This story is a collaboration between Grist and High Country News and is reprinted with permission.

On a wet spring day in June, fog shrouded the Mission Mountains on the Flathead Indian Reservation in northwest Montana. Silver beads of rain clung to blades of grass and purple lupine. On a ridge overlooking St. Mary’s Lake in the southeastern corner of the reservation, the land was mostly cleared of trees after state-managed logging operations. Some trees remained, mainly firs and pines, spindly things that once grew in close quarters but now looked exposed without their neighbors.

Viewed from the sky, the logged parcel was strikingly square despite the mountainous terrain. It stood in contrast to the adjacent, tribally managed forest, where timber operations followed the topographic contours of watersheds and ridgelines or imitated fire scars from lightning strikes.

“It’s not that they’re mismanaging everything, but their management philosophy and scheme do not align with ours,” said Tony Incashola Jr., the director of tribal resources for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, or CSKT, as he looked out the window of his Jeep at the landscape. “Their tactics sometimes don’t align with ours, which in turn affects our capability of managing our land.”

This nearly clear-cut, 640-acre parcel is state trust land and is a small part of the 108,886 state-owned acres, above- and belowground, scattered across the reservation — this despite the tribal nation’s sovereign status.

The Douglas fir and ponderosa pine trees that remained in the square would thrive on the occasional fire and controlled burn after logging operations, benefiting the next generation of trees. Instead, the area was unburned, and shrubs crowded the ground. “I see this stand right here looking the exact same in 20 years,” said Incashola. It’s his first time being on this land, despite a lifetime on the reservation — because it’s state land, the gate has always been locked.

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State trust lands, on and off Indian reservations, make up millions of acres across the Western United States and generate revenue for public schools, universities, jails, hospitals and other public institutions by leasing them for oil and gas extraction, grazing, rights of way, timber, and more. The state of Montana, for example, manages 5.2 million surface acres and 6.2 million subsurface acres, a term pertaining to oil, gas, minerals, and other underground resources, which distributed $62 million to public institutions in 2023. The majority of that money went to K-12 schools — institutions serving primarily non-Indigenous people.

States received many of these trust lands upon achieving statehood, but more were taken from tribal nations during the late 19th and early 20th centuries through a federal policy of allotment, in which reservations were forcibly cut up into small parcels in an effort to make Indigenous peoples farmers and landowners. The policy allowed for about 90 million acres of reservation lands nationwide to move to non-Indigenous ownership. On the Flathead Reservation, allotment dispossessed the CSKT of a million acres, more than 60,000 of which were taken to fund schools.

But the Flathead Reservation is just one reservation checkerboarded by state trust lands. 

To understand how land and resources taken from Indigenous peoples and nations continue to enrich non-Indigenous citizens, Grist and High Country News used publicly available data to identify which reservations have been impacted by state trust land laws and policies; researched the state institutions benefiting from these lands; and compiled data on many of the companies and individuals leasing the land on those reservations.

Altogether, we located more than 2 million surface and subsurface acres of land on 79 reservations in 15 states that are used to support public institutions and reduce the financial burden on taxpayers. In at least four states, five tribal nations themselves are the lessees — paying the state for access to, collectively, more than 57,700 acres of land within their own reservation borders.    

However, due to instances of outdated and inconsistent data from federal, state, and tribal cartographic sources, our analysis may include lands that do not neatly align with some borders and ownership claims. As a result, our analysis may be off by a few hundred acres. In consultation with tribal and state officials, we have filtered, clipped, expanded, and otherwise standardized multiple data sets with the recognition that in many cases, more accurate land surveying is necessary.

The state trust lands that came from sanctioned land grabs of the early 20th century helped bolster state economies and continue to underwrite non-Indian institutions while infringing on tribal sovereignty. “The justification for them is very old. It goes back to, really, the founding of the U.S.,” said Miriam Jorgensen, research director for the Harvard Project on Indigenous Governance and Development. The goal, she said, was to help settlers and their families gain a firmer foothold in the Western U.S. by funding schools and hospitals for them. “There’s definitely a colonial imperative in the existence of those lands.”

Although tribal citizens are a part of the public those institutions are supposed to serve, their services often fall short. On the Flathead Reservation, for example, Indigenous youth attend public schools funded in part by state trust lands inside the nation’s boundaries. However, the state is currently being sued by the CSKT, as well as five other tribes, over the state’s failure over decades to adequately teach Indigenous curriculum despite a state mandate to do so.  Arlee High School is a public school on the Flathead Reservation. Six tribes, including CKST, have sued the state of Montana for failing to implement its Indian Education for All curriculum in public schools over the past few decades, despite a mandate to do so.

Related: Climate change is sabotaging education for America’s students – and it’s only going to get worse

Since 2022, the CSKT and the state of Montana have been negotiating a land exchange in which the tribe will see some 29,200 acres of state trust lands on the reservation returned, which could include the logged, 640-acre parcel near St. Mary’s Lake. In the trade, Montana will receive federal lands from the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture, or potentially both, elsewhere in the state. Such a return has been “the want of our ancestors and the want of our tribal leaders since they were taken,” Incashola said. “It’s not a want for ownership, it’s a want for protection of resources, for making us whole again to manage our forests again the way we want to manage them.”

Tribal nations and states have struggled with state and federal governments over jurisdiction and land since the inception of the United States, says Alex Pearl, who is Chickasaw and a professor of law at the University of Oklahoma. But the potential return of state trust lands represents an opportunity for LandBack on a broad scale: an actionable step toward reckoning with the ongoing dispossession of territories meant to be reserved for tribes. “The LandBack movement that started as protests has become a viable policy, legally,” Pearl said. 

The Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation is one of the largest reservations in the U.S., stretching 4.5 million acres across the northeastern corner of Utah. But on closer look, the reservation is checkerboarded, thanks to allotment, with multiple land claims on the reservation by individuals, corporations, and the state of Utah. Altogether, the Ute Tribe oversees about a quarter of its reservation.

The state of Utah owns more than 511,000 surface and subsurface acres of trust lands within the reservation’s borders. And of those acres, the Ute Tribe is leasing 47,000 — nearly 20 percent of all surface trust land acreage on the reservation — for grazing purposes, paying the state to use land well within its own territorial boundaries. According to Utah’s Trust Lands Administration, the agency responsible for managing state trust lands, a grazing permit for a 640-acre plot runs around $300. In the last year alone, the Utes have paid the state more than $25,000 to graze on trust lands on the reservation.

Of all the Indigenous nations in the U.S. that pay states to utilize their own lands, the Ute Tribe leases back the highest number of acres. And while not all states have publicly accessible lessee information with land-use records, of the ones that did, Grist and High Country News found that at least four other tribes also lease nearly 11,000 acres, combined, on their own reservations: the Southern Ute Tribe, Navajo Nation, Pueblo of Laguna, and Zuni Tribe. According to state records, almost all of these tribally leased lands — 99.5 percent — are used for agriculture and grazing. 

The Pueblo of Laguna, Zuni, part of the Navajo Reservation, and Ramah Navajo, a chapter of Navajo Nation, are located in the state of New Mexico, which owns nearly 143,000 surface and subsurface acres of state trust lands across a total of 13 reservations. The Navajo Nation leases all 218 acres of New Mexico state trust lands on its reservation, while the Ramah Navajo leases 17 percent of the 24,600 surface state trust land acres within its reservation’s borders. The Pueblo of Laguna leases more than half of the 11,200 surface trust land acres in its territory, while the Zuni Tribe leases 37 of the 60 surface trust land acres located on its reservation. The nations did not comment by press time.

Cris Stainbrook, president of the Indian Land Tenure Foundation, said that for tribes, the cost of leasing state trust lands on their reservations for grazing and agriculture is likely lower than what it would cost to fight for ownership of those lands. But, he added, those lands never should have been taken from tribal ownership in the first place.

“Is it wrong? Is it fundamentally wrong to have to lease what should be your own land? Yes,” said Stainbrook. “But the reality of the situation is, the chances of having the federal or state governments return it is low.”

In theory, tribal nations share access to public resources funded by state trust lands, but that isn’t always the case. For example, Native students tend to fare worse in U.S. public schools, and some don’t attend state-run schools at all. Instead, they enroll in Bureau of Indian Education schools, a system of nearly 200 institutions on 64 reservations that receive funding from the federal government, not state trust lands. 

Beneficiaries, including public schools, get revenue generated from a variety of activities, including leases for roads and infrastructure, solar panel installations, and commercial projects. Fossil fuel infrastructure or activity is present on roughly a sixth of on-reservation trust lands nationwide.

While state agencies can exchange trust lands on reservations for federal lands off-reservation, the process is complicated by the state’s legal obligation to produce as much money as possible from trust lands for its beneficiaries. Still, some states are attempting to create statewide systematic processes for returning trust lands. 

At the forefront are Washington, which is currently implementing legislation to return lands, and North Dakota, which is moving new legislation through Congress for the same purpose. But because of the lands’ value and the states’ financial obligations, it’s difficult to transfer complete jurisdiction back to Indigenous nations. Trust lands must be swapped for land of equal or greater value, which tends to mean that a transfer is only possible if the land in question doesn’t produce much revenue.

Related: How colleges can become ‘living labs’ for fighting climate change

That’s the case with Washington’s Trust Land Transfer program, which facilitates exchanges of land that the state’s Department of Natural Resources, or DNR, deems unproductive. Those lands are designated as “unproductive” because they might not generate enough revenue to cover maintenance costs, have limited or unsustainable resource extraction, or have resources that are physically inaccessible. A 540-acre plot of land that was transferred to the state Department of Fish and Wildlife in a 2022 pilot program was considered financially unproductive because “the parcel is too sparsely forested for timber harvest, its soils and topography are not suitable for agriculture, it offers low potential for grazing revenue, it is too small for industrial-scale solar power generation, and it is located too close to the 20,000-acre Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge for wind power generation.”

Currently, Washington’s state constitution does not allow for the exchange of subsurface acreage; the DNR retains mineral rights to state trust lands even after exchange. Transfers are funded by the state, with the Legislature paying the DNR the value of the land to be exchanged so the agency can then purchase new land. The value of all the lands that can be exchanged is capped at $30 million every two years.

Even that money isn’t guaranteed: The legislature isn’t obligated to approve the funding for transfers. Additionally, the program is not focused solely on exchanges with Indigenous nations; any public entity can apply for a land transfer. Through the pilot program in 2022, the state Department of Fish and Wildlife, Department of Natural Resources, and Kitsap County received a total of 4,425 acres of federal land valued at more than $17 million in exchange for unproductive trust lands. All three entities proposed using the land to establish fish and wildlife habitat, natural areas, and open space and recreation. None of the proposed projects in the pilot program had tribes listed as receiving agencies for land transfer. However, six of the eight proposals up for funding between 2025 and 2027 would be transferred to tribal nations.

In North Dakota, the Trust Lands Completion Act would allow the state to exchange surface state trust lands on reservations for more accessible federal land or mineral rights elsewhere. The legislation made it through committee in the U.S. Senate last year and, this fall, state officials hope to couple it with bigger land-use bills to pass through the Senate and then the House.

But one of the legislation’s main caveats is that it, like Washington, excludes subsurface acres: North Dakota’s constitution also prohibits ceding mineral rights. North Dakota currently owns 31,000 surface and 200,000 subsurface acres of trust lands on reservations. State Commissioner of University and School Lands Joe Heringer said that returning state trust lands with mineral development would be complicated because of existing development projects and financial agreements.

Right now, the only mineral development happening on reservation-bound state trust lands is on the Fort Berthold Reservation in the state’s northwestern corner, with the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, also known as the Three Affiliated Tribes. 

Initial oil and gas leases are about five years, but they can stay in place for decades if they start producing within that time. “There’s already all sorts of leases and contracts in place that could get really, really messy,” Heringer said.

By design, subsurface rights are superior to surface rights. If land ownership is split — if a tribe, for instance, owns the surface rights while an oil company owns the subsurface rights — the subsurface owner can access its resources, even though the process might be complicated, regardless of what the surface owner wants.

“It’s not worthless, but it’s close to it,” Stainbrook said of returning surface rights without subsurface rights. 

Still, Stainbrook acknowledges that programs to return state trust lands are meaningful because they consolidate surface ownership and jurisdiction and allow tribes to decide surface land use. Plus, he said, there’s a lot of land without subsurface resources to extract, meaning it would be left intact. But split ownership, with tribes owning surface rights and non-tribal entities holding subsurface rights, prevents tribes from fully making their own choices about resource use and management on their lands. And states are not required to consult with tribes on how these lands are used.

“In the sense of tribal sovereignty, it has not increased tribal sovereignty,” Stainbrook said. “In fact, I mean, it’s pretty much the status quo.”

Of the 79 reservations that have state trust lands within their boundaries, tribal governments of 49 of them have received federal Tribal Climate Resilience awards since 2011. These awards are designed to fund and assist tribes in creating adaptation plans and conducting vulnerability and risk assessments as climate change increasingly threatens their homes. But with the existence of state trust lands inside reservation boundaries, coupled with state-driven resource extraction, many tribal governments face hard limits when trying to enact climate mitigation policies — regardless of how much money the federal government puts toward the problem.

