NIAGARA FALLS, N.Y. — For the last year, Niagara Falls High School senior Ciara Johnson has ripped up tile, torn out walls and built custom cabinets in her high school construction class. To get a taste of each of the trades, the students here have been renovating the former cafeteria kitchen in the old high school campus downtown, a once bustling area now marked by vacant storefronts.

Ideally, the seniors will graduate this summer and get a job or, like Johnson, enroll in a trade school that will lead to a career. In a community where fewer students are enrolling in college, the construction class presents a slate of opportunities that don’t require a degree. It wasn’t until her class poured and paved hundreds of pounds of concrete to build a pavilion in a local park her junior year that Johnson realized she enjoyed the meditative nature of working with cement.

“It just clicked to me: ‘Maybe I should do this,’” Johnson said.

At Niagara Falls High School, students are encouraged to consider their careers upon arrival in ninth grade. By 11th grade, every student at the school must pick from one of five pathways, ranging from business and finance to design and engineering. The shift toward career education comes as about one-third of seniors at Niagara Falls High are rejecting college and instead choosing to enter the workforce after graduation, compared with roughly a quarter a decade ago, said Superintendent Mark Laurrie, who retired in June. In a town that’s struggled with population declines, where now-shuttered manufacturing plants once dominated the local labor market, there’s an urgency to prepare high school students for careers. 

“It’s important to give them hope for the future with a career pathway — a career, not a job — to have something to aspire to and, hopefully, keep them in the city and in the state,” Laurrie said.

Across the country, a growing number of communities are contending with population declines, driven, in part, by dropping birth rates and tighter restrictions on immigration. More than half of all counties in the U.S. lost population from 2010 to 2020. Enrollment in higher education, too, has sunk nationally, down about 1.5 million students since 2010 as the cost of tuition has risen and more families question the value of a college degree. 

The students graduating from college now are also entering a difficult labor market, spurred by uncertainty around tariffs, inflation and how artificial intelligence might disrupt jobs. In communities where population is trending down, there’s an added pressure for schools to better prepare students to leave high school able to enter the workforce, said Emily Passias, deputy executive director of Advance CTE, a nonprofit that represents state career and technical education leaders.  

“There are a lot of communities across the country where the local opportunities for great jobs are evolving,” Passias said. “We see a lot of communities trying to very intentionally look at their labor market conditions,” she added, “and prepare young people for those types of roles.”

At Niagara Falls High, that means every class is tailored to a career, such as English 435, “Writing for the Workforce,” or a class where students study science through the lens of natural disasters and public policy. Electives, too, all serve a larger purpose at the school: Students interested in law school or law enforcement might take a new elective course called “Street Law.”

“If we understand that not every kid is geared for college, that makes the high school experience and below all the more important,” Laurrie said. 

Related: Schools push ‘career ed for all,’ even kids going to college

Niagara Falls, a community defined by its natural wonders, attracts millions of tourists each year to view waterfalls that rank among the largest by volume in the world. More than 3,100 tons of water plunge over the cliffs each second in Niagara Falls State Park, the oldest state park in America. 

As manufacturing plants have closed and jobs have shifted over the past seven decades, the waterfalls are steadfast. Hospitality and tourism has eclipsed manufacturing as the largest industry, said Dawn Cody, senior employment and training coordinator for Niagara County. 

That shift has had consequences for the community, which was hit hard when tourism plummeted during the pandemic. Last year, tense relations between the U.S. and Canada led to a 21 percent drop in border crossings from Canada into New York, or about 3.4 million fewer tourists than normal. The Niagara Falls USA Visitor Center said visits were down 27 percent. 

The dramatic drop in immigration could also have consequences not only in Niagara Falls, but in the broader Western New York region, said Timothy Glass, a state labor market analyst for the area. Buffalo, which sits about 20 miles south of Niagara Falls, reversed a 70-year population decline on the 2020 Census because of immigration into the city. With immigration in the U.S. dropping drastically more recently, it’s unclear whether that trend will continue.

“Buffalo has been increasing in population and steady in unemployment; Niagara Falls, however, has still struggled,” Glass said.

While the Canadian side of Niagara Falls has been growing its population, the number of residents on the American side has been cut in half over the last 60 years, from more than 100,000 people in 1960 to fewer than 50,000 residents today. The decline of manufacturing plants stems from many companies moving production overseas, where costs are lower, Glass said. Fewer employment opportunities is a major reason many families in the town moved elsewhere to find jobs.

Related: Do career ‘pathways’ work? Delaware offers early clues

Niagara Falls High principal Bryan Rotella grew up a few blocks off Pine Avenue, a downtown neighborhood affectionately known as Little Italy for the lively restaurants and stores that once lined it. He’s witnessed much of Niagara Falls’ changing landscape. 

“The Como Restaurant, this was a staple, and now it’s closed,” said Rotella, gesturing toward the bright red sign still hanging on the storefront. “My grandma worked here for 50 years. Places like that are where people had their banquets, their weddings, things like that. Those cornerstone places are gone now.” 

Vacant buildings with signs that say “office space available” are scattered among the businesses that remain. The shuttered storefronts are another reminder that students who graduate from Niagara Falls High School have fewer employment options in the town than graduates did decades ago.

Student enrollment in the Niagara Falls City School District, too, has gone down, dropping from about 7,500 students in 2006 to fewer than 6,500 today. After the Covid pandemic, the school district ramped up its efforts to focus on the career options students do have, preparing them for jobs both local and far. In 2023, the principal announced that every junior and senior in the school must choose a career pathway. Since then, the high school has refined its course catalog so that each class falls into five career categories: visual performing arts; business, finance and entrepreneurship; computer science and information technology; design, engineering and construction; and human services.

Within those categories, guidance counselors push students to pick classes related to a specific career. Just over half of the students at Niagara Falls High choose human services, a broad pathway that includes careers like teacher, law enforcement officer and attorney, among others. Other pathways include careers where students will likely have to leave Niagara Falls, in biotechnology and mechanical engineering.

“We start doing career interest inventories in ninth and 10th grade to start exposing them to what’s out there,” Rotella said.

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

There’s a delicate tension high schools must balance — students should be exposed to careers but also have the opportunity to explore outside of a rigid pathway, said Jerre Maynor, senior director of solutions design and delivery at Jobs for the Future, a nonprofit that advocates for workforce solutions. Students who don’t plan on enrolling in college after graduation may change their minds later, meaning programs should prepare them for both paths.

Despite college enrollment numbers dropping and surveys that show more people are questioning the value of a higher education degree, 72 percent of jobs will require some level of postsecondary education by 2031, according to a 2024 report from Georgetown’s Center on Education and Workforce. Overall, jobs that require degrees tend to pay better, too, though salaries vary significantly by career and degree.

Niagara Falls High has been trying to address those demands by adding “dual credit” options to pathways that historically haven’t had them — 62 of the high school’s courses offer students the chance to simultaneously earn college credit, including classes like criminal justice for students in the law enforcement path, through a partnership with the State University of New York Niagara, the local community college. Staff in the school’s postsecondary success office, which was created in 2021, have also been working to increase the number of employers willing to offer internships to high school students.

Students in a pre-med or biomedical research pathway can apply for a three-week summer internship at the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo. For major industries that don’t offer internship opportunities, like the nearby aerospace propulsion company Moog or the manufacturing company Voss, counselors and teachers have been coordinating day trips so students can get a glimpse of what a career there might be like.

“As a public education institution, we have a moral obligation to graduate kids that not only get a degree, but have a pathway choice where they’ve had some exposure and some work to their next phase of life,” Laurrie said.

What students do with these experiences when they graduate from Niagara Falls High is up to them. The staff knows some students will leave the community for different opportunities. Johnson — whose construction class is helping transform the old high school campus into an arts and cultural center — hopes that a career in cement masonry will take her beyond Niagara Falls.

“There’s a lot of job opportunities in the world — why stay in one place?” Johnson said.

Others said they want to stay to be a part of the revitalization of the only town they’ve called home.

In the waning days of the school year in June, senior Leo Nadrowski was planning for the seventh annual Soap Box Derby held in honor of his dad, an elementary school safety officer who started the event and who died in 2022. The event always draws hundreds of participants to watch children race in hand-made soap box cars. Nadrowski’s evenings are often filled with events like this. On a Monday evening in June, he went to the baseball game of a student his mom teaches in her elementary school classroom. A local pizzeria brought food, and bystanders walking their dogs joined the crowd.

“People say, ‘You don’t want to live in Niagara Falls because it’s bad.’ What I saw yesterday, it looked like you could have been filming a movie,” Nadrowski said. “It was the American Dream.”

High school senior Emily Webber has always wanted to work in schools. Specifically, she wants to work in schools in Niagara Falls, where she’s lived her whole life. 

When Webber finished her final classes at the high school in June this year, she left with 25 hours of experience in elementary classrooms, thanks to the high school’s internship program. She also had enough credits to shave about a year off her college coursework, putting her on a fast track to a teaching degree.

Her plan is to save tuition money by getting her associate degree in teaching at SUNY Niagara before transferring to a master’s program in Buffalo, where she’ll also be able to complete her bachelor’s degree. 

She doesn’t want to stay out of Niagara Falls for long, though. Despite the town’s long-term population declines, she believes in the spirit of the community to rebuild.

“With the right assistance, I think we can bring Niagara Falls back,” Webber said.

