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.

Educators around the country are scrambling to save jobs and programs created in the last few years as they face the end of the federal funds aimed at helping schools recover from the pandemic.

The Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) Fund gave districts nearly $200 billion. School systems leveraged these funds to pay for high-dosage tutoring, early literacy support, leadership development, enhanced counseling, expanded student exposure to career pathways and other endeavors. But when access to that money ends later this year, school administrators will face stark choices. To make a difference now, they will have to do even more with less resources as their students continue to struggle.

That means coming up with answers to some tough questions. Can educators free up essential resources from ineffective programs and nonstrategic professional development? Will they close buildings that have dwindling numbers of students? Should states put money into a coalition to expand evidence-based reforms? How should school leaders address funding inequities and invest in historically marginalized students?

School administrators cannot rely on existing strategies and instead should use the lessons learned from the last few years to boldly envision and invest in the future. The task will not be an easy one because the education field is obsessed with shiny new objects when we should be investing more in leaders and systems advancing the hard work that will drive scalable innovation.

Related: Widen your perspective. Our free biweekly newsletter consults critical voices on innovation in education.

The changes our students need require the type of courage, coalition building and focus demonstrated by participants in the University of Virginia’s Partnership for Leaders in Education (UVA-PLE).

Some examples:

• In Ector County, Texas, student achievement rose after the district reorganized to focus on talent development and rigorous academics. The district also dramatically increased internship and associate degree credit opportunities.
• In Oklahoma City, the district consolidated schools before the pandemic, and it has used the savings to invest in instruction, student support, leadership development and popular student programs that focus on technology. These purposeful actions led to the start of overdue academic gains, decreasing the number of underperforming schools from 30 to 10, increasing districtwide proficiency in 14 of 14 tested areas in grades 3 to 8, and ensuring every high school achieves growth on the ACT.
• In Englewood, Colorado, an intensive focus on instructional leadership and systems helped every school that had been placed on the state’s accountability watch list move to good standing, and one of those schools received the state’s highest rating.

As part of UVA-PLE’s 20th anniversary, we closely examined recent successful system change efforts to better understand what leaders need to do next. We found that our most successful partners are more responsive to the reality of schools, teachers and students and collectively display three attributes:

• They ignite action with a compelling vision and a willingness to disrupt the system. Leaders face up to harsh realities, drive focus and allocate resources to where change is possible.
• They build coalitions for sustained effort. Enduring change can’t be top down or bottom up but must include administrators, teachers, students and the larger community.
• They lead the learning and embrace evidence. Leadership teams consider opportunities and risk-taking with a data-driven approach so that they can understand and amplify what is working.

Today, our instructional supports are often not interconnected, our tutoring efforts are typically not complementing instruction and our students are not given enough rigorous learning experiences to expand their postsecondary opportunities.

Related: OPINION: Urban school districts must make dramatic changes to survive

States and funders can play a critical role in system change by drawing attention to and expanding effective efforts like those mentioned above. Today, too much attention is being paid to issues that may or may not lead to long-term transformation but are very unlikely to help current students. That must change. Emerging AI efforts, for example, show great promise but, like past technological innovations, will have negligible student impact unless leaders design them with greater attention to coherence and rollout.

We need to invest more in initiatives that promise to advance educational outcomes and opportunity now and lay a stronger foundation for future ingenuity. And no matter the challenge, leaders must be supported as they make tough choices and reimagine resource allocation.

Rather than fear the end of ESSER funds, we see it as a galvanizing moment. Now is a time to invest resources boldly in successful strategies and in leaders who are ready to insist that teams work together to achieve compelling results.

William Robinson is executive director of the University of Virginia Partnership for Leaders in Education (UVA-PLE).

This story about the end of ESSER funds 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 OPINION: As federal pandemic funds end, K-12 systems must look for bold changes appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Reports about schools squandering their $190 billion in federal pandemic recovery money have been troubling.  Many districts spent that money on things that had nothing to do with academics, particularly building renovations. Less common, but more eye-popping were stories about new football fields, swimming pool passes, hotel rooms at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas and even the purchase of an ice cream truck. 

So I was surprised that two independent academic analyses released in June 2024 found that some of the money actually trickled down to students and helped them catch up academically.  Though the two studies used different methods, they arrived at strikingly similar numbers for the average growth in math and reading scores during the 2022-23 school year that could be attributed to each dollar of federal aid. 

One of the research teams, which includes Harvard University economist Tom Kane and Stanford University sociologist Sean Reardon, likened the gains to six days of learning in math and three days of learning in reading for every $1,000 in federal pandemic aid per student. Though that gain might seem small, high-poverty districts received an average of $7,700 per student, and those extra “days” of learning for low-income students added up. Still, these neediest children were projected to be one third of a grade level behind low-income students in 2019, before the pandemic disrupted education.

“Federal funding helped and it helped kids most in need,” wrote Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, on X in response to the two studies. Lake was not involved in either report, but has been closely tracking pandemic recovery. “And the spending was worth the gains,” Lake added. “But it will not be enough to do all that is needed.” 

The academic gains per aid dollar were close to what previous researchers had found for increases in school spending. In other words, federal pandemic aid for schools has been just as effective (or ineffective) as other infusions of money for schools. The Harvard-Stanford analysis calculated that the seemingly small academic gains per $1,000 could boost a student’s lifetime earnings by $1,238 – not a dramatic payoff, but not a public policy bust either. And that payoff doesn’t include other societal benefits from higher academic achievement, such as lower rates of arrests and teen motherhood. 

The most interesting nuggets from the two reports, however, were how the academic gains varied wildly across the nation. That’s not only because some schools used the money more effectively than others but also because some schools got much more aid per student.

The poorest districts in the nation, where 80 percent or more of the students live in families whose income is low enough to qualify for the federally funded school lunch program, demonstrated meaningful recovery because they received the most aid. About 6 percent of the 26 million public schoolchildren that the researchers studied are educated in districts this poor. These children had recovered almost half of their pandemic learning losses by the spring of 2023. The very poorest districts, representing 1 percent of the children, were potentially on track for an almost complete recovery in 2024 because they tended to receive the most aid per student. However, these students were far below grade level before the pandemic, so their recovery brings them back to a very low rung.

Some high-poverty school districts received much more aid per student than others. At the top end of the range, students in Detroit received about $26,000 each – $1.3 billion spread among fewer than 49,000 students. One in 10 high-poverty districts received more than $10,700 for each student. An equal number of high-poverty districts received less than $3,700 per student. These surprising differences for places with similar poverty levels occurred because pandemic aid was allocated according to the same byzantine rules that govern federal Title I funding to low-income schools. Those formulas give large minimum grants to small states, and more money to states that spend more per student. 

On the other end of the income spectrum are wealthier districts, where 30 percent or fewer students qualify for the lunch program, representing about a quarter of U.S. children. The Harvard-Stanford researchers expect these students to make an almost complete recovery. That’s not because of federal recovery funds; these districts received less than $1,000 per student, on average. Researchers explained that these students are on track to approach 2019 achievement levels because they didn’t suffer as much learning loss.  Wealthier families also had the means to hire tutors or time to help their children at home.