Related: COLUMN: The world is waking up to education’s essential role in climate solutions

In 2023, a wildfire swept the Flathead Reservation, just west of Flathead Lake. Afterwards, the CSKT and the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, which manages the state’s trust lands, discussed salvage timber operations — in which marketable logs are taken from wildfire-burned forests — on two affected state trust land parcels, both inside the reservation. The tribe approved a road permit for the state to access and salvage logs on one parcel, but not the other, since it wasn’t as impacted by the fire. Later, the tribe found out that the state had gone ahead with salvage operations on the second parcel, bypassing the need for a tribal road permit by accessing it through an adjacent private property.

That lack of communication and difference in management strategies is evident on other state trust lands on the reservation: One logged state parcel is adjacent to a sensitive elk calving ground, while another parcel, logged in 2020, sits atop a ridgeline and impacts multiple streams with bull trout and westslope cutthroat trout. The uniformity and scale of the state logging — and the prioritization of profit and yield — do not align with the tribes’ forestry plans, which are tied to cultural values and use of land, Incashola said. “Sometimes the placement of (trust lands) affects cultural practices, or precludes cultural practices from happening on those tracts,” he said. “We can’t do anything about it, because they have the right to manage their land.” 

Montana’s Department of Natural Resources and Conservation did not make anyone available to interview for this story, but answered some questions by email and said in a statement that the department “has worked with our Tribal Nations to ensure these lands are stewarded to provide the trust land beneficiaries the full market value for use as required by the State of Montana’s Constitution and the enabling legislation from Congress that created these trust lands.”

Since the 1930s, the CSKT has prioritized reclaiming land, buying private and state trust lands back at market value. Today, the tribe owns more than 60 percent of its reservation.  

While logging used to be the tribe’s main income source, it has diversified its income streams since the 1990s. Now, the tribe’s long-term goal is for its forests to return to pre-settler conditions and to build climate resiliency by actively managing them with fire. The state’s Montana Climate Solutions Plan from 2020 acknowledged the CSKT as a leader on climate and recommended that the state support tribal nations in climate resilience adaptation. However, that suggestion remains at odds with the state’s management of, and profit from, reservation lands. The 640-acre parcel near the Mission Mountains that Incashola had never been able to visit because of the locked gate, for example, abuts tribal wilderness and is considered a sensitive area. Since 2015, the state has made $775,387.82 from logging that area.

The legislation that included the Montana-CSKT land exchange passed in 2020, but progress has been slow. The exchange doesn’t include all the state trust land on the reservation, which means the selection process of those acres is ongoing. The lands within the tribally protected areas, as well as those near the Mission Mountain Wilderness, are of high priority for the CSKT. There are some state lands that are ineligible, such as those that do not border tribal land. But the state has also interpreted the legislation to exclude subsurface acres that could be used for mining or other extractive activities. The tribe is steadfast that subsurface acres are included in the legislation. The impasse has complicated negotiations.

“It’s out-and-out land theft,” said Minnesota State Senator Mary Kunesh of state trust lands on reservations. Kunesh, a descendant of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, has authored two bills that returned state land to tribes, each with a decade or more of advocacy behind it.

On the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe’s reservation in Minnesota, for example, the tribe owns only about 5 percent of the reservation, although federal legislation recently returned more than 11,000 acres of illegally taken national forest. Meanwhile, the state owns about 17 percent. That ownership has an impact. Tribes in Minnesota do not receive revenue from state trust lands on their reservations, nor do tribal schools, Kunesh says. “Hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars that could have perhaps been used to educate, to create housing, to create economic opportunity have been lost to the tribes,” Kunesh said. Still, “it’s not that the tribes want money. They want the land.”

Land return is contentious, but Kunesh has seen support for it from people of all backgrounds while working to pass legislation. “We do need our non-Native communities to stand up and speak the truth as they see it when it comes to returning the lands, and any kind of compensation, back to the tribes.”

But those land returns will also require political support from senators and representatives at both the state and federal level. “Ultimately, it is up to Congress to work with States and other affected interests to find solutions to these land management issues,” the National Association of State Trust Lands’ executive committee said in an email.

In some states, legislators have indicated strong resistance. Utah lawmakers passed a law this year that allows the state’s Trust Land Administration to avoid advertising state land sales. The law gives Utah’s Department of Natural Resources the ability to buy trust land at fair market value, ultimately avoiding possible bidding wars with other entities, like tribes. The legislation came after the Ute Indian Tribe outbid the Department of Natural Resources when trying to buy back almost 30,000 acres of state trust land on their reservation.

“It’s going to have to take the general public to get up in arms over it and say, ‘This is just morally wrong,’” said Stainbrook of the Indian Land Tenure Foundation. “We haven’t gotten to that point where enough people are standing up and saying that.”

Near the southeast edge of the Flathead Reservation is a place called Jocko Prairie — though it hasn’t looked like a prairie for some time — with stands of large ponderosa pines and other trees crowding in, a result of federal fire-suppression practices on tribal lands. The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes have worked to restore the prairie by keeping out cattle, removing smaller trees, and reintroducing fire. Land that was once crowded with thickets of brush is now opening up, and as more sunlight reaches the ground, grasses and flowers have come back. 

This year in early June, a sea of blue-purple camas spread out on the ground under the trees, reactivated by fire after decades of lying dormant. It was a return.

This story is a collaboration between Grist and High Country News and is reprinted with permission.

This story was reported and written by Anna V. Smith and Maria Parazo Rose. Data reporting was done by Maria Parazo Rose, Clayton Aldern, and Parker Ziegler. Aldern and Ziegler also produced data visuals and interactives.

Original photography for this project was done by Tailyr Irvine. Roberto (Bear) Guerra and Teresa Chin supervised art direction. Luna Anna Archey designed the magazine layout for High Country News. Rachel Glickhouse coordinated partnerships.

This project was edited by Tristan Ahtone and Kate Schimel. Additional editing by Jennifer Sahn and Katherine Lanpher. Kate Schimel and Jaime Buerger managed production. Meredith Clark did fact-checking, and Annie Fu fact-checked the project’s data. Copy editing by Diane Sylvain.

The post Trust issues: How schools profit from land and resources on tribal nations appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

This week, I wanted to highlight our continuing early ed math coverage by talking to Joe Hong, who wrote a story about a Milwaukee school district trying to revive methods it used for math instruction a decade ago. Our conversation below has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

A small group of teachers in Milwaukee are trying to return to math strategies the district used from 2004-2014. Teachers in the district call this “the golden years of math instruction.” Could you explain what made math during those years different?

It came down to a two-pronged accountability structure. First, there was a hierarchy of university professors, district administrators, teacher leaders and classroom teachers that bridged the needs of educators in the field and the latest research surrounding math pedagogy. Second, it was the university professors who oversaw the funding — a substantial amount of $20 million — and made sure it was spent just on improving math instruction and not redirected toward competing priorities in the school district.

Part of the glue that seemed to hold this instruction model together was the school district’s partnership with the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. When that partnership ended a decade ago, the district went back to using its own in-house math curriculum. My understanding is that partnership is still gone. How are educators in the district trying to keep the “golden years of math instruction” alive?

DeAnn Huinker, the University of Wisconsin professor who oversaw the partnership, is still running teacher trainings. Some of the teachers who were in the classroom in the early 2000s are now holding leadership positions in the district. Having these folks around makes it easier to continue the work, although at a smaller scale.

There’s a moment in your story where a first grade teacher is surprised she’s enjoying math. Do you get the sense proponents of this instruction model see the Milwaukee teachers benefiting as much as the students?

Yes, in fact I think so many teachers struggle with teaching math because they themselves aren’t comfortable with it. Milwaukee’s approach has always been centered around making sure teachers know the math. More than one person involved in Milwaukee’s math instruction told me, “When teachers are learning, students are learning.”

Was there any pushback to teaching math in this way?

There was some resistance. Part of it isn’t unique to math. Principals and teachers are wary of change because it can often mean more work for them, which often means allocating funds and time that they don’t have. And then there are also the ongoing debates in math education. Milwaukee’s approach really emphasizes the concepts behind math over the procedures, and while I don’t know whether the more procedurally-minded educators pushed back against the Milwaukee Mathematics Partnerships in the early 2000s, I’ve already gotten emails since the story published from educators criticizing the conceptual approach.

You touch on a trend in this story that I’ve noticed in my own reporting — early childhood teachers gravitating to younger grades to avoid having to teach difficult math. Do you get the sense the training intentionally targets the district’s early elementary educators to re-teach them how to think about math?

Milwaukee Public Schools has definitely focused on early childhood educators in recent years. Many of these teachers admit that they got into elementary teaching because they weren’t “math people.” But they’re starting to rethink their identities with these trainings and learning how to leverage their own expertises in child development and classroom management to engage with the youngest learners.

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

The post Reviving a successful math strategy for the early grades appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Following intense, sometimes violent protests on campuses, colleges and universities are taking steps to encourage better and more civil dialogue and debate among students who disagree.

Some schools are offering new guidance and coursework around how students should speak to one another in an effort to bridge deep differences. At the same time, they’re tightening restrictions on campus protests related to the war in Gaza, and cracking down on protest tactics with heightened enforcement.

We explore the new approaches and talk with experts about the efforts to help students speak across their differences. 

Scroll to the end of this transcript to find out more about these topics.

Listen to the whole series

TRANSCRIPT

(Sound of campus protest)

Kirk: After a year of intense and sometimes violent protest on college campuses … this fall’s orientation sounds different.

Orientation video: Colleges and universities tend to bring together people of different backgrounds, faiths and opinions. …

Kirk: Listen to this freshman orientation video some schools are using now, Jon.

Orientation video: Though it may not seem like it at first, making an effort to talk and listen to those who you disagree with can have a lasting impact on your campus culture.

Kirk: The video is produced by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which describes itself as a nonpartisan group that defends student and faculty free speech. It’s called “Talking Across Differences.”

Orientation video: We limit ourselves when we only engage with similar worldviews. In this setting, we become less curious, more hostile to perceived differences and less reflective.

Jon: This is where we are, Kirk. The political and social climate on some campuses has gotten so bad that colleges have to teach their students how to have a conversation.

Kirk: From the University of California to the University of Wisconsin, Rutgers to Harvard, colleges are amplifying or tightening their free speech and protest policies. The stated goal is to manage campus demonstrations, especially in light of the recent unrest over the Israel-Hamas conflict.

So some administrators and nonprofits say they’re stepping in to help improve civil discourse.

We’re going to dive into what’s really going on and then explain what it means for you.

Music:

Kirk: This is College Uncovered from GBH News and The Hechinger Report, a podcast pulling back the ivy to reveal how colleges really work, and why it matters.

I’m Kirk Carapezza from GBH News. …

Jon: … and I’m Jon Marcus with The Hechinger Report.

Today on the show: “The politics of protests.”

The divide on college campuses surrounding the war in Gaza runs deep. It’s changing the college experience for many students, starting with new guidance on student protests and how those rules are communicated and enforced.

Kirk: Yeah. Both the University of California and Cal State systems are cracking down on encampments and unauthorized structures on their campuses. Cal State’s new public assembly policy prohibits things like barriers, tents and even masks that conceal protesters’ identities. The University of California has issued similar directives urging campus leaders to reinforce existing bans on encampments and mass demonstrators.

Jon: These changes come after a rocky spring semester, when protests tied to the Israel-Hamas conflict swept across campuses.

Sound of campus protest:

Jon: And, Kirk, there could be financial consequences. California lawmakers say they’ll hold back $25 million in state funding for the University of California until it sets up a policy for free speech and protest.

Kirk: Rutgers and Columbia have unveiled their own new policies limiting access to campus to those with school IDs.

Jon: And over at Penn, administrators are limiting microphones, speakers and megaphones and banning chalk pictures or slogans on the walls and sidewalks.

Kirk: These schools say they’re aiming to balance the right to protest with the rights of other students looking to get an education or use a public space. But the new rules raise even more questions.

How will these policies be enforced, especially the bans on masks and encampments? And what does all this mean for student activism, which has long been a part of campus life? If you’re a student or a parent, it can be confusing. So we called up an expert to learn more and to provide some historical perspective.

Robert Cohen: My name is Robert Cohen. I’m a historian. I teach history and social studies at New York University.

Kirk: Cohen says student activism has always been controversial and unpopular with the public.

Robert Cohen: And that means that universities are under pressure to suppress student activism. You’d be surprised with the number of movements that have happened and also the fact that the public disapproved of them — when it was the sit-in movement against racial discrimination in lunch counters. The Freedom Rides, the free-speech movement, the antiwar movement of the ‘60s were all underwater. Politically, they were unpopular.

News commentator: They said they were there to protest the war, poverty, racism and other social ills. Some of them were also determined to provoke a confrontation.

Robert Cohen: And so there was pressure for various reasons to suppress them, as was true last semester.

Kirk: Yeah. In the spring, more than 3,100 students were arrested between mid April and mid June, and that’s higher than most of the 1960s. So it’s tempting, I think, to compare these nationwide campus protests to the anti-Vietnam War movement. But today’s protests have not been nearly as widespread or as violent.

Robert Cohen: That’s one of the reasons why I was so upset about all the arrest, because there’s so little provocation for it. In fact, that’s why the majority of the charges were dropped, because they didn’t really, you know, it wasn’t brazen lawlessness and certainly almost no violence. The largest student protests in American history were in May of 1970, following the Cambodian invasion and the tragic shootings of student protesters at Kent State and Jackson State. The number of students involved in protests there was almost half the student population in the United States — in the millions

Jon: Last semester, the total was in the thousands, not the millions. A new survey finds that two thirds of students say the protests didn’t have any effect at all on their educations. Yet many colleges spent the summer preparing and bracing for more protests. And they’re trying to keep what happened in the spring from escalating.