Contact staff writer Ariel Gilreath on Signal at arielgilreath.46 or at gilreath@hechingerreport.org.

This story about career options 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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Two days before the sweltering July 4 weekend, Martina Meijer, a New York City elementary teacher who occasionally substitutes over the summer, covered a class. The city’s summer school program had just begun and that day temperatures reached 100 degrees. 

“Even though the AC was on, it wasn’t working very well,” said Meijer. “There was no programming, no schedule, no plans shared.”  

For four hours straight, Meijer and her students remained in the classroom. The stifling heat drained their energy, leaving them lethargic and making it difficult to focus. When she called the main office to ask if she could take them to the gym or outside for recess, school officials told her the weather was too hazardous, she said. They instructed her to stay in the classroom and give her class of 15 students indoor movement activities — commonly known as “brain breaks” — by following YouTube tutorials.

While many school districts prioritize placing students and staff in schools with air conditioning during summer programming, the blistering temperatures around the country sometimes mean it’s not enough. Problems like malfunctioning air conditioners still persist, and cooling systems have their limits during periods of intense heat like this July’s heat dome. 

Climate change is increasingly testing the limits of how summer programs — when students take part in enrichment activities or remediation — can ensure academic needs are met while keeping students safe from the blazing heat.

Federal regulations that would protect workers like teachers from heat illnesses by mandating water breaks, rest periods and areas to cool off, have stalled for the foreseeable future. 

In recent weeks, schools in major cities and rural communities alike have had to end classes early, close or completely restructure daily activities. 

Kristen Hengtgen, the program director of UndauntedK12, a national organization committed to reducing carbon emissions in K-12 schools, said that many educators rely on temporary or improvised solutions whenever possible.*

“Smaller things that we are seeing now, like moving indoors, moving to air‑conditioned spaces, having hydration breaks and cooling periods when temperatures are unsafe, flexible scheduling, doing stuff earlier in the day — I think that will continue to happen,” said Hengtgen.

When classrooms become overheated or outdoor recess gets canceled, students struggle to focus and learn. Excessive heat impairs cognitive performance, putting students who need extra academic support during the summer at an even greater disadvantage.

“A lot of the kids in summer school may already be having academic challenges,” said Elizabeth Bechard, public health manager at Moms Clean Air Force, an environmental advocacy group dedicated to protecting children from the effects of climate change. “Asking them to catch up with their learning in very suboptimal learning conditions, when it’s too hot to learn, is not going to help so much.”

Related: The heat is on: As climate change threatens student athlete safety, states try to adapt

Children are especially vulnerable to heat-related illnesses compared to adults. This is because their thermal regulation systems are still developing. They tend to sweat less and breathe faster, Bechard said. And for those without air conditioning at home, the risks are higher for both their physical well-being and their ability to learn effectively.

“If students are going to schools that don’t have air conditioning, and then coming home to homes that also don’t have air conditioning, there’s no chance for the body to really rest and recover,” said Bechard.

On the last day of school in early June, the Philadelphia School District dismissed students early at 52 insufficiently air-conditioned schools due to extreme heat.

“When the mercury climbs above 85-90 degrees, we either send students home early or move those schools to virtual days,” said Tony Watlington Sr., the superintendent of the School District of Philadelphia.

Teachers are also trained to ensure children aren’t exposed to conditions that could lead to dehydration or heat stroke, he said.

“Our teachers do a really good job of using professional judgment and not having kids out in 90‑degree heat with that sun barreling down on what we sometimes refer to as concrete deserts,” Watlington said. 

Without professional training or clear guidelines, however, some families worry about leaving critical heat safety decisions up to teachers.

In late June, parents in Virginia’s Alexandria City Public Schools received an advisory letter outlining precautions for staff during an anticipated heat wave, when experts warned the heat index could reach 112 degrees. School officials urged staff to restrict outdoor activities and remain vigilant for signs of heat exhaustion. 

“I feel like it’s a mix of mostly saying the right things, but it’s also dependent on the discretion of various adults,” said one parent, who requested anonymity to maintain her privacy. “We have no idea what level of training they have — like, ‘Be aware of the signs of heat exhaustion and heat stroke’ is great, but how do we know people are?”

Related: Extreme heat is changing when students go back to school

Higher temperatures are also sparking and intensifying the frequency of wildfires. 

In mid July, Canadian wildfires clogged the skies with a thick haze of smoke, forcing programs like Summer Rising in New York City to move all outdoor activities for thousands of students inside. 

While periodic indoor movement breaks keep students engaged throughout the day, they fall short of helping them release energy or recharge in the way outdoor play provides. 

Research shows that recess improves academic outcomes, social development and emotional regulation. If students can’t expend their energy outdoors, it can hinder their development.

“There’s this horrible chicken-or-egg situation that teachers have, which is: Kids really need to get out and run around, especially younger kids,” said V. Kelly Turner, a heat researcher and professor at UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. “If they don’t get their energy out outside, they can’t focus on their schoolwork inside. But if they’re outside roasting, then they can’t focus inside either.” 

Nathan Cruz, a parent whose 6-year-old daughter attends Sharp Avenue Elementary School in Los Angeles, feels the weight of this predicament. 

“Sometimes [the kids] forget to drink water, could get dehydrated, and there’s been conditions, like nosebleeds,” said Cruz. 

On especially grueling days during the school year, when temperatures climb to triple digits, Cruz said children in the after-school program remain inside the school’s auditorium.

“It’s a lot of kids and it gets tight,” said Cruz. “It can be a challenge because you can’t keep them indoors every day, even though the weather could be over 95 degrees for over two to three weeks at a time.” 

Schools in the Northeast, like Philadelphia, face similar challenges and were not built to handle unusual and prolonged stretches of extreme heat. 

A 2021 study by the Center for Climate Integrity, an environmental group that helps communities hold fossil fuel companies accountable, found that over 13,000 public schools nationwide — many built in a different climate era — would require $40 billion to install HVAC systems. In the Northeast, states that didn’t require air conditioning in the past — like Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont — need it today. 

On average, public schools in the United States are nearing 50 years old, which means they require major structural upgrades to install proper HVAC systems and improve airflow. Philadelphia’s school buildings are even older — 73 years old, on average. 

“Because it’s an old city and we have a lot of old buildings, we can’t go and just drop air conditioners in all of the windows,” Watlington said. “People ask all the time, ‘Why don’t you just put some $100 air‑conditioning units from Home Depot or Lowe’s and call it a day?’ It’s not that simple.”

Related: Want to read more about how climate change is shaping education? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

During the July 4 week that summer school classes proceeded in New York City, schools in Washington, D.C., canceled all outdoor programs, citing the high temperatures. 

One district suspended bus routes because its buses lacked air conditioning. Smaller districts, like Joliet Public Schools in Illinois, switched to remote instruction, while the Central Falls School District in Rhode Island shut down all summer programs. 

In the Midwest, the Madison Metropolitan School District in Wisconsin also canceled summer school for elementary students when meteorologists projected temperatures to feel as hot as 108 degrees.

Scott Chehak, senior executive director of building services at the Madison Metropolitan School District, said the district tracks weather forecasts to assess heat risks. 

“If it does hit an extreme weather warning or extreme heat warning, we tend to close schools if we see it coming,” said Chehak. “Sometimes we’ll have calls on the weekends with our executive staff just to make sure that we’re looking ahead.”

They also designate larger, air-conditioned spaces, such as gyms and libraries, as “cooling centers” where students rotate throughout the day. There, children have access to fans, extra hydration centers and specialized cooling towels.

Chehak said they train their staff to look for signs that a child might be overheating, especially for students who might be underprepared for hotter weather. 

“Are they starting to lose attention? Does it feel like they’re warming up? You can tell by human behavior,” said Chehak.

For 14 years, Denisha Jordan, a veteran physical education teacher, worked in one of the hottest regions in Los Angeles at a high school in the San Fernando Valley, where she constantly monitored signs of heat exhaustion. 

“When it comes to the high heat, you see more heat illnesses,” said Jordan. “Their skin will be cherry red. [There’s] profuse sweating, even when the kids aren’t doing anything.”

During her entire time there, the gym and locker rooms never had air conditioning, Jordan said. Outside, beneath the relentless sun, she recalls a student showing her the melted soles of his shoes after playing basketball on the playground’s scorching asphalt. 

“If it’s 80 degrees outside, our blacktop can easily reach 90 degrees and above,” said Jordan. “I would go and put my hands down and see how long I could keep my hands on there, and if I couldn’t keep my hands on there, then I would know that we’d have to be on the grass that day.”

As summers intensify and heat waves creep into the fall months, Hengtgen from Undaunted K12 believes schools will need to create long-term action plans, rather than ad hoc, one-off emergency responses, even during summer school when temperatures are at their highest. 

“Sometimes things like an extreme heat plan may seem fluffy or extra when we have a literacy crisis,” said Hengtgen. “But we are threatening the mission of public education if we can’t provide buildings that are safe and comfortable and healthy spaces for kids to learn and for teachers to teach.”

* Correction: This sentence has been updated to correct Kristen Hengtgen’s job title.

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

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

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For as long as anyone remembers, no childcare center on Kauaʻi has had a single opening for an infant or toddler. Not one.

On this tropical island lush with vegetation, the childcare landscape is desolate. Kauaʻi is the only major Hawaiian island that has gone without center-based infant and toddler care for most of the past 15 years if not more — the data just doesn’t go back any further. 

