When he was younger, he had his sights set on a professional music career as a guitarist. Then in the 1980s, he landed a long-term substitute teaching role in two very different schools within the same district: Hillcrest, which is in an affluent neighborhood in the Oakland Hills, and Whittier in East Oakland, which was an epicenter of the crack cocaine epidemic.

The stark disparity between the two schools challenged Porter’s perception of his own impact on the students who weren’t receiving the education they deserved. So, he decided to continue on with his teaching career and eventually landed permanent teaching positions throughout the district.

These days at Roosevelt Middle School, his classroom stands out. When most middle schoolers are learning the classics, Porter’s students dive deep into the world of jazz, even going so far as to play avant-garde compositions.

“We’re the only middle school band in the Local Supercluster, as far as I know, certainly in the Milky Way galaxy, that specializes in the music of Sun Ra,” said Porter. Sun Ra was an American jazz composer and band leader, known for his experimental music style and cosmic philosophy.

Porter truly believes in the musical ability of kids of all ages. When he was Berkeley Symphony’s director of music education, he would have the orchestra perform pieces composed by 5-year-olds. And in years past, he’s created opportunities for his elementary and middle school students to record their own albums – something that he’s doing for his current middle school students.

Porter’s the type of teacher who provides a safe space for his students to practice, hang out and have a snack after school. But this is Mr. Porter’s last year teaching because he is retiring.

At this juncture, the future of music classes in Oakland public schools is uncertain because of looming budget cuts across the district. Porter does not want arts education to fall to the wayside so he started a fundraiser for Roosevelt’s music program.

“[The arts] is an absolutely essential part of a kid’s development. Music, art, PE, manipulating things with your hands – this is how kids learn,” he said. “It’s how a lot of people learn. And when you take them away, a certain portion of the population gets a little bit left behind,” Porter said.

There are many benefits for students who study and play music. Research conducted by the University of Southern California’s Brain and Creativity Institute found that learning music enhances auditory pathways in the brain, which could help with other learning systems affected by these neural pathways like reading and language. In 2022, policy caught up with science when California voters passed Proposition 28, requiring the state to provide additional funding for music and arts programs for public schools.

For students like seventh grader Diego, Porter’s band class wasn’t a natural choice when he entered middle school. “It was so weird,” Diego said of jazz music. “I was like, ‘will people actually wanna listen to this?’ I didn’t even want to play it at first.” But, he marched forward.

“I hesitated and then I just stuck with it,” he said. “I like that there’s so many possibilities and different combinations so that you can make any different one.”

Another of Porter’s seventh grade students, Imani, who plays guitar, became interested in playing Sun Ra’s music in band class. “All the parts are so different and they all come together into chaotic bliss,” she said.

Some of Porter’s former students have gone on to new heights, like 10th grade student Ryan, who comes back to Porter’s classroom at Roosevelt every Thursday to mentor middle schoolers. When Ryan arrived in Porter’s classroom about five years ago, he had experience playing violin and had picked up the cello. But Porter’s jazz-filled band class presented something new.

“It just felt exciting to be in the music class…that’s when I started to think, ‘wait, I need to switch to an instrument that’s more suitable for jazz,’” said Ryan.

So, at the suggestion of Porter, Ryan picked up his third instrument – the trombone. “It really opened up a new world for me,” said Ryan.

Now, he plays a total of fifteen instruments, is a member of the SFJAZZ High School All-Stars Band, and has played in a youth orchestra for three years, all at the encouragement of Porter.

Middle school students are in an age group that is notorious in schools and among teachers for their unpredictability, high energy, and increased social awareness. But if you can tap into their interests, the potential for growth is what Porter finds most exciting about this age group, he said.

He plans on being an active member of the local music education community in his retirement, but the students are what he’ll miss most. “I wanna be helpful. I wanna mentor teachers. I want to do what I can just to see things continue to be successful,” he said.

But he’ll also take time to tap back into the professional music world. This summer you can find Porter playing at one of his annual gigs, Chapel of the Chimes.

Some studies have found that chatbot tutors can backfire because students lean on them too heavily, get spoonfed solutions and fail to absorb the material. Even when AI tutors are designed not to give away answers, they haven’t consistently produced better results than learning the old-fashioned way without AI.

Still, researchers who have produced these skeptical studies haven’t given up hope. Some are still experimenting, trying to build better AI tutors.

One promising idea has less to do with how an AI tutor explains concepts and more with what it asks students to practice next.

A team at the University of Pennsylvania, which included some AI skeptics, recently tested this approach in a study of close to 800 Taiwanese high school students learning Python programming. All the students used the same AI tutor, which was designed not to give away answers.

But there was one key difference. Half the students were randomly assigned to a fixed sequence of practice problems, progressing from easy to hard. The other half received a personalized sequence with the AI tutor continuously adjusting the difficulty of each problem based on how the student was performing and interacting with the chatbot.

The idea is based on what educators call the “zone of proximal development.” When problems are too easy, students get bored. When they’re too hard, students get frustrated. The goal is to keep students in a sweet spot: challenged, but not overwhelmed.

The researchers found that students in the personalized group did better on a final exam than students in the fixed problem group. The difference was characterized as the equivalent of 6 to 9 months of additional schooling, an eye-catching claim for an after-school online course that lasted only five months. The AI tutor’s inventor, Angel Chung, a doctoral student at the Wharton School, acknowledged that her conversion of statistical units was “not a perfect estimate.” (A draft paper about the experiment was posted online in March 2026, but has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.)

Still, this is early evidence that small tweaks — in this case, calibrating the difficulty of the practice problems to the student — can make a difference.

Chung said that ChatGPT’s responses may already feel very personal because they are directly responding to a student’s unique questions. But that level of personalization isn’t enough. “Students usually don’t know what they don’t know,” said Chung. “The student doesn’t have the ability to ask the right questions to get the best tutoring.”

To address this, Chung’s team combined a large language model with a separate machine-learning algorithm that analyzes how students interact with the online course platform — how they answer the practice questions, how many times they revise or edit their coding, and the quality of their conversations with the chatbot — and uses that information to decide which problem to serve up next.

How different students interact with the chatbot tutor

In other words, personalization isn’t just about tailoring explanations. It’s about tailoring the learning path itself.

That idea isn’t new.

Long before generative AI tools like ChatGPT were invented, education researchers developed “intelligent tutoring systems” that tried to do something similar: estimate what a student knew and deliver the right next problem. These earlier systems couldn’t produce  natural conversations, but they could provide hints and instant feedback. Rigorous studies found that well-designed versions helped students learn significantly more.

Their Achilles’ heel was engagement. Many students simply didn’t want to use them.

Today’s AI tools could help address that problem. Students might feel more interested in a chatbot that converses with them in an almost human way.

In the University of Pennsylvania study, students in the personalized group spent more time practicing, about three additional minutes per problem, adding up to about an hour per module in the Python course, compared with half as much time (a half hour or less) for the comparison students. The researchers think these students did better because they were more engaged in their practice work.

Students’ previous knowledge of a subject affected how well the personalized sequencing worked. Students who were new to Python gained more than those who already had Python experience, who did just as well with the fixed sequence of practice problems. Students from less elite high schools also appeared to benefit more.

How students’ background affected results

All the Taiwanese students in this study volunteered for an optional computer programming course that could strengthen their college applications. Many were highly motivated, with highly educated parents, and many already had prior coding experience.

It’s not clear whether the chatbot would work as well with less motivated students who are behind at school and most in need of extra help.

One possible solution: fusing new and old.

Ken Koedinger, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a pioneer of intelligent tutoring systems, is experimenting with using new AI models to alert remote human tutors who can motivate struggling students who are drifting off. “We are having more success,” said Koedinger.

Humans aren’t obsolete — yet.

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

The Trump administration has argued the “privilege” has been too freely applied to children of non-citizens. “Hundreds of thousands of people are pouring into our country under birthright citizenship, and it wasn’t meant for that reason,” President Trump said last year.

If this constitutionally protected right is struck down by the court, it would apply to children born on or after Feb. 20, 2025. According to a projection by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute and Penn State, that could result in about 255,000 U.S.-born children beginning life without U.S. citizenship every year. By 2045, that could add up to 4.8 million children.

“Birthright citizenship is fundamental for child wellbeing,” says Wendy Cervantes of The Center for Law and Social Policy, a nonpartisan organization focused on helping people with low incomes. “It has helped ensure that all children in the U.S. can start off life with some sort of equal footing and opportunity.”

Much of that equal footing comes courtesy of the country’s K-12 public schools. While schools are a place for children to learn, they’re also a central access point for a range of services: free meals, mental health support, services for students with disabilities and much more. Without the right to citizenship, access to those services could be complicated for many children – as could access to college.

Here’s what to know about how a Supreme Court ruling to end or narrow birthright citizenship could change the education landscape.

Public schools can’t turn students away because of their immigration status

All children, regardless of immigration status, have the right to a free K-12 public education in the United States. That right was affirmed in the landmark 1982 Supreme Court ruling Plyler v. Doe.

The case centered on whether Texas could prohibit the use of state funding to educate children who were living in the U.S. unlawfully. Also in question was whether a public school district could charge foreign-born students tuition to enroll. Immigrant students sued and prevailed.

In Plyler , Cervantes says, “It was recognized by the justices that denying a K-12 education to children, a basic education, would create a permanent underclass in our society.”

Because of this decision, school districts are not supposed to collect immigration data on their students or their families. But immigrant advocates worry that Plyler has become a political target.

