Young people experiencing family instability and trauma are at increased risk for precarious living situations and interrupted educational experiences. And students who leave school before graduation are considerably more likely to experience homelessness and less likely to enroll in college. 

By failing to systematically and preemptively address youth homelessness through our schools, we are increasing the chances of hundreds of thousands of young people becoming and remaining homeless. 

We can change this. 

Schools are key to intervention. Schools can and should serve as indispensable resources for students who are experiencing unstable housing or outright homelessness. Lamentably, too often, there aren’t enough staff members to carry out existing support programs, much less manage additional programs designed for youth who are at risk for or are already experiencing homelessness.

Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter to receive our comprehensive reporting directly in your inbox.

I saw these issues firsthand when I worked as the chief of staff at Chicago Public Schools, but they are prevalent at schools nationwide. For roughly 700,000 youth ages 13 to 17, not having stable or any housing is top of mind, a recent study found. 

Here are some suggestions for identifying youth at risk and tackling youth homelessness systemically. 

Paying more attention to risk factors will increase the chance that at-risk students will be identified earlier and interventions enacted. 

We’ve learned a lot about risk factors at the independent, nonpartisan policy research center I lead. For example, a family’s income is a strong indicator of risk, so school officials and staff should be hypersensitive in districts where families are struggling financially.

Yet appearances alone won’t necessarily indicate which students are struggling. Many schools rely on student self-reporting, which students are less likely to do if they don’t know there are resources available or if they are too ashamed to reveal their status. 

Schools should initiate a universal screening at the beginning of the school year to gauge if students are vulnerable to homelessness. All staff should routinely be trained to look for signs of homelessness and risk factors. 

Not everyone at a school needs to deeply engage with each student, but they should be aware of signs so they can make referrals to a social worker or the school’s McKinney-Vento liaison if needed.

The federal McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act includes a requirement for schools to provide “comparable” transportation for homeless students to get to and from school. And while every school has a McKinney-Vento liaison who administers programs funded by federal dollars, at many schools that assistance boils down to just providing a bus pass for homeless students, nothing more. 

If their school is only able to provide a bus pass, students’ many other needs — like clothing and mental health care — will not be met. 

Having more school social workers would also help identify students struggling with housing stability and match them to programs and services that could meet their needs. 

Another significant risk factor for homelessness is dropping out of school. A truancy officer’s role is critical when students drop out. Administrators should be asking themselves what it takes to get kids back in school to stay. The goal of that position should not be to identify and punish students but to figure out what resources they need to get them back to school and keep them there. 

Related: Couch surfing, living in cars: Housing insecurity derails foster kids’ college dreams

One way to ensure that interventions are available and applied would be to mirror the work of the Title IV-E Prevention Services Clearinghouse, the place where evidence-based interventions for child welfare are vetted, rated and made eligible for federal reimbursement. 

The inclusion of an evidence-based clearinghouse in a federal program is a legislative component that has historically enabled bipartisan buy-in. Since schools are already burdened by tight budgets and overworked staff, adding a clearinghouse for homelessness prevention efforts would allow qualified outside agencies to provide — and be reimbursed for — evidence-based intervention services. 

Two other points not to be overlooked are that youth homelessness is experienced disproportionately by Black, Hispanic and LGBTQ youth, and youth homelessness is a leading pathway into adult homelessness. That’s why supporting young people at risk for or experiencing homelessness — through substantial investments and increased services — is a significant way to address racial inequity and break these cycles. 

The point of school is to educate and nurture our youth so they can successfully pass on to the next phase of life. If we work together, we can disrupt the brutal cycle of homelessness and give more young people the future they deserve. 

Bryan Samuels is executive director of Chapin Hall. He previously served as chief of staff at Chicago Public Schools, director of Illinois DCFS, and commissioner of the Administration on Children, Youth and Families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services during the first Obama administration.

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What you need to know

Hechinger’s executive editor, Nirvi Shah, joins us this week to share what she learned at the recent Moms for Liberty summit and how the organization’s targeted focus on transgender students helped lead to a temporary block to portions of President Joe Biden’s new Title IX regulations in some states. 

You found that schools even in the same district are following different Title IX regs. What does this mean for students? 

The big takeaway: These are confusing times. Federal court rulings have paused *requiring* schools in some states to follow new Biden administration regulations on sex discrimination. And individual schools in other states are also exempt from being *forced* to adopt those rules, though local school boards, generally, can adopt the regulation. The reality on the ground is, however, that schools within some districts may be following different federal rules about Title IX, which makes for an administrative mess. 

Hechinger’s Sarah Butrymowicz created a pair of searchable databases to see which colleges and K-12 schools do not have to follow the Biden administration, but the list can change — 1,700 schools were added during the week of the Moms for Liberty summit — so make note of the time stamp.

After some defeats for Moms for Liberty-backed school board candidates, observers have questioned whether the group’s influence has waned. What’s your assessment of the group’s strategy? 

The group is still big on endorsing school board candidates, and school board races are the only elected office for which it makes endorsements, co-founder Tiffany Justice told me and Hechinger writer Laura Pappano in an interview during the summit. (Justice endorsed Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump personally during a one-on-one chat the two had at the M4L summit over Labor Day weekend in D.C.) Justice reiterated in our interview that “All politics is local,” and that the group wants power to be closest to the people and not the federal Education Department. “So how do you solve that? You make sure that you have strong local school boards who answer to their constituents.”

School board races aside, many, including Moms for Liberty, would characterize it as a significant victory — for local schools and like-minded parents — that they got a federal court to agree to preferences of Moms for Liberty member parents on which Title IX regulation should apply at their children’s schools, even if Justice said it was something she never imagined when the group got its start during the pandemic. 

What most surprised you about this year’s Moms for Liberty summit? 

This was the theme of our story: this laser-like focus on transgender issues at schools. It came up often and was at the center of many speeches and breakout sessions. In the past, the group has had a more expansive message but this year, they seem to have one specific target. “There’s no such thing as a transgender child. Please quote me on that,” Justice told us. “There are children who are experiencing mental distress and they need kindness and compassion and help to feel comfortable in their own bodies, because no child is born in the wrong body. There is no right way to be a boy or a girl.”

What we are reading

All-charter no more: New Orleans opens its first traditional school in nearly two decades 

My colleague, Ariel Gilreath, reports on the opening of the first traditional school run by the New Orleans school district since Hurricane Katrina devastated the city. 

Theater, economics and psychology: Climate class is now in session

Hechinger Report editor Caroline Preston launched her climate change newsletter (which you can sign up for here) with a look at how some colleges are embedding climate-related instruction into diverse fields.

Students aren’t benefiting much from tutoring, one new study shows

Despite billions in federal funding during the pandemic, a new study shows that tutoring to help students catch up on learning losses hasn’t yielded great results, reports Hechinger columnist Jill Barshay.

How transparent are state school report cards about the effects of COVID?

Most states are failing to help parents understand how the pandemic negatively affected students’ academic performance and attendance, according to a new report from the Center on Reinventing Public Education. This may be because some school districts didn’t have quality longitudinal data on absenteeism and other measures before the pandemic and have not made that data public. 

Characteristics associated with English Learners’ academic performance

Having a teacher of the same race, and attending a school with a higher percentage of students enrolled in dual language immersion English instruction, is associated with better reading scores for English learners, according to a new analysis by the Government Accountability Office. Hechinger Report contributor Kavitha Cardoza wrote recently about a former superintendent’s fraught efforts to make his Alabama district more welcoming for English learners. 

A framework for digital equity

In this report, nonprofit group Digital Promise explains how K-12 schools can take a leadership role in ensuring Black, Hispanic, Native American and rural students have equal access to high speed internet, computers and digital literacy training. I wrote about these digital divides in an article about the 2024 National Education Technology Plan.