There are spots on the island’s military base, but those are reserved for military families. There have historically been about 22 licensed home-based childcare centers that could also take infants and toddlers, but they’re limited to only two children under 18 months; most choose to only have one infant or none at all. That amounts to about 10 to 14 seats for the 700 babies who are born on the island every year. And hiring a nanny on Kaua’i is a prohibitive cost for many: The going rate is between $35 and $40 an hour. 

On the mainland, if parents are in a childcare desert, they often get around it by driving to the next nearest town or moving neighborhoods to be near family. On Kauaʻi, there’s nowhere to go without leaving the tiny island behind. So parents have made it work because they had to. Families living intergenerationally relied on each other to help with the care. Grandmas and aunties stepped in to help. Moms took their kids to work with them or they found a job that they could do from home to give them more flexibility. In many cases, moms left the labor force altogether. 

This has gone on so long that it has become an accepted way of life. 

Across Hawai’i, more than half of parents report leaving their jobs due to childcare challenges, according to a 2025 survey by the Chamber of Commerce Hawai’i. On Kauaʻi, “it is a very stressful situation, and in most cases it’s going to be the mother that has to to quit her job and stay at home and it puts on an additional burden to the family financially,” said Carol Wear, the executive director of PATCH, Hawai’i’s childcare resource and referral agency.  

The situation came to a head during the pandemic, which decimated the scant childcare options on Kaua’i. Five home-based childcare centers had shuttered by 2023. Families’ finances got tighter after the island’s top industry, tourism, shut down for much of 2020. An already unwieldy housing affordability problem ballooned. Fewer families could afford to have one parent home not working to care for their child. 

Faced with a need that was growing more desperate, the island’s first known infant and toddler spots opened up by 2024. The Kauaʻi Montessori Project, a preschool in Līhuʻe, the county seat, opened 12 infant and toddler spots thanks to some grant funding that came through during the pandemic. Then an Early Head Start center serving the lowest-income children — the island’s first — opened in 2025 with eight infant and toddler spots. Coming soon is a third center, a renovated grocery store space, that the county decided to turn solely into an infant-toddler center in response to the need. It will open with 32 seats for kids ages 6 weeks to 3 years old early next year. 

That brings the count of infant-toddler spots to about 30 currently — still only enough for about 4 percent of the island’s infants. For the Head Start center, the kids on that waitlist alone could fill three more centers, said Novelyn Hinazumi, the director of Kauaʻi programs at Child & Family Service, the nonprofit that operates Head Start programs on the island. 

“This shortage has placed enormous strain on families, contributed to workforce loss and increased community awareness of the need for systemic change,” said Natasha Perry, the county’s early childhood coordinator. 

For moms, it has put into question whether their families can continue to live on Kauaʻi at all. 

Aakara Wiegand, a single mom of a 2-year-old who has lived in Hawai’i for 15 years, has to take her daughter with her to work at a rental car company. With her other business running wellness retreats, she can only do about half as many events because she can barely manage it with her toddler. 

The nanny rates are unaffordable, Wiegand said. And even finding a nanny at the last minute is difficult. She had one nanny lined up for an upcoming colonoscopy, but the nanny had to travel, so Wiegand was forced to cancel her appointment. 

It has put severe strain on her life, she said: “I have basically stopped doing things.” 

Even more complicated is the fact that her toddler is receiving early intervention services for her speech and social emotional development. The very few options on the island don’t often cater to children who need additional support, Wiegand said. Last year, she was able to get her daughter a spot at a daycare, but she only lasted there four days. “She just couldn’t emotionally fit in that group, but it was the only option available. So that was frustrating at that time,” Wiegand said.

With no family or support on the island, Wiegand is starting to research a move to North Carolina in the next year. Becoming a parent has changed her experience on Kaua’i.

“It’s just not a very sustainable environment anymore,” she said. “It’s definitely taken a toll on me.”

Part of how Kauaʻi found itself with such a severe infant and toddler care shortage is a familiar story. In Kauaʻi, like much of the country, infant and toddler spots are harder to offer because no one makes money from them. Per Hawai’i’s licensing rules, there needs to be one teacher for every four infants in each infant-toddler classroom, which makes staffing expensive. 

But on this island, there’s also a space problem. 

Hawai’i’s licensing guidelines require 35 square feet of play or instructional space per child as well as 75 square feet of outdoor space per child, not unlike what most other states require. In most places that’s not a big constraint, but on an island 33 miles wide with a massive housing shortage, real estate is tight. 

Mandie Gibson, the principal of the Koloa Early School, a preschool on the south part of the island about 10 miles west of Līhuʻe, said she’s been trying to add an additional building to run an infant-toddler center for seven or eight years, but on the island, the process is lengthy. Even if it does come together soon, which she expects it may, construction is projected to take six to 10 months. Adjusted for Kauaʻi time — everything takes longer here, she said — it’ll likely be closer to a year and a half.

Gibson first sought to add infant and toddler spots as a workforce retention tool for her own staff. But the addition didn’t come together in time; she lost one full-time teacher last year when his wife had a baby and he had to move into a part-time position elsewhere. 

She’s seen families on both ends of the spectrum: those with the means to hire nannies to care for their younger children and those who had to move away to find care. 

“Here, it’s very transient. It’s three to five years for a lot of people. The island spits you up or embraces you,” Gibson said. 

Kauaʻi’s retention problem also extends to its teachers. If the island wants to continue to add more infant-toddler centers, it’s going to have to figure out how to recruit and train staff. Under Hawai’i regulations, infant and toddler teachers depending on their education level need one to two years of experience with that age group to qualify. How do you get experience on an island that has never really had spots to begin with?

Toni Fujimoto, the early childhood education program coordinator at Kauaʻi Community College, has been working on that side of the problem for years, including helping shape recommendations to the state to modernize the childcare licensing requirement. One of her goals is to set up apprenticeship programs for her students in partnership with the island’s centers. Some students can currently get experience at home-based centers or at centers like Gibson’s, which takes kids as young as 2 and technically counts as infant-toddler experience. But the options are severely limited. 

And it’s already hard to recruit students to early childhood because the positions are among the lowest paid jobs in the country; some students just choose to work in tourism or other industries instead of pursuing the education needed to work in childcare. Last semester, Fujimoto had only four graduates from the associate’s degree program. She is now recruiting as early as middle school, sussing out any students who may have interest. 

One of Fujimoto’s recent graduates, Alysha Palacio, grew up on Kauaʻi with her grandparents caring for her. But she did not have that option when she became pregnant her senior year in high school in 2021. Her fiance is a plumber and couldn’t bring their daughter with him to work. Her mother is a store manager who works from sun up to sundown with no days off. Her father is a waiter who often works double shifts. Her grandparents passed away. Already, Palacio’s sister-in-law had to leave the island because of lack of childcare.

Palacio chose to study early childhood education — hoping, at first, that it would also prepare her for being a mom — and kept her daughter with her while she did classes on Zoom or went to campus. It took her four years to complete her associate degree. She graduated in May hoping to go work at a preschool but is still waiting to hear back about a job.

Out in the community, she sees the struggle reflected in other moms. At a restaurant recently, she noticed her server’s young children sitting alone at a back table. 

“Another waitress comes in and she has her kids, and she puts her kids on this back table, and it clicked in my head that they’re bringing their kids here because they have nobody else to watch them, so their kids are literally going to work with them,” she said. “When I see that in public I feel really bad.”

At Kauaʻi Montessori, director Marci Whitman has had to weigh whose pocketbook she would hurt more. She recently lost two teachers because they couldn’t afford housing on the island; another two nearly became homeless. But to pay them, she had to raise an already high tuition. 

She chose the teachers, who are paid between $20 and $27 an hour. 

Over the past several years, Kauaʻi’s efforts to add more infant spots have butted up against a growing affordability crisis that is among the most severe in the nation. As much as some parents may want to put their youngest in childcare, few can actually afford it.

Tuition for infant spots at Kaua’i Montessori is $2,400 a month. On an island where the median household income is about $83,000, that price would swallow about a third of it. So though Whitman may have 12 spots for infants, only three are taken due to the high cost.

Statewide, the average cost of full-time, center-based infant care in Hawai’i is $25,096 per year, according to an analysis by Child Care Aware. That’s second only to Massachusetts among the 47 states for which there is data. 

Businesses on Kauaʻi are trying to fill gaps as they can. Tamara Lawrence, a mom of three young kids, opened a play space in 2023 to try to offer some respite for stay-at-home parents or those working from home with their kids. But the business struggled to make a profit — people said the play space was too expensive. 

They recently moved into a new space on the main street in Līhuʻe and established a nonprofit arm that will help them take in some grant funding to lower costs. After their grand opening next month, they’ll start marketing the Play Hale’s drop-in childcare option: two hours a day for $25. 

“My goal is to eventually make it very minimal payment or no payment at all — that’s what our community wants and needs,” Lawrence said. 

The community also needs something really basic: childcare they can trust. Over and over again, the question of whether parents could trust childcare providers came up in more than a dozen conversations The 19th had with parents, providers and childcare experts on Kauaʻi. In a place where, for decades, people have relied on their family and each other for care, growing to trust more formal childcare options is a barrier in itself (for those who have the luxury of choice). Hawai’i also seriously lags other states in its reporting of incidents of serious injuries or abuse at childcare centers. Though the state is required by federal law to report such cases annually, regardless of whether there are any incidents at all, it hasn’t reported any data in a decade. 