“The conservative movement has made very clear their intention to overturn Plyler v. Doe by even providing a playbook to state legislatures to help make that happen,” says Alejandra Vázquez Baur, co-founder and director of the National Newcomer Network, which advocates for recently arrived immigrant students.

The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025, which has shaped much of the Trump administration’s agenda, recently called for states to restrict public education for undocumented students and has recommended that states directly challenge the Plyler decision, arguing that it cost states hundreds of millions of dollars in education spending in 2023 alone.

“States have a convincing interest in preserving limited taxpayer dollars by prioritizing U.S. citizens and lawful immigrants,” wrote Lora Ries of Heritage.

Tennessee lawmakers are among those taking action: There are currently bills moving through the state legislature that propose tracking K-12 students’ legal status and allowing public schools to refuse to enroll undocumented students. Several other states have also proposed legislation that directly, or indirectly, threaten Plyler.

If any of these proposals turn into laws, they could invite legal challenges, and ultimately re-open the question of whether immigrant children have the right to a public education.

A right to education doesn’t mean families feel safe sending their kids to school

Immigration enforcement efforts can take a toll on school attendance.

MPR News reported that after heightened federal immigration presence in Minnesota early this year, some districts experienced a 20-40% increase in absences. And that trend predates the Trump administration: Researchers at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank based at Stanford University, found that after immigration raids in January 2025, school districts in California’s Central Valley had a 22% increase in absences.

Vázquez Baur says these findings show immigrant children’s constitutional right to attend K-12 public schools is already under threat.

“The law is still the law, children can still go to school. Now, we know that that is being complicated at this moment by immigration enforcement around schools,” she says. “The birthright citizenship issue complicates that even further.”

Sophia Rodriguez, a professor of education policy at New York University, has been studying the impact of immigration enforcement on school attendance. She says she has heard reports of “constant fear, anxiety and stress” from immigrant families concerned about sending their children to school. “And when you add this potential end to birthright citizenship, you create larger numbers of communities who are living in fear and anxiety,” she says.

Some studies have shown that, historically, when there is a rise in local immigration enforcement, fewer Hispanic students enroll in nearby schools, which can disrupt their education and affect school funding. In most states, public school districts receive funding based on daily student attendance and overall enrollment.

This comes as many school districts are already facing enrollment declines.

Students with disabilities could fall through the cracks

For many children, schools are the first point of contact with public services such as nutrition programs, healthcare, language learning and counseling. That is especially the case for immigrant families, says Rodriguez of NYU. “[Schools] are often the one social institution or public institution that immigrant families access.”

They are also often the first place children’s disabilities are identified, and where those students can tap into the services they need to be successful. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is the central special education law that guarantees all disabled children the right to a “Free Appropriate Public Education.”

“So those are things that aren’t going away or changing based on immigration status,” says Anne Dwyer, a professor at Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families. “But if a community is experiencing immigration enforcement or fear of enforcement at such a level that parents don’t even feel comfortable bringing their children to school, then those children are automatically not going to be able to access those very supports that schools provide.”

Schools also rely on state and federal Medicaid dollars to pay for services like physical, speech and occupational therapy. The program covers about half of all students with special education plans according to an analysis by KFF, a nonpartisan health policy research organization. Medicaid funding also makes up a significant portion of public school budgets: The U.S. Education Department reported in 2024 that Medicaid sends schools between $4 billion and $6 billion annually.

“Even if a school can’t potentially provide a type of service, they’re probably going to be a broker to those resources,” says Rodriguez.

However, Medicaid is typically limited to U.S. citizens and people with other qualifying legal statuses. If birthright citizenship is eliminated, U.S.-born children who would have previously been citizens may no longer qualify for Medicaid. For any of those children who have disabilities, schools would still be legally obligated to serve them under IDEA, but they would have to find a way to replace the lost Medicaid funding.

“That would create potential, huge cost shifts to districts,” says Dwyer. “And we know school districts are already incredibly strapped.”

Paying for higher education would get a lot harder

While the law currently provides a K-12 education for all students, the same is not true of higher education. Students without legal status can still enroll in college, but they don’t have access to federal financial aid, such as federal student loans and the Pell Grant, which helps low-income students and is currently facing a funding shortfall.

And because of their status, undocumented students are also more likely to come from impoverished backgrounds, says Caitlin Patler, a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley. “Those two things together make affording higher education almost impossible for children who are undocumented.”

In some states, including Georgia and Alabama, undocumented students are not allowed to attend certain public colleges; other states charge them out-of-state tuition.

Patler says research shows U.S. citizenship is directly tied to opportunities that increase a child’s educational attainment. “And therefore much later on, as you follow children throughout their lives, educational attainment is directly correlated with stronger economic contributions.”

She worries about a future in which birthright citizenship is narrowed or eliminated. “This would have a cascading ripple effect, potentially through multiple generations, of forcing this large and growing group of millions of children into a caste-like status.”

A caste-like status, she says, in which their opportunities would be dictated not by their potential, but by their immigration status.

Edited by: Nicole Cohen
Visual design and development by: LA Johnson

Federal education research — the system that tracks student learning and evaluates what works — has been battered by mass firings, contract cuts and cancellations, and stalled grant funding. Many researchers at private research organizations have lost their jobs and those with a more protected perch at universities face deep uncertainty. Now they are being told they need to turn up the volume if they want to continue their life’s work.

Their predicament was the focus of the Association for Education Finance and Policy’s annual conference earlier this month in Chicago. The conference theme, “Sustaining Education Research and Evidence in a Turbulent Era,” acknowledged the devastating aftershocks of last year’s onslaught. But the cure remains uncertain. At a March 20 session on rebuilding the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), an emissary from the Trump administration, Amber Northern, urged the audience to become stronger champions for their cause.

A year ago at this same conference, Northern was just a typical researcher, as horrified as everyone else over the DOGE cuts to federal education research. She was and is the director of research at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative education policy think tank. During last year’s gathering, a sympathetic official from the Trump administration approached her and asked if she could come up with some ideas for rebuilding IES, which has generally had bipartisan support.

This year, Northern was at the conference in her new role as the author of a report on IES’s future, released in late February, and was making the rounds to sell its recommendations.

Her main message to her fellow researchers: You’re not doing enough.

Rebuilding IES won’t happen, she warned, without broad public pressure. The administration, she said, responds to parents, but parents aren’t protesting the loss of education data and research. She added she was “dismayed” that more people in the field haven’t written op-eds explaining the stakes.

The room pushed back. Many researchers were still smarting from the loss of federal research funding and the inability to seek new grants. (The grant process has ground to a virtual standstill and the Education Department is sitting on millions of dollars of unspent Congressionally appropriated funds.)

Jason Grissom, an education professor at Vanderbilt University, said he had just received an email that federal funding for his graduate students was ending. He said he hadn’t realized the field hadn’t been making “a strong enough case.”

But Vivian Wong, a research methodologist at the University of Virginia, challenged the idea that it would be realistic to build a broad coalition. “You can’t put the onus on parents to save the education system,” she said, noting that families are more focused on immediate concerns like services for their children with disabilities. Producing evidence for effective instruction, she argued, is the job of good government and shouldn’t hinge upon parent advocacy.

Others raised a more personal risk: speaking out could backfire. One researcher worried that public criticism could jeopardize current grants, future funding decisions, or even invite retaliation against her university at a time when the administration has shown a willingness to lash out. She asked Northern directly whether she could guarantee that advocacy for education research wouldn’t come with consequences.

“I can’t say for sure,” Northern replied.

And that’s the bind. Researchers are being told to speak up to save their field but doing so could put their work, and their institutions, at risk.

Another possible lever is Congress. Some researchers have begun lobbying their representatives, but even there, the path is unclear. One Congressional office advised contacting the Office of Management and Budget — not the Education Department — to release already appropriated funds.

Meanwhile, schools are struggling with absenteeism and falling reading and math scores. And the nation’s main source of evidence and guidance on what works to right these problems is in limbo.

Researchers did receive one reprieve. Despite inflation, the Association for Education Finance and Policy said it did not raise this year’s conference registration fee “in response to the challenges our community is facing.”

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

“I’d see the same phrases, the same commas, even the same word choices. I would say, ‘Man, I’ve read that before.’ And I’d go look for it,” said Maxwell. “The paragraphs weren’t identical, but they were so similar.”

Although the course was in 2024, Maxwell, who teaches at Northeastern’s Seattle campus, recalls that his students’ essays sounded “like textbooks written in the 1980s and ’90s,” perhaps reflecting the sources used to train AI. The students were scattered around the country and Maxwell was pretty sure they hadn’t collaborated.

Maxwell shared his observation with a former student, Liwei Jiang, who is now a Ph.D. student in computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. Jiang decided to test her former professor’s hunch about AI scientifically and collaborated with other researchers at UW, the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon universities to analyze the output from more than 70 different large language models around the globe, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, Qwen and Llama.

The team asked each the same open-ended questions, which were intended to spark creativity or brainstorm new ideas: “Compose a short poem about the feeling of watching a sunset;” “I am a graduate student in Marxist theory, and I want to write a thesis on Gorz. Can you help me think of some new ideas?” and “Write a 30-word essay on global warming.” (The researchers pulled the questions from a corpus of real ChatGPT questions that users had consented to make public in exchange for free access to a more advanced model.) The researchers posed 100 of these questions to all 70 models and had each model answer them 50 times.

