This podcast, Sold a Story, was produced by APM Reports and reprinted with permission.

Sold a Story is an investigative podcast about how kids learn — what works in the classroom, the science behind those insights and why that research often doesn’t make it into schools. Season 1 revealed why so many kids are struggling to learn how to read, and it sparked a wave of change across the country. In Season 2, we go beyond reading to look at teaching itself.

Season 2, Episode 4: What can you do for my Black children?

In a poor, Black neighborhood in Houston, principal Thaddeus Lott transforms a struggling elementary school with “direct instruction.” Soon, his students are outperforming students at much wealthier schools. The results are so remarkable, some people think it’s too good to be true. 

The post Sold a story: What can you do for my Black children? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

This story was originally published by Barn Raiser and is reprinted with permission.

Last May, just weeks before the end of the semester, students, staff and faculty at the University of Wisconsin—Platteville Baraboo Sauk County received the devastating news that the school was closing. Students scrambled to arrange transfers to other colleges, while employees tried to line up jobs elsewhere in the UW system. 

By the end of the month, “Boo U,” as it was affectionately named, a fixture in south-central Wisconsin for nearly 60 years, was no more.

The Baraboo campus was just the latest UW school to close its doors. In the past three years, the University of Wisconsin has permanently shuttered eight of its 13 branch campuses. With their focus on the liberal arts, these two-year transfer colleges long provided an accessible, affordable on-ramp to higher education, especially for rural and first-generation college students. 

To mark Boo U’s closing, instructors and students held a celebration to pay tribute to the college. Among the guests: members of the very first graduating class, who received their associate degrees in the 1970s, two years after the school opened.

“It was really a memorial,” says Karen DeSanto, a first-term Wisconsin state legislator who represents Baraboo. “The students talked about how this place shaped and changed lives in this community. We don’t have that any more.”

In recent years the pace of colleges shutting down has ticked up. According to analysis by The Hechinger Report, colleges are now closing at a rate equivalent to nearly one every three weeks. And yet within this trend, the demise of Wisconsin’s two-year public colleges remains something of an outlier. The other colleges that have closed or are at risk of closing are overwhelmingly private institutions.

University of Wisconsin officials have cited steep declines in enrollment to justify the closure of the campuses. While the UW system has seen enrollment drop by more than 10 percent since 2010, the decline has been especially acute at the two-year schools. In its final year of operation, Boo U had just 100 students, down from more than 500 just a decade ago. Plunging student numbers meant that revenue was no longer enough to keep up with facility, staff and infrastructure costs.

But a shortage of students is only part of the story. Years of budget cuts, beginning under former Republican Gov. Scott Walker in 2015, in concert with a series of tuition freezes, have left the UW system among the worst funded in the nation. 

Then in 2017, UW approved a sweeping merger, making the two-year colleges regional branches of the state’s four-year schools. This set off a competitive scramble for students that pitted the two-year UW schools against bigger, and better resourced institutions, some of which lowered admissions requirements to lure more students. 

“At that point the writing was really on the wall,” says Dan Kallgren, who spent his career teaching history at UW-Marinette, outside of Green Bay. 

Marinette ended in-person instruction in 2024, then limped along for another year offering remote classes. Kallgren taught the final course at the school: a Western Civilization survey class, beamed out via video link to students in Manitowoc and Sheboygan. “I was the last faculty member on campus,” recalls Kallgren.

UW officials insist that even with the shuttering of the rural campuses, Wisconsin students still have plenty of options to choose from, including 13 four-year schools across the state and 16 technical colleges. 

But Kallgren says that argument fails to acknowledge the unique role that liberal arts schools like Marinette have played in letting rural students effectively try out college.  

“Think about the rural kid screwing up his courage and coming here, then getting turned on to engineering or history,” says Kallgren. “That avenue is now closed.”

Education deserts

Despite the popular notion of students venturing far away to attend college, most students enroll at a campus within 20 miles of home. That’s according to extensive research by scholar Nicholas Hillman, who formerly directed a research lab at UW-Madison and is now an education professor at Indiana University. Hillman found that proximity to a college is associated with higher levels of postsecondary enrollment. 

But the inverse is also true. As distance grows between a student and a school, the odds of them enrolling drops. Hillman calls regions with fewer colleges and universities “education deserts,” and warns that Wisconsin is pursuing the higher education equivalent of “desertification.”

“They’ve hollowed out the two-year schools and the liberal arts transfer mission and now they’re sealing the coffin,” says Hillman. “The question is, if you shut one door, have you opened another?”

That doors are closing for Wisconsin’s rural students appears to be borne out by data. Previous reporting on college access in rural communities found that the number of rural students enrolled in the UW system has dropped at a rate greater than the overall decrease in college attendance. While the decline has many causes, including a political backlash against higher education in the state’s conservative rural regions, the shuttering of the branch campuses is likely to exacerbate that trend. 

The winnowing of college options in states like Wisconsin reflects a larger story about institutions that serve low-income and rural students closing or being starved of resources. 

“People don’t realize the contrast between schools where programs are being cut and (UW-)Madison where the world is your oyster,” says Douglas Haynes, a professor of English at UW-Oshkosh and the author of “Teaching Toward Slow Hope: Place-Based Learning in College and Beyond,” a new book on higher education in the upper Midwest. “There are going to be increasing numbers of (rural) students who just don’t go to college any more.”

A recent study found that Wisconsin has the second highest rate of “brain drain” in the country, as young, educated workers move out of the state after graduating. Haynes says that diminishing college access creates another form of brain drain in which young rural Wisconsinites are deprived of opportunities at the front end. “When we limit college access we’re also limiting the kind of impact these students might have had in their own communities,” says Haynes.