Lawrence said that, culturally, trust was a big issue, which is why she always advises her staff to create a connection with every patron that comes through their doors. Even remembering someone’s name can make someone more likely to return.

Nora Gregg, a stay-at-home mom of a teenage daughter and two boys under the age of 2 said the philosophy among most of the moms she knows on the island is that mom should be home with their baby. Some moms put their kids in nature pods, unlicensed childcare options where kids learn outside, or they gather together to share the caregiving. “That’s actually how women have mothered for many centuries — that’s the village,” she said.

“Parents here, they don’t just give your kids to strangers,” said Gregg, who has lived in Kaua’i for three years. “When I think back to how I put my daughter on the East Coast in daycare that I didn’t know the person, isn’t that weird?” 

On Kauaʻi and elsewhere in the United States, a country that has now been in a childcare crisis for years, so much of the experience continues to be shaped by what little choice parents even have in the matter. 

Connie, a single mom of a 4-month-old who has lived on Kauaʻi for five years, doesn’t trust anyone to care for her baby. So she brings her daughter along as she cleans Airbnb’s across the island. Cleaning is a lucrative job for women here; on any given year, 1.4 million tourists visit an island of 74,000 locals. She can’t afford to lose the job, which she needs to keep her health insurance. But Connie’s boss doesn’t know she brings her daughter to work. The 19th is only using her first name to protect her identity. 

“I’d be lying if I said it was a walk in the park,” Connie said. “I could be just about done with the job, and she gets really really upset or fussy, and sometimes there’s nothing I can do to calm her down until we can get in the car and she falls asleep in her car seat. Or I could be just about done with my job, and my boss is like, ‘Oh, hey, can you go here? Can you go there? Can you do all these extra things?’”

She doesn’t feel like she has options. She can’t afford a nanny. But as her daughter gets older, she is going to have to seriously consider asking her family to move to the island with her to help, she said. 

Until then, she sneaks her daughter’s bouncer and toys with her to work hoping her boss won’t find out.

“I have to take the risk every day.”

This story was reported by Chabeli Carrazana of The 19th, and reprinted with permission. Meet Chabeli and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

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ASHLAND, Ore. — When Ulysses McCready was in fifth grade, a group of Southern Oregon University music students hauled instruments to Orchard Hill Elementary School to help get local kids excited about joining the middle school band. It worked on McCready, who picked up the flute and soon fell in love with music. 

“That day I was like, ‘I am going to be in SOU’s music program one day,’ ” they said. 

A decade-and-a-half later, McCready, now 26, transferred from a local community college to Southern Oregon, in Ashland, both because of that childhood exposure and because it’s the only four-year university in the region and they needed to stay close to their family.

But the university’s financial troubles have disrupted their first two years. They enrolled as a political science major and became fascinated with gender and women’s studies, only to see both programs be scheduled for phasing out. They joined the wind ensemble and pep band, only to see the music department placed on the chopping block this spring, as university leaders cut millions more dollars from the budget.

The school’s financial crisis has been a great source of stress for students, faculty, staff and area residents. McCready and other students said they are considering transferring to other schools. 

Southern Oregon’s financial picture is that grim. The school has been struggling financially for years with decreasing enrollment and increasing costs. This year, a surprise $15 million hole in the budget — the result of an ineffective budgeting strategy and computer problems, officials say — meant that SOU couldn’t make payroll or pay the electric bill by Feb. 2027 without a bailout from the state. Without financial help and major cuts to the budget, this 150-year-old public university would have to close, its leaders said. 

Across the country, financial pressures have battered many colleges, forcing some small private institutions and for-profit schools to close. Public colleges have also faced challenges, and some large systems have closed branch campuses or merged with other institutions. But Southern Oregon is one of the first public regional universities to face serious risk of closure. 

For now, the university’s doors remain open thanks to emergency, one-time funding from the state. Before sending the money, however, the state required that university leaders balance the budget. To do that, they had to find a way to cut $20 million — about one-fifth of the roughly $100 million annual budget, administrators said. 

Related: Interested in more news about colleges and universities? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter.

On July 21 — after a fraught spring term, a controversial set of cost-saving recommendations from an outside consulting group, several town halls and raucous student protests — leaders unveiled a final plan that will cut $20 million by sunsetting one major (in music industry and production), eliminating 61 faculty and staff positions, increasing class sizes and cutting more than $1.45 million from the athletic department. 

Earlier cuts eliminated eight majors, 11 minors, one graduate program, the undergraduate honors college and a total of 151 full-time faculty, staff and administrator positions. Once the new cuts are made, the university will have lost a total of 212 faculty and staff positions in four years, and eliminated a total of nine majors, including chemistry, Spanish and international studies.

It seems clear the university has no “Plan B,” said Ben Cannon, executive director of Oregon’s Higher Education Coordinating Commission, the state agency that manages funding and policy for public colleges and universities.

“There’s not someone out there — whether the legislature or another institution or philanthropist — that we are aware of that seems ready to swoop in and pick this place up if it’s unsuccessful with transformation,” Cannon said. Closure, he said, is “a practically unthinkable outcome, and yet, it’s not evident what else would occur.”

The university, which has existed under various names since 1872, is a landmark in Ashland, an artsy city of about 22,000 people, about 14 miles from the California border. The university is among the largest employers in the largely rural region. 

Ashland is a relatively wealthy and highly educated city, but many of the surrounding communities that SOU serves are not. For many students who live between the University of Oregon (to the north), Oregon Institute of Technology (to the east) and California State University, Chico (to the south), SOU is the public four-year university closest to home, and the most affordable. Roughly 30 percent of the student body comes from California, in part because students from five counties in northern California are eligible for in-state tuition rates at SOU.

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

Data collected in The Hechinger Report’s new College Financial Health Tracker show that between 2019 and 2024, SOU’s revenue fell 9 percent, after adjusting for inflation, compared to an average of 1 percent at all public colleges in the country. In the same period, enrollment at SOU fell 11 percent, compared to an average decline of 4 percent at all public colleges.

The decreasing revenue puts a greater strain on SOU than it might on other colleges because the state has been stingy with its support. Oregon allocates $9,672 per student — only about 80 percent of the national average of $12,082 per student, according to the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association.

Richard J. Bailey, the institution’s president since 2022, had already made major cuts under plans called SOU Forward, in 2023, and SOU Resiliency, in 2025. His latest plan to save the university is called SOU Vitality. 

Bailey said he saw structural problems in the SOU budget almost immediately upon taking the job and initiated the first round of financial cuts during his first year. Less than two years later, in the fall of 2025, he declared that the university was in “financial exigency.”

But those cuts weren’t enough. This February, Bailey alerted the board to the current cash flow problem, which came as a surprise to the board of trustees. 

Yet, “I don’t think that was a drastic surprise,” said board chair Sheila Clough. She acknowledged the university has been operating on a tight budget for at least the last eight years, and in that sense, she said, this crisis has been a long time coming. 

In an interview, Bailey said that he hadn’t done a good job of looking at the institution’s finances beyond the education and general fund, which he said accounts for two-thirds of the total budget. He said he didn’t pay close enough attention to other budget items, such as athletics or housing.

Bailey said the issue was complicated by a difficult transition between software systems, during which problems arose with the transfer of financial and payroll data from one platform to the other. That led to a “lack of awareness and granularity” of financial information, Bailey said.

The lack of detailed information meant that the scope of the problem  didn’t become apparent until late January of this year, Bailey said. Three days later, he met with the board to tell them.

“I’m responsible for everything that happens at the institution, so I accept full responsibility for not having the full awareness of just how dramatic and grave the challenges really were,” Bailey said.

Ruth A. Johnston, vice president of the consulting arm at the National Association of College and University Business Officers, said she’s never heard of a college losing sight of its finances during a software transition, but “anything is possible.” 

Related: Fewer students and fewer dollars mean states face closing public universities and colleges 

After the board learned about the budget shortfall, Bailey and other leaders went to the state capitol to ask for help. The legislature agreed to grant $15 million in emergency funding, so long as leaders found a way to balance the budget. As a part of the deal, SOU leaders are required to provide monthly financial reports and quarterly cash flow projections to the state.

The success of the Vitality plan depends in part on whether enrollment projections are accurate, Bailey said, both for new students and returning students.

At a meeting of the board of trustees, Sophia Smith, a sophomore who serves as student body president, called the ongoing financial crisis a failure of their leadership. 

“If these reductions and eliminations must occur, then ensure that they are the last that we see of you,” Smith said. “I beg you to break the cycle of failure.”

Smith, who came to SOU from the Portland area, said repeated cuts are painful to students, and “it would be, at this point, less cruel to close our doors entirely.” 

The financial crisis has indeed taken a toll on students. Rumors swirled in the months between the announcement of the budget shortfall and the final cuts being announced. 

Vincent Ghiglieri, who just graduated with a bachelor’s degree in business, said that between the two rounds of cuts while he was in school and the looming cuts this spring, the university felt like “a dead man walking.”

He came to SOU from Shady Cove, a river town of 3,000 people, because it was the closest and most affordable four-year option. He was also drawn by the music program — he wanted to major in business, but he didn’t want to give up playing the trumpet. He graduated with a minor in music, which, as a result of last year’s budget cuts, will not be offered to future students. 