Middle-income districts, where between 30 percent and 80 percent of students are eligible for the lunch program, were caught in between. Roughly seven out of 10 children in this study fall into this category. Their learning losses were sometimes large, but their pandemic aid wasn’t. They tended to receive between $1,000 and $5,000 per student. Many of these students are still struggling to catch up.

In the second study, researchers Dan Goldhaber of the American Institutes for Research and Grace Falken of the University of Washington estimated that schools around the country, on average, would need an additional $13,000 per student for full recovery in reading and math.  That’s more than Congress appropriated.

There were signs that schools targeted interventions to their neediest students. In school districts that separately reported performance for low-income students, these students tended to post greater recovery per dollar of aid than wealthier students, the Goldhaber-Falken analysis shows.

Impact differed more by race, location and school spending. Districts with larger shares of white students tended to make greater achievement gains per dollar of federal aid than districts with larger shares of Black or Hispanic students. Small towns tended to produce more academic gains per dollar of aid than large cities. And school districts that spend less on education per pupil tended to see more academic gains per dollar of aid than high spenders. The latter makes sense: an extra dollar to a small budget makes a bigger difference than an extra dollar to a large budget. 

The most frustrating part of both reports is that we have no idea what schools did to help students catch up. Researchers weren’t able to connect the academic gains to tutoring, summer school or any of the other interventions that schools have been trying. Schools still have until September to decide how to spend their remaining pandemic recovery funds, and, unfortunately, these analyses provide zero guidance.

And maybe some of the non-academic things that schools spent money on weren’t so frivolous after all. A draft paper circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research in January 2024 calculated that school spending on basic infrastructure, such as air conditioning and heating systems, raised test scores. Spending on athletic facilities did not. 

Meanwhile, the final score on pandemic recovery for students is still to come. I’ll be looking out for it.

This story about federal funding for education 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.

The post PROOF POINTS: Some of the $190 billion in pandemic money for schools actually paid off appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Jacqueline Strickland has spent nearly her entire life caring for children in Washington, D.C., starting at age 7, when she began babysitting her siblings after school, and then more formally at 14, when she began working at a daycare center.

Despite the low pay, Strickland, 59, has stuck with her career, even as colleagues left child care for better-paying jobs at the post office or driving school buses.

“People look at child care providers as, you know, babysitters,” Strickland said. “But early childhood is the foundation. It’s the most important part of a child’s life because of the brain development that takes place.”

Three years ago, the financial landscape changed. Her salary jumped from $57,000 to $75,000 a year, thanks to a massive experiment underway in the nation’s capital, which seeks to solve one of the major drivers of the child care crisis: Most educators don’t make a livable wage.

The city-funded $80 million Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund has been transformational for district child care providers like Strickland; they’ve been able to pay down credit cards, move into new apartments, buy or pay off cars, schedule overdue dental procedures, help care for family members and even buy first homes.

But earlier this year, the roughly 4,000 early educators who have benefited from the pay equity program were dealt a blow by Mayor Muriel Bowser’s 2025 budget proposal. Bowser is suggesting eliminating funding for the program — along with cuts to other agencies — because of a requirement from the District of Columbia’s chief financial officer that the city replenish its depleted reserve fund, she said. That would mean a pay cut for the people who have already received a salary bump.

The budget is scheduled to be approved by the D.C. Council in June. The mayor’s office did not return a request for comment about her proposal.

Strickland, who had started the process of buying a home, has now put it on hold. She said that, before the equity fund, she had been waiting for the city to do right by child care providers like her.

“Just to be able to know that you can meet your monthly bills on time and not juggle money. To know that you can buy groceries and buy medication. To be able to afford healthcare and go to the doctor. To be able to put a little aside for retirement. I feel like I’m healthier because I don’t have to stress as much,” said Strickland, who works at an Educare center in the city’s Deanwood neighborhood.

If the mayor’s budget proposal comes to fruition, Strickland will go back to waiting.

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic toppled the country’s long-eroding child care system, policymakers in Washington had a vision for tackling the sector’s most intractable challenges, including access, recruitment, retention and pay.

That vision resulted in the pay equity fund, passed by  the D.C. Council in 2021. It provides supplemental payments to teachers in licensed child development centers and homes, with the goal of bumping up their pay to match the minimum salaries of D.C. public school teachers with the same credentials. The program has been funded through a tax on residents earning more than $250,000 a year.

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

“It’s one piece of a larger law and larger suite of investments meant to support the whole child,” said Anne Gunderson, a senior policy analyst at the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute. “Specifically, it’s a compensation program meant to disrupt pervasive and centuries-long undervaluing of caregiving, where, due to structural racism and sexism, that’s really disproportionately harming Black and brown women.”

The pay equity program requires teachers to earn more advanced certificates and degrees if they want their salaries to increase. The costs of their tuition and books are covered almost entirely by a child care scholarship from the district in tandem with the pay equity program.

Although the mandate to earn more credentials can be taxing and eats into the time early educators can spend caring for their own families, more than a dozen teachers interviewed for this story said it’s well worth the effort.

Artia Brown, who has been working at the Educare center in Washington’s Parkside neighborhood for 10 years, graduated with her associate degree this year from Trinity Washington University and is already enrolled in classes in the bachelor’s degree program. She plans to get her master’s degree and doctorate as well.

“I have a long journey ahead of me, but the pay equity really motivated me to go back to school and to make sure I get as much credentialing as I can,” Brown said. “It will pay a livable wage, and people are starting to understand how important early education is.”

The 41-year-old, who lives in Montgomery County, Maryland, with her college student son, saw her salary increase from $27,000 before the pay equity program to roughly $37,000 with the supplemental funding. It’s allowed her to pay off her car, start saving and support her two nieces.

The pay equity program also provides funding for child care facilities to offer free or low-cost health insurance to educators and other staff.

“Really what we’re seeing for the first time is an appropriate level of compensation and benefits for a workforce that has really been ignored for far too many years,” Gunderson said.

Early data suggests that the pay equity program has helped the city hire, recruit and retain child care employees.

The research firm Mathematica found that, by the end of 2022, the program’s initial payments had increased child care employment levels in Washington by about 100 additional educators, or 3 percent.  Moreover, nearly 2 in 3 educators said that, because of the program, they intend to work in the sector longer than they’d previously planned.

And the program’s impact has continued to grow. Comparing child care employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics between 2019 and 2023, Mathematica associated the program with an increase of 219 educators, or nearly 7 percent.

Child care center directors said that they believed the program’s payments were not only influencing their “best” educators’ decisions to stay at their centers, but helping them recruit qualified educators.

Early anecdotal data from the Urban institute shows that quality has increased alongside educator pay. When researchers asked early educators about the statement “Because of the Pay Equity Fund payments, I can better focus on the needs and development of children I work with,” 71 percent somewhat or strongly agreed.