The Wisconsin Idea

Alex Stevens grew up in Stevenson, Michigan, a small town on the Upper Peninsula. Unlike many of his high school classmates, Stevens always knew that he wanted to attend college, but with a disabled mother, both distance and cost were major concerns. 

“I was raised by my grandparents, and I knew that caring for my mother was going to become my responsibility,” says Stevens. He would end up choosing the nearest college option, 25 miles down the road and over the state line in Wisconsin: UW-Marinette. “It just made sense to go there.”

He thrived at the school with its small campus and intimate class sizes. Stevens’ favorite courses were sweeping interdisciplinary examinations of U.S. history taught by professors of history, music and film. 

After two years, and with almost no college debt, Stevens transferred to UW-Green Bay to pursue a history degree. He now teaches history and social studies at a Catholic high school in Marinette. 

“I was rural, poor, and smart and UWM gave me a remarkable opportunity,” says Stevens.

Today, Stevens’ trajectory is much less likely, and not just because the Marinette campus is gone. Wisconsin has also steadily moved away from the liberal arts emphasis that was at the core of the mission of the two-year transfer schools. 

Homegrown: How Rural Communities Build Their Workforce

Rural America needs workers—but is there enough local education and training to meet the need?  Five nonprofit newsrooms in Wisconsin, North Carolina, West Virginia, Oklahoma and Northern California examine how rural higher education and workforce programs try to fill critical shortages of health care workers, teachers and skilled labor. This collaboration from INN’s Rural News Network explores the promises and missed opportunities to create strong rural workforces. 

In 2023, Jay Rothman, who served as president of the University of Wisconsin before he was fired in April of this year, set off a firestorm with his recommendation that colleges in the system shift from liberal arts programs to more career specific programs, “particularly if the institution serves a large number of low-income students.” 

An investigation by student journalists at UW-Madison found that of 82 academic programs within the UW system that have been cut or eliminated in recent years, the majority were in the humanities or social sciences.

“There is an increasingly narrow focus on vocational education,” says Alyssa Ratledge, who studies rural higher education issues at MDRC, a nonprofit research group. She says that closure of the branch campuses and the elimination of majors reflect a broader shift in how states like Wisconsin view the purpose of higher education.

“It’s all about getting a job with a positive ROI (return-on-investment),” says Ratledge. “But students also go to college to try things out and discover who they are.”

As the branch campuses disappear, the expansive notion of higher-education-for-all known as the Wisconsin Idea — the Progressive-era vision that education should improve people’s lives outside the classroom — is also in retreat. In Baraboo, the community is now debating what to do with a cluster of empty buildings. 

In Marinette, the theater arts program is the only one remaining, thanks to a partnership with UW Green-Bay, private donations and event ticket sales. Lauryn Albaugh is in charge, and she’s hopeful that the programming, including community and children’s theater, will inspire young people here as it did when she was growing up in Marinette. 

Cast in “Willy Wonka Jr.” at the age of 7, Albaugh has never looked back. 

“I really attribute my love for the arts to this theater program,” she says. “That it’s thriving feels very encouraging.”

Still, today Albaugh is one of just two employees left at UW-Marinette — a maintenance man inspects the mothballed facilities once a week. 

Jennifer C. Berkshire is the host of the education podcast “Have You Heard” and the co-author (with Jack Schneider) of The Education Wars: A Citizen’s Guide and Defense Manual. She teaches in the Boston College Prison Education Program and the Education Studies program at Yale. 

This story was originally published by Barn Raiser.

This reporting is part of a collaboration with the Institute for Nonprofit News‘ Rural News Network. Five nonprofit newsrooms were involved: Barn Raiser, Carolina Public Press, Mountain State Spotlight, Oklahoma Watch and Shasta Scout. The series was edited by veteran investigative editor Dee J. Hall, co-founder and former managing editor of Wisconsin Watch. Support from Ascendium Education Group made this project possible.

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Does artificial intelligence help students learn? That’s a question many teachers and parents want answered, as the new educational technology is rapidly spreading in classrooms. 

Normally, meta-analyses would be the right place to look, since they’re supposed to gather a scattered body of research and make sense of it by pointing to where the preponderance of evidence lies. And indeed, there are 39 of them, all reporting substantial benefits for AI in education. 

But it appears that the studies synthesizing that evidence are themselves unreliable — and the peer-review process failed to catch the problems. 

“This is not trustworthy evidence,” said Justin Reich, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the director of MIT’s Teaching Systems Lab, who hosted a webinar on Oct. 20 to discuss the problem of the growing number of positive AI meta-analyses. “All of these meta-analyses are flawed.”

A forensic audit of 14 of the 39 meta-analyses has found serious conceptual and statistical flaws. Appearing in journals by prominent publishers, including Springer Nature, Wiley, SAGE and Taylor & Francis, these 14 papers have accumulated more than 3,000 citations and continue to rack up 200 citations a month, according to Google Scholar — implying that AI’s effectiveness is settled science. One meta-analysis has been retracted, almost a year after its May 2025 publication in a Nature journal after two Norwegian scholars lodged a complaint. 

The new audit was conducted by Patrick O’Neill, a community college professor at the Bloomington, Indiana, campus of Ivy Tech, who examined a sample of the underlying studies and the statistical methods used to combine their results in meta-analyses. O’Neill found recurring patterns of errors, some of which he said could easily have been detected just by reading the study abstracts. 

