In the United States today, 9 out of 10 school superintendents are white and two-thirds are white men. When you think of a typical superintendent, the person you imagine probably doesn’t look like me. 

As a Latina, my leadership isn’t often expected, nor is it always welcome. 

Institutional biases block career advancement for educators of color, who constitute only 1 in 5 U.S. teachers and principals. We are promoted less often and experience higher turnover than our white colleagues. 

This is a serious problem: The caliber and stability of our educator workforce affects our education system’s quality and capacity for improvement. We must address these barriers: Educators of color enhance student learning and are key to closing educational gaps. 

Much has been written about why we need to break down barriers in order to diversify the educator workforce. Much less covered has been the formidable task of how to launch and sustain transformative solutions. I urge fellow superintendents from all racial, ethnic and cultural backgrounds to act now.

That’s what we are doing inWaukegan public schools in Illinois, which serve a diverse population of about 14,000 students from preschool through high school, near Lake Michigan, about 10 miles south of the Wisconsin border. I am using my leadership position to take strong, unapologetic action so that every student can graduate from high school prepared and supported to pursue their dreams. 

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

Since taking on the superintendent role, I’ve found that when it comes to the young men in our district, we’ve got serious work to do. 

After analyzing a wide range of data and engaging in deep reflection last year, we realized that our Black male students often lack the necessary resources and support to reach their full potential. This aligns with national trends through which these students typically face low expectations, inequitable discipline that fuels the school-to-prison pipeline and a shortage of effective, culturally responsive teaching.

We launched an ambitious, systemwide, data-driven initiative aimed at creating equitable opportunities to help our Black male students and educators. I believe our efforts can provide an example for any school system dedicated to closing opportunity and achievement gaps for all students. 

Research confirms the intertwined success of Black students and educators. Studies show that low-income Black male students are 39 percent less likely to drop out of high school if they had at least one Black male teacher in elementary school. Our goal is to convince more Black male educators to build a career in our district because we know that hiring and retaining Black teachers and leaders can measurably improve math scores for Black students.

Related: White men have the edge in the school principal pipeline, researchers say

Some key insights from our work stand out as essential tools for continued success. First is the indispensable role of broad support from executive leadership. My commitment to addressing education inequities is deeply personal. I relate to many of the challenges our Black male educators face and, as a mother to a Black teenage boy, the urgency of this effort pulses through my veins.

Our board of education’s steadfast support has been equally key to launching our initiative, with board members helping drive us toward significant, measurable achievements.

Community engagement and leadership are our foundational principles. I know that the solutions we need won’t come from me alone. This acknowledgment led us to launch a task force that includes Black male students, teachers, principals, students’ fathers and other family members and community partners. 

We’ve also hosted planning sessions involving diverse stakeholders to try to foster buy-in and accountability as we move forward. And we’ve engaged national partners with unparalleled expertise to help us guide professional learning for district officials using an inclusive, equity-focused lens. 

We are also dedicating staff to oversee the work. We created a new position to catalyze our multiyear initiative and are investing in our teachers and leaders while we pursue systemic transformation. In particular, we launched a local leadership chapter for Men of Color in Educational Leadership, where our educators can share experiences, seek guidance and grow professionally within a community of practice.

We rely on a framework that highlights skills vital for the success of education leaders of color and contributes to the broader goal of systemic change in education. I often turn to these resources myself when reflecting on my own leadership as a woman of color. 

Acknowledging the extent of the challenge is just the start to fostering inclusive, equitable education. We have begun the critical process of setting goals so we can transparently track and communicate our progress. We are also trying to see how this focused initiative advances broader efforts to strengthen and diversify our entire educator workforce, including paraprofessionals, teachers and school leaders. 

Other superintendents can do this too. Find your champions, allies, community leaders and partners. The time for brave, visionary leadership is now.

Theresa Plascencia is superintendent of Waukegan Public Schools in Waukegan, Illinois. She sits on the Association of Latino Administrators and Superintendents Advisory Policy Committee and on the Men of Color in Educational Leadership National Advisory Council. 

This story about diversifying the educator workforce 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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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.

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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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Education has become a major battleground for the attempted anti-racist paradigm shift of diversity, equity and inclusion work; mirroring society, this work remains stuck in a cycle of advancement and retaliation.

Education administrators at all levels need to act now to resist a rising tide of efforts against social science knowledge. That tide includes bans on state funding for teaching DEI in schools, public colleges and state agencies.

Alabama just followed Florida, Utah and Texas in banning state funding of DEI work and DEI positions and programs are being restricted, challenged and canceled across the nation, in industry and academia. DEI instructors are suffering the consequences.

The backlash against DEI work is predictable. History reminds us that counterattacks have followed every advancement in equity and inclusion, from Brown vs. Board of Education to affirmative action.

But schools must not acquiesce to this backlash. The work is too important to abandon. That’s why schools need to broaden the reach of DEI content and protect the instructors and faculty who are responsible for teaching it.

Related: One school district’s ‘playbook’ for undoing far-right education policies

Instead of caving in, educational institutions should double down on DEI efforts. California is leading the way by requiring the teaching of ethnic studies at the secondary level. That’s a good start, but to be transformative, nationally, content should be representative and include African American studies; Asian American studies; Latinx studies; Native American Studies; women, gender and sexuality studies; and sociology and other social sciences across the K-12 curriculum. The lack of instruction in these fields in K-12 education can help explain why there are such strong attacks on DEI.

Universities also need to integrate such content more fully to foster an understanding of diverse experiences and inequities within our institutions. Universities would do well to consider requiring DEI seminars as part of orientation and encourage faculty to include DEI content in every course. Universities can offer professional development to faculty and staff.

Universities must also update retention, tenure and promotion methods to create new ways for faculty who teach DEI content to be evaluated and help neutralize the personal and political anti-DEI response. Neither university nor K-12 policies have yet caught up with the need to protect faculty.