How Americans feel about hot-button education issues

About 60 percent of people support school vouchers, according to a new poll from news outlet The 19th and SurveyMonkey. Eight-seven percent of respondents want schools to teach about the history of slavery and racism, 60 percent favor instruction on Judeo-Christian values, and 51 percent support instruction on LGBTQ+ people in history and literature. 

From the vault

When my colleague Sarah Butrymowicz began reporting on education in 2010, cell phones in the classroom were all the rage. Educators and experts hoped that allowing students access to their own devices in school would revolutionize learning. Now that’s changed, of course: A growing number of districts and states are banning the devices or clamping down on cell phone use (and in some cases even Chromebooks and tablets), arguing that they distract students from learning and pose threats to young people’s mental health. 

Cell phone use also frequently leads to behavior problems. Sarah spent months last winter examining thousands of discipline records from a dozen school districts as part of Hechinger’s series on school discipline, Suspended for … what? Cell phones played a role in hundreds of student suspensions. Students were suspended for refusing to give up their phones, recording teachers, blaring music or taking videos, and taking calls in the middle of class. As cell phone bans spread, we’ll be following whether some of these discipline issues subside – or whether there’s an uptick in discipline and suspensions as schools punish kids and send them home for refusing to follow the bans. 

Et cetera

Do we need to rethink school policies that put parents on the hook for paying for lost or damaged digital devices? Michael Wear, chief executive officer of the Center for Christianity & Public Life, recently used X to draw attention to this issue: “As someone who grew up in a family that struggled financially, I really think school districts need to think carefully about the ethics and ramifications of mandating kids accept a $1000 electronic device that they didn’t ask for, and then telling parents that if anything happens to the device the family will have to compensate the district for the loss.”

This story about Moms for Liberty was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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MISSOULA, Mont. — From the outside, the building that was once Cold Springs Elementary School in Missoula, Montana, looks abandoned. Beige paint peels from its cinder-block facade. A blue banner proclaiming “graduation matters” hangs tattered and bleached by the sun. But inside, past a vacant office and around a dimly lit corner, there’s a stack of brand new cots, shoe racks with tiny sandals and the telltale smell of graham crackers.

Five independent child care centers opened here in the spring, the first participants in a unique network called Missoula Child Care Advantage, or MCCA. A sixth center plans to open its doors at Cold Springs in September. When the programs reach full capacity, they’ll serve a combined total of up to 90 kids, infant through pre-school.

Like many communities across the country, Missoula County has a desperate shortage of affordable child care. But Missoulians have found one part of the solution hiding in plain sight: unused public buildings, such as schools closed to accommodate changing enrollments. Cold Springs Elementary was bursting at its nearly 90-year-old seams when it shut its doors in late 2018 and its students moved to a new facility.

As the retrofit projects proceed, new ways of doing the business of child care are emerging, too.

The details of the child care crisis vary by community, but the big picture is the same: Parents are scrambling. More than half of American children under the age of 5 live in a “child care desert,” defined as any census tract where the number of children under 5 is at least triple the number of licensed child care slots. In Montana, the number of slots available meets only 44 percent of total demand, according to the state’s Department of Labor and Industry. For infants, that percentage drops to 32 percent.

Parents Adam Rasmussen and Meredith Repke, who secured one of the initial 42 spots at Cold Springs, are among the lucky ones. For a decade, Missoula offered the couple their ideal lifestyle: mountains within minutes to bike, hike, run, and climb. In late 2022, they welcomed a daughter, Hope. But when it came time for Hope to start in child care a year later, they couldn’t find a single provider with an open slot. At the time, they had been spending a lot of time in Whitefish, a town about 130 miles to the north, due to an illness in the family. When they couldn’t find a child care opening in Missoula, they opted to stay in Whitefish while they continued the search.

MCCA’s opening felt too good to be true, Repke said. Hope enrolled at Montessori Plus International, whose founder saw the Cold Springs location as a way to expand her popular day care to a second site. Repke and Rasmussen moved back to Missoula, into a new house a short bike ride away from the school. “It allowed us to resume our lives,” Repke said.

Related: Our biweekly Early Childhood newsletter highlights innovative solutions to the obstacles facing the youngest students. Subscribe for free.

Inside Cold Springs, each of the six MCCA classrooms has been transformed into a unique day care. Through one door, a nature-themed space with fluorescent ceiling lights covered in fabric replicates staring up into a stand of birch trees; through another is Hope’s Montessori-inspired program where children learn to speak in Mandarin.

There are a few hang-ups with the space, said Sally Henkel, who coordinates MCCA under the auspices of the United Way of Missoula County. Due to licensing guidelines written before the network’s inception, children in different child care programs are required to stay strictly apart. This ensures clear accountability if anything goes wrong, said Henkel, who works closely with the county licensor.

For most providers in the area, it’s never an issue because they operate alone. But for the co-located providers at Cold Springs, it makes for a strange dance. And for kids who see other kids but aren’t allowed to interact with them, it’s just confusing. “Outdoor time is awkward,” Henkel said.

Still, the space at Cold Springs is a win. Communities need infrastructure devoted to child care much as they need schools, roads, and bridges. But “there’s no dedicated federal funding source to support that,” said Bevin Parker-Cerkez, who leads early childhood work nationwide for the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), a community development financial institution. As a result, small-scale child care providers often are on their own when it comes to planning for, maintaining, and upgrading facilities, Parker-Cerkez said. And with barely-there profit margins, upgrades typically aren’t in the budget.

“These are spaces for zero-to-five year olds — they’re getting beat up with wear and tear,” Parker-Cerkez said. “People don’t recognize how much [space] affects the quality of programming. Not just for kids, but for employees, too.”

At Cold Springs, some maintenance costs are built into providers’ $900 per month rent. For small providers who might otherwise operate out of a residence, that’s a steal. The median rent for a two-bedroom house in Missoula is twice that, and housing prices have more than doubled in the past decade.

Missoula County Public Schools’ involvement is a part of what makes MCCA work, said Grace Decker, who spearheaded the network’s formation in her role as the coordinator of Zero to Five Missoula, under the United Way’s umbrella. The district has offered a 5-year lease and cut-rate rent.

But space is only part of the solution to an enormously complex problem. “It’s the pot, but it’s not the soup,” said Decker, who started a new job in March coordinating Montana Advocates for Children, a statewide coalition.

Related: Free child care in America exists — if you cross paths with the right philanthropist

In 2019, Decker began meeting with a group of Missoulians with an interest in the future of child care, including providers, school district officials, and representatives from local businesses and health care. The child care providers painted a bleak picture of their balance sheets. For example, unexpected vacancies — as when a child is pulled out of a center on short notice — can cost them thousands of dollars and threaten their financial survival.

Decker and her collaborators brainstormed ways to alleviate costs. They came up with a plan for a new kind of child care network, open to any licensed provider in Missoula County, in which local businesses could purchase a membership. While the providers would offer child care to all families, employees at member businesses would have waitlist priority. The membership fees paid by the businesses would fund shared access, network-wide, to critical money- and time-saving services like waitlist management, telehealth, and payroll. “That’s where we start to actually stabilize the sector,” Decker said.

Today, Cold Springs school serves as a pilot site for the network. MCCA used a $414,000 state grant and raised about $200,000 more to reconstruct the classrooms as care centers. Two businesses are signed on as charter members. The hope is that the network’s success at Cold Springs will help to drive its growth countywide.

Henkel, whose position is funded by the city, came on as MCCA’s coordinator in January 2023, several months after she was hired. The hold-up? She couldn’t find child care for her 8-month-old son.