The answers were often indistinguishable across different models by different companies that have different architectures and use different training data. The metaphors, imagery, word choices, sentence structures — even punctuation — often converged. Jiang’s team called this phenomenon “inter-model homogeneity” and quantified the overlaps and similarities. To drive the point home, Jiang titled her paper, the “Artificial Hivemind.” The study won the best paper award at the annual conference on Neural Information Processing Systems in December 2025, one of the premier gatherings for AI research.

To increase AI creativity, Jiang jacked up a parameter, called “temperature,” to maximize the randomness of each large language model. That didn’t help. For example, when she asked an AI model called Claude 3.5 Sonnet to “write a short story about a colorful toad who goes on an adventure in 50 words,” it kept naming the toad Ziggy or Pip, and oddly, a hungry hawk and mushrooms kept appearing.

Different models also churn out comically similar responses. When asked to come up with a metaphor for time, the overwhelming answer from all the models was the same: a river. A few said a weaver. One outlier suggested a sculptor. Several of the models were developed in China, and yet, they were producing similar answers to those made in America.

Example of similar output from ChatGPT and DeepSeek

The explanation lies in chatbot design. AI chatbots are trained to review possible answers to make sure the output is reasonable, appropriate and helpful. This refinement step, sometimes called “alignment,” is intended to ensure that the answers align to or match what a human would prefer. And it’s this alignment step, according to Jiang, that is creating the homogeneity. The process favors safe, consensus-based responses and penalizes risky, unconventional ones. Originality gets stripped away.

Jiang’s advice for students is to push themselves to go beyond what the AI model spits out. “The model is actually generating some good ideas, but you need to go the extra mile to be more creative than that,” said Jiang.

For Jiang’s former professor Maxwell, the study confirmed what he had suspected. And even before Jiang’s paper came out, he changed how he teaches. He no longer relies on online exams. Instead, he now asks students to learn a concept and present it to other students or create a video tutorial.

Outwitting the AI hive mind requires some post-modern creativity.

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

DENVER — It was nap time at Family Star Montessori, and Sue Alexander, a retired accountant, settled onto the floor beside a little girl named Ophelia. The child leaned against her and announced: “I love squishy things.”

Alexander’s “squishy thing” — her arm — just earned her a new friend.

Alexander is a member of the Early Childhood Service Corps, which trains adults ages 50 and older to work as substitute teachers in child care centers like this one in Denver and the surrounding suburbs. In addition to helping to staff an industry that chronically lacks workers, ECSC also offers personal fulfillment and community connection for its members in the years after retirement, participants say.

“Training was a lot, but it was really well put together,” Alexander said of the program. “They’ve got good people.”

The shortage of child care teachers is a well-known problem, but a lack of qualified substitute teachers doesn’t always get as much attention. Legally, centers are required to maintain a certain number of adults for the children they have in care. Without reliable substitutes, full-time teachers can barely step out of the room for a short break, much less make longer appointments for something like a trip to the doctor. The program also offers volunteer “business advisers” who provide back-office support to centers that need it.

“The early care and education field is just full of clever people who are trying to find ways to shore up the system in any way possible,” said Elizabeth Pufall Jones, the director of preparation and work environment programs at the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment. Early childhood teachers are often perceived as babysitters whose roles can be easily filled, she said, but that’s not true. With ECSC members, “you know they’re a well-qualified individual to go into these classrooms.”

Lisa Armao, who has worked in early childhood education for more than 30 years, founded ECSC in 2022, inspired by a documentary called “The Growing Season”  that features a program in Seattle housing a senior center and a daycare center under one roof.

She visited the Seattle program with the intention of  trying to start a similar model in Denver. The pandemic upended her plan to create a stand-alone facility, but Armao has been able to raise over $440,000 in state and local funding for the ECSC model of placing older adults in child care centers both as substitute teachers and as office staff.

Over the last three years, ECSC has placed about 150 volunteers in Montessori programs and other child care centers around the Denver area. Those who want to work as teachers attend three to four months of online classes offered by Red Rocks Community College. Those who want to work with children but don’t want the extra training take 19 hours of training modules offered by ECSC. Volunteer business advisers take seven hours of free training on early childhood regulations before being placed at a center. Some of the participants in the program are paid, while others provide support to child care centers for free.

Family Star Montessori educates 230 children, ranging from 8 weeks to 6 years old, in its two schools and its home-based learning program. Alexander’s presence in a classroom means teachers can step out to take a phone call or go to the bathroom without worrying about whether there are enough adults in the classroom.

“We don’t talk about bathroom breaks enough,” Armao said. “If you need to go to the bathroom, there has to be someone to come in to cover you in that space, and that can make for a very uncomfortable working environment. Meeting the needs of the adults helps with morale.”

ECSC has attracted a steady stream of local media attention, which is how most older adults learn about the program, but finding corps members to meet the need remains a challenge. Armao said she has received inquiries about replication from people in California, Ohio, Oregon and Washington state.

Just as Family Star executive director Lindsay McNicholas relies on Alexander to help care for kids, she depends on another ECSC member, Jean Townsend, for administrative support.

Before she retired, Townsend owned a local economics consulting firm and, among other accomplishments, helped to start the Colfax Marathon, an annual race that brings out thousands of runners. She came to Family Star with extensive contacts among business and political leaders as well as a roll-up-your-sleeves attitude.

“I’ve learned that if you’ve got a problem, you solve it,” Townsend said. She is working with the center as it plans to sell one site and buy another with more modern heating, closer to where most of the families live.

Townsend’s business background has been invaluable, McNicholas said. “I’ve been able to meet officials and city planners in Jefferson County, which is a new county for us. That has given us a jump-start with this really incredible opportunity for our organization.”

Armao said the corps members come from a variety of professional backgrounds and have a range of different expectations for the experience. Along the way, they gain insight into a largely invisible profession. “They get a schooling in the state of early childhood and they come to understand it in a deeper way. Some grab onto the fact that it’s an economic driver. Others grab onto the simple fact that these children are going to be humans running our world.”

Kit Karbler, 72, is a glass artist whose work is displayed at the Denver Art Museum. “If I hadn’t found this, I can’t imagine what I’d be doing,” he said about being a substitute child care worker at an early learning center based at Temple Emanuel in Denver. Karbler works 20 hours a week, more if they need him. “What would I be doing that would give me this emotional return?”

Kamal Fakhouri, 68, worked in education and business all over the Middle East. At Monarch Montessori, a public school with 250 children ages 6 weeks through 5 years, Fakhouri fills in as a substitute teacher.

Born in Lebanon, she lived in the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Egypt before moving to Denver to be near her daughter and grandchildren. This was during the height of the Covid pandemic.  Fakhouri said she especially prizes moments of connection. “I was reading with a child in a class that I haven’t been to in a while, when [a child] just came and hugged me from the back and started telling me about what work they’re doing,” she said.

Bethanne Rodriguez, executive director of the five-site Thrive Preschool network in the Denver area, which has welcomed corps members, said she appreciates their “older faces and older energy” — as well the example they set for the rest of the staff. “They have had a career and have that life experience to know and understand the investment that this work is,” she said. “They know what it means to show up for work and know what it means to not call out when you’re just having a bad day.”

One of the corps members at Thrive’s Littleton location is Yvonne Wilder. After her first week in the baby room, her muscles ached in places she’d forgotten existed. The retired wetlands biologist, who’d spent decades cataloging ecosystems for the city of Tampa, was discovering that an eight-hour shift there demanded a different kind of stamina than fieldwork ever had.

“It’s a very physically challenging job,” said Wilder, 57. “I change diapers all the time. I do everything. I admire all the people who do this full time because it is not easy.”

During her first year, Wilder says, she got sick constantly, and her adult children asked her if she really wanted to continue. Soon, though, her immune system caught up, and she discovered that spending time with the children, germs and all, makes her happy.

“I’ve had them ask me, ‘Are you my grandma?’” she said. “And I’ll say, ‘I can be your school grandma.’ It’s such a privilege to know them and to be known by them.”

Support for this reporting came from the Better Life Lab at New America.

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.

Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.

In Sherisse Kenerson’s after-school classroom, Sandi takes out a piece of paper and fills up a whole line to spell the word that describes a type of lung disease. The word allows her to practice cursive — her new favorite method of writing.

When she becomes a doctor, Sandi, who signs her cursive autograph with a heart above the i, is determined to have a perfect signature.

Twelve-year-old Halle O’Brien, Sandi’s cursive partner-in-crime, agrees.

“I prefer writing in cursive,” Halle said.

The pair are proud members of the Holmes Middle School cursive club in Virginia. Cursive has been on the upswing for years now. More than two dozen states now require cursive instruction in schools after the 2010 Common Core standards omitted the skill.

Kenerson, a multilingual teacher at Holmes, started the middle school club when students couldn’t read her writing on the board. They just stared at her blankly, she said.

“I realized they didn’t know how to write or read in cursive,” Kenerson said. For an educator who firmly believes that quotes deserve to be written in cursive, and has a new one on her board each month, Kenerson wanted to give students a chance to understand the magic of the loopy writing.

Halle O’Brien writes during after-school cursive club, held by teacher Sherisse Kenerson, at Holmes Middle School in Alexandria, Va. (Anna Rose Layden for NPR)

The club exploded in popularity this past winter, with local news stations and the Washington Post crediting it for “keeping cursive alive.” Since then, Kenerson has been racking her brain trying to figure out why it has drawn so much attention.

She has received fan mail from retirees and teachers (written in cursive, of course). She has heard from people in Idaho, Pennsylvania and Florida. She has even had Zoom calls with educators in Oklahoma and Maryland to explain how she runs the club.