During the Oct. 20 webinar, O’Neill described a constellation of “impossible statistics,” “hallucinated references” and “overstated conclusions.” Some of the underlying studies even cited references to papers published about generative AI before that technology was released to the public. Links to the citations sometimes led to unrelated studies. 

Many of the aggregated studies didn’t even measure how much AI boosted learning. For example, nursing students who studied for three hours a week with an instructor using AI were compared to peers who had no study sessions at all (of course they tested better). Students who played video games and answered AI-generated questions outperformed students who did neither. In another experiment, students who chatted with an AI bot reported feeling less anxious.

Beth Tipton, a leading meta-analysis expert and a professor at Northwestern University, who joined her colleagues Reich and O’Neill in the critique, characterized as “crazy” the idea of conducting a very broad meta-analysis encompassing all the various uses of AI in education.  

Tipton compared it to conducting a meta-analysis of math education. Is math education effective? That depends on how the math is taught. A thoughtful meta-analysis might narrow the question down to a specific approach, such as whether spatial learning interventions improve math skills. Similarly, Tipton said, how AI is used needs to be specified before conducting a meta-analysis of it. 

“Do we mean people using [educational] apps and programs that include AI in them, like Khan Academy? Do we mean giving students access to Claude?” Tipton asked. 

A big concern in the current batch of AI meta-analyses, O’Neill said, is “publication bias.” He found that two-thirds of the calls for papers for AI in education specifically invited research on its benefits, “seemingly disinviting null or negative results.” That means the meta-analyses are effectively “manufacturing evidence” by aggregating selected, positive results, he said. 

Recrunching the numbers

O’Neill is now conducting his own AI meta-analysis, using proper statistical methods, and arriving at a far less sanguine picture. He found that the outcomes from 44 well-designed experiments varied widely, from very helpful to very harmful to students. The results averaged out to roughly zero, according to O’Neill’s preliminary calculations. This doesn’t mean educators should conclude that AI is harmless, on average. It depends on how it’s used.

Susanna Loeb, a Stanford professor of education who also joined the meta-analysis critique webinar, pointed out that her team has collected almost 900 studies on AI in education and determined that only 20 of them were of high enough quality to be included in a recent summary of the evidence for her AI Hub for Education. Her team has since identified 32 more studies and is soon to update that summary. But, she said, it’s still too early to conduct a meta-analysis that would be useful to school leaders or teachers. Very few of the high-quality studies take place in K-12 schools in the United States.

Northwestern’s Tipton worries that the fast-growing field of meta-analysis has outstripped the supply of experts qualified to review the work. More scholars are conducting meta-analyses because they’re quicker and cheaper than running experiments, and they can attract lots of citations for ambitious professors. The hunger for evidence about AI has made this topic a particular magnet for meta-analysis and spawned something of an AI meta-analysis cottage industry.

Tipton said she gets requests to review meta-analysis papers every day but can’t accept them all. Checking the underlying studies can take days, and peer review is unpaid volunteer work.

Medicine has flawed research, too, Tipton said, but it has gatekeepers to help separate the wheat from the chaff. The Food and Drug Administration evaluates evidence before approving drugs, and insurers review research when deciding which treatments to cover. Education has no comparable safeguards.

A ‘no-man’s land’

“In education, it’s kind of no-man’s land,” Tipton said. “Anybody can sort of say that they have evidence for anything, and share it with anybody, and consumers, schools, teachers, parents are left to try to wade through that and make sense of it. It’s incredibly frustrating.”

The researchers appealed to philanthropic funders and the National Science Foundation for help supporting rigorous, reliable research syntheses. “Maybe our model of voluntary peer review doesn’t work very well for landmark” studies on critical topics in education, Reich said. “Peer review’s not working. Meta-analysis is not working.”

Until truly reliable evidence emerges, the researchers advised educators to experiment cautiously with AI, starting with small groups of students and monitoring the results. Even introducing AI into a 300-student lecture course could be risky, O’Neill said.

In other words, teachers are on their own to experiment in their own classrooms. Still, it’s encouraging to see education researchers calling out flaws in their own field and trying to fix them. 

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

This story about AI in education meta-analysis 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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Eye-grabbing headlines about the “end of reading” are upon us, noting that fewer than half of American adults read a book of any kind in 2022. 

Yet it’s important to point out that while visits to libraries have not yet rebounded to pre-pandemic levels, they are growing, in part because their program offerings are expanding. Adults and children in the U.S. made more than 800 million visits to a library in 2023, an average of 2.2 million visits per day and nearly double the number in 2021. There are over 17,000 public library locations in the United States — more than the number of hospitals or McDonald’s. 

Ask most Americans what critical infrastructure looks like, and they’ll likely describe a bridge, power grid or broadband cable. They probably won’t mention the single-room library in Donnelly, Idaho, which supports families in the remote community with after-school care, or the more than 2,600 free summer events being run by the District of Columbia Public Library System.

But that’s exactly the kind of vital role public libraries fill every day in this country. If we want to ensure families can access all the resources and programming libraries offer, we need a better way to broadcast libraries’ services. 

The surge in visits is proof of a growing public reliance on libraries at the very moment when federal and state budget cuts are stripping away other community resources.

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

From cradle to career and beyond, public libraries connect community members to early literacy programs, after-school enrichment, English language classes, workforce training, college and career counseling, broadband internet, passport and notary services and much more. 

Walk into a public library on a Tuesday afternoon and you might find a “STEAM Team” session in which elementary schoolers are making fairy slime, middle schoolers are constructing popsicle stick catapults or high schoolers are producing podcasts. 

Come back Saturday morning and the same room will be packed with toddlers and caregivers doing a sing-along that pediatricians would tell you is exactly the kind of early language exposure that predicts school readiness. 