As professionals, instructors are expected to facilitate controversial course content and student dialogue. Yet, for DEI instructors, university environments can be openly contentious, particularly in predominantly white spaces and in courses addressing a less receptive crowd.

And yet DEI content is vital. If students are exposed to DEI curricula, they can learn how white supremacy is enacted and maintained. They can learn how white privilege and power operate, how institutional policies uphold whiteness, how stereotypes are perpetuated and how implicit biases cultivate mistrust and disrespect.

Yet many students, especially in required courses, have difficulty accepting these concepts.

Usually, when a student in a classroom is not understanding the material, they ask for help. But a different tactic is typical in DEI classes. There, too often, struggling students attempt to discredit the educator and the field of social science.

In course evaluations, some students have called DEI educators “divisive” or “close-minded” for discussing racism — and have even attacked the appearance of their DEI educators. Their end-of-term evaluations reveal hate speech protected by anonymity.

These attacks then become entrenched as part of professors’ academic records and impact their well-being, salaries, employment and careers. Research shows that women and educators of color, particularly Black, Asian, Latinx and Indigenous women, receive worse evaluations than their white and male counterparts.

How should educators respond to such hostility and resistance? Should we confront, ignore, accommodate, negotiate, tolerate or use conflict mediation techniques?

A business educator would not be required to conform to the beliefs of anti-business students; we don’t ask dental educators to change their practices and curriculums to be more palatable to anti-dentistry audiences.

To accommodate resistance to our legitimate fields is to coddle and reproduce white supremacy.

Related: STUDENT VOICE: Bill targeting DEI offices in public universities has a chilling impact on students

DEI knowledge must be made accessible even to an aggressively anti-DEI crowd. This education is direly needed. States and universities fail their faculty and the public when they cave in and allow cuts and bans to DEI and fail to protect those who teach it.

Education is meant to broaden horizons and encourage critical thinking. Exposure to social science research, which underpins and is informed by much DEI work, is needed to build an informed public.

When paradigms are shifting, they rarely go without resistance.

Sumer Seiki is an artist and associate professor at University of British Columbia with the Restoration Project.

Megan Thiele Strong is a sociology professor at San José State University and a 2023-24 Public Voices fellow at the The OpEd Project.

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

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At a national park in Virginia on Monday, President Joe Biden announced that people can start applying to the American Climate Corps, a program that is expected to connect workers with more than 20,000 green jobs. 

“You’ll get paid to fight climate change, learning how to install those solar panels, fight wildfires, rebuild wetlands, weatherize homes, and so much more that’s going to protect the environment and build a clean energy economy,” Biden said at the Earth Day event. 

The American Climate Corps (ACC) is modeled after the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which was created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 to employ men in environmental projects on the country’s public lands — projects like trail building, planting trees and soil erosion control. Nearly 3 million people were put to work in an effort to address both Depression-era unemployment and to shore up national infrastructure.

But it wasn’t very diverse. Although Black and Native American men were allowed to enroll, the work was segregated. And women could not apply. For a brief time, a sister program created by Eleanor Roosevelt — mockingly called the “She-She-She camps” by its detractors — trained 8,500 women in skills like typing and filing.  

The Biden administration is adamant that this iteration of the program will attract a more diverse conservation and climate workforce, promising that the program will “look like America” and expand pathways into the workforce for people from marginalized backgrounds.

On Monday, Biden announced the launch of a long-awaited job board where applicants can look for opportunities. Some positions were created through the American Climate Corps partner agencies like the Forest Service, which announced the Forest Corps — 80 jobs in reforestation and wildfire mitigation — or the USDA’s Working Lands Climate Corps, with 100 positions. At the same time, the Department of Interior and the Department of Energy announced a new project that will place corps members in priority energy communities — places that have historically been the site of coal mining and power plants — for work in community-led projects like environmental remediation. All of these positions have a term limit, although they vary; some listed on the website are seven-months for example, others are over a year long. 

Other jobs listed on the site are compiled from existing conservation corps programs; either state-run programs like the California Conservation Corps or those run by nonprofits like Conservation Legacy. These provide opportunities for young people in local communities to do everything from prescribed burning on public lands to solar panel installations on schools. 

So far, there are 273 listings on the website, ranging from working on trail crews to invasive plant management to wildland firefighting positions. There is also an “ag literacy” position to teach kids about where their food comes from, and a posting for a climate impact coordinator who will help a Minnesota nonprofit develop climate resilience projects. That’s a far cry from the administration’s goal of 20,000 jobs.

But supporters of the program say opportunities to expand ACC are endless — from home weatherization positions to planting tree canopies in urban areas. The question is whether these mostly taxpayer-funded jobs will attract and retain a diverse workforce and benefits women and LGBTQ+ workers, as well as people of color. 

“We know that it is going to take everybody to solve the climate process and we need to field the whole team. That’s exactly the way we’ve thought about building this program,” said Maggie Thomas, special assistant for climate to Biden.

Because the program is working with The Corps Network, a national association of about 140 conservation groups, there is already some data on how modern-day organizations operate, said Mary Ellen Sprenkel, president and CEO of the network. “They collectively engage almost 25,000 young people a year and are very diverse — young people from urban areas to rural areas. There is a diversity of race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status and education level.”

According to the organization’s data from 2023, the most recent year available, 44 percent of their members were women and 3 percent were gender non-conforming or gender expansive.

Fifty-nine percent identified as White, while 14 percent were Black, 23 percent were Latino, 4 percent were American Indian, 3 percent were Asian and 2 percent were Pacific Islander. 

Sprenkel sees those numbers as progress. “What has evolved out of the original CCC has naturally become much more diverse in terms of member opportunities. And so building on that for the ACC, I think it will naturally happen,” said Sprenkel. 

In addition, any of the jobs created through federal agencies in collaboration with the ACC must adhere to the administration’s Justice 40 initiative, which means 40 percent of the benefits must go to marginalized communities, in this case either through job creation, or through the projects being funded through monies like the Inflation Reduction Act. 