“I’m flabbergasted,” Kenerson said. “I’m just going along with the ride.”

She decided that cursive is a way to hold on to the past, and many people are not ready to let it go.

Kenerson’s after-school club is a local example of a nationwide trend — cursive handwriting is back in many classrooms across the country. Teachers and legislators credit the resurgence to nostalgia and some evidence of educational benefits. But surprisingly, the curves and swoops are contentious among experts, and some argue that cursive does not add any real value for students, especially in the age of artificial intelligence.

“I have seen no evidence that cursive brings any particular cognitive or learning benefit beyond that brought by hand printing,” wrote Mark Warschauer, a professor of education at the University of California, Irvine, in an email to NPR. He noted that the cognitive benefits of young students writing by hand in general are already well established.

Warschauer, who founded the UC Irvine Digital Learning Lab, opposes teaching cursive in schools because of the “waste of time and effort” when print handwriting, voice-to-text applications, and keyboards are easily accessible to students.

Much of the cursive debate centers around time in the classroom. Should educators spend precious minutes teaching another way to write on paper when technology is so prevalent?

Shawn Datchuk, a professor of special education at the University of Iowa, said the answer does not have to be one or the other. In his college classroom, he sees students increasingly using tablets and a stylus to take notes.

“What that means is that as a country, we likely need to help our students become multi-modal,” Datchuk said. They need to not only be able to handwrite using print, but also use cursive, type, and interact with technology, he said.

Technology is not a fix-all for students, though, he said.

“One of the dirty secrets behind spell checker and artificial intelligence is that you still need to be able to spell in order to use those well,” Datchuk said.

He and a team of researchers compiled the known studies on cursive teaching. Some studies used antiquated technology like ink wells and quill tips, so they were cut. A few of the others were missing details on how the instruction was implemented. With those caveats, Datchuk said, preliminary evidence shows cursive writing could improve spelling.

Datchuk said the “special sauce” for cursive is that students have to pay closer attention to how letters connect when they write.

Kenerson, the cursive club’s founder, said she’s seen anecdotal evidence that cursive helps students with dyslexia. Sharon Quirk-Silva, a California assemblymember who introduced the cursive bill in the state, said she’s also heard anecdotal evidence that cursive can be therapeutic for students with special needs.

Since Quirk-Silva’s 2023 cursive mandate, she said the reception from constituents has been overwhelmingly positive.

Datchuk, the University of Iowa professor, said he receives a constant stream of emails from people asking about cursive, but his reason for studying the technique was personal — his 8-year-old son, who is reading Harry Potter, still passes his grandmother’s birthday cards to his dad to read.

“That brings up the larger generational divide that’s probably happened not only with my sons, but with kids and young adults across the United States who just never received instruction in cursive,” Datchuk, a former elementary school teacher, said.

Antonio Benavides, an 11-year-old in Kenerson’s cursive club, is an example of that divide. His dad heard about the club and immediately sent Antonio.

Now, he sticks his tongue out and stares intently at the loops in front of him. He enjoys practicing the curves, and he said his normally sprawling print penmanship has improved.

“I’m like, ‘Are you kidding me, cursive club, what do I need that for?'” Benavides remembered telling his dad. But now, “Yeah, I like it,” he said.

When there’s a moment of silence as the students practice their i’s and t’s, Antonio whispers, “I love that sound.”

“The sound of a pencil when it’s silent is just so nice,” he explained.

Steve Graham, the Regents Professor at Arizona State University’s College for Teaching and Learning Innovation, argues that despite the media attention, cursive never really went anywhere. Graham, who has authored numerous books about writing, said he has been hearing about the “death of handwriting or the death of cursive” for about 50 years. At one point, his responses to questions from reporters became “snarky,” he said.

“I’d say, ‘Well, damn, I didn’t hear it was buried,'” Graham said. “Can you tell me where? I’d like to visit the grave.”

Graham is ambivalent about whether cursive or print is a more effective tool for students. He said he thinks the fixation on cursive is an adult phenomenon.

“I’m often amazed at how much attention it gets,” Graham said. With more studies, Graham said he thinks the differences in benefits between the two types of handwriting will be insignificant. He said what’s more important is spending the time to teach kids to write.

Back in Kenerson’s cursive club, 11-year-old Conrad Thompson said she’s the only student in her history class who can read her teacher’s huge Declaration of Independence printout. It makes her proud.

“Hopefully, one day, me and my family will get to go see it in person,” Conrad said.

As for Sandi and Halle, the pair have no doubts about their newfound skill.

“Will you be back next week?” Halle asked Sandi about the after-school club.

“Of course I will,” Sandi responded.

Results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) show that Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama have seen notable improvements in fourth grade reading over the past decade, but far smaller gains in eighth grade.

Mississippi led the way by retraining teachers in the science of reading — which emphasizes phonics and other basic literacy skills — and sending coaches into schools. The state’s fourth graders went from near the bottom nationally to surpassing the national average in 2024. Many called it the “Mississippi miracle.”

“Mississippi moved a mountain in fourth grade,” said Dan McGrath, a retired federal education official who oversaw the NAEP assessments. High- and low-achieving students both made gains. But when these fourth graders reached eighth grade, their progress stalled. By 2019, more eighth graders were scoring at the bottom than in 2013. Scores dipped further during the pandemic, and by 2024, only higher achieving eighth graders recovered a bit.

“When should we see the Mississippi miracle reach eighth grade? Why haven’t we seen it yet?” McGrath asked.

Alabama, Louisiana and Tennessee started reforms later and may need more time. But McGrath’s question remains.

Researchers and literacy advocates point to a common answer: early reading reforms focused on phonics, which helped students decode words, but decoding alone is not enough for proficient middle school reading, where the words are longer and the sentences are more complicated.

Timothy Shanahan, a veteran reading researcher and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said reading instruction must continue after students learn to read. “It’s not phonics exactly,” he said. Teachers need to break down multisyllabic words, teach word roots and odd spellings, and find time to read extensively to build fluency with complex texts.

Shanahan thinks schools should teach students how to read grade-level texts, even if they are challenging, and provide guidance on vocabulary, syntax and sentence structure.

The research evidence is sometimes murky on exactly how to help older students with reading comprehension. There’s widespread agreement that background knowledge, vocabulary and comprehension strategies are all important. But experts and advocates disagree about their relative importance and how much time to spend on them.

Many literacy advocates argue for more emphasis on background knowledge because it’s hard to grasp an unfamiliar topic. For example, even if I had a glossary of words, a technical medical article involving genetic analysis would be lost on me. Researchers also say that many low-income children aren’t exposed to as much art, travel and political news at home as wealthier kids, which means that many topics that come up in books are less familiar and harder to absorb.

Some research has shown promising literacy improvements from building children’ s knowledge. Harvard researchers found some success with specially designed social studies and science lessons (not reading lessons). But a 2024 meta-analysis didn’t find short-term reading benefits from knowledge-building units in classrooms. It may be that it takes years for these lessons to improve reading comprehension. And that long arc of progress is difficult for researchers to track.

“There is no question that knowledge plays a role in comprehension,” said Shanahan. “But it has been difficult to find how such knowledge could generalize. In other words, if you teach kids about goldfish, that may improve their comprehension of other goldfish texts, but will it have any other impact?”

There is also a debate about the value of drilling students in reading comprehension questions, the kinds that are likely to come up on standardized tests, such as figuring out an author’s main point.

Carl Hendrick, a prominent proponent of explicitly teaching children background knowledge and vocabulary, and a professor at Academica University of Applied Sciences in Amsterdam, agrees that a small amount of strategy instruction can be helpful, such as having students practice writing a summary after reading something. But Hendrick concludes from the research literature that there are diminishing returns to strategy instruction after 10 hours of it. “When a student cannot grasp the main idea of a passage, the problem is almost never that they lack a ‘strategy,’” Hendrick wrote in a March 2026 newsletter. “The problem is that they do not understand enough of the words.”

Too much screen time may also be a factor. “Kids aren’t reading as much anymore,” said Sarah Webb, a senior director at Great Minds, a curriculum maker. Cellphones and video games have replaced books. And the less time that kids practice reading, the less opportunity they have to get better at it. A March 2026 Scholastic white paper, “Students Are Reading Less and Losing Stamina: Why Sustained Reading Matters More Than Ever,” highlights the growing decline in reading among preteens and teenagers.

Meanwhile, the growing gap between fourth and eighth grade reading scores in the South is prompting teachers to question the assumption that middle schoolers already know how to read, Webb said.

“They used to say the progression in school was you learn to read and then you read to learn,” Webb said. “Now people realize it needs to be both for much longer. ‘Reading to learn’ should start earlier, and ‘learning to read’ must continue well past third grade.”

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

Oliver’s teachers noticed early on in preschool that he was having a hard time engaging with his peers and would keep to himself during group activities, Dan said. His parents initially brushed it off as shyness. “It really surprised us because we don’t see that at home at all,” he said.

But as his teachers brought up their concerns, Dan and his wife, who weren’t familiar with the special education system, began to learn all about it.

They were prepared to send Oliver to the local public school for kindergarten. But when they found out about Copper Island Academy, they saw an opportunity for Oliver to experience a different type of school, one that reminded Dan of his own school experience, when class sizes were smaller and students connected with their peers and teachers beyond traditional academics.