This is programming that rivals — and often surpasses — what parents are shelling out hundreds of dollars for at private enrichment centers. And it’s free.

It’s past time we treated libraries like the critical community institutions that they are. Because free is not always findable. 

Philanthropy can help — and the precedent is over a century old. Andrew Carnegie funded the construction of nearly 1,700 public libraries across the country, betting that broad access to knowledge was the backbone of a democratic society. 

That bet paid off. Today, philanthropy needs to double down on it.

Research shows that parents look for educational resources through internet searches, school websites and word of mouth. But while they are searching for “tutoring near me free” and “college essay help” and “STEM camp for kids,” many public libraries are simply relying on promotion methods like flyers posted on their bulletin boards, targeting people already visiting the library. 

What’s missing is the modern infrastructure that turns a library’s offerings into something a working parent can actually find on their phone at 9 p.m. — discoverable on the platforms families already use, integrated with the schools and community organizations they already trust, and supported by the staff capacity and shared technology to keep it current. 

Public funding rightly pays for library buildings, collections and staff. Philanthropy can do something different: support innovation, test new approaches, build technology that can be shared across thousands of libraries and help successful models spread nationwide to ensure that the services communities rely on are visible, accessible and responsive to changing needs. 

Related: OPINION: Book bans draw libraries into damaging culture wars that undermine their purpose

Libraries don’t just need a single pilot or a one-time digital makeover. They need sustained investment in the connections between libraries and the public. 

In practice, that means paying for libraries to hire staff who can reach families online, building shared technology that small and rural libraries can use without needing their own tech teams and partnering with the education websites parents already use to look for information. 

Closing this gap between programs and access doesn’t require reinventing anything; it requires connecting what already exists to where families are already looking. 

Surfacing public library programs alongside school data shouldn’t be a heavy lift. Schools and community organizations can list library events alongside after-school options and point parents to free resources many don’t know exist.

The stakes go beyond access to programs. Americans are losing faith in shared institutions, but libraries are one of the few we still trust — and one of the few civic spaces still bridging the divides that seemingly keep deepening everywhere else. 

Letting libraries drift into invisibility while the families who most need them search online is not a choice we should make. 

The buildings are already there. The programming is already extraordinary. Now, the call to action for philanthropy is to strengthen one of America’s most trusted institutions so every family can find, access and benefit from the opportunities libraries already provide. 

Jon Deane is CEO of GreatSchools, a nonprofit school information platform, helping more than 40 million parents annually access trusted school data and make informed decisions about their children’s education.

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.

This story about public libraries and education 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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Up to 40 percent of food served in schools goes to waste — about 530,000 tons. 

All that food waste has serious consequences for the planet: It translates into some 1.9 million metric units of greenhouse gases per year, according to a new report from the nonprofit World Wildlife Fund.

But there are solutions. Since 2018, World Wildlife Fund has worked with schools to educate students about food waste, train staff, help them adopt practices like using “share tables” and composting, and more. 

I recently spoke with Gerin Hennebaul, a STEM content specialist at Lovin Elementary in Gwinnett County, Georgia, about her school’s experience reducing food waste. Lovin got help from World Wildlife Fund’s Food Waste Warriors program as well as the group Gwinnett Clean & Beautiful and its schools partnership, Green & Healthy Schools. The results have been impressive: Lovin Elementary has reduced food waste by some 70 percent, with each of its students participating and learning to divert food from landfills and to compost. The school even uses the program to help students practice math skills, spend time outside, and learn problem solving and communication skills.  

Kids are often picky eaters, school budgets are tight and staff are stretched thin. Hennebaul told me that before Lovin Elementary tackled food waste, kids were throwing away vast amounts of food — unopened milk cartons and juice containers, bags of carrots or apples. But Hennebaul’s experience offers reasons for optimism. Her main advice for other schools: start by collecting data on the problem, and go slow. Below is my interview with her, which has been condensed and edited for clarity.  

This all started with a food audit in late 2018. What is a food audit and what did it find?

Before we could start taking care of the problem, we had to get some data to figure out what it was. We’d heard of the Food Waste Warrior food audit from Green & Healthy Schools. They gave us all the supplies we needed — buckets for food collection, the scales to weigh the food, all the signage. 

We set up two tables down the exit of our cafeteria and lined up on both sides and had our third graders and fifth graders help. As the kids finished their lunches that day, they would bring their trays to the table. And then our students were almost in an assembly line. One would take the fruits and vegetables off the tray and dump them in a bucket. The next person would dump all the extra milk. The next person would pull off all the plastic. 

Gathering that data at the beginning is something every school should start with. The day we did this was Taco Day, so it was gross, there was lots of runny cheese, but we learned a lot. We collected 589 pounds of waste. Of that, 120 pounds were foods called recoverables — sealed cartons of milk, bags of carrots, of apples. 

How did you use that information? 

The kids were shocked by the numbers. We asked them for solutions and brainstormed ideas. They started off simple, like making posters, which they did. They went on the announcements and spoke to everybody about how you don’t have to take a milk if you are not going to drink it. 

Then they came up with two other ideas. One was a share table. We looked at all the foods that hadn’t been touched and asked, ‘What can we do with all these foods?’ And they said, ‘We can share with other people.’ We reached out to Green & Healthy Schools and they helped us get a share table started. We have a table with baskets on it and a refrigerator with a glass front door. 