One aspect of parity will be how well these jobs pay. Many of the positions listed on the ACC site are funded through AmeriCorps, which pays modest living stipends that have been criticized as “poverty wages.” AmeriCorps “was designed for middle class White people who could get support from their parents to have this opportunity,” Sprenkel said. But the Biden administration wants to ensure that all young people can serve, she continued, not just those who can afford to take lower-paying positions.

Sprenkel said the administration is aiming for positions to pay a living wage — with some wiggle room that allows for lower wages as long as housing and other benefits are provided. “[They’ve] said we would like for programs to strive to pay their members $15 an hour, but if that is the result of a package where you’re providing housing and transportation, that’s OK.”

One way the administration has aimed to increase pay transparency is to list an hourly wage equivalent for the jobs posted on the ACC website, said Thomas. This number could factor in stipends for transportation, living expenses and educational awards. Many jobs currently listed go above the $15 minimum — though some require more than entry-level experience. 

There are also efforts in the works to increase the low stipends of current AmeriCorps members. “The president has called on Congress to raise the minimum living allowance for all of our crew members to at least $15 an hour as a starting point,” said Yasmeen Shaheen-McConnell, senior advisor for AmeriCorps. In the interim, she said, many corps positions have been able to offer packages equivalent to $15 an hour through public and private partnerships with states and outside organizations.

Madeleine Sirois, a research analyst with the left-leaning think tank Urban Institute, has been researching workforce development pathways in the clean energy transition. She said offering paid opportunities to enter a new career is a good starting point. “So many people want to upskill, they want to get new credentials, and maybe change career paths. But then they can’t leave their current job that maybe only pays 10 bucks an hour,” she said. 

But other benefits are important, too, if the program is going to be equitable in its rollout, said Sirois. “It’s been mentioned on the portal that there are health care, child care, transportation and housing available, but it does say only some opportunities will offer that,” she said. “So it leaves me with the question of: Who has access to that and who doesn’t?” 

Among the initial 273 listings posted on the ACC site, The 19th found only four that listed child care as a benefit, though Shaheen-McConnell said that eventually more of the positions will offer it. 

Sirois said another important aspect of the ACC will be whether it will lead to actual jobs in clean energy and climate work after corps service ends. She was heartened by Monday’s announcement that the ACC had partnered with the North America’s Building Trades Alliance TradeFutures program, which will provide every ACC member access to a free pre-apprenticeship trades readiness program. Trades jobs make up the foundation of the clean energy transition, but have historically gone to men. Just 4 percent of women are trades workers in the United States. 

“These are all really important, especially for getting women and people of color into these jobs, and apprenticeships that will lead into quality careers that are unionized in many cases. So I think that’s fantastic,” said Sirois. However, while the administration has also touted that ACC positions will offer workforce certifications and skill-based training, Sirois said those are only offered for some corps members. Getting clarity on how many of these jobs will lead to improved employment opportunities will be key. 

It’s going to take time to see how the program plays out, she said, and learn if it will be successful in placing women and people of color in trades jobs, despite historic discrimination.

“When we talk about moving people into jobs, it’s making sure we’re very specific about what kinds of jobs in terms of the quality,” she said. “It’s about opportunities for advancement, having meaningful work, a workplace free from discrimination and harassment, and feeling that you have a voice on the job.” Sirois hopes the administration will collect data on corps members that tracks completion rates and job placements after service, and that the data can be disaggregated by gender and race.

Thomas said American Climate Corps jobs should be considered the earliest stage of the workforce development pipeline — leading to better paying jobs down the line. “This is an opportunity for young people to take action right now in communities across the country, on climate projects that we know have a tangible impact today.”

This story was originally published by The 19^th and reprinted with permission.

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JERSEY CITY, N.J. — When Keischa Taylor sees fellow student-parents around her campus, she pulls them aside and gives them a hug.

“I tell them, ‘Don’t stop. You’ve got this. You didn’t come this far to stop. You’re not going to give up on yourself.’ ”

Taylor is exceedingly well qualified to offer this advice. She began her college education in her early 20s, balancing it with raising two sons and working retail jobs. And she just finished her bachelor’s degree last semester — at 53.

It’s a rare success story. Student-parents disproportionately give up before they reach the finish line. Fewer than four in 10 graduate with a degree within six years, compared to more than six in 10 other students.

Many have long had to rely on themselves and each other, as Taylor did, to make it through.

Now, however, student-parents are beginning to get new attention. A rule that took effect in California in July, for example, gives priority course registration at public universities and colleges to student-parents, who often need more scheduling flexibility than their classmates. New York State in September expanded the capacity of child care centers at community colleges by 200 spots; its campus child care facilities previously handled a total of 4,500 children, though most of those slots — as at many institutions with child care on campus, nationwide — went to faculty and staff.

Taylor put her sons in a Salvation Army daycare center when they were younger. “It’s a matter of paying for college, paying for the babysitter or sneaking them into class,” Taylor recalled, at Hudson County Community College, or HCCC, where she went before moving on to Rutgers University. Even though the community college is among the few that have improved their services for student-parents, she remembered asking herself, “How am I going to do this?”

Parents with children comprise a huge potential market for colleges and universities looking for ways to make up for the plummeting number of 18- to 24-year-olds and states’ growing need for workers to fill jobs requiring a college education. Many of these parents already have some college credits. More than a third of the 40.4 million adults who have gone to college but never finished have children under age 18, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, or IWPR.

“If you want to serve adult learners, which colleges see as their solution to enrollment decline, you have to serve student-parents,” said Su Jin Jez, CEO of California Competes, a nonpartisan research organization that focuses on education and workforce policies.

Another reason student-parents are more visible now: The Covid-19 pandemic reminded Americans how hard it is to be a parent generally, never mind one who is juggling school on top of work and children.