Kirk: One idea picking up steam is to promote civic dialog in and out of the classroom. Emerson College in Boston, where more than 100 activists were arrested, has launched Emerson together. The new initiative, administrators say, is aimed at creating unity on campus.

Jon: Hamilton College in New York started a program called “Civil Discourse in Local Politics “as part of its freshman orientation, connecting students with local politicians.

Kirk: In New Hampshire. Dartmouth has started “The Dialog Project” to prepare incoming students for tough conversations. And Ohio Wesleyan University is one of the first colleges to provide civil discourse training for all students, faculty and staff.

Is this really what it’s come to? Civil discourse training?

Raj Vannakota: You can’t make assumptions about where students and faculty and administrators are.

Kirk: That’s Raj Vannakota. He leads a program called College Presidents for Civic Preparedness to help those students, faculty and administrators.

Raj Vannakota: Some of them are well on their way, right? They understand this. They do this. They’ve had tons of experience. Others haven’t. And so you have to start with the basic building blocks.

Kirk: Especially for a generation of students that lived through the isolation of Covid-19 and has never seen a national government that wasn’t deeply divided.

Vannakota says these initiatives share a simple goal to promote healthy debate.

Raj Vannakota: We need to take an affirmative posture to ensure that there is free inquiry and debate on our campuses. And I want to make clear here, we’re using the term free inquiry rather than free expression. And the reason that we’re doing that is that free expression is, you know, saying whatever the heck you want. The First Amendment has rules around that. But students really need to experience university life not as this disorienting free for all, but a forum for structured dialog and debate and learning. And that is what needs to be at the center of this. So there’s still work to be done to get there.

Kirk: Jonathan Rauch, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, agrees that students need to learn how to be uncomfortable with some of what they hear. Rauch is author of the book ‘The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.’ And he says what’s needed on campus today is a genuine culture of free speech.

Jonathan Rauch: Students should understand from Day One, it should be written on the catalog, that this is a place where you will encounter ideas that will strike you as potentially offensive, potentially harmful. We call that education.

Kirk: Then, Rauch says, students should be encouraged to take up any disagreements with each other or their professors, and not complain to administrators.

Jonathan Rauch: And indeed, they should be taking positions that they themselves don’t disagree with. That’s very good training for life. And it’s also very good training for toleration.

Kirk: But, Jon, professors on campus tell me incorporating debate into the curriculum is much easier said than done because it’s increasingly tough to bring students together for a civil conversation. And as a result, some students are reporting that they feel less safe.

Take Talia Khan, for example. She told me she always felt safe studying engineering as an undergrad at MIT and performing in the university’s jazz band.

Music:

Kirk: Here she is singing the song “Lonely Moments.”

Khan is the daughter of an American Jewish mother and Afghan Muslim father. She told me that after Oct. 7, she feared for her safety.

Talia Khan: We had students immediately saying, you know, all of this violence is Israel’s fault.

Kirk: She disagreed and says she lost friendships and that her mental health suffered. As the campus climate grew more and more polarized.

Talia Khan: I personally had best friends who I had spent a lot of time studying with, and they told me that the people who were killed in the Nova massacre deserved to be killed because they were partying on stolen land. It took me so long to process that anybody could say that. There’s no excuse for, you know, killing, raping, kidnapping innocent people.

Jon: Since the war in Gaza broke out, students like Kahn have found their campuses deeply divided. Many pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli activists have just stopped talking to each other. Some have even transferred. With both anti-semitism and Islamophobia on the rise. Researchers at the University of Chicago found that more than half of Jewish and Muslim students feel unsafe on campus because of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Robert Pape: Campus fears are more intense and more widespread than we’ve previously known.

Kirk: Robert Pape studies political violence and is the author of the Chicago report.

Robert Pape: Oct. 7 caught us all by surprise, but especially caught college campuses and universities by surprise.

Kirk: Did your survey find that these students have reason to be afraid?

Robert Pape: Yes. They’re hearing protest chants they interpret as a call to genocide. And that’s scaring not just the target group that they hear, but it’s scaring everybody. They’re observing acts of violence and intimidation on campus.

Kirk: Part of the problem, Pape says, is that students sharply disagree even about the meanings of the words they use during protests.

Robert Pape: You have one group of students who are chanting ‘from the river to the sea’ that don’t think it is implying genocide of the Jews. But you’ve got four million college students hearing that phrase thinking that means genocide of the Jews.

Kirk: For many Muslim students like Harvard junior Jana Amin, the harm they experience is very real. That’s because a pro-Israeli group started publicly identifying Harvard students involved in pro-Palestinian causes. The group put a picture of Amin’s face on a truck that drove around just outside of campus and labeled her among Harvard’s leading anti-semites.

Jana Amin: I was devastated and really scared for my own personal safety on campus. Right? Like walking around, might someone recognize me from the truck and then choose to kind of take it a step further and turn to violence?

Kirk: Before Oct. 7, Amin says she felt comfortable on campus. But the doxing truck changed that.

Jana Amin: Just seeing the truck allowed to stay there with my face, that name on it forever altered how I was going to think about my time at Harvard.

Jon: Jewish students who support Israel are also losing trust in their colleges and civil discourse.

Becca Packer: A lot of people are not willing to have a conversation. It’s, you know, their way or the highway.

Jon: As a senior at Berklee College of Music, Becca Packer was a member of the college’s newly organized Hillel, a Jewish campus group. Sitting in the back of a campus café, she says after Oct. 7, she found what she considered anti-semitic posts all over social media.

Becca Packer: One of my first things that I knew I had to do following Oct. 7 was get on Instagram and try and be that opposing voice — that, you know, opposing perspective that people aren’t going to see. Because I knew exactly what was going to happen.

Kirk: The heated environment Packer describes on and offline has real, concrete consequences for the already battered reputation of American colleges.

Jon: Yeah, the protests on campuses in the spring have only deepened the erosion of public trust in colleges and universities. A survey by the research firm SimpsonScarborough finds trust in higher education has taken a big hit, especially among Republican parents.

Kirk: Nearly half of them said the protests made them trust colleges even less.

Jon: Now, Democrats and independents were less opinionated about the demonstrations. But still, 22 percent of Democratic parents and 30 percent of independents said their trust in higher education has declined. This is coming on the heels of public trust in colleges already hitting all-time lows. Confidence in colleges has dropped from around 60 percent to just 40 percent last year.

Kirk: Among the top reasons: concerns about political agendas and professors and administrators pushing what critics call woke culture. No matter your political views, this is a crisis for American higher education, and its leaders are definitely paying attention.

Lynn Pasquerella: We’re at a crucible moment in American higher education, and we must listen to the critics who are concerned. If we don’t, then we will be complicit in our own demise.

Kirk: That’s Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities.

If college leaders just kind of scoff at this, the institutions don’t just fail, right? I mean, there’s more at stake than just the colleges themselves.

Lynn Pasquerella: Democracy fails. Students who receive an American education, a liberal education, are much more likely to resist authoritarian tendencies because they are confident in their viewpoints, even when those viewpoints are challenged. They don’t feel threatened by that. We must return to basics, articulate the value of education not only for individuals but for our society.

Jon: That’s why campus leaders are trying to take action, rolling out these new policies and programs and orientation videos. They’re gearing up for more protests, not just about Gaza, but also with tensions rising around the upcoming presidential election.

Kirk: All of this is happening at a time when culture wars are escalating and the country is polarized and partizan.

Jon: This year, colleges are trying to get ahead of this. To start, Pasquerella says, they’re updating their campus speech and protest policies, focusing on when, where and how protests can happen and making sure those rules are consistently enforced.

Lynn Pasquerella: Campus leaders, I think, have learned that they must be transparent and communicate policies widely and frequently. They have to create and sustain a culture in which there’s respect for diversity points.

Music:

Kirk: So now we’re going to explore how and how quickly the politics of campus protests and even classroom discussions have changed — and what that means for you.

I recently sat down with John Tomasi. He’s the president of Heterodox Academy, a nonpartisan advocacy group of academics working to counteract what it sees as a lack of viewpoint diversity on college campuses, especially when it comes to political diversity.

Heterodox doesn’t fully disclose its funding sources, but Tomasi says its members come from across the political spectrum, and his board has directed him not to seek funding from groups that are active in politics.

Tomasi is a former professor at Brown University, where he taught political philosophy and where he met Jonathan Haidt, the founder of Heterodox, or, as they call it, HSA.

How do you explain Heterodox Academy? What is it?

John Tomasi: It started off in the very nerdy kind of techie kind of way. Lots of scientists tended to all have the same political orientation. And famously, in front of a large auditorium of 400 social scientists, John Haidt said, ‘How many of you are Republicans?’ No one raised their hands. ‘How many of you are libertarians?’ One or two kind of hesitantly did. ‘How many of you are Democrats?’ They all raised their hands. Maybe that’s a problem. Maybe we are in a bubble, group thinking. Maybe we’re not achieving that ideal of thinking for ourselves. And so that’s a reason why the social science might not be as robust as it might be. So it began as this techie little group of academics thinking about problems and research, but then it caught a wave of public interest.

I’ll give you one example that really crystallized it for me. There was a speaker invited to Brown. His name is Ray Kelly, former police commissioner of New York City. And Ray Kelly was giving his talk and some students didn’t want him to come. They were worried about stop-and-frisk, which was a policy that he was very well known for, a policy that had very strong racial overtones. And so the students said, please don’t invite Ray Kelly to come to campus. But they invited him anyway. He came to campus and the student shouted him down. That kind of thing had happened before. But what was different now — this was now 2015 — was that the students who shouted him down took responsibility for shouting him down. They gave interviews to the student paper the next day. They said we’d shout him down again. They weren’t afraid of what they had done. They weren’t worried about punishments for what they had done. They had a kind of almost a brazenness, sort of moral commitment, to believing that shouting someone down might be the right thing to do. And so there’s always been these currents on campus that controversial speakers should be protested. You should argue against them. You should do various things to make it difficult for them — banging pots and pans on the way on the way to the lecture hall. But the idea that shouting someone down might be the right thing to do — that was kind of a new creature on the the campus. And that same creature, that same set of ideas started enacting themselves all across the country in different ways.

Kirk: Around the same time, Tomasi recalls, Yale administrators sent an email to students essentially saying, ‘Please be mindful about cultural appropriation when you plan your Halloween costumes and parties.’ Another administrator sent a follow up message saying, ‘Sure, be careful, but it’s Halloween. Don’t be too worried about the details. Don’t walk on eggshells.’

John Tomasi: And students responded really strongly against that claim that they should be able to be transgressive sometimes and not take it too seriously.

Sound of campus protest:

John Tomasi: Something had changed in the temperature on campuses. Something had changed in the way students were thinking of things.

Kirk: Tomasi says political and social divisions have deepened to the point that they’re threatening academic freedom and changing the college experience, with many students afraid to speak up, adopting a new philosophy of silence is safer. A national survey from Heterodox shows that student self-censorship has been rising steadily. It’s up to around 70 percent now. That means 7 in 10 students report that they actively self-censor.

John Tomasi: The students consistently say that the reason they self-censor is not because they’re afraid of their professors grading them down or doing bad things with which they disagree. They self-censor because they’re afraid of social media and they’re afraid of what their fellow students are going to make them famous for an idea that they floated in class and therefore their social lives and personal lives will be ruined forever, perhaps.

Kirk: I heard one speaker say, you know, we’ve got this generation now who went through puberty on social media. They went through the pandemic on Zoom, and now they’re landing on these college campuses and they haven’t ever made eye contact with someone with whom they might disagree. Would you agree with that?

John Tomasi: I think there’s something to that. But I also think it’s really important to recognize that the problems we’re seeing in this generation of students isn’t solely a problem with this generation of students. In fact, the problems we’re seeing, the patterns of behavior that we’re watching on campus now in really vivid form, are very fixed patterns of human behavior. So people get their social cues, they get their ideas, they act the way they act because of the way the people around them are acting, and to a much greater degree than we like to admit.

Jon: We should point out here that organizations like Heterodox Academy and FIRE, which produced that orientation video we heard, are controversial. Critics say these groups don’t speak for them, that they tend to support and defend conservative, provocative speakers on campus.

But Tomasi says his group is growing. More than 50 colleges have established Heterodox communities led by faculty members, including at Harvard and MIT, Berkeley community colleges and large state universities.

Music:

Jon: Heterodox Academy and fire are coming at this from the outside. At the University of Wisconsin, faculty have launched their own new program called The Discussion Project. It’s a training model that’s now catching on at other colleges across the country.

Katherine Cramer: Students are afraid of each other.

Jon: Katherine Cramer teaches political science at Wisconsin.

Katherine Cramer, in class: So welcome, everybody. It’s so great to see so many faces I recognize from years past.

Jon: And since the pandemic, she’s been participating in the program.

Katherine Cramer: They’re afraid to talk about politics, but it’s bigger than that, right? They’re afraid of saying something that will be posted online and go viral and make them feel bad about themselves. They’re afraid of being publicly shamed.

Kirk: Like John Tomasi, Cramer says, the idea that silence is safer is now widespread. Even in her classroom, with the door closed.

How quickly has the college experience changed in this way?

Katherine Cramer: Fast, I think. I mean, the cohort of people that we’re seeing of traditional college age come through colleges now have this scar from the pandemic of not having the experience of like developing the social skills through in-person interaction in that age that they were in, I guess it would have been middle school now, right, for some of the college students. And that, layered on top of this very toxic political environment, I think, has just contributed to this sense that silence is safer. Like, the best approach is to not interact and not say anything.