Related: States stuck trying to fix early ed pay as feds drop the ball

Washington’s efforts to tackle pay equity in the child care sector are unique. While several states began experimenting with increasing the pay of child care employees following the pandemic, they’ve mostly focused on one-time bonuses, with funding from federal pandemic aid, rather than long-term solutions. Maine’s $30 million program, which provides an average monthly stipend of $400 to educators, is one of the largest responses from other states or cities, but doesn’t come close to matching the reach of Washington’s pay equity fund.

“It is really systems reform in a way that I don’t think other states have approached,” said Erica Greenberg, senior fellow at the Urban Institute’s Center on Education Data and Policy.

Because of the unique nature of the program, Greenberg says that there’s been deep interest from the federal government, states, cities, counties, philanthropists and advocates — all of whom are trying to keep the child care sector afloat.

“They all want to understand how to do something like this,” she says. “D.C. has really been a beacon in that way.”

Yet, as with the rollout of any major new policy, the equity fund has had its share of implementation hiccups.

Chief among them — at least from the educators’ perspective — is that it has sometimes been a hassle to get the money they are due. In 2024, for example, the program switched from making direct payments to teachers to disbursing the money to child care providers, who were then in charge of getting the money to their employees. And the requirements to opt into the program can pose major financial hurdles for smaller centers and home-based providers.

Beyond the particular operating challenges, however, is the program’s solvency.

As educators earn more advanced credentials, the District of Columbia must pay them more — as much as $114,000 for the highest degree earners. As child care centers recruit more teachers, the costs will continue to rise. The mayor considers the natural growth of the program unsustainable, advocates say they’ve been told.

“What I would say is cutting the program or eliminating the program is what’s unsustainable,” said Adam Barragan-Smith, advocacy manager at Educare DC. “The early childhood system in this country is a market failure. Families can’t pay any more. Programs cannot pay teachers any less. The fund has been a really important and game-changing investment so that we don’t have to pass any costs on to families, and we are able to pay teachers what they deserve.”

Amber Hodges, 36, is a lead teacher at Bright Beginnings, a center in the southeast quadrant of the city. When her salary went from roughly $43,000 to $52,000 annually, she used the money to buy a car, move into a nicer apartment building closer to work and take her five nieces and nephews back-to-school shopping.

The supplemental funding makes her feel like, finally, after so many years in the industry, the work of early childhood educators is getting the respect it deserves.

“We have the most important age group, and a lot of people just look at us and say, ‘Oh, you’re daycare teachers or babysitters,’” she said. “There is nothing worse for me when you say that to me. What? I am not a babysitter. Not a babysitter. At all.”

This story about D.C. child care 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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For Janelle Bell, a 39-year-old working mom, completing her degree wasn’t financially or personally possible. Her priority was providing for her family on an annual salary of just $30,000. Drowning in $40,000 of student loan debt, she was forced to drop out of college and work full time.

Janelle’s story is all too familiar throughout the U.S. — stuck in a low-paying job, struggling to make ends meet after being failed by college. Roughly 40 million Americans have left college without completing a degree — historically seen as a golden ticket to the middle class.

Yet even with a degree, many fall short of economic prosperity.

Data from 1 in 4 higher education institutions shows that, a decade after enrolling, the average salary for college attendees is less than the average salary of high school graduates.

Related: Interested in innovations in the field of higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly Higher Education newsletter.

A majority (56 percent) of Americans don’t think that a college degree is worth the cost, a recent survey found. College enrollment dropped by 8 percent from 2019 to 2022, and Americans are sending a clear message: They need and want more options than just a college degree to make a good living. With the average price of tuition and fees across private and public universities increasing over 130 percent in the last two decades, who can blame them?

These factors prompt Americans like Janelle to seek alternative paths into the middle class.

As college enrollments fell over the last decade, the number of apprenticeships increased by more than 50 percent, and nearly half of American workers now say they have some form of alternative credentials. Clearly, Americans want affordable, fast, flexible options with a high return on investment.

Policymakers must respond to this overwhelming shift in public opinion and start helping Americans pay for these college alternatives.

One approach: Expand the federal Pell Grant program in order to give Americans greater ownership of their education journeys and the financial freedom to pay for alternative programs that lead to a better life.

Since its authorization in 1965, Pell has awarded need-based federal financial aid to more than 80 million low-income students to pay for college. In the 2022-23 academic school year, 34 percent of undergraduate students received a Pell Grant.

Yet, research shows that Pell students graduate at a rate of 18 percentage points less than their non-Pell peers. In short, the large number of Pell aid recipients is not leading to a significantly higher number of lower-income Americans earning college degrees.

In its current state, the program is not meeting its founding goals. That’s why it’s time to update this nearly 60-year-old federal program to meet the educational needs and demands of Americans today.

During his State of the Union speech, President Biden signaled his intent to “continue increasing the Pell Grants to working- and middle-class families” and ensure that college remains affordable. His fiscal year 2025 budget proposal includes a $2.1 billion increase in federal funding as part of the administration’s plan to double the maximum Pell Grant award by 2029.

But this doesn’t go far enough. We must also expand this access to Americans like Janelle, who need to be able to pay for short-term, nondegree education options.

Related: OPINION: Here’s why a costly college education should not be the only path to career success

Thankfully, the Bipartisan Workforce Pell Act, expected to be up for a full vote in the House of Representatives this year, would expand the Pell Grant program to include affordable and flexible short-term career education programs.

The bill would also create standards for these programs, to ensure that they provide the training necessary for today’s most in-demand industries and meet employer hiring requirements.

Giving Americans more access to educational routes without the high price tag of a four-year degree would create a new, more diverse and skilled talent pool that we could easily connect to employers looking to fill in-demand jobs.

This modern talent pool would benefit the entire economy. Manufacturing, for instance, is still recovering from the pandemic and is hungry for skilled talent. The National Association of Manufacturers recently projected that roughly 2.1 million manufacturing jobs could go unfilled by 2030.

Many of these jobs require training beyond a high school diploma, and short-term programs have proven successful at filling that gap. This is particularly important as more sectors become increasingly tech driven. For example, there is a pressing need for data analytics and digital skills that we know can be quickly taught by nondegree programs.

The median salary for U.S. high school graduates with no college experience is a little over $44,000 — which doesn’t cover the roughly $4,300 a month that a single person needs to afford today’s living expenses.

Americans who completed programs at the national workforce development nonprofit we run are earning wages that are higher than those of U.S. high school grads without a college degree, according to our latest Wage Gain Analysis.

In a study of 2018-22 program completers, University of Virginia researchers found that three-plus months after completion, our learners’ average annual wages had increased from $26,000 to $50,000 — more than 92 percent.

These are life-changing wage increases that can help a family afford long-term housing, allow a parent to go from working two jobs to one or enable these Americans to pay for basic medical care.

After Janelle completed her training with us and landed a job, her annual wages increased by 66 percent, and today she’s a successful technical project coordinator earning $50,000 a year. Her career promises continued upward mobility, opening new financial opportunities that seemed unattainable just a few years ago, so that she and her family can thrive.