Ghiglieri said that the uncertainty this year “made it seem like the school is done and they were just about to shut everything down and call it quits.” 

Related: Colleges are now closing at a pace of one a week. What happens to the students?

Like McCready, some students have considered leaving SOU altogether. 

First-year student Natalya Smith said that during winter term, she asked professors to write her letters of recommendation so she could apply to transfer. After the university secured the emergency state funding and Smith learned that the criminology program was unlikely to get cut, she changed her mind.

“Then it turned into like ‘OK, I’m staying and I’m going to fight for this institution,’ ” Smith said. 

Students formed the Save SOU Coalition, and the university chartered a bus to take students to the state capitol to lobby for the emergency funding. 

Some, like Tylar Penney, took it upon themselves to do research about higher education funding and suggest ideas to leaders. A sociology and anthropology major, she said her vision involves restructuring the university’s core curriculum and merging certain disciplines to reduce overhead costs. 

At an emergency student town hall in early June, Penney hammered Bailey with questions about his plans and her ideas about how to preserve all the academic programs and still save money.

Even though the state has made it clear that it won’t provide another bailout or increase baseline funding to SOU, Penney said it can’t hurt to ask.

“It shouldn’t be on students and families to fund institutions that were never designed to be profitable,” Penney said. “Public universities are like public transportation. This is a public service, it’s not a business.” 

State Representative Pam Marsh, who earned her bachelor’s degree from SOU, sponsored a bill that requires a study of the finances of all the state’s public institutions. But when SOU’s financial crisis was revealed, Marsh said, “It changed all the conversations from ‘How can we do this work, systemwide?’ to ‘How are we going to make sure that SOU can pay its bills for the next year and a half?’ ”

Still, her bill passed. Marsh said preliminary recommendations from the study are due this fall so that proposals can be considered for the 2027 legislative session. 

“SOU’s credibility took a blow,” Marsh said. “We need to climb back out of that hole and prove we can manage ourselves and that we have a vision for what we want to be and a pragmatic way to get there.” 

Dennis Slattery, a business professor who has been at the university since 2004, said in an interview that Bailey needs to do a better job of holding the university’s financial leaders accountable.

“We have an issue of trust within SOU right now,” Slattery said. “And of course we do — budgets are being cut, people are being cut. It’s mind boggling that you’re not tracking how much money you got in your pocket and if you could pay your bills.”

Slattery told the board that he had surveyed the faculty senate on their confidence in university leadership and “there was not a wholesale lack of confidence, but there are a lot of questions.”

While he understands that cuts are necessary to balance the budget, he said they will mean that the university is asking fewer people to do even more work. He’s worried about whether this strategy will be sustainable. 

“As we continue to cut more and more — if cutting is the only strategy we have of dealing with this — we’re just going to cut ourselves into oblivion,” Slattery said. 

This story about Southern Oregon University 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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Scientists rarely announce that one of their long-held ideas has failed.

But that is exactly what Ron Avi Astor, one of the nation’s leading scholars of school violence and a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said before fellow researchers at the annual meeting in April of the American Educational Research Association (AERA).

“We were wrong,” Astor told the audience.

For decades, Astor believed that improving school climate and reducing bullying would help prevent school shootings. He advised national policymakers and issued recommendations. Schools responded by investing heavily in social-emotional learning, restorative justice, trauma-informed care, counseling and other efforts to make schools safer and more welcoming.

Those initiatives have benefited students in many ways. Fewer students report bringing guns or knives to school, and schools have generally become safer.

But school shootings have not declined.

“I’ve had a complete change” in my thinking, Astor told me in an interview after the conference.

That shift came after he stepped back and looked at the evidence. During his AERA presentation, Astor showed a slide with two stark graphs. One traced a steady decline in students bringing weapons to California schools over the quarter century since the Columbine High School massacre in Colorado. The other graph showed a sharp rise in school shootings across the nation.

Diverging trends

The graphs capture a painful realization. Astor says he and other researchers had misunderstood what was driving many school shootings.

Astor noted that many school shooters had been bullied, were bullies themselves or had experienced trauma, and he believed that shootings would decline if educators reduced bullying and strengthened relationships among students locally, one school building at a time. “We were adamant,” Astor said. “Let’s focus on prevention.”

“What was missed, I believe, was that each shooter wanted to make sure that this was national,” Astor said. “Their number one audience was the media. That’s really clear to me now.”

Astor now believes many perpetrators are driven by a desire for notoriety. Shooters study previous massacres, learn from online communities and seek the publicity that follows a mass attack.

“Most of them are suicidal, and they decided to be homicidal so that they would be remembered,” Astor said.

That new way of thinking has led him to a very different recommendation. Rather than focusing on prevention inside schools, Astor believes journalists and social media companies should adopt guidelines that reduce attention on perpetrators, delay publication of manifestos and videos, and focus more coverage on victims.

“I’m not saying don’t do social-emotional or anti-gun” efforts, Astor said. “Those things are important. But if we want to see a reduction in school shootings, we need to work with the media.”

Astor compares school shootings to suicide contagions or spates of terrorism, where extensive publicity can inspire copycats. He acknowledges that it’s a long shot to persuade social media companies or the dark web to change, and he cannot prove that changing will work to reduce school shootings. “But it’s worth a try,” he said.

What makes Astor’s argument noteworthy isn’t simply his new hypothesis. It’s his willingness to publicly abandon an old one after concluding that the evidence no longer supported it. It’s never easy to change course but Astor’s openness could save lives.

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

This story about preventing school shootings 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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In too many classrooms in America, the scene is the same: children staring at tablets, headphones on, silent. Some are working through reading programs. Some have already finished and found their way to something else entirely. The teacher circulates. 

The education technology industry calls this personalized learning. Somewhere, a dashboard is registering all this as engagement. 

Nobody in any of those classrooms would agree. I know because I’ve spent a decade navigating this industry from the inside, building some of the technology that teachers, students and soon my own sons will use. 

I’ve come to a conclusion that may surprise you: Much of the backlash against ed tech is completely justified. But it misses the broader point. 

Parents are right to question whether the screens in their children’s classrooms are making them better learners. Politicians are right to demand that the industry prove it. And the nation’s largest teacher union is right to call for caution regarding screen time and student-facing AI in elementary schools. 

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

These are not fringe positions. They are honest reckonings with what educators and parents have been asking the industry to confront for years. Growing alarms about the impact of screens on children’s mental health, attention spans and academic outcomes have turned a quiet concern into a political movement.

But when the responses are blanket bans and broad restrictions that make no distinction between distraction and instruction, we’re not solving a problem — we’re avoiding it.

Walking away from technology entirely isn’t protection. It’s abdication. The students in those classrooms today are inheriting a world that runs digitally and requires digital fluency.

A middle schooler who can’t evaluate an online source or the ethics of a new kind of technology isn’t a student we’ve protected. She’s a student we’ve left behind. 

The answer to bad ed tech isn’t no ed tech. It’s higher standards, better tools and a philosophy that keeps teachers at the center. 

That philosophy draws a clear line. Teachers should have wide access to tools that extend their reach, reduce their load and give them a real-time picture of where each student is so they can adapt instruction accordingly. But anything a student interacts with directly must clear a higher bar: It has to make the subject matter come alive in ways that simply cannot happen in print or via hands-on learning. 

As a chief product officer, I make evidence-based decisions about what belongs in print, what belongs in hands-on learning and what belongs in digital form. When technology does not add real value, we choose print. But sometimes print cannot do the job. 

Digital tools can help students visualize and interact with math as it appears in the world, receive immediate feedback that deepens understanding and run a science simulation that a static page simply cannot replicate. 

High-quality student-facing technology should advance learning in ways that other formats cannot, strengthen rigorous classroom communities and give students authentic choices that build self-determination. From pre-K through second grade, that standard must be even higher because foundational skills are built through human interaction, not screen time.

Done right, the result sounds nothing like the opening sentences of this piece — it’s louder, messier and more alive. With purposeful technology, a teacher can see in real time that 20 of her 30 students solved a problem one way, and 10 solved it differently. She can then ask each group to explain their thinking to the other, producing something better than anything a static lesson plan can offer. 

That kind of immediate feedback isn’t just good teaching. Research shows that students who receive immediate digital feedback on their work can learn significantly more than those using traditional methods.

AI is no different from other technology needing to earn its place — and no exception. The debate treats it as either a silver bullet or an existential threat. Both are wrong, yet the evidence on current AI use clearly cuts in one direction: High schoolers who studied with a general-purpose AI chatbot scored 17 percent worse on their exams.

A tool that does the thinking for students isn’t a tutor. It’s a shortcut. 

Related: Teachers save time with AI. Their students may pay the price

That’s why, until we know more, I’m focused on using AI not so much with students but to help teachers with their immensely challenging jobs: supporting teachers in processing the large amount of work a class of 25 to 35 students produces; surfacing patterns before they become permanent gaps; and handling the administrative weight that pulls teachers away from teaching. 

Take a math lesson in which 35 students each submit a different solution. AI can read every response, identify answers that would drive a productive math discussion and hand the teacher the information to lead a constructive conversation with students in seconds. 

AI handles the analysis. The teacher handles the room. The students get a lesson built around what they actually need. 