On a recent walk through Cold Springs, Henkel and project architect Adam Jones pointed out the changes made to each room to make them child-care ready. Bathrooms were built, electrical sockets were brought up to code, too-porous countertops were replaced.

Asbestos abatement set the project back $12,000. “That could’ve been a lot worse,” said Jones. And rumors of a long-neglected septic tank onsite turned out to be false. “We thought we’d have to tap into brownfield funding,” Henkel said. “That would’ve set us back at least a year.”

Since MCCA’s opening last March, Henkel has fielded calls from child care advocates from other parts of Montana, as well as from Connecticut, Idaho, West Virginia and Wyoming, all looking to learn more about how the network works. A project based directly on MCCA will launch in the fall in Ravalli County, just south of Missoula.

Missoula is not alone in its approach to expanding child care. Other areas around the country faced with the child care space conundrum have looked at using closed school buildings.

In upstate New York, the 2023 closure of a parochial school led to the creation of the Ticonderoga Community Early Learning Center, set to open in September to 50 children, age 5 and under. In Texas, the United Way of Greater Austin expects to invest more than $18 million over at least two years to transform the shuttered Pease Elementary into a child care center for more than 100 children, ages 6 months to 5 years, as well as community spaces to be used for events like parent classes and continuing education for early childhood educators.

Related: Why are we sending children to pre-K programs in converted salons, bars and turkey coops?

And in Portland, Indiana, 95 miles northeast of Indianapolis, crews are completing renovations on the former Judge Haynes Elementary School, which will reopen in September as the Jay County Early Learning Center, serving 150 kids, ages 6 months to 5 years.

For years, the community has been clamoring for more child care options, said Doug Inman, executive director of the Portland Foundation. Well over half of the county’s young children in need of care are not enrolled in a known program, and only 9 percent of those in need of care are in a program deemed high quality, based on a 2018 survey. Providers named “building renovations” as one of the top barriers keeping them from seeking a higher rating.

The Judge Haynes project faced a setback in 2021 when county leaders opted not to provide funding, citing concerns about concentrating child care slots in the county seat rather than scattering them throughout the region. But the foundation’s board pushed ahead, Inman said. They purchased Judge Haynes from the local school district for $35,000 and brought on a seasoned provider with three other Indiana locations to run the center. They ultimately secured about $4 million, mostly from state and philanthropic grants, but also from community members like a Portland retiree who showed up at the foundation offices to pledge $2,500.

Today, the Jay County Early Learning Center has a new roof, floors, lighting, and bathrooms, a kitchen, a lactation room, and a gym. A toddler-friendly playground will be installed in late August, cleared of “all that equipment that would cause you to get a tetanus shot,” Inman said.

“We knew going into this that we were taking a big bite, but this is a generational project,” he said. “If we can be a model for any small community to see that a community of 20,000 people can do this, we’d love to be a place that others can learn from.”

This story about child care buildings  was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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With five children aged 11 to 24, Cyd Detiege has sent her kids to Palm Springs Unified School District in Southern California for nearly two decades.

“It’s gotten hotter,” she said, noting record-breaking temperatures in the desert city, which hit an all-time high of 124 degrees this July. The first day of school in Palm Springs this year was August 7, when temperatures reached 109 degrees. Since around 2019, Detiege says she’s contacted district officials, spoken at meetings, and posted on local Facebook pages with one goal: moving the first day of school to after Labor Day.

Related: Interested in climate change and education? Sign up for our newsletter.

Across the U.S., climate change is influencing discussions about how, and when, kids are educated. School districts, teachers, parents, students and experts are all considering how extreme heat is transforming education, and what changes need to happen for schools to adapt to extreme heat. In some places, this now includes reshaping what “back-to-school” means, as districts attempt to schedule the academic year around extreme heat.

America’s schools are vastly underprepared for extreme heat: An estimated 36,000 public schools don’t have adequate HVAC systems, and the combined costs of upgrading or installing necessary HVAC systems by 2025 is estimated at $4.4 billion nationally, according to the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank. Even school districts with air conditioning may be exposing kids to excessive heat, allowing kids to play on hot outdoor blacktops without adequate shade for recess and lunchtime.

As districts work through the lengthy process of financing and planning these infrastructure upgrades, some hope that pushing back the first day of school could reduce school closures and other effects of extreme heat on students.

The impacts of heat on students’ health and learning is well-documented; studies have found that without air conditioning, every 1 degree Fahrenheit increase in temperature during a school year reduces the year’s learning by 1 percent. Unexpected school closures can leave parents scrambling for child care, and in some cases might send students to homes that are also hot and un-air conditioned.

Since the early 1970s, demand for cooling during the back-to-school season has increased by an average of 32 percent, according to an analysis of 231 locations by the nonprofit Climate Central.

“It’s not just that we get extreme weather. It’s that our summers are literally longer,” said Joellen Russell, Thomas R. Brown Distinguished Chair of Integrative Science at the University of Arizona and member of Science Moms, a nonpartisan group of climate scientists who are also moms.

Most school districts are left on their own to plot out their state-dictated minimum days of instruction onto a calendar, while planning for holiday breaks and end-of-year testing, and balancing input from parents, teachers and students.

In Palm Springs Unified School District, this calculation has landed students with a start date in the first week of August for the past several years, according to Joan Boiko, the district’s coordinator for communications and community outreach. This allows for a three-week winter break and a two-week spring break, and allows high schoolers to finish exams before winter break.

“While it is certainly warm here in the desert in August, it is typically just as hot in early September,” wrote Boiko in an email. Detiege, meanwhile, said she remains “very disappointed” in the calendar.

The neighboring Desert Sands Unified School District made a different decision. According to Jordan Aquino, assistant superintendent for business services at the district, planning for this school year included looking into what weeks are typically hottest. As a result, the district moved its first day back from the third to fourth week of August, pushing the last day of school further into June.

The two California desert districts have air conditioning, so students are primarily affected by heat on their way to and from school, at recess, during P.E. and at lunchtime. But in other regions of the country, districts are grappling with a need for air conditioning that didn’t exist when school buildings were first constructed. Nationwide, an estimated 41 percent of districts need to update or replace HVAC systems in at least half of their schools, according to a 2020 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. In recent years, the lack of adequate HVAC systems has led to school closures and early dismissals as classrooms become too hot for students. School district leaders hope that proactively planning the school year around extreme heat will reduce some of these unexpected closures.

Carrie A. Olson taught in classrooms without air conditioning for three decades in Denver Public Schools. When the weather got warm, she’d leave her classroom windows open overnight, allowing cool air to flow in. But this tactic is less effective with the climate change-driven rise in nighttime temperatures.

In 2020, Denver voters approved a bond measure that set aside funding to install air conditioning at 24 schools. “But it still wasn’t everybody, and that rollover from when the bond was passed to when everything would be implemented was time-consuming,” said Olson, who has a doctorate in curriculum and instruction and now serves as president of the Denver Public Schools Board of Education. Pushing back the first day of school by a week seemed like an interim solution, so the district did just that starting in the 2021-22 school year.

“At that time, it seemed like things were cooling off in mid- to late-August, and a week later would really help,” said Olson. A total of 29 schools are still without air conditioning in the district, and another bond measure is going before voters this fall.

Related: Teaching among the ashes: ‘It’s not just your home that’s burned, it’s everyone’s’

In Milwaukee, where only about one-fourth of public school classrooms have air conditioning, the district took a similar approach this year. Previously, Milwaukee’s high schools and most middle schools started in August and most elementary schools started in September. But when the district surveyed employees, parents and students about the academic calendar last year, the biggest concern was air conditioning.

