On the first day of seventh grade, Elijah Brown clambered onto a bus and watched the tall buildings of the city slowly recede. He was part of a desegregation effort that took him from his predominantly Black neighborhood in St. Louis to a school in the predominantly white suburb of Wildwood, Missouri.   

The education was excellent, but students made denigrating comments about where he was from and his race. His mom worked hard – often two jobs – but sometimes there wasn’t enough money for rent. Some nights, he and his mom and sister slept in their car. Some days he could only eat when he was at school. 

Brown began to think of the University of Missouri as a way out of hard times. It was the only college he applied to, and he got in – but even with full federal financial aid, he would have needed to come up with thousands of dollars every year to cover the rest of tuition and room and board. 

To his overwhelming relief, he was awarded a prestigious George C. Brooks scholarship, which was designed to help students from groups underrepresented at the university and covered about 70 percent of tuition annually. 

“It changed my life, it really did,” Brown said.

The scholarship money meant that he didn’t have to work two or three jobs at Subway or the local gym like his friends. Brown graduated in three and a half years, in 2020, with a 3.98 GPA.

“I worked so hard. I was relentless with it, because I felt like I had something to prove,” he said. “I felt so grateful to be getting a Brooks scholarship.” 

That scholarship no longer exists. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision to ban affirmative action, Missouri, like many other universities, dropped scholarships that until this year had been reserved for students from underrepresented racial groups, even though the Court’s ruling didn’t mention financial aid.

Students say the money allowed them to attend top colleges that otherwise would have been financially out of reach, putting them on a path to the middle class. The scholarships often included mentorship programs, which helped them succeed. The financial support freed them to focus on their studies without working too many hours. And – crucially – it helped them graduate without loads of debt.

Missouri’s interpretation – that the Supreme Court’s ruling applied to financial aid as well as admissions – swept through a swath of states last year. Colleges have canceled race-conscious scholarships worth at least $60 million, according to data from public universities; the total is likely significantly higher.

In some states, elected officials ordered institutions to change the scholarships in favor of ones that didn’t consider race. In others, universities preemptively made the change, fearing lawsuits from groups eager to test the Supreme Court’s willingness to prohibit the consideration of race not only in admissions but in financial aid as well.

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

But a survey of the country’s 50 flagship public universities – whose stated missions are to provide high-quality, affordable education to the residents of their home states – shows that not all have responded the same way. While at least 13 have changed or eliminated scholarships that took race into account, another 22 have kept them intact, according to spokespeople and scholarships listed on university websites. ​​The University of Wisconsin-Madison would only say that its scholarships were “under review.”

The remaining 14 flagships either never had race-conscious scholarships or use what’s known as a “pool and match” system that honors donors’ requests for race-specific awards without creating barriers to any student who applies. 

The University of Iowa changed the Advantage Iowa Award, which last year provided $9.4 million to more than 1,500 high-performing students from underrepresented racial groups, to a purely need-based scholarship. Administrators said they made the changes, “based on the principles articulated by the U.S. Supreme Court.”

The 22 schools that kept the scholarships interpreted the ruling differently.

Pennsylvania State University, for example, decided that because the Court’s ruling “focused solely on admissions, it did not impact Penn State’s scholarship awarding,” the university’s assistant vice president for strategic affairs, Lisa M. Powers, said in an email. 

Some experts worry that slashing the scholarships could increase educational disparity, discouraging more Black and Hispanic students from going to college. About 28 percent of Black adults and 21 percent of Hispanic adults have college degrees compared with 42 percent of white adults, the U.S. Census reports.

The changes could also deepen financial inequalities. In 2020, Black college graduates on average owed $58,400 in loan debt four years after graduating – 30 percent more than white graduates, according to the Education Department. Meanwhile, Black college graduates aged 25 to 34 on average earned about 25 percent less than their white counterparts in 2022, making loan repayment more difficult.

Last fall, just 4 percent of incoming freshmen at the University of Missouri, where Elijah Brown went, were Black, down from 8 percent five years earlier. Despite ending two scholarships previously designated for underrepresented students, which were awarded to more than 350 students each year, the university expects an increase in the number of underrepresented students enrolling in the fall, according to Christian Basi who was a spokesperson there until earlier this month. Students already enrolled and receiving the scholarships will not lose them, he said.

Brown says relying on merit for scholarships without considering race will hurt Black students. SAT scores – widely considered a measure of academic merit – for Black, Hispanic and Native American students lag significantly behind white and Asian scores. 

“People who say, ‘Oh, our scholarships are all available for everyone now.’ No, they’re not,” Brown said. “They’re still going to go to mostly white people who have already been set up, generations back, for college, whose parents are college grads, and who didn’t only apply to one school because they didn’t know any better.”

Related: How could Project 2025 change education?

After he graduated, Brown worked for the University of Missouri as an admissions representative assigned to recruit students from racial and ethnic groups underrepresented there. He drove to high schools in Kansas City and St. Louis to convince Black and Hispanic students to choose his alma mater over other options, such as colleges closer to home or historically Black colleges or universities.

At meetings with students, Brown told them what he had gained by going to the University of Missouri — from the organizations he joined to the guest speakers he got to hear to the classes he took. He told them about the Brooks scholarship, saying that if they worked hard, they could have the same opportunities he had. 

“I was telling them about my experience,” he recalled, “and their eyes would light up, and they’d get so excited, like, ‘Oh, my God, it’s possible.’”