Related: The hidden financial aid hurdle derailing college students

“A lot of the current energy has come from the focus on child care crises,” said Theresa Anderson, a principal research associate at the nonprofit research organization the Urban Institute. “Student-parents are at the intersection of that.”

There’s also new attention to the benefits for children of having parents who go to college.

“The greatest impact on a child’s likelihood to be successful is the education of their parents,” said Teresa Eckrich Sommer, a research professor at Northwestern University’s Institute for Policy Research.

Lori Barr dropped out of college when she got pregnant at 19, but went back as a mother and ultimately got a master’s degree. With her son, Minnesota Vikings linebacker Anthony Barr, she later co-founded a scholarship organization for single student-parents in California and Minnesota called Raise The Barr.

“Whatever we’re doing to support the parent directly impacts the child,” Barr said. “A parent can’t be well if the child’s not well, and vice versa.”

The effect works two ways, Sommer said. In a study she co-authored of an unusual program that gives college scholarships to both high school students and their parents in Toledo, Ohio, the Institute for Policy Research found that students and parents alike performed at or above average, despite what Sommer noted were financial challenges and limited academic preparation.

“Call it mutual motivation. The children helped the parents with technical issues. The parents helped the children with time management,” she said. “We think of kids as a barrier to student success. We have to turn that on its head. Kids are a primary motivator to student success.”

Tayla Easterla was enrolled at a community college near Sacramento, California, when her daughter was born prematurely four years ago; she took her midterms and finals in the neonatal intensive care unit. “I just found that motherly drive somewhere deep inside,” said Easterla, 27, who now is majoring in business administration at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.

Krystle Pale is about to get her bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz. When she looks at her children who live with her, who are 5, 7, 12 and 13, “I want better for them. I just want them to have a better life,” said Pale, choking up.

Sydney Riester, of Rochester, Minnesota, who is about to earn her dental assistant associate degree, also said her children — ages 3, 6 and 7 — were foremost in her planning. “These kids need me, and I need to get this done for them,” Riester said.

Related: ‘We’re from the university and we’re here to help’

There’s a surprising lack of information about whether students in college have dependent children. Most institutions never ask. That is also slowly changing. California, Michigan, Oregon and Illinois have passed legislation since 2020 requiring that public colleges and universities track whether their students are also parents. A similar federal measure is pending in Congress.

“Ask community college presidents what percentage of their students are parents, and they’ll say, ‘That’s a really good question. I’ll get back to you,’ ” said Marjorie Sims, managing director of Ascend at the Aspen Institute, one of a growing number of research, policy and advocacy organizations focusing on student-parents.

Nearly one in four undergraduate and nearly one in three graduate students, or more than 5.4 million people, are parents, the Urban Institute estimates. More than half have children under age 6, according to the IWPR.

Seventy percent of student-parents are women. Fifty-one percent are Black, Hispanic or Native American. Student mothers are more likely to be single, while student fathers are more likely to be married.

Among student-parents who go to college but drop out, cost and conflicts with work are the most-stated reasons, various research shows; 70 percent have trouble affording food and housing, according to the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice at Temple University.

Student financial aid is based on an estimated cost of attendance that includes tuition, fees, books, supplies, transportation and living expenses, but not expenses related to raising a child. The out-of-pocket cost of attending a public university or college for a low-income parent can be two to five times higher than for a low-income student without children, according to the advocacy group The Education Trust.

A student-parent would have to work 52 hours a week, on average, to cover both child care and tuition at a public university or college, EdTrust says. A separate analysis by California Competes found that students in that state who have children pay $7,592 per child a year more for their educations and related expenses than their classmates who don’t have kids.

But “when they apply for financial aid, they get financial aid packages as if they don’t have children. It’s ludicrous,” said Jez, at California Competes.

Forty-five percent of student-parents who dropped out cited their need to provide child care as a significant cause, a survey released in February found. Yet the number of colleges and universities with on-campus child care has been dropping steadily, from 1,115 in 2012 to 824 today, federal data shows. That’s a decline of 291 institutions, or 26 percent.

Fewer than four in 10 public and fewer than one in 10 private, nonprofit colleges and universities have on-campus child care for students, an analysis by the think tank New America found. Ninety-five percent of those campus child care centers that existed in 2016 — the most recent year for which data is available — had waiting lists, and the number of children on the average waiting list was 82, according to the IWPR. Other students couldn’t afford the cost.

Related: When a Hawaii college sets up shop in Las Vegas: Universities chase students wherever they are

“Colleges and universities that enroll student-parents should be committed to serving their needs,” said Christopher Nellum, executive director at EdTrust-West and himself the son of a student-mother who ultimately dropped out and enlisted in the military, finding it was easier to be a parent there than at a community college. “It’s almost willful neglect to be accepting their tuition dollars and financial aid dollars and not helping them succeed.”

Even where child care is available and spots are open, it’s often too expensive for students to manage. More than two-thirds of student-parents in Washington State said they couldn’t afford child care, a state survey last year found. About half of student-parents nationwide rely entirely on relatives for child care.

Hannah Allen, who goes to HCCC, gets up at 5 a.m. to get her three kids ready for the day — first the 4-year-old, then the 6-year-old, then the 8-year-old. “I go down the line,” she said. Her schedule is so tight, she has a calendar on her refrigerator and another on the wall.

She can’t drop off her children at school or daycare earlier than 8:30 or pick them up later than 5. “When my kids are in school is when I do as much as I can.” She calls her school days “first shift,” while her time at home at night is “second shift.”

“First you put your kids, then you put your jobs, then you put your school and last you put yourself,” said Allen. “You have to push yourself,” she said, starting to cry softly. “Sometimes you think, ‘I can’t do it.’ ”

There is a little-noticed federal grant program to help low-income student-parents pay for child care: Child Care Access Means Parents in School, or CCAMPIS. Last year CCAMPIS was allocated about $84 million; the Government Accountability Office found that student-parents who got CCAMPIS’s subsidies were more likely to stay in school than students generally. But there were more students on the waiting list for it than received aid. A Democratic proposal in the Senate to significantly increase funding for the program has gone nowhere.