Moving Americans from low-wage jobs into family-sustaining careers is possible. Imagine how many more lives could be changed if we gave more people the power to use federal Pell aid to pay for these pathways.

College degrees should remain one of the many learning options available to Americans wanting to further their education. But it’s time for policymakers, workforce development leaders and businesses to advocate for lower-cost, short-term education opportunities, and that starts with passing the Bipartisan Workforce Pell Act.

Connor Diemand-Yauman and Rebecca Taber Staehelin are co-CEOs of Merit America.

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Amid the excitement and anticipation that typically accompany the approach of graduation day there hangs a disheartening reality at our high schools this year: many students won’t have the clarity of knowing where their future lies before they walk across the graduation stage.

The delay in processing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid forms has cast an unexpected shadow over their aspirations, particularly for those who are the first in their families to pursue higher education.

The resulting uncertainty is striking hardest at the hearts of our first-generation and socioeconomically disadvantaged students – especially those with undocumented parents – for whom the prospect of college is not just a personal triumph, but often a generational milestone.

The new “better” FAFSA introduced this year was in fact worse for most students because of system glitches and was particularly troublesome for any student with a parent who does not have a social security number.

Our students in this situation will likely not know their federal financial aid packages until after many private college decision deadlines.  The predicament disproportionately burdens students who are already navigating a labyrinthine college application process, often without essential support systems available to their more affluent peers.

We applaud the University of California, California State University, and other public institutions nationwide for extending their deadlines to accommodate these delays. We also applaud those private universities that have followed suit. But there remain many private universities that have not.

Students from low-income backgrounds are only about half as likely to enroll and complete college by age 26, according to the National College Attainment Network. This disparity is further amplified for students with undocumented parents, who may face invisible challenges due to limited finances, fear of deportation for themselves or their families, and a general sense of uncertainty about their place in the educational landscape.

The additional stress of uncertain financial aid deadlines only compounds such challenges, adding another layer of difficulty and potentially dissuading them from pursuing their educational ambitions.

This issue arises at a critical juncture in higher education. Universities across the nation are seeking to diversify their student bodies and attract more first-generation students. Creating a more equitable playing field for all students is paramount in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling ending affirmative action.

The current FAFSA delay throws a wrench into these efforts.

The schools we head in the San Francisco Bay Area, Alpha Public Schools and Cristo Rey San José, collectively serve 198 high school seniors, the majority of whom will be first-generation college students – including a significant portion with undocumented parents.

Their journey is already fraught with obstacles. They already navigate complex application processes, deal with financial constraints, and often lack the familial support that many of their peers take for granted.  FAFSA delays have thrust additional hurdles upon our students.

We need additional collective action on the part of more colleges, demonstrating a commitment to equitable educational access while shielding students from the repercussions of administrative inefficiencies beyond their control.

We also urge fellow organizations and institutions to unite in advocating for a long-term solution on a national scale.

Let us stand together in defense of the dreams and aspirations of our nation’s youth regardless of their background or the federal government’s administrative shortcomings.

Together, we can ensure that the door to higher education remains open for all students.

Shara Hegde is the CEO of Alpha Public Schools, a network of charter schools in San Jose, CA.

Silvia Scandar Mahan is the president and CEO of Cristo Rey San José Jesuit High School and Corporate Work Study Program.

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

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MINERAL WELLS, Texas — On many Friday nights in this rural stretch of north Texas, you can find Judith Echanique working the concession stands, flush with local fans. 

“I’m always here,” said Echanique, whose 10th-grade daughter and fifth-grade son attend the local public schools. On this February night, she was serving hot dogs, nachos, soda and candy to boosters of the JV and varsity soccer teams. “I was telling my daughter, even if you’ve graduated high school, I will still always come and volunteer, because I love being a mom and I love being involved in the community.” 

In Mineral Wells — a town of about 15,000 located 90 minutes west of Dallas — community members come together to cheer on sports teams, celebrate homecoming and applaud the school choir.

They’re familiar rituals in rural communities throughout the state, where public schools can play an outsized role, serving as social and cultural hubs, major employers and sources of collective pride and community identity. 

“I truly believe the school district is the heart of our town,” said Melanie Stubblefield, who teaches music in the fourth, fifth and sixth grades at Travis Elementary School in the Mineral Wells district, which has about 3,230 students spread across its seven schools.  

A slate of defiant Texas Republican lawmakers agreed. Last legislative session, they repeatedly refused to support a school voucher proposal championed by their Republican governor, Greg Abbott. The program would have allowed any Texas student to use public money to offset the cost of private-school tuition, but skeptical lawmakers worried the plan would divert dollars from public schools, tightening district budgets without a proportionate reduction in costs.

Republicans nationwide, many of whom already supported such private school vouchers, seized upon the issue following the pandemic, using parents’ frustration with remote schooling as one reason to expand these options. Abbott pitched his version as an effort to empower parents. 

“Our schools are for education, not indoctrination,” Abbott said at an event at the capital last spring. “The solution to this problem is empowering parents to choose the school that’s right for their child.” His office did not respond to several requests for comment.

Related: Florida just expanded school vouchers — again. What does that really mean?

The governor worked to court support by tying the passage of his voucher plan to a $7.6 billion funding boost for public schools that included teacher pay raises. Still, a stalwart group of 21 House lawmakers, most of whom represent rural areas and fear the measure would pull resources away from their public schools, sided with state Democrats to torpedo the legislation. 

“Abbott wanted them to bend the knee and kiss the ring, and they’re just not going to do it. That ain’t Texas,” said Rev. Charles Johnson, executive director of Pastors for Texas Children, a public-school advocacy group. “It is Texan to vote in the interest of your community and constituents.”

Others insist the governor’s plan would have little impact on high-performing public schools, where parents are satisfied and unlikely to pull their students. For parents who aren’t, vouchers provide an alternative. 

“We cannot ignore these cries from parents who are saying, ‘Can we please acknowledge that there are some kids that could be better served with a different option?’ That’s what empowering parents is all about,” said Mandy Drogin, who directs Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Next Generation Texas campaign. “We trust individuals to make the best choices for their lives and their families.”

Now, Abbott is targeting the holdouts, many of whom he backed in past contests, in a manner similar to what Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds did in Iowa in 2022, when she endorsed challengers during the primary, helping elect lawmakers who would support her school choice bill. Abbott has crisscrossed the state to stump for their challengers and used his own war chest, lined with a $6 million donation from a Pennsylvania billionaire who supports private school vouchers, to help power pro-voucher candidates’ campaigns ahead of the March 5 primary. 

In many of these districts, the primary election will decide the winner of the race, with Democrats or other challengers unlikely to prevail during the general election in deeply conservative regions.  