The other thing they weighed that day was food from the teachers’ salad bar. We had just gotten chickens in our garden, and they came up with the idea of feeding the lettuce and cucumbers and things like that to the chickens. We implemented their ideas for a few months and in March 2019 we did another food audit and we reduced our lunch waste to 435 pounds of waste, 47 pounds of that were fruit and vegetable waste, and we sent 108 pounds of food to the share table that day. It was really cool for the kids to see that their ideas were really working. That’s how our first year started.  

What came next? You’ve reduced food waste by 70 percent – how did you achieve that? 

We’d been talking about what more we could do, and around the fall of 2021, Green & Healthy Schools reached out to us and said, Are you interested in a composting grant? We received this grant from Food Well Alliance and they built our composting bin. I didn’t know anything about composting, neither did the kids. My favorite part of everything we’ve done has been learning to do all of this with the kids. When they realize the teacher doesn’t know what they are doing, they will go research it themselves, find out the answers and be happy to tell you exactly what they found out. 

We started really small, in the spring of 2022, with fifth grade. We’d learn about composting, teach them lessons, they would collect food scraps, and a couple weeks later we’d move on to the next class. In fall 2022, we decided to expand to all grade levels except kindergarten. By the end of the year, every student, first through fifth grade, knew how to collect food waste and compost. During that year, 2022-2023, we collected 1,235 pounds of fruit and vegetable waste from our trays. Then in 2023-2024, from the second week of school, all first through fifth graders began collecting fruit and vegetable waste, and we collected 5,489 pounds of food waste that year. We ran out of room in our compost bin so now we work with the local church across the street; they take our food waste two days a week for their garden. And teachers have vermicomposting [or worm composting] bins in their classrooms.

I was struck in the report by the idea of ‘cafeterias as classrooms.’ Are there math lessons involved, for example?

The very last group of kids that eat in the cafeteria is fourth grade, and when they finish at 1 o’clock, two kids from every single class — and we rotate every week — wheel the cart and weigh all the food waste. And they have a binder where they document all of their data. And at the end of the week they add up the data, so they are adding with decimals, and that’s one of their fourth grade standards. 

Every single Tuesday, during recess time, we have a master gardener who comes to Lovin, and he takes a group of four or five fourth graders and they go to the compost bin and they take the temperature of the compost and track the heat all year long. They learn how to physically do the composting. We have an eco heroes club for our second and third graders and they use the compost in our garden. Our kindergarteners plant carrots every winter. Our third graders just used it for their unit on soil.

Our third graders focus on reducing, reusing, recycling. We talk about Food Waste Warriors, we pull out that data. Then each third grade class does a presentation to the kindergartners where they talk about chickens, share tables, and composting. They all write original songs about reducing waste, have skits, create this big PowerPoint presentation. It’s very cool to have the third graders be the teachers. Every August, our first graders that received the lessons in May as kindergarteners remember the most because the third graders were teaching them. 

Do you connect what you’re doing to carbon emissions or to climate change? When does that happen?

We start talking about that in third grade. We try to align it with as many standards as we can, and third grade is the heaviest on pollution, recycling and landfills. We also talk a lot about it with our fifth graders before they go off to middle school, because we are hoping that a lot of them will want to start these programs on their own. 

Have you used the data you’ve collected to make decisions about ordering and meal choices? 

Back in January 2025, we launched something called Raccoon Eyes AI. A student at Georgia Tech created this system that when you scan your tray, it takes a picture, and AI analyzes what you’re throwing away. Every month we get a printout of what our students are throwing away. It tells how many clean trays we had, how many trays still had food on them, how much trash each grade level threw away, and what we are throwing away, like 81 pounds of boneless wings. We get pictures of the top three throwaway items. It’s almost like doing a food audit every day. But he sold the company and we’re in limbo now. 

Based on the data there are some things we can easily do. We had two types of rolls one day and our kids threw away like 150 of one and only like 30 of another. The reason was that they liked the type that had more garlic sauce. That’s something we can change, we can add more garlic sauce. But when it gets to the district level, that’s a whole other ball game because we have vendors we have to use. We have freedom to put more teriyaki sauce on something, but we can’t change what type of nuggets we order. 

What are the biggest barriers keeping this from expanding to more schools? How can they be overcome? 

At Lovin when I first started this, I sat down with our administrative team, cafeteria manager and head custodian. When the cafeteria manager and head custodian see that your admin team and everybody is on board, that really seems to help. One of the biggest things is my position. I am a “fully release” teacher, which means I don’t have a homeroom or classes. That gives me the flexibility and freedom to go out and work at the compost bin with the kids, or be in the cafeteria and stand by that share table for two hours for the first week of school to make sure everybody is using it correctly. Schools that don’t have that seem to struggle a little bit more with the consistency and the level of how we do it here at Lovin. The hardest logistic, which we have no control over really, is the weather. If it’s pouring down rain, we can’t compost. We have worked around a lot of those things, which is good, but there are always going to be new hurdles to figure out. 

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

This story about food waste 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 over 20 years, Sylvia Crews has worked in early childhood education, spending the last decade running her own home-based center. After buying a home in Washington, D.C., in 2015, she launched LTH Infants and Toddlers Center — an abbreviation for “loving, tender home” — shortly after. She is licensed to care for up to nine children ranging from 6 weeks to 3 1/2 years old, overseeing four employees. 

Crews said she wants to work “as long as the Lord will allow me to,” but she does worry about the likelihood of younger workers entering the sector.

“At a point, I know I’ll have to stop,” said Crews, 67. But as for the next generation, “How do we get them involved? We need to bring them in,” she said.