To the legislators drafting anti-tech bills and the parents and caregivers pushing for change: You are right to push. But push toward a better standard — not how many minutes students spend on screens, but whether the tools on those screens are evidence-based, whether they serve teachers or replace them and whether student data is treated as a trust rather than an asset. 

Those questions cut closer to the problem than any time limit ever could.

There are signs the debate is turning. More policymakers are starting to ask about quality, not just quantity. The students caught in this debate deserve better than a narrow conversation about screens. They deserve a more honest one about which tools deepen learning and which distract from it.

Alexandra Walsh is the chief product officer at Amplify, one of the country’s largest K-12 curriculum and assessment companies. She leads the strategic vision for the company’s comprehensive math, literacy and science product suites.

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.

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

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HIGHLANDS RANCH, Colo. — It was the middle of a writing lesson in Gabrielle Grace’s first grade class at Sand Creek Elementary in suburban Denver, and students were furiously jotting down details about their summer plans, the first step in composing a paragraph on the topic. 

Except for 6-year-old Dean, who was already done.

“This stuff was just too easy for me,” he said. He pointed to his worksheet, fully filled out with a topic sentence (“I do many things over the summer”) and a list of his summer activities (“park, ipad and vacation”).

“I wrote this, like, before the bell rang,” he said nonchalantly. 

At the beginning of the year, many of Grace’s students couldn’t write a sentence. “Now, they do this on their own,” she said. “Their writing is very organized. They write in complete sentences. It’s just like clockwork.”

Dean’s writing prowess — and confidence — is what many elementary school teachers dream of. For years, teachers have bemoaned the state of student writing — and have struggled to manage students’ complex, largely negative feelings about it. Across grade levels, educators say children struggle to write basic sentences, let alone use proper spelling and punctuation. In upper elementary grades, when students should be writing paragraphs and short essays, teachers are finding many students still lack fundamental skills and struggle to write at length.

In recent years, concerned by low writing scores on state exams, some districts have started to rethink how they’re teaching writing. For example, in the 61,000-student Douglas County district, administrators have added more professional development for teachers in evidence-based writing approaches and are prioritizing explicitly teaching writing to students. Similar efforts are underway in Tennessee, Pennsylvania, California and Rhode Island. 

Many school leaders say they’re seeing promising results, indicating that America’s children can write better — if they have the right instruction.

“Writing is the last bastion of education,” said Randy Barth, CEO of SRSD Online, which trains teachers in the “science of writing,” encompassing a growing body of research on effective writing instruction. “Writing, I would say, is the last thing that the education system is putting money towards.”

Related: Scientific evidence on how to teach writing is slim

For years, while America has been focused on math and reading — and in recent years, the science of reading — writing has largely been ignored.

Unlike for reading and math, national data on writing proficiency for elementary-age students is sparse. America has not released nationwide standardized writing scores from elementary school grades since 2002, when 27 percent of fourth graders scored proficient or higher.

Nationwide, there’s no good way to know how elementary students are doing when it comes to writing, said Vicki McQuitty, a professor in Towson University’s elementary education program and director of the Maryland Writing Project, an initiative aimed at improving writing instruction. “But the word on the street is that kids can’t write.” 

An analysis of recent state test results seems to confirm this. In 2025, more than half of Texas’ 360,000 third graders received no credit for their responses on an essay prompt in the state’s annual English language arts test that asked them to compare and contrast two texts. In California the same year, only 17 percent of third graders met the standard for well-organized writing on an essay asking them to demonstrate research skills when responding to a prompt. And in Florida, students on average scored 6 out of 12 possible points on the state’s writing test. 

The results aren’t much better as students age. For years, employers, college professors and high school teachers have complained that students struggle to write coherent, multi-paragraph essays when they arrive in their classrooms or apply for jobs. 

Elementary teachers, responsible for the heavy lift of early writing instruction, say they’re up against a host of challenges. Writing is a demanding task for students, requiring a certain amount of background knowledge to understand the material, fine motor skills and vocabulary, among other skills.

“I think writing is the hardest thing to teach,” said Chrissy Everett, a fourth grade teacher at Prairie Crossing Elementary in the Douglas County district and an educator of 23 years, because it involves executive function skills and knowing “how to piece it all together and what steps to do next.”

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

While the “science of writing” isn’t as deeply researched as the science of how children learn to read, experts generally agree on practices that are key to teaching students how to write. For example, students should be given time each day to write and taught different genres and purposes of writing. Educators should also explicitly instruct students in individual components of writing, starting with handwriting, spelling and vocabulary.

Adrea Truckenmiller, an associate professor at Michigan State University’s college of education, whose research has focused on writing, said students need to learn that a complete sentence includes a subject and a verb, not just a capital letter at the beginning and a period at the end. Later, they must be taught how to connect ideas by expanding and combining sentences. Finally, they can tackle essays, using worksheets and charts to plan their writing. 

But research shows teacher preparation programs vary in how much and what they teach aspiring educators about writing instruction. Many lack standalone writing instruction courses. “Even teacher educators do not always feel comfortable teaching preservice teachers about writing,” said McQuitty, from Towson. “It’s always pushed to the back.”

Once in the classroom, teachers are under pressure to prepare students for standardized tests that emphasize reading and math, experts say, often to the detriment of other subjects.

“I just assumed writing instruction was happening, but every time I walk into a classroom my assumption is proven wrong,” said Truckenmiller.

Adding to the challenge is that after spending their early years scrolling iPads and pecking at keyboards, some kids struggle to even hold a pencil. Christina Bretz, an occupational therapist with Learning Without Tears, a company that sells early reading and writing curriculum and materials, said she recently met a kindergartener who had never seen crayons and only knew how to color by using his finger on an iPad.

“As we’re seeing more children use devices, we start to see less of them manipulating objects with their hands,” said Bretz. 

Related: Why are children still struggling in school four years after the pandemic?

In 2023, district leaders in Douglas County noticed scores on the elementary writing portions of state tests were far lower than on the reading portions. As they dug into the district’s approach, “we found that teachers didn’t know how to teach writing,” said Janet Merrill, literacy coordinator for the school system.

District officials realized teachers had largely been left on their own to teach writing and were using a hodgepodge of methods. “In the past, really just whatever a teacher could find from Teachers Pay Teachers or something online was where we were,” Merrill said. 

Without districtwide common strategies, writing instruction varied greatly from class to class, and teachers often felt like they were starting each year from square one, Merrill said. Teachers largely focused on creative writing, asking students to write about a favorite vacation or birthday, Merrill said. 

“We did ‘Describe your shoe’ for like a month. And then you described your backpack,” she added. “It’s just this random writing.”

Merrill started researching science-backed ways to teach writing and learned about an approach that disability advocates in the district were championing, called Self-Regulated Strategy Development. Rather than focusing on creative writing, SRSD is prescriptive, encouraging students to respond to texts using evidence and giving them specific strategies for planning and organizing writing. 

With help from a group called Releasing Writers, the district rolled out a new approach to writing with 100 instructional coaches and teachers across its more than 70 elementary schools. Three years later, every elementary teacher in the district is following the same process: reading and analyzing examples of writing with their class; using a routine for analyzing and responding to a prompt; and relying largely on writing responses to texts, rather than creative freewrites. Teachers model the strategies and their easy-to-remember acronyms, like “TIDE,” which stands for “topic, important details, and ending.” Students at every grade level repeat the same process, with slight variations for younger students.

The district’s new approach also teaches students to be resilient as they write. They start their drafting process by writing a positive phrase to themselves, which they can read when they’re feeling frustrated or stuck.

Around the corner from Grace’s classroom, students in Kristin Allen’s kindergarten class had just finished reading a story about a group of animals who made a gift for a turtle. 

Now, Allen was working with small groups of students to help them retell that story in writing. Before the four students sitting with her got started, Allen asked them what they should write at the top of their papers. 

The children thought for a moment and started scribbling down affirmations on their pages. Allen asked them to share.

“I can do this,” said one child.

“I am smart,” said another.

Then Allen asked them to write a topic sentence about the story, followed by three details from it.

“The anumls make a gift for turtle,” one girl wrote.

Allen was quick to correct spelling and punctuation. She paid close attention to how students held their pencils. She encouraged them to leave spaces between words. 

This was Allen’s first year back in the classroom after taking several years off to spend with her own children. Prior to that, she taught kindergarten in New Jersey for 10 years. When she first started teaching, “I did not see anything like this,” Allen said, motioning to papers covered with her students’ writing, which in some cases included full paragraphs. “Some people have the attitude that ‘Oh, they’re kindergarten, they’re five and six, they can’t’.’ They can.”

Allen was eager to learn the SRSD method. But not all teachers are. Merrill said some veteran teachers were reluctant, worrying that kids wouldn’t love writing with such a prescribed process — but she’s not sure students enjoyed the old process as much as their teachers believed. 

“They saw this blank page and they just were like, ‘I don’t even know where to start.’” Merrill said. “Now, students love writing because they have the skill to actually write.”

What helped convince teachers was seeing near-immediate effects from the early adopters who piloted the approach. After the first year, educators in higher grades noticed kids who had been taught via SRSD were entering middle school with better writing skills, and they started asking their colleagues what had changed in elementary classrooms.

Related: America’s reading problem: Scores were dropping even before the pandemic

Federal research has found the SRSD approach improved writing quality across different genres, grades and assignments, and can be an effective intervention for students with learning disabilities. But despite the evidence behind SRSD and similar approaches based on the science of writing, they haven’t made it into mainstream curricula and classrooms in part because there’s still not widespread awareness of them among educators, experts say. 