The fight over vouchers generally divides Democrats and Republicans, but along with rural resistance in Texas, conservative rural lawmakers in Iowa, Oklahoma and Georgia have battled with their Republican counterparts over the issue, too. Last year, Oklahoma passed a measure that finally satisfied House Speaker Charles McCall, who hails from the rural town of Atoka (3,000-plus residents) and had previously rejected private-school subsidies in the deep-red state. Georgia has yet to find a measure that all members of the state GOP will back, although Republican Gov. Brian Kemp is trying again this year. 

For some in Texas, Abbott’s primary endorsements represent a betrayal.  

“It was the rural communities that gave the governor his double-digit win. We are conservative at the very core. That’s just who we are,” said Randy Willis, executive director of the Texas Association of Rural Schools. “That the governor wants to go after our conservative leaders and say they’re not conservative enough. It’s just wrong.”

Related: Arizona gave families public money for private schools. Then private schools raised tuition

At a mid-February campaign event in Springtown, Texas, Republican Rep. Glenn Rogers, a two-term incumbent who represents Parker, Palo Pinto, and Stephens County, was on the defensive. 

“These last two sessions have been the most conservative in Texas history,” Rogers told the crowd. “The governor and I have agreed on every single legislative priority. I have supported 100 percent of his priorities except one, and y’all probably know what that is: vouchers.” 

The sixth-generation rancher has conservative credentials. He’s been endorsed by the NRA and the anti-abortion group Texas Alliance for Life and helped pass bills to ban gender-affirming medical care for minors, severely restrict abortion access, shut down diversity and equity programs at state universities and invest in border security. 

Still, his stance on vouchers cost him the governor’s endorsement. Now, alongside more than a dozen incumbents up for re-election, Rogers finds himself in a tight primary race against the governor’s pick, Mike Olcott. 

According to Rogers, nearly 90 percent of the messages his office received from constituents during the special sessions were to voice opposition to vouchers. 

“We need to get away from this crazy talk that Republicans can’t pay for public schools and it’s not conservative,” Rogers said. “There’s nothing more conservative than supporting our public schools.”

Under the proposed plan, if a parent chose to use the voucher benefit, state funding — once allocated to the student’s public school — would follow the student to their private school. According to an analysis from the nonpartisan public policy nonprofit Every Texan, if just 1 percent of the public-school population in Rogers’ district chose to use school vouchers, schools would stand to lose more than $4 million in state money. At a 5 percent usage rate, that funding loss jumps to more than $21 million.

School administrators say that kind of hit would devastate already tight operating budgets — strained by declining enrollment after the pandemic and evaporating federal relief funding. And in rural communities without comprehensive private-school options, residents feel they have little to gain from a voucher plan. 

“We accept all-comers to our school district,” Mineral Wells Superintendent John Kuhn said. “We don’t turn kids away and say, ‘I’m sorry, we can’t handle your disability, or you don’t belong here.’ That, to me, is the state’s responsibility — not to pick and choose who gets an education.”

Ashley Mooneyham, an instructional coach in the Springtown school system, attended the Rogers event with two district colleagues. Mooneyham said she typically avoids engaging in politics, but the voucher issue motivated her to attend and speak out on social media. 

“I never post anything political at all, and I’ve been posting pretty frequently. I’m just trying to get the word out as much as possible,” Mooneyham said. “It’s really scary to me. I don’t think people understand how close vouchers are to getting passed in Texas and how drastically that’s going to change everything.”

Related: School choice had a big moment in the pandemic. But is it what parents want for the long run?

Calvin Jillson, a professor of political science at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said while he expects most incumbents to survive their primary challenges, Abbott has gained ground.  

“He’s already been successful in a few cases where a member he would have targeted decided not to run for reelection,” said Jillson. “They may have made that decision for other reasons, but certainly, the idea of running against the governor was unappealing.”

Jillson said Abbott could exert even more influence if he’s able to flip even a few seats through his primary endorsements.

“If the governor were able to dislodge several incumbents, particularly respected incumbents who’ve been around for a while, that would put the fear of God in others,” Jillson said.

Despite their potential political cost, vouchers are not a central talking point in the campaign. Although the issue is divisive among Republicans, it’s not necessarily animating. 

Related: TikTok billionaire spends millions on Texas candidates who support school voucher efforts

A poll in early February from the University of Houston’s Hobby School of Public Affairs found that 60 percent of Republican primary voters would be “less likely” to support an incumbent representative who voted against voucher legislation. Yet another recent poll by the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin found that only 2 percent of Republican primary voters listed vouchers as a “most important” issue. 

“The No. 1 issue is the border; No. 2 is property taxes and inflation,” said Rogers. “When we go door to door, rarely do [vouchers] come up, and we don’t lead with it. We lead with the border because that’s what voters care about the most. But boy, if they give us a foot in the door, we’re ready to talk about it.”

Rogers’ challenger, Olcott, has a platform that mirrors his opponent’s on gun rights, abortion and border security. Olcott lists his support for Abbott’s universal school choice plan second-to-last on his website’s list of issues. 

 When it does come up, however, the governor and Olcott pitch the voucher plan as a necessary response to “woke ideology” circulating in public schools, providing parents with freedom to protect their children from indoctrination.  

But rural educators have pushed back on those talking points, insisting their districts operate far from the culture wars of urban centers. 

“That word [indoctrinate] always gets us fired up,” said Mooneyham. “If we could indoctrinate students, we would indoctrinate them to put their names on their paper or turn in their homework, things like that.”

At stake — according to some rural educators — is not just an election result, but the future of conservative, rural life. 

“What are you going to do when that school district that is the main employer of that small town has to shutter its doors, and that little town just disappears? What happens to all of the traditions and all the memories people had of that school district?” said Brandon Dennard, superintendent of the Red Lick school district in Texarkana, Texas.  

“The very thing you profess to love, you’re trying to destroy.”

This story about Texas school vouchers 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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Though college enrollment seems to be stabilizing after the pandemic disruptions, predictions for the next 15 years are grim. Colleges will be hurt financially by fewer tuition-paying students, and many will have to merge with other institutions or make significant changes to the way they operate if they want to keep their doors open.

At least 30 colleges closed their only or final campus in the first 10 months of 2023, including 14 nonprofit colleges and 16 for-profit colleges, according to an analysis of federal data by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, or SHEEO. Among nonprofits, this came on the heels of 2022, when 23 of them closed, along with 25 for-profit institutions. Before 2022, the greatest number of nonprofit colleges that closed in a single year was 13. 

Over the past two decades, far more for-profit colleges closed each year than nonprofits. An average of nine nonprofit colleges closed each year, compared to an average of 47 for-profit colleges. 

This time last year, experts predicted we’d see another wave of college closures, mostly institutions that were struggling before the pandemic and were kept afloat by Covid-era funding. Since then, keeping their doors open has become unrealistic for these colleges, many of which are regional private colleges. 

“It’s not corruption, it’s not financial misappropriation of funds, it’s just that they can’t rebound enrollment.”

Rachel Burns, a senior policy analyst at SHEEO. 

For many, the situation has been made worse by the enrollment declines during the pandemic. 