Moving all students to a September start date “would put the district in the best position to avoid excessive heat days during the upcoming school year,” said Milwaukee Public Schools Chief Human Resources Officer Adria Maddaleni during a December 2023 meeting. The change seems to have staved off some unexpected cancellations for the district, at least this school year: Heat indexes rose above 100 degrees in Milwaukee during the last week of August, forcing some private schools that were already in session to cancel classes.

“The reality is that it’s an okay solution, but it’s not perfect, because there are many school districts where you could get 100-degree days in November,” said V. Kelly Turner, associate director of the Luskin Center for Innovation at the University of California, Los Angeles, who also leads the new Center of Excellence for Heat Resilient Communities. “But the other thing is that the heat season isn’t just shifting, it’s getting longer.”

That brings up questions of how adjusting school calendars might affect summer break and students who don’t have air conditioning at home, said Turner. For example, for a student without air conditioning at home, spending a longer portion of the hottest days of summer at home would just mean staying in a hot home or apartment.

In Philadelphia, heat also came up as one of the biggest topics of discussion when the district planned the 2023-24 and 2024-25 calendars, with survey responses from parents, students, teachers and others showing a preference for a post-Labor Day start date. “Beginning school after Labor Day avoids possible school closures due to excessive heat,” according to a document prepared for a February 2023 school board meeting. The board voted that month to start 2023-24 after Labor Day, but to begin the 2024-25 school year in August due to scheduling limitations. The district now aims to start after Labor Day “whenever possible,” while also working to expand cooling systems, according to the board meeting document. 

The School District of Philadelphia has made gains in cooling its aging buildings, including through a donation from Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts that added air conditioning units to 10 schools this year. But 63 schools still lack adequate cooling and close early when weather is expected to reach 85 degrees by noon, according to Monique Braxton, deputy chief of communications for the district.

Philadelphia dismissed schools early in 2023 and 2024 due to heat during the first week of school. Last year, 73 schools received early dismissal during the entire first week of school after Labor Day, and this year, the 63 remaining schools without adequate cooling dismissed early on Aug. 27 and Aug. 28.

Related: Canceled classes, sweltering classrooms: How extreme heat impairs learning

Experts on heat and schools say scheduling academic calendars around extreme heat comes with limitations. In much of the country, August typically experiences hotter days than June, but pushing back the first day of school still risks pushing the school year further into June, which also experiences temperatures high enough to cancel school. And with temperatures projected to keep getting higher on both ends of the academic calendar, relying on scheduling alone to address extreme heat would be a constant shuffle.

“I think that the degree that you would need to push back the school year will become greater and greater every year, unless we figure out how to adapt the structures that kids are learning in, and make the investments in updating this older infrastructure, because temperatures will continue to increase,” said Lindsey Burghardt, chief science officer at the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University.

The University of Arizona’s Russell called the strategy a “temporary stopgap” to extreme heat.

Federal money is available now for HVAC upgrades; the Inflation Reduction Act included a provision that will reimburse schools that install heat pumps and other clean energy technologies, according to Jonathan Klein, co-founder and CEO of Undauntedk12, an organization focused on supporting schools’ transition to clean energy. Some districts also used federal Covid-relief aid to improve HVAC systems, according to Liz Cohen, policy director at FutureEd, although she said it’s hard to know for sure how many districts used the funds for those upgrades due to different reporting requirements in each state.

In Denver, Olson said the board hasn’t considered pushing the start date back even further into August or September.

“Just thinking about the shift in our climate across our planet, shifting the calendar isn’t going to be as helpful as it was three years ago when we passed this,” said Olson. “The solution is going to be to get more heat mitigation strategies and air conditioning in our schools with an eye toward sustainability.”

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

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The pandemic disrupted education in previously unimaginable ways. It limited testing and pushed schools toward remote learning and easier assignments, along with softer grading and a more relaxed attitude around attendance.

These accommodations were supposed to be short-term, but most are still with us and are having a negative impact on students. This needs to change.

That’s why, as parents nationwide help their children settle into school this fall, they may want to ask questions about whether their kids are ready to dive into grade-level work — and, if not, find out what is being done to address that.

Four and a half years after the start of the pandemic, it’s time to raise the bar and stop making excuses for sagging achievement. Newly released data show that student growth in 2023-24 lagged behind pre-pandemic achievement levels in nearly every grade. That data follows the big declines in reading and math scores on the most recent Nation’s Report Card and the release of a study showing that high-needs districts have been recovering from the pandemic more slowly than their wealthier counterparts, worsening long-standing achievement gaps.

The pandemic also led to an explosion in chronic absenteeism, and we’ve seen only modest improvements. A recent study by USC researchers found a lack of concern about the issue among parents. School leaders also aren’t as worried as you’d expect, with only 15 percent saying they were “extremely concerned” about student absences in a survey released by the National Center for Education Statistics.

Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter to receive our comprehensive reporting directly in your inbox. 

At the same time, we can see clear evidence of grade inflation in rising GPAs coupled with falling or flat test scores. And while I know that teachers are trying to be supportive, lowering expectations is harmful; recent research shows that students learn more from teachers who have higher grading standards.

However, the need to raise standards doesn’t just rest on the shoulders of teachers. Education leaders and policymakers are also making things too easy. After decades of raising the bar for what’s considered grade-level performance, several states have lowered their “cut scores,” or what it means to be deemed proficient on end-of-year achievement tests.

Many states are also cutting back on K-12 assessments and graduation requirements, despite the fact that they are critical to holding education systems accountable.

Even students don’t like the go-easy-on-them approach. In an op-ed for the Baltimore Sun, recent high school graduate Benjamin Handelman notes that what is more helpful is for teachers to show enthusiasm for the subjects they teach and offer rigorous and engaging learning opportunities.

That’s important for all students, but especially for those from historically marginalized groups, who are least likely to get interesting, high-level learning opportunities.

Related: PROOF POINTS: Why are kids still struggling in school four years after the pandemic?

Keeping the bar low is going to make our kids less competitive when they leave school. It shocks me every time I hear people say, “Well, if everyone is behind, then no one is really behind.”

Eventually, young people will compete for jobs that aren’t going to have lower standards. In fact, employers will likely have higher expectations than a decade ago given advances in generative AI, the impact of technological advances on the world of work and a growing demand for employees with strong analytical, problem-solving and interpersonal skills.

Progress over time is central to our lives. When I was growing up, my competitive swimming coach was a former world record holder and Olympian. The time she had needed to be the fastest in the world in the 200-meter butterfly in 1963 was just barely fast enough for her daughter to qualify for the U.S. Olympic trials 30 years later.

We cannot be complacent about the fact that math achievement for 13-year-olds has fallen to levels not seen since the 1990s. That’s why I’m glad there are states and systems holding kids to high expectations. We can learn from them.

In Maryland, Superintendent of Schools Carey Wright has pledged to raise rigor, much like she did in Mississippi, which made major achievement gains under her stewardship. Her strategy, emulated by others, centers around raising standards and implementing evidence-based instructional strategies, most notably in reading. Mississippi is among three states, along with Illinois and Louisiana, where research shows that students have returned to pre-pandemic achievement levels in reading. Additional strategies adopted by Illinois and Louisiana include tutoring and interventions for struggling learners and professional development for educators.

These states show us that all students can succeed when challenged and supported with high expectations and opportunities to learn. That must be what we strive for to help all kids finally put the pandemic behind them.

Lesley Muldoon is the executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the Nation’s Report Card. She previously served as chief operating officer of the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers.

This story about post-pandemic grade-level work was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.

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In August, more than 300 students started the school year in the first traditional school run directly by the New Orleans school district since 2019. It’s the first time the district has opened its own school since Hurricane Katrina swept through the city nearly two decades ago.