The Association of Community College Trustees, or ACCT, is pressing member colleges to make cheap or free space available for Head Start centers on their campuses in the next five years. Fewer than 100 of the nation’s 1,303 two-year colleges — where more than 40 percent of student-parents go — have them now, the ACCT says.

Related: Aging states to college graduates: We’ll pay you to stay

These things are a start, but much more is needed, said Chastity Lord, president and CEO of the Jeremiah Program, which provides students who are single mothers with coaching, child care and housing. “When your child is sick, what are you going to do with them? It becomes insurmountable. Imagine if we had emergency funding for backup child care.”

Jen Charles struggled with child care as she tried to earn a degree and become a social worker from the time she was 19, when she had a son who was born with disabilities. He was followed by a daughter. Charles was also working, as an administrative assistant and, later, a paralegal.

“When things were going smoothly, I would enroll for one class and say, ‘I’m going to get through this,’ ” she said. But it proved too much. And even though Charles, now 49, got an information technology certification last year through the continuing education arm of HCCC, earning a full-fledged degree “became kind of an extinguished dream.”

As important as an education was to her, she said, “your priority becomes being able to sustain your family — their well-being, their needs being met, a roof, food. All of these other things take precedence. And where in there do you fit your papers that are due, or studying for your quiz? Is that at 10 o’clock at night, when you’re exhausted?”

Just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, HCCC has steadily added programs to support the parents among its 20,000 students. It has set aside “family-friendly” spaces in libraries and lounges and holds events for parents with kids, including movie nights, barbecues, trick-or-treating and a holiday tree-lighting ceremony. There’s a food pantry with meals prepared by the students in the college’s culinary program.

Student-parents get to register first for courses. College staff help with applications to public benefit programs. Lactation rooms are planned. And there are longer-range conversations about putting a child care center in a new 11-story campus building scheduled to open in 2026.

The college’s 20,000 students are largely poor and the first in their families to go to college, said Christopher Reber, HCCC’s president, and many are not native English speakers. Ninety-four percent qualify for financial aid. Having children, Reber said, “adds insurmountable challenges to that list of insurmountable challenges.”

There’s an even more immediate motivation for the two-year college to support its student-parents. It graduates only 17 percent of students, even within three years, which is among the lowest proportions in the state.

“If a student doesn’t know where their next meal is coming from, it doesn’t matter how much academic support you offer — the student is not going to succeed,” said Reber, in his office overlooking downtown Jersey City.

Related: One college finds a way to get students to degrees more quickly, simply and cheaply

With a grant it got in January from the Aspen Institute’s Ascend, HCCC is expanding its work with the housing authority in Jersey City to help student-parents there enroll in and complete job-focused certificate programs in fields such as bookkeeping and data analytics, hiring a coordinator to work with them and appointing an advisory committee made up of student-parents.

It can be hard to win the trust of student-parents, said Lori Margolin, HCCC’s associate vice president for continuing education and workforce development. “Either they’ve tried before and it didn’t work out, so they’re reluctant to go back, or it’s too much of an unknown. ‘Do they care that I have children and I’m not going to be able to take classes at these times?’ ”

Like other schools, HCCC had what Reber called “Neanderthal” rules for student-parents. They weren’t allowed to bring their kids to campus, for example.

“I remember one student, a single mother, relying on parents and friends to watch her baby. The only time she could study was late at night [in the library], but the library said no.”

That rule was dropped, with more changes planned. A new program will reward student-parents with financial stipends for doing things such as registering early and researching child care options, said Lisa Dougherty, senior vice president for student affairs and enrollment at HCCC.

A few other colleges and universities have programs designed for student-parents. Misericordia University in Dallas, Pennsylvania provides free housing for up to four years for up to 18 single mothers, who also get academic support and tutoring, priority for on-campus jobs and access to a children’s library and sports facilities.

At Wilson College in Pennsylvania, up to 12 single parents annually are awarded grants for on-campus housing and for child care, and their children can eat in the campus dining hall for free.

St. Catherine University in Minnesota subsidizes child care for eligible student-parents and has child-friendly study rooms.

And Howard Community College in Maryland, whose president was once a student-parent, provides mentorship, peer support, career counseling, financial assistance and a family study room in the library.

“That may not seem like a big deal, but those are the messages that say, ‘You belong here, too,’ ” Lord said.

These efforts have so far helped a small number of students. Forty single mothers have graduated from the Misericordia program since it was launched more than 20 years ago, for instance.

Some of the obstacles for student-parents are hard to measure, said Jessica Pelton, who finished community college after having a daughter at age 20 and ultimately graduated from the University of Michigan, where her husband also was enrolled.

“You’re typically isolated and alone,” said Pelton. “I just kind of stuck to myself.”

She would often miss out on nighttime study groups with classmates who lived on campus. “Their priorities are not to go home, make dinner and put their kid to bed. We don’t have the option to go party. We’re not here on our parents’ money. We’re paying our own way.”

Some faculty offered to let her bring her daughter to class, she said. “It really meant a lot to me, because it made me feel like a part of campus.”

Finding fellow student-parents helps, too, said Omonie Richardson, 22, who is going to college online to become a midwife while raising her 1-year-old son and working as a chiropractic assistant 35 hours a week in Fargo, North Dakota.

“I felt very isolated before I found a group of other single moms,” she said. “If we had the understanding and support in place, a lot more parents would be ready to pursue their educations and not feel like it’s unattainable.”

This story about student-parents was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

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In 2023, Diamond Harriel was looking to make a career switch. She had a 10-month-old daughter and had recently gone back to school for a business administration degree, hoping it could help her earn higher pay than the temporary administrative jobs she had been working. 