Jon: As an educator expected to lead freewheeling discussion. Cramer says it’s increasingly hard to get students to talk and have civil conversation if they disagree. Instead, she says, they’re staring at their phones.

Katherine Cramer: Yes, and even to the point where I’ve said, ‘you know, I just want to point out to you all that when you’re done talking about that, like, using the discussion protocol and talking about the course content, you can talk about anything. Anything. I’m not going to like get mad at you for not talking about the course content. You can talk about anything.’ And still, they’re silent.

Jon: As a political scientist, Cramer notes that her students are part of a broader political environment in which Americans are being encouraged by their leaders to be suspicious of each other.

Katherine Cramer: There’s an us and there’s a them, and you don’t want to engage with the other side, because not only are they the other side, they’re evil. And if they get control, if they get a hold of you, the world is coming to an end. Like, that’s the environment we all are in, including these college students.

Jon: So what does The Discussion Project suggest that people do to change this? First, it says that everyone should get a turn leading the discussion.

Katherine Cramer: It makes it like very egalitarian in who’s who gets control and who gets to speak. But also helps us understand how to ask questions about the course content that allows people to bring in who they are as human beings.

Jon: With a presidential election looming. Kramer says figuring out how to hold civil, constructive conversations in a classroom matters far beyond the campus.

Katherine Cramer: You know, it’s a big deal, because what goes on in college is an indicator of what’s going on in other parts of American life. But also because generally we’re talking about young people, and they are the future of this country. And many of these people, for better or for worse, are going to go on and be leaders in our political system. And so, if the skills that they’re developing in college right now are silence is safer, do not engage with people of different opinions or you’re going to be harmed — that doesn’t bode well for the future of our political system.

Kirk: This is College Uncovered, from GBH News and The Hechinger Report. I’m Kirk Carapezza …

Jon: … and I’m Jon Marcus. We’d love to hear from you. Send us an email to GBHNewsConnect@WGBH.org. Or leave us a voicemail at (617) 300-2486. And tell us what you want to know about how colleges really operate. We just might answer your question on the show.

This episode was produced and written by Kirk Carapezza …

Kirk: … and Jon Marcus, and it was edited by Jeff Keating.

Meg Woolhouse is supervising editor.

Ellen London is executive producer.

Production assistance from Diane Adame.

Mixing and sound design by David Goodman and Gary Mott.

Theme song and original music by Left Roman out of MIT.

Mei He is our project manager, and head of GBH podcasts is Devin Maverick Robins.

College Uncovered is a production of GBH News and The Hechinger Report and distributed by PRX. It’s made possible by Lumina Foundation.

Thanks so much for listening.

The post College Uncovered, Season 3, Episode 2 appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

VESTAVIA HILLS, Ala. — Principal Lauren Dressback didn’t think about it after it happened. After all, she was workplace-close with Wesley Smith, the custodian at Cahaba Heights Elementary School, in this affluent suburb of Birmingham. She called him “the mayor.” She said that he knew her two children, asked about her family almost daily and made a point of interacting. “Every day, a huge bear hug,” she recalled.  

So, when Dressback, just after last Valentine’s Day, asked Smith to come into the nurse’s office and shut the door, and then shared three photos on her phone of who she had just started dating, it felt ordinary. Afterward, she said, “I just moved right on about my day.” 

But the 2 minute, 13 second-exchange — captured on video by the nurse — would prove fateful.  

In a few short months, after a two-decade career, Dressback, a popular educator, would go from Vestavia Hills City school district darling to controversial figure after she came out as gay, divorced her husband, and began dating a Black woman.  

Within days of showing the custodian the photos, she was ordered to leave the building and was barred from district property. Soon, she found herself facing a litany of questions from district leaders about a seemingly minor issue: employee timesheets. In April, she was officially placed on administrative leave. On May 2, during a packed school board meeting, she was demoted, replaced as principal, and sent to run the district’s alternative high school. 

At that school board meeting, as he had for weeks, Todd Freeman, the superintendent, refused to offer an explanation, even to Dressback. Rather, at the beginning of the meeting, he read a statement that “we have not, cannot, and will not make personnel decisions based on an individual’s race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, national origin or disability.” (When contacted, Vestavia Hills City Schools spokesperson Whit McGhee said the district would not discuss confidential personnel matters and declined to make Freeman available for an interview. He provided links to school board meeting minutes, district policies and Alabama educator codes without explaining how they applied in Dressback’s case. Freeman and two other district officials involved in the situation did not respond to emails requesting interviews or a list of detailed questions.) 

Despite Freeman’s assertion regarding personnel decisions, many people in the community believe differently. So many, in fact, that “the Dressback situation” has lit up social media (one TikTok post has more than 313,000 views), spurred supermarket conversations and online chatter — and challenged allegiances.  

“The entire situation has divided the community,” said Abbey Skipper, a parent at Cahaba Heights Elementary. Some people, she said, are “trying to label everyone who is on the side of Dressback as leftists or Democrats or radicals” and assuming “everyone who supports the superintendent and the board is a Republican — which isn’t true.”  

A private Facebook group, “We Stand With Lauren” quickly gathered 983 members, while a public Facebook post by a fifth grade teacher at Cahaba Heights complained of the “news frenzy and whirlwind of social media misinformation” and stated that, “We Stand for Our Superintendent, Our District Office, Our Board, and our new principal, Kim Polson.” The May 8 teacher post, which got 287 likes and 135 comments, both in support and challenging the post, went on to say, “To do our jobs to the best of our ability, we trust the people who have been charged to lead us.”  

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

Alabama has among the strictest anti-gay policies in the nation. This past legislative session, the House passed a bill to ban LGBTQ+ flags and symbols from schools. It also expands to middle schools the current “Don’t Say Gay” law, which prohibits instruction or discussion of LGBTQ+ issues in elementary schools. Its sponsor, Rep. Mack Butler, who represents a suburban community in northeast Alabama, stated that it could “purify the schools just a little bit.” He later walked back the comment. The bill died in the Senate, but Butler has vowed to reintroduce it next session. 

The bill was one of dozens introduced or passed in states around the country restricting classroom discussion of gender identity, books with LGBTQ+ characters and displays of pride symbols. The laws have contributed to a climate in which “every classroom has been turned into a front” in a battle, said Melanie Willingham-Jaggers, executive director of GLSEN, which advocates for LGBTQ+ individuals in K-12 education. “Every educator, every administrator now has to be on that front line every single day,” she said. “We’re seeing educators leave because of the strain of the job made worse by the political moment we’re in and we’re also seeing because of the political moment we’re in, educators being targeted for their personal identity.” 

Tiffany Wright, a professor at Millersville University in Pennsylvania who studies the experience of LGBTQ+ educators, said right now many “are very on edge.”* Wright and her colleagues have surveyed LGBTQ+ educators four times since 2007, with new 2024 data to be released in November. While the past decade has seen strides toward acceptance, “the regional differences are huge,” she said. “Folks in the South definitely felt less safe being out to their communities and students.” November’s presidential and statewide elections could yield even sharper differences in LGBTQ+ protections between red and blue states.  

While quite a few states long had laws barring discrimination based on sexual orientation, it took a 2020 Supreme Court decision, Bostock v. Clayton County, to bring such protections to Alabama. That changed landscape spurred Dressback to engage lawyer Jon Goldfarb, who filed a complaint alleging work-based discrimination with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which is investigating. This fall, he expects to file a separate federal civil rights complaint. In 30 years of practice in Alabama, Goldfarb said, “I’ve had a lot of people that have come to me and complain about being discriminated against because of their sexual orientation.” Until Bostock, he would tell them, “There is nothing we can do.” 

A review of Dressback’s personnel file shows no reprimands until June, when she received an evaluation questioning her professional conduct that followed her filing the EEOC complaint. This raises a question: Why was she removed?  

Dressback’s situation, however, is about more than the law. It also challenges her place in the white Christian, predominantly conservative community she grew up in, belongs to and loves. And it offers a test case in a divided political time: Will her removal and the outcry that followed harden partisan alignments — or shake them? Even in Alabama, a Pew Research Center survey shows, more than one-third of those who lean Republican say homosexuality should be accepted. 

Brian DeMarco, a local attorney and high school classmate of Dressback’s, was sporting bright print swim trunks, a T-shirt and a Vestavia Hills baseball cap when we met at the public swimming pool where he’d brought his kids. We sat at a picnic table; the squeals of children released to the joys of summer carried in the warm Alabama air. He said he understands why some people may not be comfortable with a gay elementary school principal. 

“Her coming out as an educator, being around children, I think that frightens people, certain people all over the country,” he said. And in the South, in a conservative town, “it does become a bigger issue to people.” Politically, DeMarco tends “to swing right,” but sent Dressback a message of support on Facebook. “Everybody that knows Lauren  knows she is a good person,” he said. 

In fact, Dressback’s case has spurred public outrage because so many people do  know her. She attended Vestavia Hills Public Schools — Class of 1997 — and her mother, now retired, was a popular high school English teacher and yearbook adviser. She followed her parents into education (her father was a geography professor) and returned to teach social studies at the high school.  

In 2015, she was named secondary teacher of the year; in 2017, the graduating class dedicated the yearbook to her. She moved into administration and advanced; in 2022 she was appointed principal of Cahaba Heights Elementary School. She was awarded a three-year contract, effective July 2023, following a probationary year. In December — weeks before she was told to gather her things and was escorted off school grounds — she was given a positive write-up by an assistant superintendent who observed her running a meeting of teachers about the school’s “core values.” 

It also matters that this story is unfolding in Vestavia Hills. The city’s motto is “A Life Above,” and the municipal website declares that it “exemplifies the ideals of fine southern hospitality.” The community was born as a post-World War II subdivision and incorporated in 1950 with 3,000 residents (it now has 38,000). It is an effortfully attractive place with well-kept painted brick homes and clipped lawns. It is named for Vestavia, the exotic estate of former Birmingham Mayor George C. Ward whose Roman-inspired home was here. The 1930s-era news accounts describe lavish parties with male servers draped in togas. 

Vestavia Hills is also one of the “over the mountain” suburbs of Birmingham. When you drive over Red Mountain out of the urban core with its reminders of steelmaking and jazz, of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Negro Leagues, away from streets where shabbily dressed men push wheeled contrivances, where pride flags fly and breweries sprout, where drag queens coexist with affirming churches, you enter a different world. Birmingham is a Black city; Vestavia Hills is 86 percent white.  

Related: A superintendent made big gains with English learners. His success may have been his downfall 

And like surrounding white suburbs of Mountain Brook, Homewood and Hoover, Vestavia Hills competes on lifestyle, including its public schools. Alabama is hardly an education leader, yet the four districts earn mention in U.S. News rankings. Church is also central to life here; biographies for public officials name which they attend.  

“You move a child into the school system, there’s two questions they’re asked,” Julianne Julian, a resident and another Dressback high school classmate, said when we met at a coveted rear table inside the Diplomat Deli, a popular Vestavia Hills lunch spot. “Who are you for as far as football — Alabama? Auburn? — and what church do you go to?” 

Teams matter in Vestavia Hills — the high school’s in particular. The district itself was founded in 1970 amid federal desegregation orders, when residents broke away from the Jefferson County Schools and agreed to pay an extra tax. They adopted the Rebel Man in Civil War military uniform as the district’s mascot. Dressback’s 1996 junior year high school yearbook includes a photo of students at a rally waving massive Confederate flags. “It was just kind of the way we were growing up,” said DeMarco, who in high school displayed a Confederate flag on his Nissan pickup. “It was just kind of cool.” 

It wasn’t until 2015 that the district considered changing the mascot. After contentious public meetings in which some argued that the mascot and flag were not racist — a point ridiculed by John Oliver on national television — the district chose to adopt the 1Rebel rebrand. (Mess with one Rebel and you mess with us all, is the concept. They are still called “The Rebels,” but simply use the letters “VH.”) 

When I met with Dressback, days after school let out, she answered the door to her apartment wearing a T-shirt that read “love. empathy. compassion. inclusion. justice. kindness.” She looked like she could use every one of those things.  

She was welcoming, but said she was nervous about talking. She had not spoken publicly since she was escorted out of Cahaba Heights Elementary in February. We sat at her dining table — I brought an Italian sub, no onions or peppers, hot, from Diplomat Deli, Dressback’s regular order — and in our conversations then and later, she appeared to believe the best about people. 

Others in Vestavia clearly believe the best about her: Since things erupted, her phone has pinged with messages, including from former students. “Thank you for making an impact on my life,” said one of the many that she shared with me. “You stood up for me in class when someone made fun of me for having depression and I’ll never forget that,” wrote another. And, “you may not remember me, but I had you as a teacher during my time at VHHS and even when I was not your student, I still saw you as a person who cared for all students, not just the ones on your roster.” (Dressback said she has “not received any negative messages. Not one.”) 

At Cahaba Heights, parents noticed her gift for calming children with behavior issues. A mother of twins who got tripped up by transitions (drop-off is “the hardest part of our morning”) said that, with Dressback greeting them at the curb, “We didn’t have that struggle this year at all.” Sometimes Dressback would slip on a wig or costume — Santa, Minion, astronaut, among others; before winter breaks she donned an elf outfit and climbed atop the brick marquee in front of the school to the delight of arriving children and passing cars. She wanted to remind everyone that school is fun. 