The pre-K-8 school, named after New Orleans cultural and civil rights icon Leah Chase, came together in just a handful of months. Its opening ends the city’s five-year run as the only all-charter school district in the nation. Charter schools receive public funding, but are independently run. 

For some, the opening of the Leah Chase School is a symbol of stability. In a district that’s been out of the business of directly managing schools for five years, it is a tentative step toward a new era in the city where permanent, traditional neighborhood schools are more commonplace. NOLA Public Schools, the district’s official name, has about 41,600 students, 75 percent of whom are Black.

The decision to open the school in a short time also reflects shifting attitudes in the community and the Orleans Parish School Board, which was once committed to having only charter schools in the district. What happens with the Leah Chase School is a litmus test for a school system that was once considered failing in most metrics, and it will likely determine how it operates future schools, and when. 

“I think the opening of the Leah Chase School does mark a new period for New Orleans public schools,” said J. Celeste Lay, a political science professor at Tulane University who studies education policy. “I think they are more willing to consider directly running schools in ways we haven’t seen, certainly since Katrina.”

The dispute over who runs schools in Orleans Parish goes beyond the national debate over school choice. What happens when a city with a struggling school system gets swallowed by the sea, and how does that system recover when the waters recede?

The idea to open Leah Chase cropped up in January after a tense board meeting over the future of Lafayette Academy. That charter school, in New Orleans’ Uptown neighborhood, received an F rating on the state’s report card. Superintendent Avis Williams recommended revoking the school’s charter in November. Typically, a different charter group would offer to step in.

But when the December deadline for a new operator came and went with no charter group stepping up, Williams recommended that the board keep the school closed, requiring parents to find another option for their children.

At that time, she presented the obstacles to opening a district-run school, from the abbreviated timeline to hire staff and adopt curriculum to planning for the city’s declining birth rate and drop in district enrollment.

Board members ultimately approved the superintendent’s recommendation, but they made it clear: If the school is closing, the district should have a plan to replace it. 

Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter to receive our comprehensive reporting directly in your inbox. 

A day after the January board meeting, the superintendent made a sharp turn. The district would run the school after all, in the building that had been occupied by Lafayette Academy.

Williams said the decision to open the school was what the board, and community, wanted.

“That was just something the community has impressed upon our board members, and they did vote unanimously for us to direct-run the Leah Chase School and for us to direct-run more schools,” Williams said. 

Both the Recovery School District – a special statewide district created to manage underperforming schools – and New Orleans Public Schools had poured money into renovating and abating asbestos in the building that housed Lafayette Academy that is now the site of the Leah Chase School. That was one factor in wanting to keep this particular building open. But more than anything, the decision stemmed from a growing sentiment in the community, and among newer board members, that it’s time for the district to have a traditional school again, said Carlos Zervigon, a member of the Orleans Parish School Board whose district includes the Leah Chase School.

“There’s a sense that if we’re a system of choice and a system of innovation, one choice should be a school run in a traditional way by the school district directly, with a focus on the neighborhood,” Zervigon said. “That should be one of the choices, and there’s a strong feeling about that.” 

In its first week open, the Leah Chase School had already met the goals district leaders outlined for it. The school has a full staff, a principal, a bus transportation system and more than 300 students enrolled — many of whom transferred from Lafayette.

“My expectation was certainly that there would be some glitches, but it was a seamless day,” said Williams, the superintendent.

The district still has logistical questions to answer. School enrollment in NOLA has dropped by about 5 percent — 2,400 students in five years, according to the district — and if enrollment continues to fall, more school closures are on the horizon. That’s something the superintendent has been tasked with addressing in a five-year plan she’s set to present to the board this fall, along with goals for future traditional public schools.

“That’s part of the optimization plan — we’re looking at size of schools, number of seats available,” said Leila Jacobs Eames, vice president of the Orleans Parish School Board and one of the board’s more vocal advocates for traditional schools.

Financially, the district will need to open more traditional schools to cover the cost of district office staff required to run schools. The district is currently using its fund balance to cover much of the start-up costs for the Leah Chase School. 

“The question is, with their skeleton crew, can they do all that and create the internal capacity to operate schools again?” said Douglas N. Harris, a professor at Tulane University and director of the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice. “And the larger question — will they be good at it?”

Related: PROOF POINTS: New study shows controversial post-Katrina school reforms paid off for New Orleans

Hurricane Katrina was the catalyst that resulted in New Orleans’ charter-focused district, but the district’s poor performance, and the city’s broken trust in the school system, predates the devastating storm. In 2004, one year before Katrina, only half of high school students were graduating, and under a quarter of seniors were enrolling in college. School board members and officials were indicted on corruption charges stemming from millions of unaccounted-for dollars. The 2005 hurricane pushed a district already on the brink into collapse.

When Katrina destroyed nearly 90 percent of the public schools in the city, the state’s Recovery School District took most of them over, while the Orleans Parish School Board still had control of a few schools. The years immediately following Katrina were chaotic — schools opened, and closed, on a dime. 

“You had kids that were switching schools every other year because their school would close or their school would transition” to a charter school, “would take on new grades or close certain grades. It was a crazy, terrible time,” said Lay.

Slowly, the few remaining noncharter schools transitioned into charter schools. The arguments in favor of a charter system were numerous: Academic and school management decisions would be left to schools instead of to a district with a history of corruption; charters gave students the opportunity to attend schools outside of their neighborhoods; and the new system brought the promise of change for a city that desperately needed better options.

But it also left a bitter taste. There were concerns about shifting power from a majority-Black, locally elected school board to a majority-white state board — many of whose members had no direct ties to New Orleans. And the district’s entire teaching staff, which was 71 percent Black, was fired. By 2014, fewer than 50 percent of public school teachers in New Orleans were Black.

“You have a Black majority constituency that is being told your elected officials cannot directly control your schools, and it feels a lot like disenfranchisement,” said Zervigon, the school board member. 

Because charter schools were no longer merely an option for families but the main source of public education in New Orleans, the Recovery School District created rules that charters elsewhere don’t have to follow: Enrollment in schools was handled by the district, charters had to provide transportation options, and they had to have district permission before expelling a student. The state passed legislation — Act 91 — enshrining those rules into law before the Recovery School District handed its schools back to the New Orleans public school district in 2017. By 2019, every public school in the parish was a charter, and most of those schools are Black-led, Zervigon said. 

Related: New Orleans finally has control of its own schools, but will all parents really have a say? 

Overall, schools in the district are performing better now than they were before Katrina. The high school graduation rate has risen to 78 percent in 2022, from 54 percent in 2004. The college entry rate rose to 56 percent in 2021, from 37 percent in 2004. 

“Test scores went up, high school graduation, college graduation, ACT scores — everything improved, which is really unusual,” Harris said. “A lot of them improved quite considerably, which is also very unusual. It’s generally the most successful district school reform that we’ve ever seen — of any kind, not just a charter district.”

Schools have stabilized compared to the years after Katrina, but the framework of a charter system requires closing poor performing and financially struggling schools. Though the number of schools closing each year is far lower than it was in the years directly after Katrina, it is not uncommon for a charter to get revoked. Along with Lafayette Academy, the school district rescinded the charter of the 180-student Living School, which didn’t reopen this fall.

Ultimately, people are sick of that cycle, Zervigon said.

“It’s just not reasonable to tolerate closing schools anymore,” he said. “This idea of closing your way to improvement — no one wants to do that.” 

There’s disagreement on how successful the city’s charter model has been for students more recently. In 2019, New Orleans schools were among the top in the nation for academic growth according to a Stanford University report. But annually, most of the city’s schools get a C, D or F rating on state report cards. A 2016 study from a different department at Stanford University said the quality of schools in the city varies greatly depending on the school, and the main mode for addressing this — closing failing schools — hurts achievement for displaced students.