“It’s not corruption, it’s not financial misappropriation of funds, it’s just that they can’t rebound enrollment,” said Rachel Burns, a senior policy analyst at SHEEO. 

Data from the National Student Clearinghouse shows that undergraduate enrollment has stabilized and even slightly increased for the first time since the pandemic, but a continuing decline in birth rates means that fewer high school seniors will be graduating after 2025, so these colleges will face even greater enrollment challenges in the years to come.

Hundreds of colleges are expected to see significant enrollment declines in the coming years, according to David Attis, managing director of research at the education consulting company EAB. Among the reasons, he said, are declining birthrates, smaller shares of students choosing college, and college-going students veering toward larger and more selective institutions.

By 2030, 449 colleges are expected to see a 25 percent decline in enrollment and 182 colleges are expected to see a 50 percent decline, according to an EAB analysis of federal enrollment data. By 2035, those numbers are expected to rise to 534 colleges expecting a 25 percent decline and 227 colleges expecting a 50 percent decline; by 2040, a total of 566 colleges are expected to see a 25 percent decline and 247 are expected to see a 50 percent decline, according to  EAB’s analysis. 

These are predictions, of course, and they certainly don’t ensure that all those colleges will close. But with these drops in enrollment expected to continue, colleges need to plan now and make significant changes in order to survive, Attis said.

“Imagine if you lose half your students – that is a threat to your continued existence.”

David Attis, managing director of research at the education consulting company EAB.

“Imagine if you lose half your students – that is a threat to your continued existence,” Attis said. “You’ll have to make some pretty dramatic changes. It’s not just a ‘We’ll cut a few academic programs,’ or ‘We’ll trim our administrative staff a little bit.’ That requires a real reorientation of your whole strategy.”

Many colleges face the decision to merge with another institution or close down entirely, Attis said. And if they wait too long to find a college to merge with, they really won’t have a choice. 

“If you wait until you’re on the verge of closure, you’re not a particularly attractive partner,” Attis said. “But if you’re not on the verge of closure, then you’re not as motivated to find that partner.”

Attis said that he’s been surprised to hear from several leaders of regional colleges – both private and public – that they are in talks about mergers. 

“Whether they’ve pursued them or not, they’ve either made a call or gotten a call,” Attis said. “They’re thinking about it in a way I hadn’t heard in the past.” 

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As Columbia University puts the last touches on its brand-new campus in Harlem, it has reached a milestone: The university is now the largest private landowner in New York City.

In a city where land is more valuable than almost anywhere in the nation, the school now owns more than 320 properties, with a combined value of nearly $4 billion. The growth has helped it stay competitive within the Ivy League and meet its broader ambitions to become a global institution.

By many measures, those ambitions have also helped lift the city around it, attracting higher numbers of students, producing new jobs and boosting New York’s reputation as an international center of knowledge.

But as Columbia has expanded its footprint, it has also become more of a drain on the city budget because of a state law more than 200 years old that allows universities, museums and other nonprofits to pay almost no property taxes.

The law saves Columbia more than $182 million annually, according to an analysis by The New York Times. The amount has soared from $38 million just 15 years ago as the university has bought up more properties and their value has increased.

Columbia’s property tax savings, which are a fraction of its $14.3 billion endowment, far exceed the tax breaks granted to many high-profile commercial developments, including large-scale sites like Hudson Yards. They are 50 percent larger than those at Yankee Stadium and greater than the combined tax deals for Citi Field and Madison Square Garden.

Even as Columbia has swallowed up more land, it has taken fewer students from New York City. Since 2010, the number of city students enrolled in Columbia’s undergraduate ranks has declined by 37 percent.

Nearly every state has property tax exemptions for nonprofits, including universities, which are exempt from paying taxes on their academic buildings and dormitories. (Universities, including Columbia, pay tax on properties they own that are not used for educational purposes.)

But they are often contentious, and the seven other Ivy League universities pay some property taxes on those buildings or voluntarily pay millions of dollars every year to their local governments and school districts.

Not one university in New York City does, including two of the nation’s wealthiest institutions, Columbia and N.Y.U., which had property tax savings of $145 million this year.

“I call them the untouchables: I can’t think of anyone who has been willing to take on this issue,” said Harvey Robins, who worked for Mayor Edward I. Koch and Mayor David N. Dinkins and has followed the issue of tax exemptions for universities. “It’s really important that we begin a conversation finally about who pays what and who subsidizes whom.”

A Columbia University spokeswoman, Samantha Slater, pointed to $170 million in contributions the university had pledged to the community near its campuses starting in 2009, saying the investments “have been a model for similar investments by other universities.”

“The effect is the same — forging partnerships with the city and local organizations to invest in the economic development of the community,” she said in a statement. She did not respond to specific questions about the institution’s property tax savings and whether it had considered making annual payments to the city.

The debate may have been muted in New York because the city has other major revenue streams, such as Wall Street. Columbia has also spent more than $2 million over the last five years to retain some of the city’s most prominent lobbying firms, who meet with officials, including the mayor, on a number of issues, including its real estate interests.

“They have a very powerful board, they talk to the mayor. I think it should be looked at, particularly in the years coming up. If you look at the budget deficits, they’re massive.”

Gale Brewer, a councilwoman and former Manhattan borough president

But with financial challenges looming, a growing number of city and state officials are re-examining the longstanding exemptions for private universities. Property tax revenue accounts for more than 40 percent of the city’s total tax collections.

Columbia’s contribution probably would be small in the scheme of the more than $31 billion the city collects every year. But it is also significantly more than some of the expenses that city leaders haggled over during budget negotiations this year. Programs serving inmates at the troubled Rikers Island jail complex were cut, for example, and the budget for free preschool for 3-year-olds was reduced.

In the coming year, federal pandemic funds — which the city has leaned on to shore up public school budgets and other services — are drying up, even as the city says it expects to spend billions to manage an influx of migrants from the southern border. Mayor Eric Adams has asked city agencies to cut their budgets by 5 percent by November and has said the Police and Fire Departments, among others, will need to slice overtime.

Gale Brewer, a councilwoman and former Manhattan borough president, said she was among those the university has lobbied in recent years, mostly in connection with faculty housing. She said she was not sure why city officials have not asked Columbia and N.Y.U. to make annual payments.

“They have a very powerful board, they talk to the mayor,” she said. “I think it should be looked at, particularly in the years coming up. If you look at the budget deficits, they’re massive.”

‘Civic project’ or ‘land grab’?

The state’s tax breaks for nonprofits date to 1799, long before Columbia and other higher education institutions became vast enterprises with billion-dollar endowments. At the time, the country’s first universities were primarily connected to religious denominations and were deemed charitable enterprises.

Columbia opened in 1754 and moved in the early 20th century to its core Morningside Heights campus, where it confined itself for nearly a century. In 1968, it abandoned its move to construct a gym on the edge of Harlem — a project that was derided as “Gym Crow” — after enormous protests. Then, in the early 2000s, Columbia administrators, led by its president at the time, Lee C. Bollinger, said the university could no longer remain competitive without a larger campus.