One day, through a program that helps single moms, she saw a flier about a new city initiative in Rochester, Minnesota, that aimed to bring women of color into the construction workforce.  

After learning more, Harriel enrolled into a trades readiness training program that taught the ins and outs of construction, from how to read a blueprint, to operating different tools and basic safety. The program exposed her to the possibilities within the construction world: building inspections, project management, apprenticeships in skilled trades like plumbing and electricity.

The city initiative that guided Harriel through the training and helped set up the interview is called the Equity in the Built Environment program. It started in 2023 after Rochester Mayor Kim Norton won a $1 million grant from the Bloomberg Philanthropies Global Mayors Challenge. 

When the 2020 recession hit, one thing had become apparent to Norton: Women of color were bearing the brunt of it. In Rochester, they already held some of the lowest paid jobs, and as the pandemic took hold, those positions disappeared in sectors like the service industry, which disproportionately employs women of color. 

Related: The jobs where sexual harassment and discrimination never stopped

“Probably they struggled the most anyway,” Norton said. “But it was held up and in the sunlight during the pandemic in a way that it was so obvious you couldn’t ignore it.” 

What her office realized is that there wasn’t a shortage of employment opportunities.

Rochester, with a population around 220,000, was halfway into a $585 million, 20-year funding initiative to build new infrastructure downtown. It was also home to the prestigious Mayo Clinic, which had just announced a $5 billion economic growth project.  

All of that growth meant a lot of available construction jobs, which was facing a worker shortage. Could that problem be solved by diversifying the workforce? 

“Our research showed that very few women are in construction and almost no women of color. We said, ‘Well, here’s an opportunity,’” Norton said.  According to the city, women of color make up 13 percent of the city’s population but less than 1 percent work in the construction industry.

Over the past year the city has piloted Equity in the Built Environment to create a solution that could work for everyone — both the construction industry facing an employee shortage and the women they sought to help. If they are successful, they could be a model for other cities as construction projects boom across the country. 

The pilot project consists of tackling the workforce challenge in three ways, said project manager Julie Brock: educating women and girls about the employment possibilities; training and recruitment for women of color; and addressing long-standing issues with discrimination and harassment in the industry. 

First, program participants are set up with a career counselor with a local workforce development nonprofit, and then they enter either a trades readiness track, or an entrepreneurial track that helps women start their own construction businesses. Throughout that time they have access to wraparound services like child care and transportation to remove barriers to attending classes. For those looking for a job, the program works to place them at three different companies that are partners in the work. So far eight women have completed the program. 

Related: Women in construction have been marginalized. This bill would change that

Explaining to women that there could be a job in the field that fits their interests and skills has been a challenge, Brock said. At first, women assumed that the only jobs available would be more around tradework. Now, the pilot program has framed conversations around the built environment, more broadly, with other career opportunities in health and safety inspections, interior design and project management among others.

“The mindset shift is you are not asking people to go on a construction crew to swing hammers,” Brock said. “If somebody wants to do that, that’s great. But there is amazing wealth to be made in the built environment.”

Aaron Benike, vice president of operations at Benike Construction, one of the pilot’s partner companies, said that his company is doing whatever it can to attract a more diverse workforce. It’s what drew him to participating in this pilot. 

With the industry currently going through a wave of retirements of its primarily White male workforce — nationwide 1 in 5 construction workers is 55 or older — he realized they need to be more intentional about outreach. 

Out of over 200 employees, they have few women, and just one woman of color who currently works for the company. 

“It’s just a segment of the population that for one reason or another isn’t part of the team,” Benike said. “For one reason or another they haven’t felt welcome or we haven’t reached out, it’s probably both.”

The construction industry as a whole does have a reputation for discrimination and harassment. A report released by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission last year found that women were often denied jobs or harassed and discriminated against on job sites in the construction industry. 

Benike, who had the opportunity to talk with women interested in construction when the program was being designed, said it opened his eyes to things he’d never really thought about. For the women, he said, “safety meant safety from harassment … and that was a blind spot to me,” he said. “I’ve been on job sites my whole life and never experienced anything like that, but why would I, right?” 

His company is currently undergoing training to obtain an Inclusive Workforce Employer Designation, a series of trainings focused on diversity, equity and inclusion, and a requirement to participate in the pilot. He hopes that job seekers will see that as a sign that his company is a safe space to work. The city’s pilot also has trained mentors at each company to work with women when they are hired to ensure a smooth transition into a new field. 

Benike wants to convince more women to consider getting into the field. “The pay is good. The training is good. It’s safe and the pension is good,” he said. 

In recent weeks the city has also launched public service announcements to bring more women into the pilot; now that it’s been running for over a year, organizers feel ready to scale up. 

For Sara Tekle, a participant who did the entrepreneurial track, the pilot has helped her start a business in craft labor, doing the demoing and cleaning up for construction projects.

Tekle, who is originally from Eritrea, was working in nursing at the Mayo Clinic for years. She had already been doing side jobs with construction after taking on some remodeling at her own house. 

But the program helped her build her website, start the process of getting her contractor license and register her business. She is now in a training that will help her place bids for construction work. She’s also been able to network with companies from the city’s pilot who could potentially contract with her company.

The Rochester City Council has adopted requirements that a certain number of women- and minority-owned businesses be involved in construction on city projects, which could help women like Tekle. 

The program made Tekle feel more comfortable working in construction and supported in making a transition to running a company full-time, which she hopes to do in May when bidding season starts for construction work. 

Tekle, who also works as a women’s advocate, said she’d like to encourage other women she knows to consider working in the built trades — eventually she hopes to be an employer. 

“The construction industry is not engaging or welcoming to women,” she said. “When I start my own company, the biggest vision is to hire a woman.” 

This story was produced by The 19th and reprinted with permission.

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Choosing a college has always been an excruciating, time-consuming process for prospective students and their families. But it seems to be getting even more difficult.