“There’s a lot of disagreement around whether the schools are better and what better means,” said Lay, the Tulane professor. “There are people who will certainly point to increases in test scores and graduation rates as solid evidence of improvement. But I think many others look at that as a very narrow way to measure transformation or success, and instead would prefer a holistic view of success of the district: inclusion of students, stability in terms of being able to attend schools, and know those schools are going to be open for the next several years of their education.”

The five-year plan that Williams, the superintendent, will present to board members in October will include plans for new traditional schools and how the district will address declining enrollment.

Board members and the superintendent have said they are still committed to charters. But the school system will likely add more traditional schools to join the Leah Chase School.

“They’ll probably operate a couple more, but still fundamentally remain a mostly charter school district,” Harris said. “I think that partly because a big change can only happen slowly.”

This story about New Orleans schools was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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WASHINGTON, D.C. — Apparently, there is not enough joy to go around, and some “joyful warriors” are upset about, among other things, what they see as their nickname being ripped off.

Joy has become a theme of the Democratic ticket — Vice President Kamala Harris proclaimed herself and running mate Tim Walz “joyful warriors” against their Republican opponents. The conservative parent group Moms for Liberty made a point of attacking the Democrats’ use of the phrase during its four-day annual summit over Labor Day weekend in Washington D.C.

“I want to remind people who are the OG Joyful Warriors,” Moms for Liberty co-founder Tina Descovich said Friday evening, ahead of an appearance by Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump.    

Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter to receive our comprehensive reporting directly in your inbox. 

As a whole, the summit sent dual messages. One cast Moms for Liberty and the broader Republican party as working to appeal across party lines. The other unleashed strikingly vitriolic language about claimed dangers of the Harris-Walz ticket — especially to parents. Leaders made one particular issue — transgender students — the focus of their messaging. Staple concerns of past years, including social emotional learning, DEI initiatives and “inappropriate” books, took a backseat. There was little talk of academics or learning.

Instead, co-founder Tiffany Justice painted schools as predatory, seeking to infect children with ideas about gender that lead them to declare they are nonbinary. And Walz, whose policies as governor of Minnesota are considered LGBTQ+-friendly, was a special target of attack. 

“Tim Walz is, I mean, what a radical, radical bad guy,” Justice said in an interview with The Hechinger Report, calling him “anti-parent” and repeating inaccurate portrayals of  Minnesota law as allowing minor children to come to the state for gender-affirming care without their parents’ consent and saying that children can be removed from their parents’ custody if they disagree with their kids’ desire for gender-affirming care. (A Minnesota law gives courts there the ability to intervene temporarily in a custody dispute across state lines when a child cannot obtain care.)

She also raised concerns about what she called “a social contagion that has taken over in our country. It’s called rapid onset gender dysphoria,” Justice said, referring to a disorder described in a paper published last year in the scientific journal Archives of Sexual Behavior that has since been retracted. 

“There’s no such thing as a transgender child. Please quote me on that,” she continued. “There are children who are experiencing mental distress and they need kindness and compassion and help to feel comfortable in their own bodies, because no child is born in the wrong body.”

Aside from a playful interlude featuring covers of John Mellencamp and Lynyrd Skynyrd that brought attendees clad in sequined MAGA wear and American Flag-inspired fashion to their feet, the event felt less organized — and less joyful — than past years.

Related: Title IX regulations on sex discrimination can be Trump-era or Biden-era, depending on your state or school

Instead, the prevailing tone was one of aggression. The us-versus-them framing is not new. At the first Moms for Liberty summit, in Tampa in 2022, attendees were invited to a well-choreographed unveiling of the alleged dangers facing children in public school — and an urgent call to get involved. The second, in Philadelphia, schooled them in real-time opposition as the extent of protests seemed to surprise attendees doing what they saw as the noble work of moms. This year, many got that this was less about gathering information or learning than rallying around your team. On the cusp of a big election, what could they do to help? How could they recruit more people to defeat a Democratic ticket cast as lethal to their children’s well-being — even as they look to be having lots of fun and supporting lunchbox issues like school meals?

“It’s crazy what’s going on,” said one Maryland mom, a first-time attendee who said she has become more active “because I can” since her youngest graduated from high school. “Moms with 5- and 6-year-olds don’t have time to fight.”

The summit gathered some 600 moms, grandmothers — and a fair number of dads, for whom an in-person appearance from Trump was perhaps the biggest draw. Even though the former president was on stage for nearly an hour, he said little about education, instead repeatedly veering to the subject of immigration regardless of what question Justice asked him. In some of his few comments on schools, he charged without evidence that public schools are aggressively involved in providing gender-affirming care.  

“The transgender thing is incredible,” Trump said. “Think of it. Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.”

Some of Trump’s remarks on immigration, meanwhile, focused on the dangers of newcomers to public education. At one point, he alleged that new arrivals bring gangs and disease into schools, and are welcomed warmly while current students are shut out. “They don’t even speak English,” he said. “It’s crazy. And we have our people that aren’t going into a classroom. We have students that were there last year that aren’t allowed into the school.”

Trump also spent time reflecting on the difficulties of being a candidate. When Justice asked Trump for his advice to busy moms considering a run for school board — some of the core work of Moms for Liberty is to encourage members to seek office — his answer was, “Don’t do it.” 

While Justice noted to the crowd that Moms for Liberty endorses candidates only in school board races, she personally endorsed Trump as she concluded her interview. 

Related: Moms For Liberty flexes its muscles — and faces pushback

Despite the clearly partisan tone of the summit, there was an effort to cross ideological lines to expand support for the Republican ticket ahead of the election. A Friday morning keynote panel featured four women whom Justice said had “chosen to walk away from the Democratic party”: Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii; Texas state Rep. Shawn Thierry, who left the Democratic party in late August; athletic clothing maker and former gymnast Jennifer Sey who has written about how she regrets voting for President Joe Biden; and New York City parent advocate and former Democratic congressional candidate Maud Maron.

Gabbard, who was recently named to be part of Trump’s transition team, said the Democratic Party “is no longer the big tent party that welcomes people from all walks of life.” She coached attendees on how to approach a person in their circle “who doesn’t quite see the truth,” and urged them to do so. “Scroll through your phone. Think about the people who may need a little bit of a nudge,” she said.

“Who’s gonna unite our country?” Gabbard called to the crowd. “We are!”  

This year’s summit lacked the hundreds of protesters who were a constant presence at the 2023 event in Philadelphia, spurring a large and visible security detail and barricades at the hotel entrance. By contrast, the streets outside of the JW Marriott in Washington, less than half a mile from the White House, were quiet.

Yet many of the same groups that had gathered to protest Moms for Liberty last year  staged a separate counter-event, “Celebration of Reading,” on Saturday at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in downtown Washington. Participants read aloud banned books and gave away nearly 1,000 of them to children and families who arrived in strollers and on foot.

At the same time, several dozen conservative groups, including Moms for Liberty, organized what they said would be the first annual “March for Kids” to “bring awareness to the decline of our educational system and the erosion of parental rights.” Originally planned for the National Mall, it was moved at the last minute indoors to the Daughters of the American Revolution Constitution Hall; organizers cited safety concerns. As it got underway, some 300 people populated a hall with a capacity of 3,702.

Meg Simons, digital strategy manager at the progressive advocacy group People for the American Way, said that the strong showing of protestors in Philadelphia so motivated many older members of her 40-year-old organization that they started Grandparents For Truth to counter Moms for Liberty.