“We have this knowledge base concentrated in a really small number of people that hasn’t been scaled yet,” said Truckenmiller, from Michigan State University. In addition, schools have competing priorities, she said, often thinking they need to get reading instruction right first before focusing on writing.   

But in Douglas County, officials say focusing on writing is key to improving reading. And they’ve already noticed a difference in test scores: After a year of rolling out the strategy in a handful of schools, the district said it saw state writing scores increase by 3 percentage points. Math scores increased too, which district officials attribute to students having the skills to better analyze questions and problems. This summer, at the request of educators in the district, Merrill and her colleagues will begin training all their middle school teachers in SRSD. 

Students have noticed the difference as well.

Last year, “you just had to sit down and write,” said Connor Miles, a fourth grader in Everett’s class at Prairie Crossing Elementary. How did that make him feel? “Completely lost,” he said.

One of Connor’s classmates, 10-year-old Arya Melancon, said this year, teachers are better able to explain the process of writing. They are providing her and her peers with strategies and systems, and she likes sorting through evidence from texts and “building” paragraphs and responses. 

“We’ve definitely improved this year. We have a better understanding,” she said. The difference was most glaring to her and her classmates when they sat down to take their end of grade state test in the spring, she added.  

“Last year we were all scared of writing prompts,” Arya said. “This year, we felt like we were ready.”

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

This story about writing skills 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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This spring, I spoke to a mom in suburban Washington, D.C., who was growing increasingly worried about a lack of filters on her kids’ school devices. During class this year, her kids watched Kendrick Lamar videos on YouTube, she told me. One came home knowing the words to a semaglutide commercial. Parents at the school shared concerns that their fourth graders regularly played a game called BitLife, a text-based life simulation game created in 2018.

She was one of more than 45 parents, educators and experts across the country for my recent story about the dangerous content and games children access on their school-issued devices,

From my reporting, I had already heard of — and tried out — other games elementary students are playing at schools around the country, one featuring Jeffrey Epstein and another where a “corpse-like grandmother” chases players with a bloody baseball bat. In comparison, BitLife’s premise sounded less disturbing than some others I had played, perhaps even relatively innocent. (Spoiler alert: It’s not.) 

I started the game as “Ally Baker,” the daughter of a school psychologist and police officer. The game then presented me with random life scenarios and asked me to choose how to respond. When my character was 5 years old, a screen popped up that read, “You broke your parents’ sex toy while you were trying to understand what it was. What will you do?” (The options were to admit it or lie about it.) My character went on to be assaulted by her brother, diagnosed with depression and diagnosed with cervical cancer. (Between those events, I also failed my driver’s test.) Ally Baker died at age 21.

As disturbing as it is to think about elementary-age children playing this game, I learned while reporting my recent story that this is just the tip of the iceberg. While some districts have layers of blocks and filters, others have a piecemeal approach, with far fewer blocks. And even in some districts that try to block content, children are often able to outsmart the filters and access wildly inappropriate content. In fact, many game designers — and fellow students — are helping them do so. 

When I first navigated to BitLife, for example, the website boasted about being able to circumvent blocks because it was using a proxy server: “BitLife is available to play unblocked right here on Bitlife.School. This means you can start a new life on your school Chromebook, library computer, or even at work during a break.” I found another website hosting the game that advised players they could “press CTRL+Q to hide your screen.” Doing so changed the screen to a page titled “Math Lesson Notes — Week 3 Overview” with notes about a fake math lesson. (Although the tab at the top still read “Bitlife.”) Questions sent to an email address on the Bitlife website were not answered as of Thursday morning.

I also came across a Google Doc with dozens of links to unblocked games. (Schools use, and do not block, Google Docs.) Not only are these websites well aware of schools trying to block games, some of them seem to be actively trying to enable students to keep playing, illustrating just one more of the many challenges schools are up against when it comes to young children and technology. 

Read my story, published in partnership with Mind/Shift.

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It seemed like a win-win: a proposal to let community colleges in Illinois award bachelor’s degrees in certain subjects to rural residents and working adults who live beyond commuting distance of four-year universities.

The change would not only make things “easier and more affordable for students,” according to backers including Gov. JB Pritzker; it would increase the supply of workers with the skills employers need. 

But four-year universities lined up against it. And a political ally, flanked by several of their presidents, was blunt about why: It would cut into their business.

“We’ll lose those students to the community college level,” Senate Majority Leader Kimberly Lightford pronounced.

Under attack from politicians, scorned by the public for their cost and facing unprecedented enrollment and financial problems, universities and colleges are responding by taking the fight to … each other.

At the same time that they’re lobbying against community college bachelor’s degrees, four-year universities are pursuing the exploding dual-enrollment and short-term workforce training markets community colleges have dominated.

The most selective among them are expanding their early decision programs to lock in more applicants and prevent them from enrolling elsewhere. Recruiters are poaching students from competing colleges, even after they’ve put down their deposits — something admissions officers once explicitly agreed to never do. 

Public universities are dangling incentives to lure high school graduates from going to their own public university campuses in neighboring states. And private, nonprofit colleges are opening satellite branches in other schools’ backyards.

“This is the clash that occurs when you have declining populations overall and declining high school graduating classes,” said Davis Jenkins, senior research scholar at the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University. (The Hechinger Report, which produced this story, is an independent unit of Teachers College.)

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

Some of this intensifying competition could be a good thing for students and families, who are getting more choices as well as bigger discounts and other perks to enroll at colleges and universities that need to fill seats. 

In many cases, however, “turf wars” and “mission creep” — as critics call this infighting — are heightening anxiety among consumers and preventing changes that could serve them.

“That was one of my biggest frustrations with the debate, because it felt like there wasn’t even a willingness to acknowledge a problem, and we have a problem in this state,” said Emily Shields, executive director of Community Colleges for Iowa, where lobbying by private four-year colleges blocked a plan to let community colleges in rural areas offer bachelor’s degrees. 

“We have people in every region who would like to get a bachelor’s degree but can’t” because they live too far from four-year campuses and have families and jobs, Shields said. 

More than 35 million people live beyond what the federal government defines as typical commuting distance from a public, four-year university, according to a study published by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University. 

That’s among the reasons lawmakers in 24 states have passed laws allowing community colleges to offer bachelor’s degrees. 

But momentum behind this approach has slowed, as four-year colleges worry it will siphon away some of their dwindling supply of students. Enrollment at universities and colleges nationwide already fell by nearly 2 million from 2010 to 2023 — the most recent period for which the figure is available — and the number of 18-year-olds, who make up most of their new customers, is projected to decline by 13 percent from this year until 2041. 

Only about 76,000 students are enrolled in bachelor’s degree programs at community colleges nationwide, compared to 5.3 million at four-year colleges and universities. And research shows that most are 25 or older, and likely wouldn’t typically choose a four-year campus, and that adding bachelor’s degrees to community colleges does not significantly affect enrollment at their four-year public and private, nonprofit counterparts. 

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

Yet in Iowa, private, four-year colleges argued that some would be forced to close if legislators let community colleges offer four-year degrees. The idea has also now stalled in Illinois, where more than a dozen community colleges are in areas where the nearest four-year university is too far away to commute.

An even bigger battleground in the fight for students is dual enrollment (also called dual credit, early college and concurrent enrollment), through which high school students take college-level courses for credit. Community colleges provide these courses to more than 70 percent of the high school students who take them, dominating a market that has quickly grown to 2.8 million students — so many that they now comprise more than a fifth of community college enrollment, overall, and the fastest-growing share of it.

This has not escaped the notice of four-year colleges and universities, which are adding their own dual-enrollment programs at an accelerating pace. 

The number of four-year universities that have joined the National Alliance of Concurrent Enrollment Partnerships, or NACEP, which accredits these kinds of programs, went up by 36 schools between 2022 and last year — a 27 percent jump.

“To see that kind of increase really raised our eyebrows,” said Amy Williams, NACEP’s executive director. 

The top reason institutions give for taking on this role, a NACEP survey found: as a recruiting tool.

While it may serve universities, this is not entirely helpful for students, NACEP warns. In 90 percent of high schools that offer dual enrollment, it found, more than one institution is now providing it. And in nearly 60 percent of those cases, two or more providers offer the same courses to students in the same high schools. 

“Understandably, learners cite challenges navigating different enrollment deadlines, fee structures, degree pathways and transcript requests across institutions,” NACEP notes.

Related: Desperate for students, colleges resort to previously banned recruiting tactics 

Four-year universities continue to expand their dual-enrollment offerings, however. Universities in Nevada, for instance, have been doing this, the state’s faculty association wrote, as “a means to mitigate the impacts of declining enrollment among their traditional students.” In the process, those faculty alleged, “quality and rigor are often trampled upon.” 

Colorado lawmakers just passed legislation making it easier for four-year universities to provide more dual-enrollment courses in high schools in that state. 

“Demographics are absolutely a factor” there, too, said John Albright, executive vice chancellor of the Colorado Community College System. 

“There are fewer traditional-age students. Birthrates are declining. Institutions are responding to this,” Albright said. The question, he said, is whether adding more providers “expands opportunity and keeps pathways clear for students or creates a more fragmented system. We don’t know the answer to that.”