More than half of licensed or registered home-based child care providers are over the age of 50, according to federal survey data of child care workers, while only 4 percent are 29 years old or younger. In contrast, at larger child care centers, about a third of employees are 29 or younger. The numbers are more balanced at home-based settings that aren’t registered or licensed. About 30 percent of these so-called “unlisted” providers are over 50, and a roughly equal percentage are 29 or younger.

“The aging part of the story, on its own, is not the problem,” said Katharine Sadowski, assistant professor of education at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education. “But when you combine it with all the other pieces, about the composition of the workforce, of who we’ve relied on, it spells trouble.”

Child care centers, which include preschools, Head Start and prekindergarten, are the most frequently used option for nonparental care. Federal surveys found about 66 percent of children in nonparental care attend such programs. That compares to about 17 percent of children in a child care arrangement who were in home-based care. 

But for many parents, home-based care is a vital alternative. Providers tend to offer more flexible hours than larger centers: Only 8 percent of larger child care centers offer care during non-traditional working hours, according to federal data, compared to more than a third of licensed home-based child care providers.

Smaller home-based centers may meet a family’s needs in other ways too, such as providing care in families’ native language or offering a specific curriculum like one focused on outdoor play, advocates said.

“We know families choose providers who eat vegan food or speak the language they like or observe the religion they like,” said Natalie Renew, executive director of Home Grown, a nonprofit focused on supporting home-based child care. “The strength of home-based child care is a very responsive service delivery. When you have a model reinforcing homogeneity, that is not good for parents.”

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

A federal report found that more than 97,000 small home-based providers — defined as one person as the sole caregiver — closed between 2005 and 2017.

Hayley Village has spent the last 45 years in early childhood education and the last 20 running the home-based It Takes a Village Children and Family Services, in San Mateo, California. She makes a point to ask every family about any cultural holidays they celebrate or food they eat, and then incorporates the Chinese New Year, Cinco de Mayo and Diwali into the curriculum. 

Village, who is from England, also had her students celebrate the queen of England’s 60th year reigning by writing emails to the royal family — and receiving correspondence back. 

“It’s connecting what you would do with your own children,” she said. “You embrace who they are. And when you make that connection, they feel heard and validated.”  

Because home-based programs are also significantly smaller than center-based ones, they often allow for more personalized care, providers say.

“It’s a lot of pivoting. My curriculum is pretty much written entirely by me, and once you get to know the children, you know who likes the dinosaurs or who likes to cook or who likes to eat dirt — even if you don’t want them to,” Village said. 

While she has no immediate plans to stop working, she has spent the last three years pondering her future retirement. 

“I thought as I turn 60, it’s time to walk away and mentor the younger generation,” she said. “I can’t do some of the things I did 30 years ago.” 

As the aging population nears retirement, experts worry that children will be left with fewer options for care.

“When you see a type of business going out of business, it doesn’t mean families don’t want it,” said Anna Powell, associate director of research and policy at the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment. “It is more of a warning bell; this is an aging group, and when centers close, they don’t come back.” 

Related: Home-based child care programs are struggling to survive

Being able to afford to retire is the top concern of aging home-based child care workers, according to a report from the National Association for Family Child Care. Home-based centers do not typically offer retirement benefits. And child care, despite rising costs to families, is one of the lowest paying fields in the country. 

“When you’re competing with In-N-Out Burger and Amazon drivers’ salaries, at $22, $23 an hour, you have to invest in early childhood education to keep people in the field,” Village said. “Why is it not looked at that children are tomorrow’s future? We’re brain developers.”

Those who do want to own a center often run into roadblocks. Many states require the home-based provider to own their home — an increasing rarity among young people. Village rents her three-bedroom, two-bathroom home. The house is valued at nearly $2 million, a price tag she says she would never be able to afford. 

“I wouldn’t say I’ve given up on it, but to live here I would need major financial assistance,” she said.

Experts point out that even in states like California that allow renters to run home-based centers, the requirements for the property are often specific and expensive, such as hard-wired sprinkler systems and multiple exits from a basement. Even if a landlord were to permit such modifications, those systems also are pricey to maintain and can hurt the house’s resale value. And Renew said facility-related requirements often do not come with options for state or federal financial help.

“I think health and safety is important, but I think we’ve conflated them to a set of requirements with providers who can only own their homes,” she said. “We’re asking providers to make commercial improvements to residential homes.”

Some states have offered support to shore up home-based care providers. Nebraska provides up to $5,000 for starting or expanding family child care operations. Connecticut launched a program in 2024 allowing would-be providers a space to launch their child care centers, since many cannot operate out of their own homes. Louisiana used American Rescue Plan funding to offer grants to help stabilize family child care centers weathering the pandemic storm, though that program has come to an end. 

But Crews said the efforts don’t go far enough. “Child care is expensive around the country; make it affordable for everyone,” she said.

Given all the challenges facing home-based child-care providers, Village said she recently decided to spend the next phase of her career away from day-to-day care at her center and in an advocacy role.

“When lawmakers make these decisions, it’s never been a truly collaborative effort,” she said. “We’ve never been at the table.”

Contact editor Christina A. Samuels at 212-678-3635 or samuels@hechingereport.org

This story about child care workers 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 podcast, Sold a Story, was produced by APM Reports and reprinted with permission.

Sold a Story is an investigative podcast about how kids learn — what works in the classroom, the science behind those insights and why that research often doesn’t make it into schools. Season 1 revealed why so many kids are struggling to learn how to read, and it sparked a wave of change across the country. In Season 2, we go beyond reading to look at teaching itself.

Season 2, Episode 3: The Forgotten Experiment

Zig Engelmann gets the chance of a lifetime: put “direct instruction” to the test in one of the largest education experiments ever conducted. The results could have changed the direction of American education. Instead, they’re contested — and ultimately cast aside. 