Marge Baker, a founding member of the grandparent group, said it bothered her to see Moms for Liberty “out there organizing and trying to claim this mantle of freedom when what they want is the freedom to decide what all parents and children can read.” Baker spoke moments before her husband, Robert Banks, was to read aloud “The Lorax,” which has been banned in some places for promoting an environmentalist agenda and negatively depicting the logging industry.

Heidi Ross, another grandmother, traveled from Buckeye, Arizona, to help out at the event. “This is my world,” she said, holding up a screen shot of her 2-year-old granddaughter, Lili. Ross said she has been upset by the rise of school vouchers in her state and the attacks on books. “Children should know about everybody, every family,” she said, adding that, “there are different families, even in my Republican neighborhood.”

During the Moms for Liberty summit, attendees chatted at booths staffed by representatives of organizations such as Lifewise Academy, which touts a Bible education program for public school students that can be offered during the school day. Other booths plus a strategy session run by lawyers with The Heritage Foundation and Institute for Free Speech offered guidance to parents for fighting the new Biden administration Title IX regulation, which extends protection against sex discrimination to students based on gender identity and sexual orientation. Moms for Liberty helped derail the regulation, at least for now, in 26 states and thousands of schools in other states, a list that is growing by the week.

Julie Womack, head of organizing for Red, Wine & Blue, a national progressive group that helps suburban women organize, hosted an online information event about the new Title IX rules, a panel with parents of trans kids, and is planning a “Troublemaker Training” on Oct. 16 to counter disinformation about transgender individuals. “Many people in real life have very little experience,” with transgender individuals, said Womack.  Even parents of transgender youth, she said, admit “they didn’t know how to handle it. Well, we are all learning. It is OK to learn. But it is not OK to exclude.”

Liz King, who leads the education program for the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, one of the counter-event’s sponsors, said Moms for Liberty is boxing people out rather than being inclusive. As the group’s language escalates, she said, “they have resorted to the old canard of fear-mongering.”

This all comes at a critical time.“One of the questions right now is, ‘What does it mean to be a parent?’” said King. “What we see with this organization of Moms for Liberty is a betrayal of the responsibility of parents and an anti-liberty agenda.”

This story about Moms for Liberty was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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Lawsuits challenging the Biden administration’s Title IX rule on sex discrimination have led to judges blocking its implementation in 26 states. The new rule was also halted in schools and universities attended by children of members of Moms for Liberty, Young America’s Foundation and Female Athletes United, following lawsuits from those groups.

The result is a messy legal landscape with school officials trying to figure out their obligations. Below are lists of K-12 schools and colleges that, because of court injunctions, are continuing to follow the Trump administration’s Title IX rules instead of the newer regulations.

Search below and read our full report about this issue.

The post See whether your school uses Biden or Trump’s rules on sexual discrimination and gender identity appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

In Sheridan County School District #3 in northern Wyoming, where it can take an hour on the bus each way for students to attend the K-12 Clearmont School, the Biden administration’s rewrite of Title IX rules for addressing sex-based discrimination was welcomed — by some.  

The new rules, said Chase Christensen, the school’s principal and superintendent of the district, offer a rural community like his a streamlined process that “can alleviate the burdensome investigation process for districts and for schools.” His district spans 1,000 square miles and serves 85 pupils. 

“I think they were a large move forward,” Christensen said. 

Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter to receive our comprehensive reporting directly in your inbox. 

The regulation that took effect this month was meant to replace Trump-era rules set in 2020 that, among other conditions, typically require multiple impartial adults to investigate and respond to allegations of sex-based discrimination. That demand, Christensen said, especially strains small communities and districts with limited personnel. Plus, he said, those bringing a complaint “are not wanting a remedy four months later,” but in a few days. “They are wanting to move on.” 

But Wyoming and 25 other states sued to halt the Biden administration rules, and thus far, have succeeded in court. So in those states, plus a growing list of individual schools around the country, the new rules are blocked from taking effect.  

The result is a messy legal landscape with school officials trying to figure out their obligations. In some cases, schools in the very same district are subject to different rules. 

“It is creating so much more work and chaos,” said Emma Grasso Levine, the Title IX policy and senior program manager at the advocacy group Know Your IX. “Are we enforcing this rule or that rule?“ 

At the center of the court challenges is that the Biden administration’s new rules, issued in April, expand the definition of “sex” to include sexual orientation and gender identity. This aligns with protections extended in the workplace by a 2020 Supreme Court ruling and offers greater support for transgender students. That spurred lawsuits from political leaders in red states and groups including Moms for Liberty, explicitly objecting to this broader definition. As a result, several judges blocked the new regulations, which also are intended to protect students who are pregnant or who have terminated a pregnancy, from taking effect in certain states, as well as in schools attended by children of members of Moms for Liberty and two other groups that were plaintiffs in one of the lawsuits.  

Opponents of the Biden-era regulations have cast the court decisions as a victory. In Missouri, Attorney General Andrew Bailey described the court order blocking the law in his state as “a huge win,” arguing that the proposed new rules were “a slap in the face to every woman in America.” The rules, he said in a press release, “would have forced educational programs that receive federal money to accept a radical transgender ideology.” 

Related: ‘They’re just not enough’: Students push to improve sexual assault prevention trainings for college men 

Earlier this month, the Education Department made an emergency request to have the polarizing matter of protections based on gender identity or sexual orientation considered apart from the other provisions so that the new rule would not be on hold entirely in some states. On Aug. 16, the Supreme Court denied that request. The new rules do not address transgender athletes, which the department is taking up separately. But Grasso Levine said the rise of anti-LGBTQ sentiment around sports participation, along with laws barring transgender athletes and gender-affirming health care in some states, has helped to drive the objections to the Biden administration’s Title IX regulation. 

Now there is confusion and frustration, both from those eager to protect LGBTQ+ youth through the expanded definition of whom the law protects — and school officials hungry for more streamlined rules around Title IX complaints. 

“It would be nice if we could take a big-picture look at the update, rather than targeting a couple of words that didn’t match up ideologically,” said Christensen, the superintendent and principal in Wyoming, where a statewide injunction has kept the new rules from taking effect. 

This is also a problem in populous states like Pennsylvania, said David Conn, a lawyer who has worked on Title IX and LGBTQ+ issues in schools for over a decade. 

The old regulations “have these very detailed rules for how to handle a complaint” that, he said, are not a good fit for typical minor cases of student misconduct. Conn said the new guideline better serves the day-to-day needs at the K-12 level and “allows for informal resolution, which in school districts is a big deal.” 

When the new rules went into effect, they represented “a significant step forward in improving policies for LGBTQ students,” said Brian Dittmeier, policy director for GLSEN, a group started by teachers in 1990 that advocates for LGBTQ+ individuals in K-12 education. 

According to GLSEN data, 83 percent of LGBTQ+ students said they were assaulted or harassed because of their gender identity in school in 2021, and nearly 62 percent of them did not report it. Such findings, said Dittmeier, suggest “a gap of trust” and students “not feeling they were protected by school policies.” 

Since it was passed in 1972, Title IX — just 37 words — has leaned on regulations to shape its enforcement. Each administration has tweaked the language, but the Biden administration’s more detailed review, which included public comment, sought to give the new rules “the force of law” in contrast to the Obama administration’s “Dear Colleague” letter guidance, said Suzanne Eckes, Susan S. Engeleiter Chair in Education Law, Policy, and Practice at the University of Wisconsin.  

She said that the new rules interpreting the Title IX phrase “on the basis of sex” as including sexual orientation and gender identity are in line with the June 2020 Supreme Court decision in Bostock v. Clayton County. That ruling found that sex-based employment protections under Title VII covered sexual orientation and gender identity, stating that “it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.” 