To help Columbia expand, New York State condemned land in 2008 in the West Harlem neighborhood of Manhattanville and used eminent domain to seize properties for the university. The university made promises to be a good neighbor and hire local workers. 

“There was a time when Columbia really turned its back on where it was located,” Bollinger said in a 2006 interview with The Times. “I wanted to take exactly the opposite approach.”

Bollinger, who declined to comment for this article, told community leaders and neighborhood groups that the university had changed since the 1968 upheaval. 

A lawsuit briefly halted the Bollinger plan because judges agreed it was not a “civic project.” Nick Sprayregen owned self-storage warehouses in West Harlem and fought Columbia’s efforts to buy his properties. “This is a really nothing more than a land grab of the most extreme type,” Sprayregen said in 2007. He died in 2016.

A higher court allowed the project to go forward. Columbia moved several dozen residents to a 12-story condominium building and gave them $7,000 each.

As it expanded, the university said that it spent at least $600 million with local firms, many of them owned by women and people of color, for construction, maintenance and repairs at its campuses — approximately 16 percent of the total it spent during that time period.

The university has also paid out about $104 million of the $170 million it pledged to the community — to local organizations, an affordable housing fund and city agencies like the Parks Department. The university also said it had spent more than $100 million in upgrades to local infrastructure since 2009 and that it would soon pay to replace two escalators at a subway station on 125th Street.

“Columbia continues to prioritize engagement with our local community — from Morningside Heights to Harlem, Washington Heights and beyond,” Slater, the Columbia spokeswoman, said in a statement. “We focus on meaningful investments that provide local jobs and economic opportunity, along with sustainable community partnerships.”

Maritta Dunn, the former chairwoman of Community Board 9 who lives across the street from the new campus, praised it. “It gives the local community a nearby pretty park with trees, benches and tables,” she said.

But some residents said the university ultimately hired few local residents, overlooked local companies for much of the work and has not been as welcoming to neighbors as promised.

“It didn’t happen the way I thought it should have happened,” said Walter J. Edwards, the founder of the Harlem Business Alliance whose company, Full Spectrum, helped renovate a 1920s building on the new campus. “If you are displacing us, give us something.”

Altagracia Hiraldo, who runs the Dominican Community Center, said she had hoped for more, including the chance for neighborhood nonprofits like hers to work on campus.

“They forgot about us,” Hiraldo said.

Since the expansion, Columbia’s new properties in West Harlem have more than doubled the market value of the neighborhood, and they are now valued at $644 million. The centerpiece of the campus is the Jerome L. Greene Science Center, a massive glass and steel structure. Additional buildings are under construction, including a 34-story residential tower for graduate students and faculty.

Because Columbia took over properties that had been paying taxes, the city now collects half the annual property taxes that it collected on that land in 2008, The Times found.

Taking more space, but not more students

Local public schools have questioned Columbia’s commitment to its surrounding community. As recently as 2010, a quarter of Columbia’s undergraduate students came from New York City: 2,236 students. By 2022, that number had decreased to 1,416, or about 15 percent of the student body.

Several administrators at local public schools said that the university, which has been vocal in supporting diversity and affirmative action, has shown minimal interest in recruiting local students, especially children from low-income families.

Its overall student body is 7 percent Black and 15 percent Latino, and 22 percent of students receive Pell grants, which are aimed at low-income students. The racial breakdown is similar to other Ivy League universities; a higher share of Pell-eligible students attend than at some of its peers. (Columbia declined to share demographic data for its New York City students.)

Jerome Furman, a counselor at East Side Community School in the East Village of Manhattan, where about two-thirds of students are low income, said he has had students accepted to every Ivy League college except Columbia in his seven years at the school.

He said his calls and emails about college fairs or students who apply go unanswered.

“The relationship has been nonexistent,” Furman said.

“If New York is such an asset to them, then it makes sense to make sure that New York students are represented in a real capacity in the student body.”

Fred Raphael, the college and career counselor at Boerum Hill School for International Studies in Brooklyn

Columbia would not say how many New York City public school students are enrolled, but said that the number had increased in the past five years and that students from 45 of the city’s public high schools entered Columbia last year.

Fred Raphael, the college and career counselor at Boerum Hill School for International Studies in Brooklyn, where a majority of students are Black or Latino, said that acceptances have become so rare that he doesn’t see Columbia as a realistic option, even for his highest-performing students.

“If New York is such an asset to them,” he said, “then it makes sense to make sure that New York students are represented in a real capacity in the student body.”

Other urban Ivy League universities declined to share enrollment from their home cities, except for Brown University, located in Providence, R.I. A Brown spokesman said on average between 20 and 30 undergraduates from Providence public schools enrolled in a given year — slightly more than from comparably sized cities outside Rhode Island.

Other major universities in the city have a larger percentage of New Yorkers. At Fordham University in the Bronx, 23 percent of undergraduates come from New York City, a percentage that has been stable for the last decade. At N.Y.U., about 17 percent of undergraduate students are New York City residents.

Like Columbia, N.Y.U. has sought to transform itself into a national and global powerhouse. It has been expanding since the 1980s and recently began to build out its own campus, for the most part on land it already owned, including a 23-story glass and steel academic building in Greenwich Village that cost $1.2 billion to construct. After community backlash, the expansion has been scaled back, but the university will pay no property taxes.

“I would bet my life that they are nowhere near the end of their growth,” said Andrew Berman, the executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group Village Preservation.

An N.Y.U. spokesman pointed to the contributions the university makes to the city, including its students who assist in public school classrooms and its relatively large Higher Educational Opportunity Program, which provides college access for low-income New Yorkers. It also noted that the majority of its graduates stay in New York for work and that its thousands of employees pay in excess of $100 million in payroll taxes.

“We recognize the budget challenges the city faces. Nevertheless, we feel the charitable status that derives from N.Y.U.’s educational mission — and the attendant tax policies — is not a one-way exchange,” said an N.Y.U. spokesman, John Beckman. “We are deeply appreciative of those policies, but we also take some humble pride in the many, many ways, small and large, that N.Y.U. contributes to the city’s well-being and its economy.”

New York’s exceptional exceptions

New York is among 49 other states with property tax exemptions for private, nonprofit entities, which supporters say allow them to provide crucial social, economic and cultural benefits to their communities. In the case of universities, they conduct often costly research and public-policy studies and employ people who pay income taxes.

But in other cities, officials have pressured universities to make voluntary payments, known as payments in lieu of taxes, or PILOTs, or similar annual donations. Even within New York State, other cities have charted a different course.

In upstate Ithaca, Cornell University started making annual payments decades ago that have now grown to $1.6 million and are expected to climb to $4 million in October.

Columbia has sought to maintain close ties to many of the people who might put pressure on it to contribute, spending more than $2.2 million since 2017 on firms that lobby city and state officials. The university said that the firms that it employs provided other services in addition to lobbying and spent most of their lobbying efforts on education, research and health care.