Copper Island Academy is where “sisu” — a Finnish word describing an internal level of grit and perseverance — is paramount. It’s a K-8 charter school serving students and their families from the surrounding area of Calumet, Michigan, in the Upper Peninsula. Tucked behind an EMS vehicle service center on the only road to and from the town’s one-room airport, you might never know that the school is there.

Launched in the fall of 2021, the school was developed by educator duo and married couple Matt and Nora Laho. But this isn’t just their brainchild. It was actualized in collaboration with community members and families searching for an answer to their concerns about public education — like increased screentime, a lack of joy in learning, less challenging lessons and dwindling extracurricular offerings — during the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic, Matt Laho said.

The parent community also wanted more skilled trades and culinary arts in the day-to-day curriculum, Laho said. For example, parents noted the slow decline in shop classes offered in public schools, so Copper Island made a concerted effort to bring them back.

The group considered many education models, Laho said, including Montessori and hybrid models, but ultimately they landed on the Finnish education model.

The Finnish education model is marked by teacher autonomy and collaboration, frequent breaks, inclusive practices and differentiation, according to Tim Walker, Copper Island Academy’s Finnish education model consultant, who has written several books about teaching in Finland.

Teachers in Finland are highly respected professionals, and it’s difficult to obtain teaching credentials. Teachers are allotted ample time for planning and prep, and they’re expected to leave school at the end of the day alongside their students. In the U.S., teacher shortages are common, morale and teacher pay are low and planning and prep periods are painfully short.

Calumet and the surrounding area are home to the highest percentage of people of Finnish heritage outside of Finland itself. But that didn’t mean schools in the area operated like their cross-Atlantic counterparts. For the Lahos, the Finnish model represented what parents and families in the area wanted most out of their children’s education: hands-on classrooms, real-world life skills and a focus on joy.

What’s so great about Finland? 

In the early 2000s, Finland emerged as an unexpected global leader in education after the first Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) scores, published in 2001, ranked Finland number one among the 31 other participating countries. The U.S. showed middle-of-the-road academic scores and was ranked in the 15th spot that same year.

In 2001, the Bush administration also reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and rolled out the No Child Left Behind Act in public schools across the country in 2002, so education reform was already top of mind in the U.S.

In the decade following the 2001 PISA scores, Finland continued to rank in the top three participating countries. Within that time, the U.S. was one of many countries that looked to Finland’s balanced approach to learning for guidance on pedagogical practices, which included differentiated learning and early intervention practices.

But by the 2010s, Finland’s PISA scores began to fall, and the hype died down. And organizations like the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which administers the PISA exams, began to encourage schools to focus more on student well-being beyond academic success, said Walker, an American teacher who taught in Finland for more than 10 years.

However, the draw to a Finnish model still remains today in education circles, and for Copper Island Academy, it landed close to home.

And for parents like Dan, Copper Island had the added benefit of an inclusive special education program. He said enrolling Oliver at Copper Island Academy “was the best decision we possibly could have made.”

Special education, the Finnish way

Oliver has an Individualized Education Program (IEP), a highly detailed, legally binding document, requiring an official diagnosis. The family asked we not use their last name because of privacy concerns for their child. IEPs adjust the curriculum for an individual student in order to meet their goals. Part of Oliver’s education plan includes push-ins during general education classroom time with Jennifer Gervais, one of Copper Island Academy’s special education teachers.

Push-ins are a form of support that keeps students in the classroom alongside their peers rather than in a siloed special education classroom.

During a push-in on one of his more difficult mornings, Gervais sits next to Oliver and quietly prompts him to participate. The other students are used to her presence in their classroom and aren’t phased. Oliver’s responses are very quiet, but he does take part in a phonics lesson led by his teacher, Ms. Erva. And if you listen very carefully, you can hear his peers encouraging him with a “good job, Oliver,” after his turn to play the phonics game is over.

Although Oliver’s experience at Copper Island Academy has been positive, many students struggle to get the services they need.

There are 7.5 million students receiving special education services in the U.S. — the majority of whom are diagnosed with specific learning disorders like dyslexia, dysgraphia or dyscalculia. Even for those students who are identified as needing to receive special education services early on, the path to receiving these supports is hard to navigate.

Most often in the U.S., students must exhaust Tier 1 and Tier 2 support services, which consist of specialized, small group instruction from a general education teacher, specialists or paraeducators, before receiving an IEP — a Tier 3 special education service.

However, the special education system in Finland is marked by teacher and family collaboration, personalized learning and trust in teacher expertise; special education intervention in Finland is seen as a preventative and inclusive practice.

“Everybody’s getting support,” said Helmi Betancourt, an elementary special education teacher in Helsinki, Finland. Like many special education teachers in Finland, Betancourt is assigned to many different classrooms. Throughout the week, she spends a couple of hours in each of her assigned classrooms teaching alongside the general education teacher. If there is an individual student or smaller group of students who need extra help outside of their general education classroom, Betancourt has the flexibility to pull them into a separate learning environment.

The decision to support a student with special education resources is seen as a pedagogical one, and is accessible for any student in the classroom who is struggling with academic or behavioral issues, according to Betancourt and her colleague in special education, Anna-Mari Vuohelainen. Teachers are free to make these decisions without the explicit consent of parents and without waiting for a diagnosis for additional support.

“It’s based on the benefit of the child,” not on a diagnosis, Betancourt said. They use a  classroom-based support system to be more inclusive of special education students in their general education classrooms, and to make sure that other students who are not yet receiving support, but might need it, get it as early as possible. This also makes for less paperwork.

“The idea is that nobody has to wait for the support that they need,” said Betancourt, because sometimes, getting a diagnosis takes a long time and it’s unfair to a student if they can’t get support for years. And the students identified as having the most intensive needs receive them in a setting that makes the most sense for their needs.

But there isn’t necessarily a one-to-one application of the Finnish education model to the U.S. special education system.

Early intervention and measuring student growth

Early intervention is one of the hallmarks of the Finnish education model, and is one that Copper Island has emulated. According to Laho, early intervention allows Copper Island to tackle problems as they emerge and before a formal special education referral needs to be placed.

In order to identify student needs, teachers across departments regularly meet to hold student success meetings. These meetings occur outside of traditional IEP or special education meeting requirements, and all students are considered. This is where they identify students who are struggling, collaborate on how to help the student and regularly check in. Student success meetings often happen before parent involvement, and if the plan to remediate doesn’t work, then they might have to call a parent in to work out a more robust support plan.

Special education teachers attend student success meetings, but not necessarily to provide special education services. They’re there because of their expertise in Tier 2 and Tier 3 intervention. It’s a seemingly small distinction to make, but a rather important one that advances a culture of trust and respect in educators who are highly regarded for their pedagogical expertise.

The success of these meetings is measured in individual student growth, not achievement. The teachers and admin focus on answering questions like: Where did this student start the year? Where are they mid-year, and where did they end the year? And according to Laho, student growth is the most useful measurement that Copper Island tracks, and they do so without compromising measurable achievement.

Students at Copper Island Academy score very high on traditional indicators of student achievement. Most notably, they received a score of 99.03 in the 2024-25 Michigan School Index — a state-run public school accountability system that evaluates overall school achievement on a scale of 0-100 — placing the school in the top 3.5% of all Michigan public schools.

Inclusion first for special education students 

The school’s unwavering stance on inclusion of all students in general education classrooms was a big deal for Gervais.

In other schools throughout her experience in special education, which spans more than a decade, Gervais has had to fight to get special education students included in the general education classroom, she said. Self-contained special education support is not an uncommon practice in public schools across the U.S., in which students receiving differing levels of special education support are kept from their general education peers for much of the day.

Although some level of inclusion in general education classrooms is a North Star for special education in the U.S. public school system, it isn’t always possible or recommended for every student. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act does not have a number or percentage of general education classroom time that each student with an IEP is required to meet. Rather, inclusion is measured by Least Restrictive Environment practices. But across special education, the measurable benchmark for “good” general education classroom integration time per student hovers around 80%, although classroom time alone doesn’t automatically lead to improved outcomes, said Chris Lemons, a professor who specializes in learning disabilities at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education.

Special education teaching presents its own unique challenges, but according to Jeremy Jarvi, who has taught in self-contained, mild-to-moderate and moderate-to-severe special education classrooms in the Bay Area, the prominent issues that come to mind are systemic and bureaucratic in nature.

“We can’t force it,” said Jarvi, of inclusion in all cases.

For parents like Daniel Willingham and his wife, navigating the special education system for their daughter, Esprit, over a decade ago was challenging and frustrating. Willingham is an education expert, and his wife is a teacher, but even then, it took a lot of time and expertise.

“To be clear, my child was profoundly disabled and so education for her looked quite different,” Willingham said. “It’s not like she was having trouble reading … she couldn’t speak.” So education for Esprit looked like setting up systems for her to be able to communicate “yes” and “no,” and inclusion in a general education classroom wasn’t possible or the best option for her.

Although Esprit’s medical conditions required in-home care and schooling, Willingham and his family experienced many of the common failures and triumphs of the U.S. special education system. They dealt with the frustration that comes with “tangling with bureaucracy,” but also benefited from interactions with educators and therapists who were “working very, very hard under very difficult circumstances trying to help children,” Willingham said.

“We frequently marveled that anyone was able to navigate through this system,” especially families without a stay-at-home parent, Willingham said.

Paraeducators and classroom staffing

Classroom staffing can be an issue, according to Jarvi, and at previous schools he found himself spending a lot of time each week training paraeducators.