Related: What education could look like under Trump and Vance 

Eckes said an August 2020 case, Grimm v. Gloucester County School Board that asserted violations of Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause, found in favor of a trans student’s right to use the restroom matching their gender identity, citing Bostock in the opinion. “Title IX cases look at Title VII and Title VII cases look at Title IX. This is nothing new,” said Eckes. 

Yet that is exactly the conflict at play. Several courts blocked the new Title IX rules because of the expanded definition of “sex.” Kansas U.S. District Court Judge John Broomes ruled that “the reasoning of Bostock does not automatically transfer for the Title IX context.” He said the new rules fail to define “gender identity” and that “the unambiguous plain language of the statutory provisions and the legislative history make clear that the term ‘sex’ means the traditional biological concept of biological sex in which there are only two sexes, male and female.” 

The case before Broomes was brought by political leaders in Kansas, Alaska, Utah and Wyoming, along with Moms for Liberty, Young America’s Foundation and Female Athletes United. Broomes ruled that his injunction applied to the four states, and to schools attended by children of members of Moms for Liberty and the suit’s other plaintiffs. Following the ruling, Moms for Liberty co-founders Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich described it as victory, stating that “gender ideology does not belong in public schools and we are glad the courts made the correct call to protect parental rights.”   

The groups have urged members to request the schools and colleges their children attend be exempt from the Biden administration rule; Broomes is allowing the list that already includes hundreds of individual schools not covered by statewide injunctions to expand. As a result, Moms for Liberty leaders, ahead of their annual gathering in Washington, D.C., this week, are pitching free membership that “ensures your child’s school is included in this exemption.” That has led to the situation where in states, including Pennsylvania, not subject to a statewide injunction, one school can be governed by the new rules while another in the same district is not. 

The key point of contention in the lawsuits, said Eckes, centers on transgender students’ use of restrooms, the most litigated issue involving transgender students in schools. While the Supreme Court has so far avoided taking up such a case, she said, “if this continues to cause chaos across the United States or another case comes up around trans access to restrooms,” that could change. Right now, as a practical matter, she said, case law has repeatedly supported the right of students to use the restroom that aligns with their gender identity.    

Some states, like Pennsylvania, have strong anti-discrimination laws. As a result, the injunction applied to individual schools “is much ado about nothing,” said Conn, the Pennsylvania attorney and Title IX expert. Plus, he said, applicable court decisions support protections for transgender students in the state. “Any school district that said, ‘What do we have to do about bathrooms?’ My answer is that you have to let those students use the bathroom consistent with their gender identity. Full stop,” he said. 

Related: How could Project 2025 change education?  

That, however, may not be the case everywhere. Plus, there is the on-the-ground reality that court cases are one thing, but life in a school for LGBTQ+ students is another. Marlene Pray, director of The Rainbow Room in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a gathering place for queer youth, said students have told her they are anxious about the start of school. Some who have already returned have faced struggles — verbal attacks and isolation, harassment, and one, she said, shared that they “had trash thrown at me in the cafeteria.” 

Pushback to the new Title IX rules is just part of a larger social challenge for LGBTQ+ students, said Pray. “Their daily experience of being bullied and being targeted has not changed. And it’s not because of some list that Moms for Liberty gave some right-wing judge.” 

The problem, said Pray, is “the hundreds of legislative plans and policies that are targeting them.” 

Although the result of the lawsuits is one set of colleges and schools operating under a four-year old regulation and another set operating under a brand new one, the underlying Title IX law is unchanged, noted Anya Marino, director of LGBTQI+ Equality at the National Women’s Law Center.  

The legal action that resulted in blocking the newer rule in some places “does not eliminate students’ ability to bring claims under the statute, and it certainly does not eliminate schools’ obligation to uphold Title IX’s dictate.” Marino pointed to a guide from the ACLU this month that states as much. “I don’t think there should be any confusion regarding schools’ obligation to protect students.” 

This story about Title IX regulations was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter. 

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It’s guys night out, and dinner is coming to an end. We’ve given our credit cards to the server, who returns and drops the stack of bills in the center of the table. As per usual, one of my oldest friends scoops them up and thrusts them to my side of the table.

“Lance can calculate the tips, he’s a math guy.”

The line elicits a huge laugh, as if my title as the group’s “math guy” is a comical one. We have our “movie guy,” our “soccer guy” and of course me, the one who can quickly compute reasonable tips because I’m “good at math.”

I’ve taught high school math in Texas for the last 16 years, and I wear the epithet of “math guy” proudly. What troubles me is the notion that being “good at math” is unique to those in my vocation. Often, when people find out that I teach Algebra, they quickly recite a plethora of bad experiences with math in all forms, without indicating that they could (or should) have gone down differently.

Equally troubling is the fixed idea among many of my friends that they are the opposite of me: inherently or irrevocably “bad at math,” and they believe that is totally OK.

In fact, my friends are more loath to admit that they’re bad at cooking than math. By contrast, when was the last time you heard an adult declare at a dinner table that they are bad at reading?

Illiteracy carries a large amount of stigma for many adults, whereas most seem to be far less self-conscious about having deficiencies in math. And that’s a problem we must solve as a society.

The solution to creating the next generation of strong “math people” starts early, and it involves families and schools working together to change mindsets.

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Math, along with reading, is one of the fundamental skills we work to teach kids from a very young age. As educators, we focus on math and reading as the twin flames of childhood development, as the two progress in tandem and pave the path to academic success.

Math and reading are frequently linked when we devise legislation, whether it comes from the right or the left. Last year the Texas Legislature passed a popular bill, which put in place a plan to help more students attain access to advanced math instruction. Research shows a clear link between students’ postsecondary success and the highest level of math they took in high school. The bill gets the ball rolling by requiring school districts to automatically enroll sixth graders in an advanced math course if they performed in the 60th percentile or better on their fifth-grade state assessment or a similar local measure.

This is because students tend to find success via a cascading effect. To achieve at the postsecondary level, they need to take advanced high school math courses. To be prepared for those courses, they need access to Algebra I in eighth grade, and to be prepared for that, they need to be enrolled in advanced math in sixth grade.

Putting this bill to work will expose many students to the satisfaction of higher math just before middle school.

I was lucky to have had tangible experiences with problem-solving even younger. My mother taught me how to calculate a 20 percent tip as a child, by showing me how to move the decimal over one place to the left and double the result. I delighted in this shared family activity any time we went out to eat. My joy was only further enhanced in the elementary school classroom, where I learned the formal arithmetic that guides this technique of calculating percentages.

Sadly, few students cite a positive formative memory like mine when it comes to their own history with math, especially outside the classroom. In fact, many experience the opposite.

Related: PROOF POINTS: How a debate over the science of math could reignite the math wars

We must focus on developing an excited “growth mindset” for the learning of math, no matter how old we are, so that our children will view the subject with pleasure rather than fear.

And we need to start now. By 2030, it is estimated that over 60 percent of jobs in Texas will require at least some level of post-high school education. To get students there, we will need even more than innovative legislation.

We can lay a foundation for success in higher levels of math by showing kids the fun of math problem-solving early and often. Some examples: Have your kids sort their Halloween candy into different shapes, count the beats in their favorite songs or guess how many total Legos are in the closet.

Let’s emphasize the ability to develop numeracy with the same fervor and positivity that we emphasize literacy. Let’s stop instilling in our kids that they are either “good” or “bad” at math when they are still in single digits.

Let’s continually promote the narrative that we can all be “math people,” from grade school all the way to adulthood. That way, the next time you need to calculate a tip, or double a recipe or take measurements for a house project, you won’t have to call on the local “math guy.”

You might even take delight in solving the problem yourself.

Lance Barasch is a high school math teacher at the School of Science and Engineering in Dallas ISD. He is a Teach Plus senior writing fellow.

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

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