A spokesman for Mayor Adams, Jonah Allon, said that the city’s financial problems meant “every option is on the table to ensure we continue to fund city services we rely on.” But he did not directly respond to questions about whether the city had considered asking the universities to make voluntary payments.

Recently, calls for the universities to pay more have been growing.

After then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo proposed a $485 million cut in 2016 to CUNY, the city’s public university system, the union that represents its professors began calling for private universities to help offset the cuts.

“CUNY is the higher education institution that serves the working people of New York,” said James Davis, the president of the union, “and those same working people are effectively subsidizing these tax breaks for Columbia and N.Y.U.”

Assemblywoman Deborah J. Glick, a Democrat who represents an area that includes New York University’s Manhattan campus, has spent a decade questioning the tax exemptions. In a recent interview, the city’s comptroller, Brad Lander, praised the universities, but said they should “step up” to help CUNY.

“There’s just more urgency than ever,” he said.

During the 2021 mayoral campaign, candidates including Andrew Yang and Curtis Sliwa called for ending the property tax exemptions altogether.

But forcing the universities to pay property taxes would require lawmakers in Albany to change state law.

Zohran Mamdani, a state assemblyman who represents parts of Queens, has said he plans to try this year, with a bill that would end property tax exemptions for private higher education institutions with exemptions of more than $50 million in real estate.*

The only private universities that meet that threshold are Columbia and N.Y.U.

Liset Cruz and Emma G. Fitzsimmons contributed reporting.

*Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated how a bill that would end property tax exemptions for private higher education institutions would determine which schools are eligible. It would be for institutions with annual property-tax exemptions of more than $50 million, not more than $50 million in real estate holdings.

This story was produced in collaboration with The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit news outlet that covers education. Hechinger is an independent unit at Teachers College, Columbia University.

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In Hopewell, Virginia, about 20 miles southeast of Richmond, Juanterria Browne spends her days providing child care for children with disabilities, a demographic for which it is notoriously difficult to find care. Browne, who opened Kidz with Goals Unlimited, LLC, in early 2020, was hit hard by the pandemic. Parents pulled their children out of care, leaving Browne, a nurse and mother of three, with nearly $15,000 in unpaid tuition bills. She borrowed money from her parents and paid herself a salary of just $500 that year, so she could continue to provide meals for the children in her care, afford rent and utilities for the center and make payroll for her employees. Even that wasn’t enough. Browne also started working night shifts at a nearby hospital, often going to her second job after spending all day at her center.  

Then, in 2021, the American Rescue Plan Act was signed into law and $39 billion was sent to states to help stabilize the child care industry. Browne received a welcome influx of funds: nearly $83,000 to help keep her business open. Browne used the money to wipe out the debt owed to her by families who struggled to pay after losing their jobs and then had to pull their children out of care completely. She raised staff pay from $10 an hour to $15-$18 an hour. She gave herself a salary of $34,000, which allowed her to quit her night job and work full time at the center. She also used funds to upgrade her playground equipment, buy cleaning supplies and provide a scholarship to a family that was struggling to make ends meet.  

Nationwide, ARPA funds helped steady a rocky industry that has historically been marked by poverty-level wages for educators and high staff turnover.

“Child care, as a field and industry, was already in crisis before the pandemic,” said Michelle Kang, chief executive officer for the National Association for the Education of Young Children. “The pandemic laid bare some of the challenges that already existed.”

While other countries provide support to sustain the operations of child care programs, the United States historically does not. The federal pandemic stabilization funds provided a rare infusion of operating money, a move reminiscent of when the federal government briefly funded child care to support working parents during World War II.

Since the pandemic, nearly 16,000 early childhood programs have shuttered. Between January 2020 and January 2022, around 120,000 child care workers left the industry, many for higher paying jobs, leading to immense staffing shortages and soaring waiting lists for parents who were unable to return to work full-time due to a lack of care. Educators and experts say the federal relief aid prevented the situation from getting worse. Those funds helped keep more than 200,000 early childhood programs open and more than 1 million early childhood educators employed, thus allowing more than 9.5 million children to receive care.

When the federal stabilization funds run out at the end of September and child care providers can no longer rely on this much-needed funding, experts say the consequences could be immense. A recent report by The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, found an estimated 3.2 million children will eventually lose child care if those federal funds are not replaced.

That loss will hit especially hard in Virginia, where Browne works, as well as in a handful of other states, including Arkansas and West Virginia. It’s estimated that up to half of all licensed programs in those states could close. “Providers are going to do everything they can to hang on,” said Julie Kashen, director of women’s economic justice and a senior fellow at The Century Foundation. “We saw during the pandemic, they went into personal debt, they stopped paying themselves a salary, they’re going to do whatever they can because they know how important their jobs are for supporting children and parents.”

Experts warn that programs will be forced to make cuts or shut down. “Millions of parents will be impacted and some will have to leave the workforce,” Kashen added. “It matters to children, it matters to their families and it has ripple effects beyond that to the economy and states and employers.”

The effect of losing the funds could be even more grim for family child care providers, whose programs are typically smaller than center-based care and rely mostly on parent tuition payments.

“Most of the family child care educators that we work with are not in a position to raise their prices because their parents just can’t pay,” said Jessica Sager, co-founder and chief executive officer of All Our Kin, an organization that focuses on supporting family child care providers. In the years leading up to the pandemic, these programs were already struggling, with 97,000 closing between 2005 and 2017. “We’re going to lose more programs,” Sager said. “That’s a pretty dire situation to be in.” Ultimately, parents will have fewer choices for child care, she added. “These family child care programs are especially important for infants and toddlers and families working evenings and weekends. They’re going to be especially hard hit in terms of the choices available.”

In Virginia, Browne has already stopped receiving the federal stabilization funds, which means she will now go back to relying on parent tuition and state funding that only covers part of the cost for low-income children to attend child care, as well as any private or public grants and donations she can find. Nearly half of the children she enrolls are from low-income families who pay with state subsidies. But, as is the case nationwide, the reimbursement amount Browne gets per child is far less than the cost of providing care. She recently started working 12-hour nursing shifts at night again, driving straight to her center in the morning to check on her staff and the children before going home to sleep for a few hours. “It’s hard,” Browne said. “My body is not going to be able to take much more of working two full-time jobs.”

By the end of the year, Browne would like to be able to offer benefits to her staff. She is planning to open a second center this fall and hopes to earn enough from the two centers to quit her hospital job for good. Many experts and early childhood advocates say the success of programs like Browne’s, however, depends on more federal support. Congress has yet to take up legislation to allocate the needed funds to the child care industry, even though several lawmakers and the director of the United States Office of Management and Budget have called on Congress to act and voters have showed strong support for the idea in past polls.

“During the pandemic, for this brief moment, we rallied,” Sager said. “We did all these things to make programs sustainable. Now we’re taking that money away, but conditions have not fundamentally changed. The end of this funding really feels to our educators like they are no longer essential. Like they and the families in their care are being abandoned.”

This story about benefits of child care funding 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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