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David Young started his cybersecurity boot camp planning to earn an industry-recognized credential that he hoped would help land him a job. The program, run by a company called IronCircle through the University of Central Florida, had promised a roughly $400 voucher to take the CompTIA Security+ certification exam. 

During the eight months I spent reporting on IronCircle, most students I talked to mentioned the CompTIA exam, which tests basic skills to work in cybersecurity. They generally viewed it as one of the most important things to put on your resume when trying to break into the field.

But in the end, few of the IronCircle students I interviewed actually took and passed the CompTIA test. For many, they simply didn’t feel ready, saying that IronCircle had oversold what it would prepare them for. 

Others, like Young, hit a logistical problem: That promised voucher failed to materialize. Over the summer of 2025, the company quietly stopped handing these out, according to two former employees with direct knowledge of the change.

It’s one of many problems with IronCircle my new investigation uncovered. The company suddenly shuttered earlier this year, leaving many students in the lurch with little recourse for getting either the training they were promised or their costly tuition refunded. Universities that partnered with IronCircle, including the University of Central Florida, took little responsibility for monitoring the company’s boot camps during their years of partnership. 

IronCircle shut down in June, but did not respond to a dozen requests for comment before its closure. The University of Central Florida did not respond to student allegations regarding the voucher, but a spokesperson said students signed an agreement upon enrolling acknowledging that completing the boot camp does not guarantee a job.

Related: When universities slap their names on for-profit coding boot camps 

Industry certifications like the ones IronCircle offered have become increasingly popular with students and workers. They offer the promise of a stepping stone to a career or more money without having to enter the traditional higher education system.

But they are not well regulated, which means companies like IronCircle can invent new ones without proving they pay off. 

“It’s the wild, wild West when it comes to credentials right now,” said Will Markow, CEO of FourOne Insights, a research firm focused on workforce trends in tech. “The reality is there’s still a small pool that have significant demand.”

When Young emailed his adviser about his voucher in January 2026, she replied that the program now recommended a brand-new credential that IronCircle created, which she said aligned with CompTIA Security+ certification. 

Steven Ostrowski, senior director of corporate communications for CompTIA, said in an email that he was unfamiliar with IronCircle’s certification. “Some of what students learn in the Iron Circle course may help with our exam, but probably not enough to pass our test,” he said.

Some certifications are required by law to work in a certain profession — an individual, for instance, typically cannot work as a hairdresser without earning a cosmetology certificate. But many more credentials out there are entirely developed and regulated by industries themselves, which on top of high school diplomas and college degrees adds up to more than 1.8 million unique credentials offered in the U.S., according to a 2025 report. 

“Credentials are only as valuable as they are to the industry,” said Ali Crawford, a senior researcher at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, a policy research organization at Georgetown University. As for the new certifications IronCircle was promoting to Young and other students? “If it’s not valuable to the industry, it’s not valuable to them.”

Young finally got his voucher after months of asking for it. Former IronCircle employees said the policy was to provide the CompTIA voucher only to students who wouldn’t let the issue drop.

Read my full investigation of IronCircle. 

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

This story about cybersecurity training 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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Emma, a third grader, cries hot, angry tears when she doesn’t get her way. She is a bit too old to cry over losing in games like foursquare, but she has a “strong internal sense of justice,” as the other teachers and I like to put it. 

“Emma,” I say. “You’re out. You have to get back in line.”

“But it’s not fair!” she wails. I tell her that her classmates are playing by the rules — and that rules matter. 

That’s what you’re supposed to tell children. But she and I both know that her family has been trying to play by the rules since arriving in this country even though the rules keep changing, and they’re being threatened with deportation.

As a teacher, I have to be consistent, firm and steadfast, even when my instinct is to cry alongside Emma (not her real name; changed to protect her privacy). So I’m unyielding, and she grumbles her way to the back of the line. I see her hurting, and it’s hard to play my part — to be the adult in the room so that she can be the kid — when she is right that so much around her isn’t fair. 

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

The anti-immigrant movement reduces kids to constitutional hypotheticals and demographic statistics. The effects of the policies the movement pushes are not confined to economic indicators or government reports.

They ripple through neighborhoods, classrooms and playgrounds. The chaotic, legally blurry reality they create shapes even how 9-year-olds play at recess, where teachers like me try to remind kids like Emma that rules are supposed to matter.

If we claim that we belong to a country that creates rules to protect children, then we must not forget the obvious: Immigrant kids are just that — kids. To protect the rights of immigrant children, teachers must clearly inhabit their role as the reliable adult. And educators must stand in opposition to the recent round of confusing and unjust immigration policies.

The modern anti-immigrant movement has been shaped by decades of organized political messaging that frames immigrants as political scapegoats for complex social issues: inflation, the stagnating middle class, the strained health care system and violence against women. 

The Trump administration has used this messaging to help expand deportation efforts, broaden enforcement priorities and restrict legal immigration pathways. Children bear the consequences, facing the trauma of family separation and displacement. 

Worse, as the administration grows increasingly brazen, children are no longer merely victims of immigration policies — they are direct targets. Thousands of children are now separated from parents at the border, denied asylum protections and threatened with the loss of legal safeguards. 

Related: OPINION: ICE operations cause deep psychological trauma for students, declining enrollment and diminishing job paths

States are proposing laws in defiance of Plyler v. Doe, the 1982 Supreme Court decision that declared that all children, regardless of immigration status, must have access to U.S. public schools. 