“Her love for the children just reached every square inch of the school,” said Skipper, the Cahaba Heights parent of a second grader who moved to the neighborhood specifically for the school. Her removal “plunged me into grief. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, I lost weight. The amount of upset was palpable. I loved her. She loved my child.” 

As we sat at her dining table, Dressback shared that she sensed she was gay in high school but said that “it sort of felt clear to me that I couldn’t have that life here.” The only gay people she knew well were two family members. When her Uncle Dennis died of complications from HIV and her cousin Robyn died by suicide, as upset as she was, being out was tough to imagine.  

The tragedies coincided with her time at Samford University, the private Baptist college where her father taught. “It’s one of the most religiously conservative schools in the nation,” she said. “You go to Samford to not be different.” And it was there in a geography class that she met Shane Dressback, when the two arrived early one day and “started chit-chatting.” They were engaged the next year, and married in January 2001, just after her December graduation. 

“I met Shane and did very genuinely fall in love with him,” she said. “He is a wonderful man.” They had two children —  Kaylee graduated from college in May and is playing semi-pro soccer, and Tyler is a senior in high school — and were consumed with family life. But then, as she approached becoming an empty nester, Dressback began having panic attacks around being gay, she said, feeling that “I’ve pushed this down for a really long time.”  

Related: School clubs for gay students move underground after Kentucky’s anti-LGBTQ law goes into effect  

This past December, she came out to Shane. They didn’t speak for more than 24 hours. Then, she texted him to say she was going to church. Minutes after the service began, she told me, “He texted me and said, ‘I’m here. May I come sit by you?’ So, we sat together at this church service. Both of us cried the whole way through it.” 

Shane Dressback told me that he struggled with the news. On one of his worst days, however, he said that God told him to love her “no matter what.” The next day, he told Lauren, “I was going to love her unconditionally and unconventionally.” The marriage ending was painful, but they remain close. “I know she loved me for 23 years,” he said. “There was nothing fake there.”  

The two held hands as they told their children and parents. They divorced, sold their home and rented apartments near one another. They still have family dinners and Shane cooks; leftovers of “Daddy’s Jambalaya” were in the refrigerator of Lauren Dressback’s apartment when I visited. Kaylee came by with her goldendoodle, Dixie, to grab a helping for lunch. 

Throughout Dressback’s ordeal with the school district, Shane has been her defender. “Lauren is a child of God and should be treated as such,” he said, as we sat at a friend’s brewery during off-hours. He knows her to be professionally excellent; her personal life should not matter. “It was no one’s business what was going on in our bedroom beforehand and I don’t think that’s anybody’s business now,” he said. “People have drawn a line in the sand where I think it needs to be more about, you know, loving people as Jesus did.” 

Shane was the one who urged Dressback to attend a brunch in early February organized by members of a LILLES Facebook group, which connects later-in-life lesbians. There she met her girlfriend, Angela Whitlock, a former medical operations officer in the U.S. Army and law student (she graduated in May). The two began a relationship that appears to charm and steady Dressback. At a dinner during my visit, they held hands under the table.  

Dressback says she came out to Freeman, the superintendent, at the end of a one-on-one meeting in January in the spirit of transparency. But the incident that appears central to Dressback’s removal unfolded just after Valentine’s Day, when Dressback asked Smith, the custodian, to come into the office of nurse Julie Corley, whom she described as a close friend at the time, and “close the door.”  

Dressback said it was Corley’s idea to show Smith the photos to see his reaction. He was in the lunchroom near Corley’s office. The brief exchange between Dressback and Smith was captured on video. (Dressback said she did not initially notice Corley filming, but did not stop her when she did, something she now regrets.) Corley did not respond to several interview requests by email and text, and, when reached by phone, said she was not interested in speaking and hung up. Dressback said she has not had any communication with Corley since being removed. 

“You shared something about your past, I was going to share something with you,” Dressback says to Smith in the video. “Do you want to see a picture of who I’m dating?” She and Whitlock had had their third date on Feb. 14. He says reflexively, “Shane?” She responds, “He’s my ex-husband.” Smith appears surprised. “April Fool?” and asks how long they were married. She says, “23 years.” He expresses disbelief. “You and him broke up?” Dressback holds out her phone to show a photo of her and Whitlock. 

“Who the hell is this? I mean, Who is this?” he asks. Several times Smith states that he doesn’t believe it. She hands him her phone. “Bullshit!” he exclaims as he looks at the three photos. “Stop lyin’!” There is one of Whitlock kissing Dressback on the cheek, one with their faces cheek to cheek and one in which they are sitting at a bar with Dressback’s arms around Whitlock, their noses touching. Smith then says, “Wow, I’m sorry,” and pulls her into a hug. “Once you go Black, baby, you don’t go back,” he quips. She groans at his attempt at humor.  

Dressback’s lawyer said that an affidavit the district obtained from Smith “appears to be in conflict on several points with what the video shows,” including a claim that he was made uncomfortable by the encounter. When reached by phone, Smith insisted, “I made no type of statement” even as district officials were “coming at me” seeking to query him, he said. “I hadn’t talked to nobody about the incident.”  

(McGhee, the school district spokesperson, declined to provide answers to specific questions, including regarding the apparent affidavit from Smith.)  

Days after Dressback shared the photos, on the morning of Feb. 23, Meredith Hanson, the district’s director of personnel, and Aimee Rainey, the assistant superintendent who had given Dressback the positive write-up in December, arrived at Cahaba Heights for a surprise meeting. Dressback said they told her that someone had complained that she shared “explicit” details of her relationship at a meeting with teachers. Dressback knew that to be untrue. “I kind of relaxed because I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, that absolutely did not happen,’” she recalled. 

They questioned her in a way she found confusing. She asked for details of the complaint, but was told, “You know, ‘explicit.’ And I’m like, I know what ‘explicit’ means. Like are you going to tell me what they said I said or what?” They asked if she showed Smith photos of her and her girlfriend. She said she did. Meanwhile, she observed to me later, “There is a picture of Shane and me kissing on our lips at our wedding on the bookshelf right behind them.” (Hanson and Rainey did not respond to interview requests or to a list of detailed questions for this story.) 

Dressback says she was then told to gather her belongings, and that she was being placed on “detached duty,” requiring that she work from home. She was barred from school property. She was escorted from the building, which she said made her feel “like a criminal.” She expected to be gone for a few days.  

But several days later, Dressback was informed of a new problem: timesheets. In January, she had met with staff to remind them about clocking in and out (everyone must clock in, and paraprofessionals must clock out during lunch).  

On March 4, while still barred from the Cahaba Heights campus, Dressback met with Freeman, Rainey and Hanson in the conference room at the central office to discuss timesheets. Two days later, she was told that the following morning, March 7, she was to fire two employees for irregularities on their timesheets. One, she knew, had an attendance problem. She said that she had already discussed with Hanson not renewing him at the end of the school year.  

The other was a close friend, Stefanie Robinson, a paraprofessional who worked with students with severe disabilities, including those requiring help with feeding and diapering. Robinson often stayed in the classroom during her lunch breaks to aid the special education teacher because one student had as many as 30 seizures a day. When I met Robinson at her home, she acknowledged to sometimes forgetting to clock out or in, or not being able to do so if she was attending to a child’s needs. “If I’m in a massive diaper situation, I’m not going to remember to clock out, or if I’m helping a kid that’s having a seizure or, you know, one that’s in crisis,” Robinson told me.  

What most upset Robinson, however, was that shortly after Dressback was escorted out of the school and placed on “detached duty,” requiring she work from home, Robinson faced 45 minutes of questioning by Hanson and Rainey about Dressback’s dating life that she says “felt like an interrogation.” After confirming that she and Dressback were close, Robinson says she was asked questions such as, “When Lauren goes on a date, what does she say happens? And I was like, ‘What do you mean? What do you want to know?” They pressed: “Well, when she goes on a date and the date ends, what does she say happens after that?” Robinson insisted, “I don’t ask her how her date ended.”  

Related: Rural principals have complex jobs – and some of the highest turnover 

On March 7 at 5:58 a.m., Robinson received a text from Hanson asking her “to start your day at the Board of Education” instead of Cahaba Heights. As soon as she arrived at the central office, she saw Dressback in the room; Dressback said Freeman had told her to fire Robinson. “I could tell she’d been crying,” said Robinson. “And I just smiled at her, I was like, ‘It’s OK.’” Robinson recalled Dressback saying, “in the most robotic tone, ‘It’s my recommendation to the board that your contract be terminated immediately.’” 

She hugged Dressback, told her she loved her, and left. Robinson texted the parent of one of her students, a second grade girl who is nonverbal, uses a wheelchair and has cerebral palsy and epilepsy. The girl’s mom, Payton Smith, no relation to Wesley, told me that she’d appreciated how Dressback had welcomed her child to the school a few years earlier. The principal had asked, “‘What do we need to do to make your kid feel comfortable?’ and recognized her as a child,” and not a set of legal educational requirements to meet, Smith recalled. Despite Robinson’s key role in her daughter’s education, Smith said she was not officially notified until March 19 — nearly two weeks later — via email that “Mrs. Robinson is no longer working at VHECH,” district shorthand for Cahaba Heights. 

Yet an email of district documentation shared with me states the date of Robinson’s leaving as April 5, and said that she had resigned. Nonetheless, the district continued to pay her for the rest of the school year, which she said felt “like I was being paid off because they knew what they did was wrong.” She is now a clinical research data coordinator for University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine. (Neither McGhee, the district spokesperson, nor Hanson, in charge of HR, responded to email requests seeking comment on why Robinson was fired, the claim that she had resigned, or the discrepancy in her pay.)  

Meanwhile, on March 13, Dressback emailed Freeman asking to be reinstated to her position at Cahaba Heights, immediately. “I believe the action the system has taken against me is discrimination because of my sexual orientation, my interracial relationship, and my gender,” she wrote. The next day, Goldfarb, her lawyer, filed the EEOC complaint. (He later amended it to allege additional discrimination and that the district had retaliated against her for the filing.)  

On April 18, Dressback received a letter signed by Freeman officially placing her on administrative leave. It states that she is “not to contact any employees of the Vestavia Hills Board of Education related to your or their employment or relationship with the Vestavia Hills City Schools.” The letter does not state a reason for the action. 

As a result, to parents and some educators, Dressback seemed to have vanished. “I thought like, ‘Oh, I bet she’s sick. That’s really sad,’” said Lindsay Morton, a Cahaba Heights parent, a reaction echoed by others. Then, on April 27, two of Dressback’s classmates from high school posted videos on social media.  

“Where is Principal Dressback???” a schoolmate and friend, Karl Julian, titled a video on his YouTube channel. It has been viewed more than 11,000 times. Lauren Pilleteri Reece, who as laurenpcrna has 228.7K followers on TikTok, posted several videos narrating Dressback’s battle; the first has more than 313,000 views and 3,400 comments. Reece has known Dressback since high school. 

When the Vestavia Hills School Board called a meeting five days later, on May 2, to take up Dressback’s employment, everyone seemed to know about it. People rallied outside the district headquarters holding posters with messages such as “We Stand with Principal Dressback” and “Love is Love.” Many people wore green, Dressback’s favorite color, to signal support. Local TV and news reporters showed up.  

The room thrummed with emotion. There were angry, even tearful Cahaba Heights Elementary parents, teachers and retired teachers, students, former classmates and others who knew Dressback, plus some who didn’t know her. “I’ve never met her, I just know she had been wronged,” said Jim Whisenhunt, an advertising executive whose children, now grown, attended Vestavia Hills public schools.  

Dressback, fearing that she could not keep her composure, did not attend. Those who did attend had a lot to share. But before public comments were permitted or a vote was taken, Freeman read the prepared statement in which he said he wanted “to address, in general, personnel decisions made by the board.” He went on to say that they “have not, cannot, and will not make personnel decisions based on an individual’s race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, or disability” and that “all of our decisions are vetted thoroughly and thoughtfully.” He added that “district employees contribute to academic excellence and are committed to our mission to provide every child in our schools the opportunity to learn without limits.” Then, over the objections of many in the audience who demanded a chance to comment before a vote was taken, the board officially transferred Dressback from Cahaba Heights Elementary to the alternative school.  

When public comments began, the outrage was obvious. “We may color outside of your lines a little bit, but coloring outside of your lines at no point does that ever mean that we are unprofessional. Lauren did not become unprofessional overnight,” said a charged-up Reece, who also came out as an adult. “You started looking at her as unprofessional overnight.”  

Rep. Neil Rafferty, a Democrat who represents Birmingham, stated that he “felt compelled to drive straight here” after “a long week in Montgomery” even though it is not his district. “We are all watching this. It is not just a Vestavia Hills issue anymore,” said Rafferty, the only openly gay member of the Alabama Legislature. The action, he said, signals “to your students who might be LGBTQ that they don’t matter.” 

Rev. Julie Conrady, minister of the Unitarian Universalist Churches of Birmingham and Tuscaloosa, and president of a local interfaith group, stood up to speak. “You are sending her a message that in Vestavia Hills it is not OK to be LGBTQ,” she told the board and superintendent. “You should not be punished in your job in 2024 because of who you love.” Conrady, in black liturgical robe and green stole, told the crowd “that there are consequences here for all these people. I want you to get pictures of every single name and vote them the hell out!” (The school board is appointed by the City Council, not elected.) 

Another speaker, Allison Black Cornelius, who said she was “a conservative Republican,” focused on what seemed to make this issue explode: the silence. The superintendent and board had given no explanation, even to Dressback, as to why she was removed and now demoted, she said. “When you wait this long,” said Cornelius, “it puts this person in this black cloud.” 

