 of the state’s elementary schools used karaoke-like software that encouraged more singing. 

“Singing is natural, it precedes talking,” said Ann C. Kay, co-founder and education coordinator of the project. By encouraging more singing, Kay said, teachers can “develop young brains for reading.” The program, run by a nonprofit called the Rock ‘n’ Read Project, was used for 14 hours over a span of 12 to 16 weeks. A report to the legislature after the program concluded said that children who participated made notable literacy gains. 

The program has shifted to bringing more music to early childhood classrooms by educating educators and parents on the literacy-related effects of music and singing. This year, the Rock ‘n’ Read Project is partnering with four Head Start pre-K classrooms in Minneapolis to train teachers and encourage daily singing and basic music skills, like beats, rhythm and pitch. By introducing music early, Kay says the program hopes to build early literacy skills and ultimately close reading achievement gaps.

“Auditory processing is the key to language and literacy,” Kay said. “This is how it starts.”

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Online shopping. Smartphones with 5G. Meal delivery. Instantaneous access to information. 

So much of the world has speeded up. But college seems to take forever.

Now change may be coming to long-standing practices that slow students down.

Some colleges and the accreditors and states that oversee them are adding and approving three-year bachelor’s degrees that require fewer credits than the traditional four-year kind.

Institutions facing enrollment declines hope the new three-year degrees will attract students unwilling to spend the usual amount of time and money that it takes to graduate. States need those graduates to fill jobs.

Nearly 60 universities and colleges are planning, considering or have already launched reduced-credit, three-year bachelor’s degrees in some disciplines. They’re calling them “applied” or “career-focused” bachelor’s degrees. 

Related: Faster, thinner: Colleges are swiftly trimming a B.A. degree to three years

At least one school, Ensign College in Utah, has announced that it will change all of its bachelor’s degrees into three-year programs requiring 90 instead of the usual 120 credits.

States including North Dakota and Massachusetts have approved this new approach, and Indiana and some others have required or are considering requiring their public universities to add them. 

Students are increasingly impatient with the time they have to spend to get a bachelor’s degree — and the resulting cost. More than half of college students need more than four years to finish one, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

Some are derailed by personal complications. But many colleges also slow them down by failing to provide enough of the courses students are required to complete, declining to accept their transfer credits, refusing to recognize work experience and holding back academic transcripts over even small unpaid bills.

Related: Students can’t get into basic college courses, dragging out their time in school

That means not only taking longer and paying more for a degree, but waiting longer to start earning a full-time income.

Growing numbers of students have taken matters into their own hands. They’re collecting credits in dual enrollment and Advanced Placement classes during high school and loading up their schedules in college with more courses. More than 7 million of them have been taking classes in the summers.

While earning bachelor’s degrees with fewer credits may appeal to some students, the idea is so new that there’s a key unanswered question: whether employers, graduate schools and licensing agencies will accept them. 

Related: Momentum builds behind a way to lower the cost of college: A degree in three years

In a survey, one institution that is offering reduced-credit, three-year degrees — Johnson & Wales University — found support among employers. But graduate school admissions officers in a separate survey by a consortium of colleges said almost unanimously that they wouldn’t accept applicants with bachelor’s degrees of fewer than 120 credits.

There was an important footnote, though: The admissions officers at those graduate schools said they would revisit that policy as more reduced-credit undergraduate degrees are being introduced. 

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.

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This story was produced by the Associated Press, in partnership with Chalkbeat and AL.com, and reprinted with permission. 

MODESTO, Calif. – Before every important test, teacher Nancy Barajas dims the lights, turns on a disco ball and blasts music from her playlist. Her sixth graders dance together as a “pre-celebration” to boost their confidence, then take their exam.

Lately, there’s been a lot to celebrate in elementary schools in Modesto, California. Both reading and math scores have increased consistently over the past several years. 

But across the country, results are gloomier. Researchers warn that the U.S. is experiencing a reading recession — a slide predating the pandemic’s disruptions in schooling.

Scholars at Harvard, Stanford and Dartmouth analyzed state test scores from third to eighth grade for over 5,000 school districts in 38 states, allowing comparisons across school districts and states in a national Education Scorecard.

What they found was sobering: Only five states plus the District of Columbia had meaningful growth in reading test scores from 2022 to 2025. Nationally, students remain nearly half a grade level behind pre-pandemic reading scores and only slightly better in math.

While schools have focused on catching kids up since the Covid-19 pandemic upended education, reading test scores have been falling since 2013 for eighth graders and 2015 for fourth graders, according to the National Assessment for Educational Progress.

“The pandemic was the mudslide that had followed seven years of steady erosion in achievement,” said Thomas Kane, a Harvard professor who helped create the Education Scorecard.

Still, some states and school districts are making progress — largely by shifting toward phonics-based instruction and providing extra support for struggling readers.

The picture is also brighter in math. 