Four-year universities are targeting another traditional realm of, and growth area for, community colleges: short-term workforce training. 

Enrollment in community college certificate programs is up 28 percent since the fall of 2021, a number likely to keep rising as students in these programs can now qualify for federal Pell Grants. 

Seventy percent of four-year university and college presidents said they plan to add or expand short-term workforce training, according to a recent survey by Hanover Research and the industry news outlet Inside Higher Ed. It’s a strategic opportunity, the conservative think tank The Manhattan Institute has said — not only because such programs can attract students who would not enroll in degree programs, but also “to demonstrate concrete economic value and responsiveness to workforce needs” at a time of falling public faith in higher education.

Related: The biggest expansion of federal scholarship money in 50 years is at hand — and almost nobody is ready for it 

But DeRionne Pollard, president and CEO of the American Association of Community Colleges, has some questions about the blurring of these boundaries.

“Is there a need that is not being met by the two-year institutions that have traditionally delivered dual-credit or workforce training in those communities?” Pollard asked. “What’s in the best interest of students? What’s in the best interest of the communities being served?” 

Students and families, she said, “don’t need duplication or competition. They don’t need confusion. They need pathways” that will get them the educations they want, affordably and in a reasonable period of time — whatever kind of institution they attend.

“The future should be built on partnerships, not turf,” said Pollard.

It’s not just community colleges’ students four-year universities and colleges are going after. It’s each other’s.

Public universities in regions where the number of high school graduates has already started falling are offering lower tuition to graduates in bordering states and even farther-away but faster-growing places. California residents, for instance, can go to most State University of New York schools for the same price they would pay at a flagship public university in California.

Private, nonprofit four-year universities are opening satellite campuses in the territories of other institutions. Northeastern and Carnegie Mellon universities operate branches in the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, where Vanderbilt University will also open a campus next year.

The fiercest competition comes in the admissions process.

Selective schools that offer early decision — increasing the odds that applicants will get in, but barring them from considering any other college once they do — are relying more heavily on it, admitting larger proportions of their students that way, research from the advocacy organization Class Action finds. To encourage that commitment, some offer inducements such as priority housing, early move-in, parking privileges and meal plan upgrades.

For students admitted through the conventional process, meanwhile, recruiting now continues well past the day on which they put down their deposits — something previously banned by a provision in the code of ethics among admissions officers that was dropped in 2020 to settle a federal antitrust case. 

Related: The number of 18-year-olds is about to drop sharply, packing a wallop for colleges — and the economy

“It became the Wild West after the antitrust settlement,” with colleges and universities poaching each other’s admitted students after the traditional May 1 deposit day, said Christy Pratt, former head of undergraduate admissions at the University of Notre Dame and a consultant at the executive search firm WittKieffer. Competition now drags on as late as September or October, when institutions close their books on the entering class.

That can mean lower prices for families, said David Attis, managing director of research advisory services at the enrollment management recruiting firm EAB. But it also “makes it much harder for students to plan and manage,” Attis said.

Nearly half of college and university applicants who were admitted from waiting lists said they were notified after May 1, according to a June survey by the college ratings platform Niche. That means most have already committed somewhere else, and have hard decisions to make, said Caroline Koppelman, founder and CEO of the private college admissions consulting firm The Koppelman Group.

“In general, the kids are more stressed out, and extending the admissions process doesn’t quell their anxiety,” Koppelman said.

To hedge their bets, students and families are increasingly putting down deposits at more than one school. Fourteen percent of students who entered college in the academic year just ended paid deposits to two or more universities or colleges, up from near-zero who did this in 2019, according to EAB. The wealthier the family, the more deposits it makes.

In some states, policymakers are stepping in to try to quash the wrangling over students. California legislators have proposed stripping the California State University System of authority it’s used repeatedly to stop community colleges from offering bachelor’s degrees, for example, as long as those degrees don’t duplicate programs available at nearby four-year universities.

In the end, said advocates, the best way for universities and colleges to vie for consumers is by giving them what they need.

“There are going to be these high-level squabbles over what are really small potatoes. What’s going to matter is that you offer value,” said Jenkins, the community college researcher.

“As far as trying to play nice in the sandbox,” added Albright, in Colorado, “everyone has a shared interest in trying to be responsive to students.”

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

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The research behind the influential “science of reading” movement was built over decades through federally supported research spanning cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, linguistics and classroom studies.

Education research organizations say a proposed 100-page sweeping overhaul of federal grant rules, which would add a new review by political appointees, could make it harder to produce similar important bodies of evidence in the future. 

The federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB) says its proposed changes are intended to strengthen accountability, transparency and oversight of taxpayer-funded grants. The May 29 proposal would revise the rules for issuing and overseeing grants, including those awarded by the Department of Education and the National Science Foundation, two major sources of federal education research funding. OMB wants the final rule to take effect by Oct. 1, according to the proposal.

But in letters submitted to OMB on July 13, the deadline for public comment, education research groups argued that some provisions could have unintended and harmful consequences by narrowing the questions researchers study, giving political considerations too much influence in funding decisions and disrupting research already underway. The education groups are asking not only for changes, but for the entire overhaul proposal to be withdrawn. 

Objections specific to education research were detailed in three letters from the National Academy of Education, signed by 19 other education and science organizations; the American Educational Research Association (AERA); and the Knowledge Alliance, a group representing about 20 organizations that conduct education research.

Could researchers study differences in student outcomes?

One of the most significant concerns raised by education researchers involves studies that examine whether educational outcomes differ among student groups.

The proposed rule would prohibit federal funds from supporting research related to what the administration calls “unlawful diversity, equity and inclusion” activities and would restrict funding for what are known as “disparate impact studies.” These analyze whether policies that might appear neutral produce different results for different groups.

The National Academy of Education, in a letter signed by 19 other education and science organizations, warned that the rule could ban studies examining racial or ethnic achievement gaps, and whether educational interventions help some students more than others.

“Whether a reading intervention works differently for English language learners, whether a discipline policy falls more heavily on students of color, whether a gifted education program under-identifies students with disabilities — these are not fringe questions,” the organization wrote. “They are central empirical questions of education policy research.”

Researchers also pointed to possible conflicts with existing education laws and programs that require demographic analysis. For example, the roughly $17 billion federal program for high-poverty schools known as Title I requires states and districts to examine student outcomes by race, disability status, income and English learner status in order to identify and support struggling groups of students.

The proposed rule does not explicitly prohibit all such analysis. But researchers argue that the language around diversity, equity and inclusion  and “disparate impact” is broad and vague enough to create uncertainty and discourage researchers from proposing important studies.

Who decides what counts as valuable research?

Education researchers also object to proposed changes that would increase political involvement in grant decisions.

The proposal would require agencies to consider alignment with federal priorities, which could change from administration to administration, and the “national interest,” which is undefined. It also states that political appointees are to review all grants before they are issued. Research organizations argue that this requirement could reduce the role of independent scientific review, when subject experts evaluate proposals based on quality, rigor and feasibility.

Researchers also worry that the Trump administration’s push for “gold standard science” in the proposal is undefined and could favor some methods over others. Education research is not as straightforward as testing the effectiveness of a new drug and often uses a variety of approaches — including surveys, interviews and sophisticated data analysis that attempt to replicate an experiment without randomly assigning students to a program or a style of instruction. 

Among other changes, the OMB proposal calls upon agencies to give preference to grant proposals with low overhead costs, which disadvantages large research universities. It would also cut federal funding for attending conferences and publication costs, unless specifically approved. Researchers would be required to provide written justification for each request to receive grant funds, adding to their regulatory paperwork. Education research organizations objected to all of these proposals. 

The White House proposal emphasizes supporting research that can yield immediate results or breakthrough innovations. In response, the Knowledge Alliance pointed to the science of reading as an example of why real progress requires patience.

“Researchers would be less likely to pursue important long-term questions that are critical to creating the foundational knowledge needed for scientific breakthroughs,” wrote Rachel Dinkes, president of the Knowledge Alliance. The science of reading “reflects the accumulation of evidence over many years and across multiple administrations, which has been pivotal to improving student outcomes in reading.”

What happens when research is interrupted?

Education research groups also raised concerns about the consequences of suspending or terminating grants after studies have begun.

The National Academy of Education warned that interruptions could be especially damaging for longitudinal studies, which depend on consistent data collection over time. Losing a year of data collection, the group argued, could permanently damage a study’s value.

Researchers also pointed to effects beyond universities. Federal research grants often fund partnerships between researchers and schools, provide professional learning or pay for interventions for students. The consequences of abrupt terminations are fresh in education researchers’ minds. When the Department of Education terminated dozens of research studies in 2025, for example, 1,600 high schoolers with disabilities lost services. 

Restrictions on international research partnerships were another concern. Researchers argued that broad limits on foreign collaborations could affect U.S. participation in international assessments such as PISA and TIMSS, which help policymakers compare U.S. student performance with that of other countries.

The Trump administration’s proposal to overhaul how the federal government awards and oversees grants is drawing fierce opposition from scientific societies and research organizations across many fields, from medicine to climate science. These comments from the education research community are just three among 496,775 that have been submitted. A July 14 article in MedPage Today explained that research organizations intentionally flooded the OMB with comments to respond to, hoping to either slow the rule-making process or create an administrative record that could be used in future lawsuits to challenge the rule. 

OMB did not respond to questions about the objections raised by education researchers.

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

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