Her point underscored a question others raised at the meeting to a board that largely remained silent: If Dressback did something so egregious as to require she be escorted from school and barred from district property, why was she suitable to lead the alternative school? The district declined to answer this question. 

The division, so apparent at that meeting, seemed to only harden a few weeks later during the board’s annual meeting on May 28. A group supporting the board and superintendent appeared in blue T-shirts and applauded after the board gave Freeman a new four-year contract that included a raise to $239,500 (he was paid $190,000 when he was hired in 2018) plus perks. Dressback supporters in green again spoke, sharing their frustration.  

Related: Who wants to lead America’s school districts? Anyone? Anyone?  

This is not the first time Vestavia Hills City Schools have made unpopular personnel moves. In August 2020, Tyler Burgess, a well-loved bow-tied principal, was removed as head of the high school and assigned to oversee remote learning during Covid, when many classes were online; the board voted not to renew his contract in March 2021. Students organized a protest; 3,134 people signed a petition calling for his reinstatement. The board and superintendent did not provide an explanation for their decision. Burgess, who has a doctorate in education, is now director of learning and development at a large construction firm. He did not respond to multiple interview requests. 

Danielle Tinker came to Vestavia Hills after more than a dozen years in Birmingham and Jefferson County schools, first as assistant principal at Liberty Park Elementary. In spring 2021, she was selected as principal of Cahaba Heights. From the start, Tinker, who is Black, felt unwelcome at the school where the teaching staff was nearly all white, she told me when we met for lunch. The day she was introduced as the new principal, a staff member emailed her, saying that “Cahaba Heights is a family” and that “today was hard on this family,” according to a copy of the email that she shared with me. Tinker said she was told by staff that the faculty had wanted a different principal; a later inquiry confirmed that staff felt “blindsided” when she was selected over that individual. 

As principal, Tinker raised questions with Rainey, the assistant superintendent, over student articles in a fall 2021 newsletter, including two about race. They were titled “Anti-Racist Kids: Leading the Way to New Beginnings” and “Learning About Racism: How It Can Change Lives.” Tinker told me she feared those articles would be “more fluff than addressing the actual challenge” with claims such as “Racism is part of our lives, but it doesn’t have to be a bad thing if we are the ones ending it.” Rainey agreed to pause publication of the newsletter, which she said upset several teachers who wanted it published.  

On Dec. 16, 2021, several hours after Tinker told teachers that publication was being paused, Tinker emailed Hanson raising an “employee concern” after one of the teachers “stormed down the hallway” and was “pointing at me and yelling,” according to a copy of Tinker’s email exchanges that she shared with me. The next day, Tinker received a letter from Freeman stating that he was recommending she be transferred to the alternative school, effective Jan. 3. In March, Tinker filed a complaint of racial discrimination with the EEOC and resigned, using her remaining personal time to cover her pay for the remainder of the school year. In February 2023, she and the district reached a settlement for an undisclosed amount. She is using the money to attend law school. (McGhee, the district spokesperson, did not answer questions about Tinker or Burgess; Rainey and Hanson also did not respond.) 

On my last day in town in early June, Dressback gave me a guided tour of Vestavia Hills. We met inside the Diplomat Deli; Reece, Dressback’s high school classmate with the large TikTok following, joined us. As we walked out, Dressback, wearing a Care Bears T-shirt, showed off a new tattoo on her left forearm. In typewriter font it reads, “Speak the truth, even if your voice shakes.” 

I slid into the passenger seat of her car, a red Buick Encore whose license plate reads “DBACK.” Reece hopped in back. An order of fries from Milo’s, a favorite Dressback fast-food spot since high school, leaned in a cup holder. Soon, we passed places they hung out as kids, schools they attended, new neighborhoods and old, the spot at Vestavia Country Club with a panoramic view where kids still take prom photos.  

The discussion jumbled together past and present, reminding these childhood friends — both of whom came out as adults — how much has changed. And how much has not. When we reached Vestavia Hills High School, Dressback stopped near a small sign at sidewalk level that reads “Alternative Placement” with an arrow. I descended metal stairs that span a rocky embankment; the alternative school, Dressback’s new assignment, is subterranean, its entrance nearly hidden from view. If architecture can relay shame, it might look like this. 

Yet when I returned to the car, Dressback told me she saw the alternative school as an opportunity rather than an exit. The school has often operated without a principal (Tinker never stepped inside or interacted with students, partly because of the Covid pandemic). At that late May school board meeting, Freeman could not say how many pupils attend the school. But Dressback was struck by what DeMarco, her classmate, told her. As a student, he spent time at the alternative school; he could have used someone like her. 

“I’m not gonna just go and sit and read a book. I can’t do that,” Dressback said, as she pulled out of the high school driveway. She wanted to make it a place less about punishment and more about connecting with kids for whom the traditional school is not a fit. It should not be a dumping ground for educators or for kids, she said. “My mindset is I’m gonna go and I’m gonna make this the best damn alternative school in the state.” 

In other words, Dressback is not willing to let go or to disappear. Yet “the Dressback situation” is hardly resolved. A few days after my visit, in early June, Dressback met with Freeman to receive an official performance review for the 2023-24 academic year, a copy of which she shared with me. It was the first official yearly evaluation she had been given in her career in the district despite a stipulation in her contract that this occur annually, she said. It is searing. It finds that her “job performance is unsatisfactory.” The report was sent to the state Department of Education, per Alabama code requiring that personnel records and “investigative information” of employees placed on administrative leave for cause be reviewed by the department. 

Most damning are six bullet points of claims. One alludes to Robinson’s employment and the timesheet matter. The most explosive is cast as “failure to demonstrate moderation, restraint, and civility in dealing with employees” and includes salacious assertions, including “public displays of affection and of photographs which would not, for example, be tolerated even among high school students” — presumably a reference to the photos shown to Smith, the custodian. It includes a charge Dressback had never heard before: a claim of “remote activation by your husband of a sexual toy on your person while you were in a school meeting.”  

Related: Investigating why a high-performing superintendent left his job 

Dressback was floored by the charges, and countered each in her rebuttal, which she asked to have filed with the state Department of Education in response to Freeman’s report. Regarding the sex toy claim, Dressback wrote that it is “false. I have never done that, and I would never do that.” The very idea of “remote activation” of a sex toy by her husband was absurd, she said. “I wouldn’t think that I would need to remind you that my ex-husband and I are divorced, that I have recently come out as gay, and that I am now in a committed relationship with a woman,” she wrote. 

Such a thing never happened then, or in any school year, her rebuttal continued. She wrote that she “cannot imagine why you would credit this slanderous and irresponsible allegation” and include it in her personnel record, “other than to retaliate against me” for the EEOC filing.  

Her lawyer said in an email that the performance review “is further retaliation and an attempt to create further pretexts for the adverse employment actions the Board has already taken against her.”  

On Aug. 15, after the state Department of Education had reviewed the evaluation submitted by Freeman, the agency stated in a letter addressed to Dressback, cc’ing Freeman, that it had “examined information regarding an investigation in the Vestavia Hills City School System” and “decided to not take action against your Alabama Educator Certificate.” The same day, Freeman said in a letter to Dressback that she would “no longer be on administrative leave and may return to work” at the alternative school. 

It has been baffling and infuriating to some in the community as to how such charges surfaced so soon after Dressback was given a three-year contract extension last year.  The mystery that remains is why some people — people who were eager for her to continue leading the elementary school — now want her gone. The battle has been drawn up and is now readying to be fought. Dressback told me that beyond feeling driven to “defend my name and my integrity,” she wants to speak up for others who come after — or who are now silent.  

Of course, Dressback had hoped this could all be avoided. “I tried to just be the good employee,” she told me. “I thought if I just do what they ask me to do, this is gonna get wrapped up and I’ll go back to work” at Cahaba Heights.  

Notably, she still feels loyalty, even love, for Vestavia Hills and its school system.  

“Maybe I shouldn’t feel the allegiance I feel,” she said when we spoke over Zoom several weeks ago. “But I can’t just turn it off. It’s not like a water faucet. You know, it’s my home. It’s where I grew up and it’s where I chose to plant my career. As betrayed as I have felt, I just can’t turn my back on the system.” Rather, she wants to nudge it forward. 

*Correction: This story has been updated with the correct name of Millersville University.

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

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

As efforts to expand the child tax credit and provide paid family leave have stalled at the federal level, states are increasingly incentivizing private employers to step in and fill one of the other most painful gaps for working parents: child care.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 17 states offer child care tax credits to “employers that operate or contract out child care services for their employees.” These states are Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Mississippi, Montana, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia. 

Eric Syverson, a senior policy specialist in the National Conference of State Legislatures’ fiscal affairs program, said the conversation about a child tax credit at the federal level is driving a bipartisan consensus around finding ways in the tax code to help parents and families in need of child care services.

“I think states have now realized, ‘Oh, the federal government temporarily and now is considering again another increase in these tax credits — child tax credit, child and dependent care tax credit, the EITC [Earned Income Tax Credit]. We could also benefit from that increase if we enact our own.’ And that’s what we’re seeing a lot of states now considering,” Syverson said. 

He added that the biggest beneficiaries of state tax credits are large corporations that can afford child care costs. Even with the credit’s growing popularity, a relatively small percentage of companies take advantage of it. Syverson attributes that to the high costs of establishing a child care facility and a general lack of awareness among larger businesses about the tax credit.

Related: More companies open on-site child care to help employees juggle parenting and jobs companies open on-site child care

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 12 percent of all workers had access to child care benefits through their employer in 2023. Jessica Chang is the co-founder and CEO of Upwards, a child care marketplace that connects families to child care providers, assists child care providers with business needs, and helps businesses and government entities create child care benefits programs for their employees. Chang said her company operates among the key stakeholders in child care: employers, government, families and child care providers. 

Initially, Upwards may collaborate with employers by matching employees with nearby child care providers, a more feasible and cost-efficient option than building an on-site facility. The company can also use data from employees to help customize child care benefits. For example, if Upwards notices employees are calling off work to care for their children, they may recommend providing backup care credits to allow families to find providers at non-traditional hours. 

“By partnering with Upwards, we have been able to help our [employees] find trusted providers who are able to accommodate the varying work schedules found at our properties,” Susan Loveday, the vice president of human resources at Dollywood Parks and Resorts, told The 19th. “Additionally, to help with the cost of child care, we provide a monthly stipend to those [employees] whose children are cared for by an Upwards provider.” 

To Chang, child care as an employee benefit could resemble health insurance — or become even more important.

“That’s why you actually need to have participation between both employers and government in order to really normalize it and say, ‘This is not a social issue. This is actually an economic issue. This isn’t a mom issue. This is a family issue,’” Chang said. “We’re hearing from employers, for example, they’re not trying to say, ‘Hey, we’re gonna try this, and if it doesn’t work, we’re backing out.’ They’re actually saying, ‘How do we make this successful so there’s no longer an issue? How do we do this for two and three years because we want to make sure that it’s done correctly?’ And that is a significant shift from, say, just checking the box.” 

Federal action on child care and other family policies has been slow to advance. Last month, the Senate voted against a bigger child tax credit. Also, federal law does not guarantee workers paid days off for parental, medical and family caregiving responsibilities.

But there have been efforts at the federal level to encourage companies to aid employees with child care, a move that has support from both Democrats and Republicans. 

In 2022, Congress passed the CHIPS and Science Act, legislation that allocated $50 billion to companies expanding semiconductor manufacturing and research and offering child care to their employees. 

When President Joe Biden was the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, in a debate with former President Donald Trump, he said, “We should significantly increase the child care tax credit. We should significantly increase the availability of women and men, or single parents, to be able to go back to work. And we should encourage businesses to hold, to have child care facilities,” as ways to deal with the child care crisis. 

Related: D.C. experimented with giving child care workers big raises. The project may not last

The Heritage Foundation, the conservative group that crafted Project 2025, a proposed blueprint for former President Donald Trump’s potential second term in office, calls for Congress to encourage on-site employee child care, saying it “puts the least stress on the parent-child bond.” 

Some experts argue, however, that employer-sponsored child care is only a temporary solution to the child care crisis — and one that poses equity concerns.

For Elliot Haspel, a senior fellow at the family policy think tank Capita and the author of “Crawling Behind: America’s Child Care Crisis and How to Fix It,” employer-sponsored health insurance and its “uneven results” being mirrored in child care is something people should scrutinize. Haspel writes, “The only real solution to America’s child care needs is a system of choice that is funded by a permanent stream of public dollars,” and employer-based taxes is a way to start collecting those funds.

“We have a lot of precedents now at the state and local level of fair ways to fund more affordable, accessible, high-quality child care,” Haspel said, “In Vermont, they are funding a major child care reform bill via a small payroll tax, 0.44 percent, 75 percent of which is borne by the employer, and business owner after business owners went to the legislature and essentially said, ‘Tax us. This is important, this is worth it.’ That’s the kind of employer activity we need.”

Similarly, he said, Massachusetts, Washington, D.C., and Portland have all levied taxes on high-income households to help pay for child care.

“When we care about something and decide it has enough societal value — whether public schools or roads or parks — we find the money,” Haspel said. 

Casey Peeks, the senior director of early childhood policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress (CAP), believes employers should be more active as child care funding advocates, citing from the Council for Strong America’s report that the child care crisis costs the United States $122 billion every year in lost earnings, productivity, and revenue. She sees child care as both an economic and social issue.