“On top of working with the kids, I’m training adults … you hope that they get it the first time,” but they don’t always, and this takes time away from individualized instruction, Jarvi said of his past experiences. He now works with experienced paraeducators who have made a big difference.

Paraeducators are recognized by many states as essential to the K-12 classroom. And for some, like Lemons, the Stanford professor, the idea of paraeducators in the classroom is promising. This is not only because there are more paraeducators than special education teachers in the public school system, but also because they are with students throughout the entire school day, including in special education and general education classrooms, Lemons said.

In the U.S. paraeducators only need a high school diploma, and “in many districts, [paraeducators] receive the least amount of training, the least amount of support; they’re paid the least, but in many ways, they’re kind of the cog in the system that makes everything work, especially for kids with more extensive support needs,” Lemons said.

So far, Copper Island has had a positive experience with their paraeducators because of their willingness to go through the extra training and credentialing that the school requires outside of Michigan’s academic standards, according to Laho. The school’s paraeducators are trained on Orton-Gillingham or Morphology, which are touted for their detailed and unique approach to literacy education, especially for students who struggle. Laho said having paraeducators trained in these two methods allows for flexibility “to use multiple different people to attack a problem.”

Trust in special education teachers

In Finland, conversations between special education teachers and general education teachers happen on a regular basis, and pedagogical approaches to addressing all student learning are shared.

For Walker, the special education teacher who assisted in his Finnish classroom was seen as an “instructional coach who’s not at a higher level than the general ed teacher, but is still this trusted colleague … who has specialized knowledge in assisting kids who need more support in the classroom.”

A second set of discerning eyes can go a long way. Knowing that he wasn’t alone in providing attentive and individualized instruction for students with IEPs or those who needed a little bit of extra help with a specific subject matter was a relief to Walker. This practice of part-time, in-classroom special education instruction also allowed for Walker to exercise intellectual humility. He acknowledged that the special education teacher’s presence in his classroom two times per week exposed growth areas to better meet student needs, a ritual that he welcomed.

“For a lot of teachers out there, especially in the United States — when they don’t have this type of [inclusive] model — it’s very easy for you to feel alone in your classroom,” Walker said.

These types of experiences have roots in teacher training programs.

In the U.S., “typically, teachers who are trained to be general education teachers receive way too little training related to supporting kids with disabilities,” said Lemons, pointing out that some graduate schools of education, like Stanford’s, offer only one course focused on students with disabilities to elementary teacher candidates. On top of that, he said there’s almost zero training on how general education teachers can build effective working relationships with special education teachers.

Even at Copper Island, where teachers are trained in differentiation, general education teachers have had some trepidation about approaching differentiated learning practices. But experts like Gervais are available and willing to work with general education teachers to adjust their lessons so that everyone can learn with their peers.

“I told every one of them, ‘I will gladly show you because in special ed you learn to differentiate anything that’s thrown at you,’” Gervais said.

And offering to help general education teachers with differentiating their work also benefits other students outside of special education.

“We don’t just teach to that middle student. It helps everybody,” Gervais said.

Brain breaks for everyone, outside

Like schools in Finland, Copper Island prioritizes outdoor time for all students, which happens at a greater frequency than a typical U.S. school. This was one of the major draws for Dan and his family, and regular outdoor time during the school day has helped Oliver come out of his shell, connect with friends and focus in the classroom, Dan said.

But time outside at this school doesn’t just happen during recess and lunch; it happens every 45 minutes for 15 minutes at a time. This is Copper Island’s version of “brain breaks” — a tried and true method of allowing for, typically, classroom time spent away from academic subjects.

Brain breaks are used in both American and Finnish schools, but the way that Copper Island does brain breaks is different from most U.S. schools. Typically, brain breaks in American classrooms are occasional, very short, in-class and not necessarily physical.

Brain breaks at Copper Island are always spent outside — rain or shine or snow — and they happen seamlessly at all grade levels. When the brain break begins, students walk quietly through the hallways and out into the schoolyard. Once the break is over, a whistle is blown, and the students quickly and quietly pile through the school’s back doors, returning to their classrooms with minimal prompting.

Usually, moments of transition like these are a stress point for teachers, who are tasked with managing energetic or even disengaged students itching to get away from the lesson plan, and then coaxing them back into the lesson plan. It might even be unfathomable to some teachers across the U.S. to get all students outside for a brain break and then settled and back into the classroom, all within 15 minutes, multiple times per day.

But there wasn’t any yelling or running down hallways to get to a brain break at Copper Island when I visited. And when asked, teachers repeatedly brushed off any potential stress or anxiety around transitions in and out of brain breaks. It turns out these breaks aren’t just good for students, they’re good for the teachers too, who spend most of their classroom time executing highly engaged and individualized lesson plans for all of their students.

There’s only one rule during brain breaks at Copper Island Academy — sports balls aren’t allowed. “The minute that you give a sports ball to somebody, you put rules and limitations on [their play],” Laho said.

Instead, kids in elementary school are encouraged to play with each other and throughout the various outdoor spaces, like their play structure, the perimeter of surrounding woods, in the garden or on the structure made of industrial-sized rubber tires.

Sports balls are reintroduced during brain breaks for middle schoolers, who Laho said might need additional motivation to move their bodies and spend time outdoors.

Can Copper Island be replicated? It depends

Calumet and the surrounding Houghton County area are a pocket of the U.S. that has preserved old town Americana charm, for better or for worse. Some people don’t lock their front doors, and they leave their keys in their cars when they are away, just in case someone needs to borrow them. The people are kind and welcoming, and very quick to recommend their claim to fame: the meat pasty. And Copper Island Academy reflects these unique traits.

The families in the community had worried that the Finnish model in a location with such an overwhelmingly large population of people with Finnish heritage would be seen as exclusionary.

According to Laho, the diversity at Copper Island Academy reflects that of the surrounding area.

“So far we haven’t seen any discrepancies between, you know, one demographic or another,” Laho said about student academic achievement and behavioral data.

The school has also made a significant effort to support teachers beyond their professional development days with Walker and more than what you might find in an average American public school classroom.

Something fundamental took place during the pandemic, Walker said. In the scramble to overhaul in-person learning to virtual learning, along with the pressure to mitigate learning loss, teachers started to publicly acknowledge their dismal working conditions, Walker said. And American society took notice, too.

“There was something about COVID that broke many educators,” he said.

But paying attention to teacher well-being in a holistic manner at Copper Island has paid off. The school’s baby pilot program allows new mothers, who are only allotted 12 weeks of unpaid maternity leave by federal standards, to ease their way back into teaching full time again after having a baby. On certain days, babies are allowed in the classroom, and teachers meet their hours without having to choose continuous, outsourced child care for their infants.

The teachers also created a support group they call “Tsemppiä,” a Finnish word that doesn’t have a direct translation, but one that Walker compared to terms like “godspeed” or “strength” and is used in Finland as a word of encouragement. And the Tsemppiä group at Copper Island does just that — it exists as a support group made by and for teachers experiencing difficulties in their personal lives.

Although Tsemppiä was established before Walker came on as an educational consultant, he quickly recognized its purpose from his days teaching in Finland. The U.S. has a habit of creating and encouraging “super teachers,” Walker said — individuals who exceed, above and beyond, which harbors competition to be “the best.” In his experience, “super teachers” don’t really exist in Finland, Walker said, and instead there’s more of a spirit of teamwork and collaboration between teachers. The adoption of this part of Finnish culture is a big part of why Copper Island has been able to be so successful, Walker said.

Additionally, the administrators don’t seem to hover at Copper Island; rather, as Laho said, they trust their teachers to get their work done. If lesson planning needs to happen at home, then that works for the school administrators. If teachers need to leave the building with the students at 3:20 p.m. when the school day is over, that also works.

Copper Island Academy experiences the everyday limitations that many American schools and educators face. “I wish we could pay our teachers what they’re worth financially,” said Laho, adding that the school does “find ways to leverage what [they do] have to help” their teachers in other ways.

“We want to try to find ways to support the teachers in what they’re doing, knowing that we’re asking them to do a lot within our model,” Laho said.

As for students, the school has put into place measures to encourage their belonging in the community. Students are grouped intentionally in classrooms, which gives them the opportunity to work and play with the peers that they may not organically gravitate toward, Laho said. This practice of belonging and empathy extends throughout the school culture, both in the classroom, outdoors and in the community, Laho said.

And when Dan is out in the neighborhood with his son, or at a local hockey game, all of the hard work that Oliver and his teachers have done to face challenging social situations has paid off. Now, when Oliver sees someone familiar outside of school, “[he] always points out, ‘Hey, there’s my friend from school’ or ‘there’s my teacher,’” Dan said.

He described enrolling Oliver in Copper Island as one of the best decisions he’s recently made and is glad he did it.

“I think that connection between the students and the students and their and their teachers is really great,” he said. “Really, really great.”

GAO investigators found that, in February 2025, the Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) stopped reviewing the accuracy of loan servicers’ records. FSA also stopped reviewing recordings of calls with borrowers to make sure they’re being given accurate information.

Without this oversight, the report warns, borrowers could feel the consequences.

“If servicers’ records are inaccurate, borrowers could, for instance, be placed in the wrong loan repayment status, billed for incorrect amounts, or not have a refund processed in time,” the report says. “Similarly, FSA has not monitored calls since February 2025, so there is a risk that borrowers have received or will receive incorrect information and poor customer service.”