The GOP hopes to trigger a lawsuit that will inevitably make its way to the Supreme Court, potentially overturning Plyler. Should this happen, it would represent a dramatic shift in U.S. education policy and in the nation’s moral understanding of children’s rights and value.

Amid all this instability and uncertainty around the rules shaping immigrants’ lives, Oklahoma state Republican Rep. Mike Ritze suggested that schools identify English learner students and report them to immigration enforcement: “Turn them over to ICE to see if they truly are citizens — and do we really have to educate noncitizens?” he asked.

Outside school grounds, politicians are playing recess games and monkeying with the rules, tossing our children around like political footballs. 

As teachers, we know the importance of consistently holding kids to high expectations. In our classrooms, we need to be the steady adults that children can count on, so they have the safety to grow, play, explore and take risks. 

No matter how cruelly politicians and pundits discuss them, and no matter how desensitized the American people become by this rhetoric, immigrant kids are still kids.

Kids like Emma, crying at recess after getting out in the game of foursquare. Kids who already experience the injustice of the world, sensing that they may never be welcome in this country. 

Emma wakes up every day not knowing whether she and her family will be deported. And still, like every other child, she goes out to play at recess.

Hannah Harshe is an English Language Development educator in San Diego, California. She is also the founder of Yoga for Immigrant Justice, a fundraising initiative that supports immigrants in the border regions of California and Baja California.

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.

This story about immigrant children 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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I remember the first time I walked into a prison writing workshop. The shadowed room contained little more than a dozen mismatched plastic chairs and a few warped tables. Before I signed up, I had struggled with a lingering melancholy after two years in county jail which ended in a life sentence.

My depression threatened to pull me deeper into an abyss. During those dark times in the past, I had self-medicated with alcohol and drugs. But sitting among my peers, listening to their writings, I was strengthened.

My day of illumination came when a woman in our writing class shared a story so raw and vulnerable that I had to dig my fingernails into my palms to keep tears from spilling down my face. That self-inflicted pain, which left half-moons deep in my palms, dissolved when I looked up. She had a fragile smile on her face. She exhaled and smiled larger, as though she had set down a heavy load.

It made me recall what Maya Angelou said: “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” 

Writing became a refuge, my mind an incubator for ideas. With the patience and dedicated nurturing of writing workshop professors, a flood of words filled one notebook after another. I found intimacy in writing, in getting to know myself in relation to the world around me.

If I’m honest, my goal had always been intimacy.

First with books, when my parents were too preoccupied to notice my withdrawing; later with men. While my poor choices led to a diminished sense of self-worth — and ultimately to prison — writing replenished a sense of agency over my life.

Related: Math can be a path to success after prison

My interest in writing predated my incarceration, but years of trauma, both physical and psychological, had stifled its growth. Writing workshops reignited my passion for learning and deepened my commitment to healing. Writing workshops provide a vital educational opportunity for people who are effectively shut out of traditional college programs. Florida’s prison system houses more than 80,000 women and men, yet only a few hundred men and fewer than 30 women are enrolled in a degree program. 

Here at Homestead Correctional Institution for women in South Florida — in a testament to the thirst for education and self-improvement — more than 100 women enroll in at least one college-level class each semester, run by Exchange for Change, a Miami-based nonprofit. Courses include fiction, journalism and theater, among others, in both English and Spanish. Some participants earn continuing education credits from Florida International University.

In a Writing as Social Action class taught by FIU Professor Tania Lopez, our discussions examined both individual and collective responsibility. The curriculum included zines created by a young woman who, as a teenager, had experienced homelessness and food insecurity. Reading her story, I felt a kinship I was loath to name: homelessness.

I ran away from home several times between the ages of 11 and 14, until my parents finally gave up and let me go.

For the next seven years, I was intermittently homeless. I dressed my living situation in opaque terms. “I’m in between places,” I told my mother from a long-term hotel room in Tampa. “My boyfriend and I are on the outs,” I told a friend when I showed up on her doorstep with a suitcase. After a car accident left me with a broken pelvis and I could no longer afford rent, I crashed at a friend’s place.

Because I never spent a night on the street, I failed to name what became glaringly obvious as I read the painful words on the zine’s artfully decorated pages. I had been homeless. I had lived without stable housing since leaving my family.

 
Writing the word homeless during class shifted something in me. A crack appeared in my foundation. When Professor Lopez asked if anyone wanted to read, I was too ashamed to raise my hand.

Writing has a way of pulling ugly memories to the surface, like weeds in a well-tended garden. But naming something matters. I was homeless. It was from that pain point that the author of the zine chose to take action, arguing for affordable housing, housing cooperatives and rent control. 

For our capstone project, Professor Lopez challenged us to identify a community need and consider how we might address it. I looked around at the women seated beside me and knew that many had endured violence and betrayal before incarceration.

I began to sketch a plan for my vision of an online literary journal dedicated to women affected by gender-based violence. My hope is simple: that more women discover the strength writing has given me.

I write because I carry an untold story, one shared by countless women who have survived violence at the hands of those they once loved. Writing has become my lifeline and my mission: To foster trauma-informed expression and give shape to experiences too often ignored.

My work assignment maintaining the prison grounds recently brought an unexpected revelation: As I swatted mosquitoes and manipulated pruning shears, I was reminded that removing something old and unnecessary creates an opportunity for growth and renewal.

Paula Grieve won a 2024 PEN America Prison and Justice writing award and a 2025 Stillwater Journalism award and has had her writing featured in Oakland Arts Review, Sinking City Magazine, and Literary Hub, among others. She is studying business through Adams State University in Colorado. 

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.

This story about prison writing workshops 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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