“I describe it as a public good because I am not a parent, but I still benefit from child care. Every day I take the Metro to work, I benefit from the fact that my Metro driver, my bus driver, has their child in a safe, high-quality child care program so that they can go to work, and I can get to work,” Peeks said. “I definitely think there’s a role for businesses to play, and it’s in their best interest that we don’t have a child care crisis. … I think that whatever employers offer should, hopefully, be on top of whatever is provided through public investment.”

Another aspect of the child care crisis is supply. A June 2024 report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago found that, despite the increasing cost of child care, child care workers earn an average of $14.60 per hour. The Chicago Fed attributes decreasing supply to the low pay and high responsibility of the job; child care employment in the fourth quarter of 2023 was 9 percent below pre-pandemic levels. 

Anna Lovejoy, director of early childhood policy at CAP, acknowledges the effort being made by states to address the child care crisis, but isn’t convinced incentivizing businesses to provide care helps with the supply issue and may potentially create equity issues.

“When you do tie child care to employment, if someone loses their job or chooses to step away from their job, then they don’t have child care in the interim while they’re looking for work,” Lovejoy said. “And so that causes a disadvantage to families. I think, also, it just creates sort of an equity issue for those who have jobs versus don’t have jobs, have child care versus don’t have childcare.” 

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

The post States are turning to employers to boost child care benefits  appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

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.

This story about homeless students 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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We are still in the early days of understanding the promise and peril of using generative AI in education. Very few researchers have evaluated whether students are benefiting, and one well-designed study showed that using ChatGPT for math actually harmed student achievement. 

The first scientific proof I’ve seen that ChatGPT can actually help students learn more was posted online earlier this year. It’s a small experiment, involving fewer than 200 undergraduates.  All were Harvard students taking an introductory physics class in the fall of 2023, so the findings may not be widely applicable. But students learned more than twice as much in less time when they used an AI tutor in their dorm compared with attending their usual physics class in person. Students also reported that they felt more engaged and motivated. They learned more and they liked it. 

A paper about the experiment has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, but other physicists at Harvard University praised it as a well-designed experiment. Students were randomly assigned to learn a topic as usual in class, or stay “home” in their dorm and learn it through an AI tutor powered by ChatGPT. Students took brief tests at the beginning and the end of class, or their AI sessions, to measure how much they learned. The following week, the in-class students learned the next topic through the AI tutor in their dorms, and the AI-tutored students went back to class. Each student learned both ways, and for both lessons – one on surface tension and one on fluid flow –  the AI-tutored students learned a lot more. 

To avoid AI “hallucinations,” the tendency of chatbots to make up stuff that isn’t true, the AI tutor was given all the correct solutions. But other developers of AI tutors have also supplied their bots with answer keys. Gregory Kestin, a physics lecturer at Harvard and developer of the AI tutor used in this study, argues that his effort succeeded while others have failed because he and his colleagues fine-tuned it with pedagogical best practices. For example, the Harvard scientists instructed this AI tutor to be brief, using no more than a few sentences, to avoid cognitive overload. Otherwise, he explained, ChatGPT has a tendency to be “long-winded.”

The tutor, which Kestin calls “PS2 Pal,” after the Physical Sciences 2 class he teaches, was told to only give away one step at a time and not to divulge the full solution in a single message. PS2 Pal was also instructed to encourage students to think and give it a try themselves before revealing the answer. 

Unguided use of ChatGPT, the Harvard scientists argue, lets students complete assignments without engaging in critical thinking. 

Kestin doesn’t deliver traditional lectures. Like many physicists at Harvard, he teaches through a method called “active learning,” where students first work with peers on in-class problem sets as the lecturer gives feedback. Direct explanations or mini-lectures come after a bit of trial, error and struggle. Kestin sought to reproduce aspects of this teaching style with the AI tutor. Students toiled on the same set of activities and Kestin fed the AI tutor the same feedback notes that he planned to deliver in class.

Kestin provocatively titled his paper about the experiment, “AI Tutoring Outperforms Active Learning,” but in an interview he told me that he doesn’t mean to suggest that AI should replace professors or traditional in-person classes. 

“I don’t think that this is an argument for replacing any human interaction,” said Kestin. “This allows for the human interaction to be much richer.”

Kestin says he intends to continue teaching through in-person classes, and he remains convinced that students learn a lot from each other by discussing how to solve problems in groups. He believes the best use of this AI tutor would be to introduce a new topic ahead of class – much like professors assign reading in advance. That way students with less background knowledge won’t be as behind and can participate more fully in class activities. Kestin hopes his AI tutor will allow him to spend less time on vocabulary and basics and devote more time to creative activities and advanced problems during class.

Of course, the benefits of an AI tutor depend on students actually using it. In other efforts, students often didn’t want to use earlier versions of education technology and computerized tutors. In this experiment, the “at-home” sessions with PS2 Pal were scheduled and proctored over Zoom. It’s not clear that even highly motivated Harvard students will find it engaging enough to use regularly on their own initiative. Cute emojis – another element that the Harvard scientists prompted their AI tutor to use – may not be enough to sustain long-term interest. 

Kestin’s next step is to test the tutor bot for an entire semester. He’s also been testing PS2 Pal as a study assistant with homework. Kestin said he’s seeing promising signs that it’s helpful for basic but not advanced problems. 

The irony is that AI tutors may not be that effective at what we generally think of as tutoring. Kestin doesn’t think that current AI technology is good at anything that requires knowing a lot about a person, such as what the student already learned in class or what kind of explanatory metaphor might work.

“Humans have a lot of context that you can use along with your judgment in order to guide a student better than an AI can,” he said. In contrast, AI is good at introducing students to new material because you only need “limited context” about someone and “minimal judgment” for how best to teach it. 

Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at (212) 678-3595 or barshay@hechingerreport.org.

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

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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.

The post SUPERINTENDENT VOICE: As a Latina, my leadership sets me apart and gives me a chance to set an example appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

This is an edition of our climate change and education newsletter. Sign up here.

109 on the first day of school?

That was the case this year in Palm Springs, California, where parent Cyd Detiege has been campaigning to delay the start of the school year because of extreme heat.

Palm Springs Unified District officials haven’t budged, but administrators elsewhere in the country are shifting school calendars to keep kids from commuting to school in high heat and learning in sweltering classrooms, according to a new Hechinger story from writer Erin Rode.

The neighboring Desert Sands Unified School District, after studying which weeks are typically hottest, decided to postpone its first day from the third to fourth week of August and push the last day of school further into June.

Other districts that have experimented with delaying the start of school because of heat are Denver, Milwaukee and Philadelphia. At best, though, the schedule shakeups are a stopgap. “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,” said Carrie A. Olson, Denver school board president. The solution for her district, she said, is going to be more air conditioning and heat mitigation strategies in schools.

Climate change has certainly scrambled how I think about seasons. Growing up in Washington, D.C., I used to love July and August. Now it feels like fall is the new summer, the time to finally escape outdoors and enjoy being outside.

Related reads

How extreme heat is threatening education progress worldwide. New UNICEF data demonstrates how hot temperatures are unraveling education gains globally, writes The New York Times’s Somini Sengupta. One in five kids today experiences twice as many extremely hot days as their grandparents did.

Canceled classes, sweltering classrooms: How extreme heat impairs learning. I wrote about kids suffering in school buildings without air conditioning or being sent home early for “heat days,” and how high temperatures deepen racial divides in education.  

As climate change fuels hotter temperatures, kids are learning less. The 19th’s Jessica Kutz covered how policymakers are taking notice of how higher temperatures mean dehydrated, exhausted students. 

The interview

I spoke with Shiva Rajbhandari, 20, who just stepped down at the end of a two-year term this month on the Boise School Board, in Idaho. Rajbhandari ran and won at age 17 on a climate change platform. He’s now a sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an organizer for the Sunrise Movement, helping to lead its push for a Green New Deal for Schools. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

You ran for school board on comprehensive climate education and energy efficient schools. How much progress were you able to make on those issues?

I’ve been really impressed with the progress in the Boise school district. We have conducted a districtwide, scope one through three carbon audit, using a private contractor, and have identified easy ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and save money in the process. Now we are putting together a long-term plan on greenhouse gas emissions mitigation and also on water conservation, waste reduction and climate education.

What do you want to see happen in the next two years?

I hope that we can pass a comprehensive climate action plan this school year. A lot of these changes, especially with money coming from the EPA and Inflation Reduction Act, are changes that we can begin implementing immediately. We now have a grant to purchase electric buses. There’s a lot of stuff around energy efficiency and the way we build our new buildings especially, where it’s really easy to, say, install an electric heater instead of a natural gas heater. I’m also looking forward to an upcoming bond in 2028 when I think we’ll put a lot of these climate infrastructure projects on the ballot.

Do you feel like your other school board members took you seriously?

Not at first. I think there was an attitude of, I’m here and I don’t really know what I’m doing. But I think I changed that over the course of my term. And I do think that I’ve expanded student voice. My fellow trustees, many of them didn’t have kids, they are not interacting with kids on a day-to-day basis who are in our school district. I do think people begin to underestimate young people and the students in our schools. And I think I helped to change that.

You had pushed for a permanent student non-voting position on the board but that didn’t happen. Is that something you’ll keep pushing for?

Yes, absolutely. We just saw last week in New York the signing of legislation requiring all school districts to have at least one non-voting student member on their school board. We have other states and districts where that is the case. I think that, fundamentally, students bring a perspective that is needed in the boardroom. They’re on the ground in the classroom every day and they are the ones seeing the implementation of the policies and the budgets that school boards are voting on.

What are the biggest barriers to progress on these climate and education issues?

I think it’s a belief gap. There is kind of this old guard that thinks schools are the place to teach reading, writing and math. And that’s absolutely true. But there’s so much more of a role that schools have to play in modern society. We have schools that are feeding America’s kids, schools are providing child care, they are agents of socialization. It’s really the place where most people in this country interact with government on a day-to-day basis. Schools are keystone entities in our community and they have a lot of power to shape what our communities look like. And I think when it comes to stopping the climate crisis, that’s the ultimate superpower of our schools. When a school has installed solar panels, it shows everyone else in that neighborhood that solar panels work and are saving our district money. When a school in Phoenix, Arizona, can provide heat relief when it is 110 degrees, it shows our communities what climate resilience looks like. But the belief gap exists out there that we don’t have the technology to solve climate change, that it’s really expensive, and it’s not schools’ place.

Help a reporter

My colleagues and I were struck by a recent Guardian story on four high school football players who died in August for what appears to be heat-related causes. The news outlet notes that 77 heat-related athlete deaths have been recorded since 2000, of which 65 percent were teens. At Hechinger, we want to learn what training coaches and teachers need to keep kids safe in a hotter world. What do you think about kids playing sports in extreme heat? Do we need new rules and regulations on outdoor sports? Let us know your thoughts at newsletter@hechingerreport.org

Resources and events

• How districts are spending Inflation Reduction Act dollars to green their schools: Undaunted K12, a nonprofit group that advocates for schools to reduce their climate toll, recently shared an interactive map that shows which school districts use federal tax credits to defray the costs of clean energy projects. Some examples: The Menasha Joint School District in Wisconsin expects to receive $3.8 million in tax credits to help build a new carbon neutral middle school that includes solar panels and energy storage. Hasting Public Schools in Nebraska is using the federal dollars for ground-source heat pumps, while North Carolina’s Clinton City Schools are investing in solar.  

• How to protect vulnerable Americans — including children — from extreme heat: That’s the topic of an event on Sept. 18 hosted by the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank. Speakers include Levar M. Stoney, the mayor of Richmond, Virginia; Rev. Terrance McKinley, a vice president with the National Black Child Development Institute; John M. Balbus, director of the Office of Climate Change and Health Equity for the Department of Health and Human Services; and David Michaels, an epidemiologist and professor at George Washington University.

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

The post Too hot for school appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

College has become a new battleground in the culture wars, and it’s affecting where students enroll and what they’re learning. 

Divisive protests, police crackdowns, and a chilling backlash against free speech are among the reasons that a growing number of students say they don’t feel welcome on some college campuses. 

In this election year, we talk about the politics of higher education, how it affects you and how to pick a college where you’ll feel welcome.

Conflicts over abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, and DEI, as well as what can and can’t be taught in classrooms, are stirring up campus life. 

A majority of students say abortion laws and restrictions around the discussion of race and gender would have at least some effect on where they go to college, according to a Gallup survey. 

It and other polls also find that some students at four-year universities feel as if they don’t belong or disrespected.

Students on the left and right alike say they’re increasingly reluctant to express controversial opinions, but that it’s okay to report on classmates or faculty who do. 

Hear more about this, against the backdrop of a contentious presidential election.

Listen to the whole series

TRANSCRIPT

Scroll to the end of this transcript to find out more about these topics.

Sound of promotional video: Congrats. Congrats. Congrats on getting into UC Davis! … Welcome to the friendliest. college campus!

Jon: This is a promotional video welcoming students to the University of California, Davis. 

Sound of violent protest

Kirk: And this is how welcoming the campus actually sounded when a conservative student group hosted a speaker who opposed abortion and disputed that there’s systemic racism in America. 

Jon: Protesters on one side said the speaker shouldn’t have been allowed to share his views at all. People on the other side wanted to hear him out. The event was canceled. 

Kirk: Welcome to college in America right now. 

Jon: More precisely, this is how unwelcoming college has become. Students and their parents say the breakdown of civility is affecting how they choose a school. And it’s gotten worse with the crackdowns on LGBTQ and reproductive rights and the conflict in Gaza. And we haven’t even discussed the looming presidential election. 