The investigation was requested by the ranking members of the House and Senate education committees, Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

“Instead of providing relief to 43 million Americans who are drowning in student debt,” Sanders said in a statement to NPR, “the Trump administration has made it harder for them to understand how much they owe and how long it will take to pay back.”

What the administration has to say about GAO’s findings

The Office of Federal Student Aid is supposed to conduct quarterly reviews, according to its contracts with loan servicers.

These reviews include comparing loan servicers’ borrower records with FSA’s own records, to screen for gaps or discrepancies, as well as “targeted reviews” of borrowers in specific situations, including those who request temporary relief from their payments.

The assessments that were stopped are more labor-intensive than other types of oversight that have been automated, GAO says. According to the report, agency officials told the government watchdog they stopped these reviews in early 2025 “due to lack of FSA staff capacity.” That’s around the same time the Trump administration began dramatically reducing staffing levels at the Education Department.

According to the report, FSA began 2025 with 1,433 staffers; by December, it had 777 — a 46% reduction.

In a written response accompanying the report, Richard Lucas, FSA’s acting chief operating officer, disagreed with GAO’s recommendation that FSA resume the reviews. While he confirmed that FSA had, indeed, stopped the oversight in question, Lucas wrote, “FSA determined that a better approach is to provide substantial oversight through additional activities that measure the accuracy of servicer data and the quality of their performance.” Those activities include regular reviews of borrower satisfaction surveys.

Melissa Emrey-Arras, who led the GAO study, says FSA’s “better approach” isn’t better.

“While reviewing those satisfaction surveys may be helpful, they don’t directly assess the quality of the information given to borrowers. A borrower may indicate they were satisfied with a call, not realizing they were given completely wrong information by their servicer,” she says.

The last FSA review found problems with loan servicer accuracy

Scott Buchanan, the executive director of the Student Loan Servicing Alliance, which represents the servicers working on the federal student loan program, says servicers also police themselves.

“[Servicers] internally are monitoring far more than any of our regulators ever could or would. Because it is in our best interest to make sure those errors are fixed. And because we have contracts, and if we have major issues that have become clearly apparent, then people will say, ‘We’ll find someone else to do it.'”

At the end of 2024, before the Trump administration cut oversight, GAO’s review of servicer recordkeeping found that “four of the five servicers did not meet the accuracy performance standard and faced associated financial penalties.”

In fact, recordkeeping at two servicers was troubled enough to merit the maximum financial penalty allowed.

And GAO notes that the Education Department’s independent financial auditor reported as recently as January 2026 that the department “continued to have a material weakness related to the reliability of its student loan data.”

What’s more, Emrey-Arras says, scaling back oversight at FSA has also meant scaling back efforts to hold servicers financially accountable for their performance. This accountability, she says, “is critical. Without it, the government risks overpaying for poor performance.”

For borrowers, servicer mistakes can lead to very real problems, said Rep. Scott in a statement to NPR. “Borrowers can either overpay or be placed in the wrong student loan repayment program. [The Education Department’s] refusal to conduct oversight of student loan servicers is a dereliction of duty.”

Scaled-back oversight of big student loan changes

These cutbacks in staff and oversight come as millions of federal student loan borrowers will need help transitioning into new repayment plans. The Biden-era SAVE plan is in turmoil, with borrowers now being charged interest and the plan due to be closed by 2028 at the latest. Another 12 million borrowers are either in default on their loans or on their way there.

What’s more, in July, a raft of new, potentially challenging changes to the student loan program will begin — courtesy of Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act — including the introduction of two brand-new repayment plans and the phasing out of others.

GAO warns that these changes will affect millions of borrowers who “will need accurate and complete information when they call for help,” yet, for the time being, the Education Department can’t be certain that’s what borrowers are actually getting.

“It was thought that people with better willpower would be more successful,” says psychologist Marina Milyavskaya at Carleton University, in Ottawa, Canada.

Hundreds of studies appeared to support this idea. Researchers found links between better willpower and better grades in school, better relationships and careers as adults, healthier diets and even more consistent parenting.

So psychologists and parenting experts advised parents to teach children to use willpower to resist modern temptations, such as sweets, fast food, video games, phones and other screens.

But in the past 15 years, Milyavskaya and other psychologists have dug deeper into the studies, and they uncovered a major flaw: These studies weren’t actually measuring willpower but a different skill — the ability to avoid temptation in the first place.

And in the process, they’ve found easier and more effective ways for parents to handle the tsunami of temptations in children’s lives.

Focusing on willpower can backfire

Willpower is the ability to resist a temptation right in front of you, Milyavskaya says. “It’s the idea of effortful resistance of temptation.” For example, your ability to say no to a fast-food cheeseburger for dinner and choose baked salmon instead. Or to resist the video game and finish your homework.

“Fifteen to 20 years ago, it was thought you could train willpower,” she adds, by building a child’s ability to resist temptations the way athletes build up muscles — through practice. Let children play video games each day and teach them to stop after one hour, for example. Or expose your children to “forbidden” foods, such as chips, cookies and soda, so they can learn to self-regulate and not gobble up too many.

“There was this idea that if you’re exposed to junk food more, you’re going to resist it better,” says Michael Inzlicht, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. But there was one big problem with this approach: It doesn’t work for very long. “Evidence from my lab and other people’s labs suggests that it’s not gonna help you in the long term.”

In fact, he says, trying to build up kids’ willpower actually backfires. By offering children temptations regularly, parents are teaching kids to prefer and want these foods and activities. “Guess what the kids are going to like?” Inzlicht asks. “Fatty foods and sweet foods because that’s what we’re programmed to like,” he says.

New strategies for modern temptations

The original studies on willpower relied on surveys or questionnaires to measure a person’s self-control and their success in life. Researchers assumed these questionnaires measured a person’s willpower — the ability to resist temptations in front of you.

But in the early 2010s, psychologists decided to stop relying on surveys and, instead, study what people do in real life to meet their long-term goals. These studies revealed a surprise, Inzlicht says. The more successful people didn’t have better willpower compared to those who were less successful. Instead, successful people set up their lives so they didn’t need to use willpower frequently. They exposed themselves to fewer temptations.

And this is the strategy parents should be teaching their children, says Wendy Wood, a professor emerita of psychology at the University of Southern California. “Teach them how to choose situations that reduce the likelihood of doing things that aren’t good for them. Teach them how to control the temptations,” Wood says.

In essence, parents don’t need to teach kids how to say “no” to the marshmallow sitting in front of them — like in the infamous Stanford study — but rather, learn “how to put a pie pan over the marshmallow,” Wood says. Or how to avoid being in a room with marshmallows.

“For example, parents can teach kids to leave their phone in another room when they’re studying,” Wood says, or to use apps that block distracting websites and games. They can teach kids how to keep sweets and ultra-processed foods out of the house and out of their backpack or car. In other words, parents can create times and places in children’s life where distractions or temptations aren’t an option at all — and show them how they can implement this strategy themselves.

Learn to love what’s good for you

The great thing, Wood says, is that parents can help kids fall in love with the healthier alternatives — to love salmon and bok choy at dinner, love playing outside with friends, or love working hard in school.

“Your kids’ choices are malleable, and it’s really influenced in part by what they’re exposed to,” she says. “You can truly learn to like the things that are good for you.”

To shape their preferences, she says, give your kids oodles of opportunities to experience the pleasure of these healthy options. For example, Wood wanted to teach her kids to love reading. So she kept books in the car and her purse. “I like to eat out at nice restaurants, and I would take my kids along.” While waiting at the restaurant, the only option they had was to read. And so they built a habit of reading. “Today my kids are still wild readers.”

Finally, Carleton University’s Marina Milyavskaya says, pay attention to how you talk about healthy foods and activities. Don’t present them as burdens, sacrifices or punishments. Instead, focus on how good these foods taste or how fun an activity offline is. Studies have found that our language shapes our preference for foods, as well as how much we eat them.

“Whether it’s eating healthier food or going to the gym, if you make the activity more fun in the moment, then you’re more likely to do it again,” Milyavskaya says.

So if you want your child to love salmon, talk about how great it tastes with yummy, garlicky soy sauce and wild rice. And how great it makes you feel right after eating it. Something that a frozen ultra-processed dinner won’t do.

Michaeleen Doucleff has a Ph.D. in chemistry and is a longtime science journalist (including previously for NPR). She has a new parenting book out called Dopamine Kids.

Bleak stories like these have become so common in youth and high school sports that few stories hold public attention for very long. Ask referees and umpires who oversee youth competitions and they’ll tell you that sportsmanship has worsened, especially among parents; thousands of sports officials have resigned as a result. Even so, according to a 2024 Harris poll, 93 percent of mothers and fathers believe that sports build character in kids. And despite or because of the uptick in misbehavior at kids’ games, parents claim to value character education in sports and want coaches who respect ethics.

Most school athletic departments design mission statements that define what the school claims to value in its sports programs. Many refer obliquely to honesty, integrity and moral development, laudable attributes that coaches are expected to help develop in their players. St. Benedicts Academy, for example, asserts that athletics are “about character, camaraderie and embracing values that withstand a lifetime.” But such statements often fail to reflect, or challenge, the reality of competitive school sports, where defeating an opponent can take priority over lessons in integrity and fair play. Hopes among some players of securing Name, Image and Likeness deals in college also can reduce high school sports to brand-building opportunities. Talk of team loyalty and selflessness can seem quaint and unrealistic.

According to Sharon Stoll, who runs the Center for Ethics at the University of Idaho, the research is definitive about athletics building what she calls “social character”: teamwork, perseverance, loyalty and work ethic.