These days, after prospective students have figured out how to pay, how close to home they want to be, which schools offer majors they’re interested in studying, and whether the sports teams are ones they’d be proud to cheer for, there are about a zillion other things to consider. Among them: Will there be other students like them in race, gender and sexuality or political orientation? Are there laws in the state that might affect their life and education? Will there be guest speakers or outspoken professors who are shouted down on campus or banned from speaking altogether? Are they going to feel comfortable and safe walking to the nearest grocery store for instant ramen and Red Bull during finals week?

Amid the flurry of questions, one thing is clear: The culture wars are starting to affect where students choose to go for college.

Until now, when planning for college, students and families have been left to do a zillion Google searches on their own, especially if they want to learn what factors influence the social climate of any given campus. Until now, there hasn’t been an easy, one-stop-shop way to assess where a student might feel welcome.

This week, The Hechinger Report launched the College Welcome Guide, an interactive tool that allows you to search by state or any college in the nation for factors such as the racial diversity of students and faculty, freedom of speech, whether the college has an LGBTQ+ resource center, local regulations on abortion access and whether the state has enacted any legislation that might affect the way certain topics are taught.

The College Welcome Guide can also tell you the percentage of students who get Pell Grants (federal aid for students from low-income families); graduation rates by race; whether a state offers in-state tuition to undocumented students; state-level policies on tuition benefits for student veterans, and other campus data.  

The idea behind putting these various elements together in one place was to make the increasingly long and daunting process of choosing a college a bit easier and less intimidating. We don’t purport to know what college is best for anyone, but we hope that with so much information in one place, people will be able to compare options and make the best choices. 

I was one of the Hechinger journalists who worked on this guide, and I’d like to tell you a little bit about the herculean lift by our higher education team that brought it to life.  

My colleagues Jon Marcus and Fazil Khan got the idea in June, while many of us were at the Education Writers Association’s national conference in Atlanta, Georgia.

When they came back with the proposal, many of us thought it was admirable but might be impossible. If it could be done, why hadn’t someone already done it?

We started by compiling a list of all the questions we’d like the then-hypothetical tool to be able to answer, and split up the data-scavenging duties among our staff. Most of what we set out to collect, we collected. (Not everything, though! More on that in an upcoming newsletter.) And, like everything we publish, it’s all been rigorously fact-checked.

Related: Culture wars on campus start to affect students’ choices for college

Much of the data on student outcomes and diversity comes from the federal Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). For cultural climate and local policy data, we relied on the work of researchers and nonprofits. For example, the Mapping Advancement Project calculates an “equality score” for each state how welcoming or hostile it is to queer and transgender people. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression rates the state of free speech on college campuses with scores from “abysmal” to “exceptional,” based on student surveys. And we got information on state abortion laws from the Center for Reproductive Rights. (You can read more about our methodology here.) 

As the idea started to feel more like a reality, we began to argue over what to call it. We spent what felt like hours on Zoom debating whether it was a tool or an index or a tracker or a guide. It definitely would not be a ranking. We wanted to accurately describe it without being prescriptive or biased. While tedious, the back-and-forth helped us drill down even more specifically toward defining the tool’s purpose. 

We don’t purport to know what college is best for anyone, but we hope that with so much information in one place, people will be able to compare options and make the best choices. 

We had to go back to what was driving this project from the beginning. We wanted to help prospective college students answer the question: Will I feel welcome on that campus? 

The name “The College Welcome Guide” seems so obvious now, but even the word “welcome” was contested. As journalists, we do our best to remain neutral, and we worried that the word “welcome” might turn off prospective students and families who didn’t necessarily want a college that would be welcoming to everyone. 

Ultimately, we decided that every student, regardless of identity or political affiliation, wants to feel welcome on campus. What might make them feel welcome is different, but this tool measures a wide array of issues that might be important to students, regardless of what side of an issue they’re on.

For background, Jon Marcus’s story tells  more about what factors are influencing college applicants today, We hope his story, in combination with our College Welcome Guide, will be helpful to anyone who is thinking about enrolling – or re-enrolling – in college.

This story about choosing colleges was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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In the last few years, the American education system has been bludgeoned by changes that have upended decades of progress toward better academic, economic and social outcomes for all.

Politicians around the country have been aiming to demolish progressive policies by targeting teaching about race and ethnicity, the LGBTQIA+ community and women’s reproductive rights. Calls for book banning and censorship have become common. These dangerous culture wars will wreak havoc on education and education policy for years to come.

As a teacher and school-based leader, I always understood the necessity of advocating for students and helping them navigate life, and I tried to help other teachers change the trajectory of many lives.

I taught my students to respect the power of civic engagement and social activism. Recent politics has made it hard to extend that work. The rollout of Florida’s House Bill 1557, popularly known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, was the start of a radical transformation that threatens to undo decades of social change. Other states, including Indiana, Alabama, Ohio and Tennessee have followed Florida’s lead with legislation that is discriminatory against the LGBTQIA+ community. It must be resisted.

Teaching is inherently activist.

Politicians are also attacking the Black population. When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis challenged the College Board’s AP African American Studies course, he inspired others to follow suit with flagrant concessions to institutional racism. Calls to be “anti-woke” and “anti-indoctrination” have become increasingly popular battle cries. Earlier, the complete misrepresentation and misunderstanding of critical race theory signaled a disregard for the Black community and contempt for the importance of students learning about all people and cultures. Since then, states such as Arkansas and Texas have also opposed the true teaching of the history of Black people in this country by dropping African American history courses and eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. The states’ actions provide a smoke screen for efforts to limit discussion of race and racism and disenfranchise the Black community.

As teachers worry about losing their jobs for violating the often-vague language of these new laws, school boards have succumbed to the demands of the few over the best interests of the majority. Who suffers the most? The students.