David Strauss is a partner in a consulting firm that conducted a survey about this. 

David Strauss: One out of four students told us that they had actually ruled out specific schools exclusively because of political considerations, and that proportion was basically equal whether a liberal student, a moderate student, or a conservative one. 

Kirk: So how do students and their families choose a college where they’ll feel they belong, where their views will be respected even by people who might disagree with them. Where they’ll hear both sides of an argument without someone trying to shut it down?

This is College Uncovered from GBH News and The Hechinger Report, a podcast pulling back the Ivy to reveal how colleges really work. 

I’m Kirk Carapezza with GBH News

Jon: And I’m Jon Marcus at The Hechinger Report. Colleges don’t want you to know how they operate. So GBH …

Kirk: … in collaboration with The Hechinger Report, is here to show you. In this election season, we’ll be exploring how deeply politicized higher education has become and what students and their parents can do to navigate these increasingly treacherous waters. 

Today on the show: “Unwelcome to College.”

Jon: So, Kirk, students used to pick a college based on its academic reputation and its social life. 

Kirk: Yeah, but the campus quad has become a battlefield in the culture war. 

Jon: There are assaults on speech and speakers from the left and the right, messy protests, new restrictions on abortion and LGBTQ rights, attacks on diversity and complaints about excessive wokeness. 

Kirk: Yeah. And for us as journalists, these conflicts have been hard to watch. But on a more human level, they’re affecting how welcome students from all backgrounds and points of view feel at many colleges and universities.

Jon: And how they pick a school. 

Lee Dunn: I want my child to be in a place that’s safe, that has a diversity of viewpoints and opinions, but doesn’t have, a situation that could feel unsafe, or where someone’s not open to my child being able to have an open debate. 

Kirk: That’s Lee Dunn. She’s the mother of a college-bound student, and I spoke with her at a Republican political rally. But she’s expressing a concern that extends pretty much across the political spectrum right now. 

Jon: That’s right, Kirk. Several national surveys show that a growing proportion of students and their families are picking colleges based on whether they’ll feel they belong. 

David Strauss: The liberal-leaning students tended to cite an array of issues that were mentioned by most respondents who had ruled out schools — reproductive rights, racial equality, LGBTQ+ restrictions, gun laws. Among the conservative students, it was more general: too Democratic, too liberal in terms of LGBTQ laws, conservative voices not welcome, and then too liberal on abortion and reproductive rights. 

Jon: That’s David Strauss again. He’s a partner in an education consulting group called Art & Science Group. And it did a poll that found a quarter of prospective students ruled out a college because of the political environment in the surrounding state. 

Strauss says abortion in particular has become a really polarizing issue for students since the Supreme Court decision two years ago allowing broad new state restrictions. 

David Strauss: Within a week, I received a call from a president of a client institution who told me that her state had moved very quickly to restrict reproductive rights. She heard from a mother asking, ‘How will you take care of my daughter when she returns to school?” She heard from several students — ‘I’m concerned about coming back.’ And she heard from a couple of prospective students saying, ‘I’m no longer coming.’ That phenomenon is probably playing out on the right as well. 

Kirk: And that’s just one issue, Jon. There are so many others. 

For example, since policies around diversity and equity started coming under attack, Black students are increasingly choosing to go to historically Black colleges where enrollments are up. And a national gay advocacy organization says young LGBTQ students who have been harassed are twice as likely to say they don’t plan to go to college at all. Lawmakers in several states have proposed more than 500 anti LGBTQ laws in recent years. 

Jon: Alyse Levine is a private college counselor in North Carolina, where she owns a company called Premium Prep. And she’s been seeing this a lot. 

Alyse Levine: We definitely have had students consider these policy changes, as well as just, like, the vibe of what they hear about on these campuses and who feels welcome and who feels like they can speak and who can’t speak. So I can think of a few LGBTQ students in particular, some transgender students who were feeling really uneasy and eliminating some schools because of their elimination of DEI policies. I would say we have an outspoken parent body, too. So it’s not just the students, it’s also parents drawing some lines of where they feel comfortable sending their students and where they feel comfortable sending their money. 

Jon: All kinds of students are experiencing this. Gallup finds that more than one in 10 students feel as if they don’t belong on campus. Even more than that reported feeling disrespected or unsafe, or they don’t think they can express their opinions freely. 

That’s one of the reasons Angela Amankwaah chose to enroll in an historically Black college, or HBCU — North Carolina Central University — where she’s a sophomore this fall. She’s a Black student from Denver. 

Angela Amankwaah: The political landscape really emphasized for me the importance of going to an HBCU, because I knew that I would be in a community of safe, welcoming both professors [and] peers, and just an institution that actually wanted me there. 

Jon: She says she’s felt welcome at the school compared to what she would expect to experience these days at a predominantly white institution. 

Angela Amankwaah: There’s not a single class where I’m the only Black student, or I’m the only Black woman. Like, there’s just Black students all around me. There’s nothing that I can do in terms of, like, my speech, the way I dress, or even things that happen on or off campus that are strange to other students. 

Jon: Javier Gomez left his home state of Florida after it restricted discussion in schools about sexual orientation. He went to college in New York instead. 

Javier Gomez: With the Don’t-Say-Gay bill that happened in 2022 and then expanded into higher education — I mean, some of those things make me feel unsafe as a student in the South. These policies are making it harder for us to speak our minds and also feel safe in our communities and in our schools. And I definitely felt unsafe because of the Florida policies have been implemented. It’s not easy, especially specifically being a queer and Latino and first-generation student. So it’s definitely been a hassle. 

Kirk: And now, since the conflict in Gaza, Jewish and Muslim students are reporting that they feel more uncomfortable on campus. Here’s college counselor Alyse Levine again. 

Alyse Levine: The biggest issue amongst our population this year was the rise in anti-semitism. And there was lots of hesitation among our students based on what was happening on particular campuses. 

Kirk: Maya Makarovskisays she heard chants she characterized as anti-semitic at MIT, where she’s a senior this year. She says fellow Jewish students are dropping out. 

Maya Makarovski: I know so many people that have taken semesters off or that are leaving MIT. And they’re, you know, grad students or postdocs, so they’re not going to go to another place. They’re just going to leave. It’s really heartbreaking. And I’ve seen it myself. You know, this semester and last semester, my academic performance and focus has just been completely shifted. It’s so difficult to maintain. 

Kirk: Surveys find conservative students feel especially unwelcome, and it’s liberal students who are much more likely to believe it’s okay to shut down a speaker who has opinions they don’t like, or report a professor or a fellow student for saying something they think is offensive. 

Here are a few more of the people I met at that Republican political rally: student Hayley Ebert and parents John DeMeritt and Jennifer Piacentini. 

Hayley Ebert: I didn’t want to take classes that I inherently disagreed with politically. 

John DeMeritt: It’s really something, as a parent, that you have to be mindful of. The people who claim to be the most tolerant are the least tolerant of anyone who doesn’t agree with their political views. If you’re not the right skin color or the right gender, all of this stuff plays into even admissions. 

Jennifer Piacentini: I don’t want them going to a small liberal school where it’s going to be all picketing and riots. 

Jon: Now, let’s put all this into context. Like a lot of political discussions these days, there’s a lot of heat. But part of what we do on this podcast is try to also bring some light. 

Colleges are really easy targets. They’re often accused of indoctrinating students into being woke leftists. But 18-year-olds already hold very liberal views. You remember being 18, right, Kirk? 

Kirk: It’s like it was yesterday. 

Jon: There’s a national survey from UCLA of incoming freshmen, and it finds that twice as many identify with the left as with the right. That’s before they ever set foot in a classroom. And even that Art & Science survey found that while politics might be affecting where students go to college, it’s not actually stopping them from going to college in the first place. 

David Strauss: It’s a striking observation you’re making, Jon. Given the volume of the discourse and the volume of concern we’re hearing from the right that colleges have become places of indoctrinating students, it was striking to us that only 2 percent of students who had told us they had been seriously considering going to a four-year institution, but had now decided not to do so — only 2 percent of those students told us that political considerations like those I’ve just described were even one of several factors. 

Jon: The proportion of conservative high school seniors who said they decided to not go to college for political reasons is a little higher. It’s around 5 percent. But that’s still lower than we might be led to assume. 

Kirk: So, okay, with that helpful context, how do you pick a college? How do you know where you’re going to feel like you belong? 

Jon: Colleges are all very different. Take it from Stephanie Marken, whose job is to study that as a senior partner at Gallup responsible for its work in higher education. 

Stephanie Marken: Some schools do a much better job of actually embracing the diversity of their student body and really making it a productive dialog between students, as opposed to a highly contentious and challenging culture, which is often where those experiences of disrespect set in. When a student actually reports that they went to an institution in which they were exposed to diversity, they’re more likely to say their degree is worth the cost. And that’s diversity in political ideology, party affiliation, religiosity, race, ethnicity — all types of diversity. 

Kirk: Of course, every college says it encourages intellectual diversity. But experts say you shouldn’t just rely on what they say or on the website or the campus tour. 

Carolyn Pippen: The thing about campus visits is that you really are just getting one perspective a lot of times. 

Jon: That’s Carolyn Pippen. She’s a private college counselor with the college counseling company IvyWise. 

Carolyn Pippen: So I also encourage students to do some more generalized research. So is there a multicultural center on campus? Is there an LGBTQ resource center on campus? And not just does it exist, but is it any good? Are they really doing things to support those students? Or reaching out to those offices, asking to connect with students who use those resources and getting information that way. There are also, I mean, you can Google college rankings and get a million useless websites, but there are also some really valid, reputable websites that will rank students based on friendliness towards LGBT students or, you know, how welcome do Black students feel on this campus? 

Jon: You can find a lot of those sources in The Hechinger Report’s “College Welcome Guide,” which tells you about laws and policies at universities and colleges in every state. We’ll post a link to it on this episode’s landing page, and to other resources. 

But to really get a sense of what it’s like on campus, Pippen says, you need to invest some time. 

Carolyn Pippen: Attend a class. If there’s an opportunity to stay overnight, stay in a dorm with another student. As much on-campus interaction as you can get, the better. Of course, that’s much more feasible further along in the process, when the schools that you’re looking at are more limited in number. You can’t do that with 30 different colleges. 

Jon: North Carolina college counselor Alyse Levine has another piece of advice: Don’t believe everything you read or see on TikTok. 

Alyse Levine: I think it is so important not to make sweeping generalizations about schools based on how a particular issue was mishandled. Going deeper means reaching out to a particular department. If it’s a larger university, you can reach out to a faculty member. Ask to sit in on a class and see what the dialog is like. Is there open discussion? Do conservatives feel like in these liberal bubbles they can’t speak their minds?

Kirk: Wherever students end up, Carolyn Pippen says they can usually find their own niche. 

Carolyn Pippen: Even if there is sort of an overarching feel, so to speak, to a campus or, you know, there’s one political stance or viewpoint or ideology that’s predominant, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a community within that campus for them. I always tell students, like, there are theater nerds at MIT. There is a group of students like you on just about every campus. It’s just a matter of finding them. 

Jon: The alternative is more polarization and more division, if students only interact with other students just like them. That’s the fear of everyone we talk to, regardless of politics. 

John Bitzan directs the right-leaning Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth at North Dakota State University. 

John Bitzan: You know, as a parent, I mean, I have sent four kids to universities myself. And I think about, well, what do I want students to get out of the experience? Well, one thing I want them to get is I want them to be exposed to different points of view and learn from people that are different from them and learn that not everybody sees the world the same way. And I think those are really an important parts of the college experience for students. I think that we want to teach students how to deal with people who have different points of view than them in the real world. And, again, if we put them in an echo chamber, that’s not going to happen. 

Jon: Alyse Levine worries about this, too. 

Alyse Levine: I love that college campuses can still be places where there can be discussion and disagreement, and that it’s a safe place to kind of have that, and to learn. I hope our institutions don’t become so polarized like our society has become. It’s scary to think we might be moving in that direction. 

Jon: And here’s another twist. Remember Javier Gomez, the student who left Florida after Florida passed the Don’t-Say-Gay Bill? He ended up going back to finish his associate degree. 

Javier Gomez: If I’m not there, then that’s one less voice who’s fighting the fight to dismantle these discriminatory policies. So, yes, it may feel unsafe. It may feel uncomfortable. But, as well, your voice is so important. And so that’s why it was important for me to be in Miami and be in the spaces where I was not welcome. Because if I’m not in those spaces, who else is going to be in them? 

Kirk: This is College Uncovered, from GBH News and The Hechinger Report. I’m Kirk Carapezza …

Jon: … and I’m Jon Marcus. 

We’d love to hear from you. Send us an email to GBHNewsconnect@wgbh.org, or leave us a voicemail at (617) 300-2486. And tell us what you want to know about how colleges really operate. 

This episode was produced and written by Kirk Carapazza and Jon Marcus, and it was edited by Jeff Keating. 

Meg Woolhouse is supervising editor. 

Ellen London is executive producer. 

Production assistance from Diane Adame. 

Mixing and sound design by David Goodman and Gary Mott. 

Theme song and original music by Left Roman out of MIT. 

Mei He is our project manager, and head of GBH podcasts is Devin Maverick Robins. 

College Uncovered is a production of GBH News and The Hechinger Report and distributed by PRX. It’s made possible by Lumina Foundation.

Thanks so much for listening. 

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