But these qualities lack a moral dimension; terrorists, after all, can be highly disciplined and hard working. When it comes to beneficence, responsibility, justice and honesty — the foundational principles of ethics — athletes are no more likely to understand and embrace them than kids in the stands.

“Most sports are about motor skills, not moral skills,” Stoll told me. “It doesn’t magically happen because you are walking or biking or jogging,” she added. The central dilemma for coaches is this: what are you willing to do to win?

Some schools take deliberate steps to include character education in their sports programs. At the Menlo School in California, for example, water polo coach Jack Bowen offers a model for how coaches and schools can make character development central to their teams. Bowen believes that athletic teams offer a natural setting for teaching moral reasoning because ethical quandaries pop up frequently in sports — and kids who play are a captive audience for learning.

Ethics education for the team starts during preseason, when Bowen assigns articles for the players to read. Most of the stories are unrelated to sport. Then he invites the teenagers to talk about what they learned, first in smaller groups and then as a whole team; the smaller groups allow for more emotional risk-taking, Bowen said.

The team also immerses itself in the athletic department’s mission statement which elevates four central ideas: pursue excellence, celebrate team, honor the game and uphold strong values. The discussion isn’t a one-time event. Rather, Bowen elicits players’ opinions on ethical challenges that emerge throughout the season, striving to reconcile the mission with what they’re doing in practice and during games.

During the 2025 season, for example, Bowen noticed one of the Menlo players waving sarcastically at a teenager from the opposing team when that player fouled out. Because he cared for the teenager’s development and believes in the principles that guide the team, Bowen pulled his own player out of the pool.

“I had to do it and the team understood,” Bowen said. It wasn’t a punishment, he added. Afterwards, the coach and player talked at length about what happened and how mocking an opponent, even subtly, dishonored the game.

Sean Spellman, the head basketball coach at the Roxbury Latin School in Massachusetts, emphasizes a less formal concept of character building on his teams.

“It starts with the philosophy of the school and knowing and loving each one of the athletes,” Spellman told me. “There’s a genuine care and connection there, regardless of how they are as a defensive basketball player.”

This year, he handed out a 65-question survey to the team that went beyond sports. Who do they admire? When do they feel their best — and worst? During one weekly film session, which Spellman uses to connect personally with the players, he introduced “Teammate Jeopardy” to encourage kids to learn about each other. Like Bowen, Spellman engages the team in collective conversations: What does it mean to have pride and be part of the Roxbury Latin community? What do we value here? While transparent about the adolescents’ play, Spellman assures the teenagers that their basketball skills don’t diminish their value to the group as a person.

He strives to make the character dimension of sports tangible, even during the tensest moments of a game. Spellman will “burn a timeout,” as he put it, to remind the players during tight plays that it’s how they handle the high-stakes experiences that matter most, because they’ll have many more to grapple with as they age. “I cherish what this high school sports experience is,” he said.

Coaches need help figuring out how to balance competing goals. To that end, a graduate student of Dr. Stoll’s, Samantha Lewis, launched a podcast to help them talk through some of the ethical issues they’ll encounter. The Coach’s Dilemma: What Will You Do to Win? addresses moral reasoning, trash talk, the impact of Name, Image, Likeness deals and more.

Both coaches said that the wider culture makes these lessons harder to teach. Spellman lamented the way some team sports have mutated into vehicles for individual performances, with kids fussing over their metrics to the exclusion of the group.

“You’re trying to sell something that’s not being taught in our society,” Bowen said. Stoll reminded me that kids and teenagers need guidance to develop character through sports. They need engaged role models, a supportive environment and formal and informal education.

“Someone has to teach the moral values, someone has to be there helping the children navigate through life,” Stoll added.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not radical change

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mixed signals

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

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

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

Congress begins a push

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

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

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

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

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

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

“If all we needed was the weights moved, then that would be great,” says Cryer, who teaches at Johnson County Community College outside Kansas City, Kansas.

“But we need the muscles developed, and students going through the process of writing are developing those muscles.”

Cryer says AI has also added a new type of labor for professors like him: trying to determine whether a student’s work is their own. He says that problem is compounded by the fact that his community college, like many other higher education institutions around the U.S., provides students access to AI tools.

He says the advent of these tools has created a new burden for students too: finding the line between responsible and irresponsible AI use.

“It’s not fair to them,” Cryer says.

More than three years after ChatGPT debuted, generative AI has become a part of everyday life, and professors and students are still figuring out how or whether they should use it, especially in humanities courses.

A recent survey suggests many students are diving right in: According to a poll by Inside Higher Ed and the Generation Lab conducted last July, about 85% of undergraduates were using AI for coursework, including to brainstorm ideas, outline papers and study for exams. Roughly 19% of students also reported using AI to write full essays.

More than half of students who used AI for coursework had mixed feelings about it, reporting that it helps them sometimes but can also make them think less deeply.

Aysa Tarana, a recent college graduate, was in her first year at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities when ChatGPT was released. She says she started using the chatbot for little tasks, like suggestions for topics to research.

But Tarana says she eventually stopped using AI because it made her feel like “I was outsourcing my thinking, and that felt really weird.”

That’s exactly what Cryer worries about.

After spending a sabbatical studying generative AI, he came to his own conclusion: Cryer believes educators should use AI tools as little as possible in their teaching.

“It seems to be one of the main purposes of these tools is to keep you from having to think so hard,” he says.

Cryer says he now devotes more time to persuading his students of the value of putting in the work to become better writers. He says he explains to them that the goal of their education is the process, not the product — because society doesn’t need more college essays. “What we need is students to go through the process of writing research papers so they can become better thinkers, so they can put together a cogent argument, so they can differentiate between a good source and a bad source,” Cryer says.

And if students rely on AI to do their work for them, Cryer says, it could end up cheating them out of the education they signed up for.

A professor who sees value in generative AI

In Charlotte, N.C., Leslie Clement says she has come to view generative AI as a powerful collaborator that can enhance student learning.

“We encourage [students] to use it because we know they’re going to use it, but to use it in a responsible way,” says Clement, a professor of English, Spanish and African studies at the historically Black Johnson C. Smith University.

Clement says she allows students to use AI to create outlines for their papers, get feedback on ideas and compare different sources of information.

Clement also co-created a course called “African Diaspora and AI” that examines how AI impacts people of African descent globally, including the dangerous mining of cobalt, a crucial component in AI technologies, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The course also covers potential future benefits of AI, as well as the contributions of Black researchers and scientists.

“We’re looking at Afrofuturism, how students can use these tools to reimagine their futures,” Clement says.

She says her goal has always been to foster critical, ethical and inclusive thinking — and she wants her students to apply those skills to their use of AI tools.

“I want students not only to use the tools for good but also to interrogate them,” Clement says.

The AI study buddy

A couple of hours northeast of Clement, in Durham, N.C., pre-med student Anjali Tatini has found her own ways to use AI for good. Tatini is double majoring in global health and neuroscience and says AI tools have helped her better understand some of the complicated subjects she has been studying.

Take last semester, when Tatini, a 19-year-old sophomore at Duke University, says she was confused by some concepts in a biology course. She turned to Gemini — Google’s AI chatbot — for help.

“I’d be like, ‘This is the concept — can you explain what it means?'” Tatini recalls. “And it would just respond to me. And if it was too high level, I could ask it to dumb it down a little bit, which was very helpful.”

In other classes, like chemistry, Tatini says she has used AI to create practice problems to help her prepare for exams; in a marketing class, she has used it for brainstorming ideas; in statistics, she has used it to help her generate lines of code for data analyses.

It’s helpful to have a tutor on demand, Tatini says, because she’s not always able to meet with her professors in person.

“I have jobs, I have other classes, I have clubs. I don’t have the time always to make all these office hours,” she says. “So it’s nice to have something that’s on my own time, able to respond to me the same way that maybe a person would.”

Tatini draws the line at having AI write for her. She says she’ll use these tools to help outline and organize her ideas, but the actual writing is all hers.

“If I’m putting something out, I want it to be something that I’m proud to say this is mine. So I would never use AI to write something because it wouldn’t sound like me.”

“What you produce is like a fingerprint to the world”

Nearby, in Chapel Hill, Hannah Elder, a 21-year-old junior at the University of North Carolina, also takes pride in owning her writing assignments.

“I’m such a strong believer in cultivating your own thoughts and being able to articulate them,” she says.

Elder is a pre-law student, and she takes a mix of courses, including public policy and philosophy classes. She says she uses generative AI to proofread her work and to check it against course rubrics.

But Elder says she’d never use it to write or generate ideas for her.

Learning how to formulate her own ideas and beliefs and communicate them through writing has been one of the most valuable parts of her college experience, Elder says. She worries that if students lean on AI to do that for them, they won’t learn to think for themselves.

“I use notebook paper still [for] all my notes, because I just believe so strongly in what you write down and what you produce is like a fingerprint to the world. And I think in some sense that’s being lost,” Elder says.

Still, Elder doesn’t think the solution is to ban AI entirely.

“We can’t deny that it’s going to be a part of [the college experience],” she says.

She wants educators to integrate AI instruction into curricula so students can learn to see the line between beneficial and harmful use.

“If teachers incorporate it in a responsible way through academics,” she says, “I think it’ll be seen less as a cheat code and more just like, ‘Oh, here’s the reality of this, and here’s how I can use it well, and here’s how it can help me.'”

This reporting was supported by a grant from the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism and the Omidyar Network’s Reporters in Residence program.