Related: Teachers, deputized to fight the culture wars, are often reluctant to serve

There is a critical need to prepare teachers to be intentional voices calling out the oppression that continues to plague our education system. We must do this through teaching, learning and advocacy — as well as social activism and civic engagement.

I have trained in, taught and led educator preparation programs. In past years, these programs met societal and student needs through instruction on culturally responsive teaching, trauma-informed education, conscious leadership and many other progressive approaches. Our goals were not far-fetched or new.

Teacher preparation programs have traditionally served as catalysts for shaping the future of the American education system and the ways in which we collectively work as a society to improve outcomes for all students. Teaching is inherently activist. Colleges, schools of education and alternative teacher preparation programs prepare people to engage in activism through teaching and learning. This is not what some politicians would call “indoctrination”; instead, these efforts embrace the potential for educators to be true change agents and justice warriors.

Related: OPINION: You can’t teach psychology without covering gender and sexuality, and you can’t teach history without covering racism

Today, during this 21st century version of the civil rights struggle, it is more important than ever to remember the lessons of the past and the role of educator preparation in training teachers and other education professionals to confront lies, dismantle oppressive systems and be advocates for students’ causes.

We must be deliberate in the ways in which we prepare teachers to serve the community. So many rights and freedoms are currently under attack in this country. That makes it even more important to fight for justice within the American K-12 educational system and ensure that our students learn the truth. This is dire.

Eugene Pringle Jr. is a senior professorial lecturer at the American University School of Education.

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

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America has pulled back from the brink of denying science in education. About 30,000 students in Florida were set to lose out this fall because Advanced Placement psychology classes were “effectively banned” due to a state prohibition against discussing certain gender and sexuality topics in high schools; fortunately, the state education department reversed course at the last minute in a game of Public Relations Chicken.

The College Board, which administers the AP classes, had planned to remove the course, arguing that obeying the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law would weaken it.

We have to place facts, history and science at the heart of our education systems.

The College Board was right to insist on maintaining its standards, and yet the cost to students could have been extremely high. AP Psychology is a popular course, and rigorous AP classes help prepare students for college and demonstrate their skills for college admissions.

As the leader of an organization for women’s political empowerment, I am keenly aware how this latest spat — on the heels of the Supreme Court’s recent affirmative action decision — could serve to shrink the pool of young women who get to college and thus deal another blow to the political talent pipeline.

The study of psychology is particularly important in this regard because it is a field led by women. I majored in psychology before forging a political career. Excluding tens of thousands of Florida students from this subject and opportunity could have stifled them.

The ins-and-outs of all this warrant explanation. Last year, Florida lawmakers outlawed instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity. The initial ban was on instruction through third grade; that’s the “Don’t Say Gay” law. This spring, they expanded the ban through 12th grade. (I took AP Psychology as a 16-year-old, in 10th grade, and it changed my life.)

The AP Psychology course has a unit that includes definitions of gender, sexuality, gender roles and stereotypes and discusses socialization factors. Dropping such instruction from the course would mean that AP Psychology wouldn’t be “AP,” the College Board said. It stood firm in defense of the unit.

Related: Inside Florida’s ‘underground lab’ for far-right education policies

Florida’s state board of education then accused the College Board of “playing games with Florida students.” But it’s the state board that was asking teachers to ignore a key part of basic psychology.

Eventually, Florida’s education commissioner backed down, writing a letter to school district superintendents saying that the state believed the AP Psychology course could be taught “in its entirety.”

It’s still unclear how that fits with the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. The College Board issued a statement responding to the state’s new guidance with a mixture of optimism and skepticism, noting: “We hope now that Florida teachers will be able to teach the full course, including content on gender and sexual orientation, without fear of punishment in the upcoming school year.”

My own AP Psychology class in Contra Costa County, California, paved the way for my career in which I encourage young women to run for office. I was one of the youngest students in the class, and we learned everything about human behavior.

There should be nothing partisan about teaching young people the truth.

I’m still connected with my AP Psychology teacher, Jacki Della Rosa Carron, and she remains one of my favorite humans. She shaped my entire understanding of how I wanted to live and work.

My high school, like so many public schools today, offered very few AP classes. Jackie’s class was special. She helped me understand how to channel anger and prompted me to ask questions like, “How do you impact the world at a larger scale?” Focusing on psychology and later pursuing my masters in social work helped me kickstart my career, impact my community and teach young women how to do the same through political leadership.

Jackie also covered sexuality in the course. In conservative Contra Costa, I remember conversations about being gay. For many students this was their first opportunity to really think about gender and identity. This was controversial for some, but gay people are a part of American history and life, and California is where Harvey Milk did his activism.

You can’t teach psychology without covering gender and sexuality, and you can’t teach American history without covering racism.

The most infuriating thing about these latest attacks on education is that young women, especially young women of color, along with young queer and gay people, are the ones who are seeing themselves erased and further marginalized.

The timing couldn’t be worse; the mental health crisis amongst teen girls is very real.

The AP Psychology situation has created confusion and frustration for many students, teachers and parents. Some school districts decided to drop the course altogether. Others are still looking for alternative options or waiting for more guidance.

Meantime, we should commend the College Board for standing up for the integrity of the course. We should highlight the importance of psychology and AP classes. And we should continue to advocate for academic freedom and the teaching of facts.

Related: COLUMN: Pop quiz: What state just banned an AP African American studies course?

It is remarkable that to say so in America in 2023 is to risk sounding partisan. There should be nothing partisan about teaching young people the truth.

If a firestorm like this can erupt in Florida, it can catch light across the country. The stakes are too high for it to be ignored. We should learn valuable lessons from the risks exposed.

Sara Guillermo is chief executive of IGNITE, a young women’s political empowerment organization.

This story about AP Psychology and “Don’t Say Gay” was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

The post OPINION: You can’t teach psychology without covering gender and sexuality, and you can’t teach history without covering racism appeared first on The Hechinger Report.