Almost every state in the analysis saw improvements in math test scores from 2022 to 2025. Student absenteeism also declined in most states. In over 400 U.S. school districts, including Modesto, reading or math growth outpaced demographically similar districts in the same state. 

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

Researchers are still debating the reading recession’s causes. 

One possible factor, researchers say, is the rise of social media on smartphones and corresponding declines in kids’ recreational reading. States have also backed off on strict consequences for schools whose students fail to make progress on standardized tests, Kane said.

But the states that improved reading scores — notably Louisiana, Maryland, Tennessee, Kentucky and Indiana — all had one thing in common: They ordered schools to teach with a phonics-based approach known as the “science of reading.” 

For years, schools taught reading using approaches that de-emphasized phonics and encouraged strategies such as guessing words based on context clues. As reading scores tumbled over the past decade, parents, scholars and literacy advocates pushed for teaching methods that align with decades of research about how kids learn to read — largely by sounding out words.

Along with reforming teaching methods, states have also required schools to screen for learning disabilities such as dyslexia and hire coaches to help teachers improve their reading instruction.

That said, “science of reading” reforms did not guarantee success. Some states, including Florida, Arizona and Nebraska, changed parts of their reading instruction but still saw test scores fall.

In Modesto, reading instruction was revamped during the pandemic, and math a couple years earlier. The district created a new department to help students who are still learning English. Schools also ramped up teacher training, paying educators $5,000 to complete an extensive “science of reading” program called LETRS, or Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling.

Modesto’s test scores grew enough to represent an extra 18 weeks of learning in math and 13 weeks in reading. Nevertheless, the district still has a way to go: Overall scores remain far below grade level.

Related: With reading scores slipping, Massachusetts is changing course. Some teachers aren’t happy

A focus on reading has also improved scores in Detroit — but so have efforts to get kids in school more consistently. For years, the large urban district struggled with deplorable school conditions, leading to a 2016 lawsuit in which students argued they’d been denied the “right to read.” 

The lawsuit ended in a settlement of over $94 million, money that helped move the needle. While the district is still far below the national average, student test scores have grown faster than in similar urban districts in Michigan. 

“It took a lot to rebuild systems, and now kids are learning at higher levels, but I’m still not satisfied. And I think that’s the next challenge: continuing to motivate, inspire and change things,” said Detroit Superintendent Nikolai Vitti. 

The money has helped Munger Elementary-Middle School, located in a largely Latino neighborhood in Detroit, to employ 18 educators who give kids extra support in small groups. An attendance agent also makes calls to the homes of absent students, even showing up at their doors.

Just a few years ago, says first grade teacher Samantha Ciaffone, it was normal for about seven or eight kids to be absent from her class every day. Now it’s usually only one or two. 

“It allows us to be better educators to see kids consistently in the seat instead of once or twice a week,” said Ciaffone. “It makes such a difference.”

Related: Southern states boost early reading, but gains stall in middle school

For the last decade, the South has stood out as a region leading the way on education reforms — bucking an established trend of landing at the bottom of education rankings. Southern states were quick to change to research-based teaching methods, and states have paid to train and coach teachers. 

It's paid off. Louisiana and Alabama were the only states where math scores were higher in 2025 than pre-pandemic. Louisiana is also the only state that beat its pre-pandemic average in reading, with 87 percent of traditional public school students attending a district where scores are higher than in 2019. 

"I've used my pulpit to preach a back-to-the-basics approach to education,” said Cade Brumley, Louisiana’s superintendent of education. “We're not trying to chase every new and shiny thing that's out there that could distract students and teachers.”

Alabama had standout gains in reading following the pandemic, driven by a state law requiring every school to use phonics-based instruction. The Legislature modeled math reforms in 2022 off Alabama's reading successes. The state’s Numeracy Act standardized math instruction, required regular testing and mandated intervention for kids who lacked adequate math skills.

Oxmoor Valley Elementary in Birmingham hired a full-time math specialist this year to help struggling kids. The school, which made the state’s “failing” list in 2016, has steadily improved math and reading scores, although a majority of kids still test below proficient in both subjects.

“We can provide all of these supports, but at the same time, hold kids to high expectations,” Birmingham Superintendent Mark Sullivan said.

Researchers stress such progress is possible across the U.S., because it’s been done before. Starting in the 1990s, the country saw decades of growth in test scores and graduation rates, while racial disparities declined. That progress continued until the mid-2010s.

“We made enormous progress as a country in terms of educational success from over a 30-year period. Test scores went up dramatically,” said Stanford professor Sean Reardon. “And so I think that says, as a country, we can improve education and educational opportunity.”

At Modesto's Fairview Elementary, where Barajas teaches, students now practice their reading speed and fluency every day. After a dance break, the class reads a one-page text together in unison for one minute, then students split into pairs to read again. Students learning English are paired with native English speakers, and each child gets a turn reading with Barajas.

“Eventually, you get through the word like it’s water,” one boy said. “You just say it smooth.”

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

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