When he heard about the university’s decision to cancel the Brooks scholarship, he was angry.

“I talked to these freshman and sophomore students, and it’s like I lied to them,” Brown said. “They will never be able to get that opportunity at Mizzou. It makes me sick to my stomach that so many of these kids will not get that experience.”

Eyram Gbeddy doesn’t remember any college representatives visiting his Pennsylvania high school during the Covid-laden winter of his senior year, in 2020-2021, but he did get a recruitment email with an offer he thought couldn’t be real.

The University of Alabama wanted to give him a full ride. He visited the campus and fell in love with it. His mom didn’t pressure him, but she was grateful for his decision.

“She told me she was praying that I would go to Alabama because it would be so helpful to the whole family,” he said, freeing up financial resources for his two brothers’ educations.

Alabama’s National Recognition scholarship, which was earmarked for high-performing Black, Latino, Indigenous and rural students, was discontinued starting with students entering this fall. Gbeddy, who is Black, said it had allowed him to concentrate solely on his studies, and he graduated this past spring – in just three years. He will enter Georgetown University law school in the fall, which he said would have been unthinkable if he had been carrying thousands of dollars in undergraduate loan debt (median federal student debt for all graduates of Alabama is close to $23,000).

“When I sit here and I think that there are students who are just like me – who are qualified, who are smart, who would make absolutely wonderful additions to the Alabama community – who aren’t even going to be able to consider Alabama,” said Gbeddy, who is 21 years old. “It’s just heartbreaking to me.”

Just a few years ago, the University of Alabama was touting the Recognition Scholarship and its positive impact on the campus’s racial diversity. 

Related: How did students pitch themselves to colleges after last year’s affirmative action ruling?

Black students made up 10 percent of freshmen at Alabama in 2022, while 32 percent of public high school graduates in the state were Black, but that gap has decreased over the past five years.

Gbeddy predicts ending the National Recognition scholarship will reverse that trend.

“When you lose these scholarships that are targeted at Black Americans,” he said, “at people from rural areas, people of Latino ancestry, you lose such a strong recruiting tool for a university that desperately needs it.”

The University of Alabama did not respond to questions about why they canceled the scholarship.

“[T]he University will continue to offer competitive scholarship opportunities to its students in a manner that complies with federal and state law,” the university’s associate director of communications, Alex House, said in an email. 

Kimberly West-Faulcon, a professor of law and the James P. Bradley chair in constitutional law at Loyola Law School in California,said decisions to end the race-conscious scholarships can boil down to weighing the possibility of lawsuits against an institution’s commitment to racial inclusion.

“Institutions are making decisions to not defend these kinds of policies,” but to change them, said West-Faulcon. “Why are they changing their policies, instead of going to court and defending them?”

Last year’s Supreme Court admissions decision has indeed prompted a flurry of lawsuits against race-conscious scholarships and a wave of complaints to the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights by groups like the Equal Protection Project. That group, which sees the scholarships as discriminatory, says it has already succeeded in getting more than a dozen scholarship programs canceled or altered.

Indiana’s flagship was EPP’s most recent target, with a complaint filed in July against 19 private bequests that consider race. For example, one scholarship indicates a preference for an underrepresented minority student with financial need majoring in business and another for an African American law student who has at least one dependent.

“The source of funding does not matter,” William Jacobson, a Cornell Law School professor who leads the Equal Protection Project, said in an email. “The scholarships are promoted by Indiana University to its students, and IU handles the application process through its scholarship portal. As such, it needs to adhere to relevant law governing educational practices.”

A group of white students even filed a class action lawsuit against the University of Oklahoma for its institutional aid program — which doesn’t take race into account. The suit claims that Black students have been receiving financial aid disproportionately.

Related: OPINION: Following the Supreme Court’s ban on affirmative action, we must find new remedies to promote educational equity

Still, even with the legal uncertainties, some universities are holding the line. 

After consulting with legal counsel, the University of New Mexico decided to keep its National Recognition scholarship, since the Supreme Court didn’t mention financial aid and because the criteria for the National Recognition scholarship in particular are set by the College Board.

Last year, 149 Indigenous, Black and Hispanic high-performing students received these selective scholarships at the University of New Mexico, each worth about $15,000 per year. The graduation rate for students who receive those scholarships and the university’s other top merit-based scholarships ranges between 80 percent and 95 percent, the university said, compared with 52 percent for all students.

For Diego Ruiz, the scholarship, which is enough to cover tuition, fees, dorm costs and books, has been life-changing. 

“I can go to school and graduate and not have any debt,” said Ruiz, who was salutatorian of his Albuquerque high school and is entering his second year at the University of New Mexico. “This is all I wanted. This is all my parents wanted.”

Ruiz had considered going out of state for college, but the scholarship kept him in New Mexico. His mom’s family has lived in the state for many generations, mostly in rural areas, and his dad’s parents emigrated from a small town in Mexico. He is studying public health and wants to find ways to improve access to health care, especially in the rural areas of New Mexico.

He plans to go to graduate school in a medical field, which he says will be easier since he won’t have debt after college (this semester he’ll be working 20 hours a week on campus).

“I’m just really interested in trying to give back to the community that raised me,” said Ruiz, who is 19. “I’m super interested in battling the disparities that we have in New Mexico.”

Brown, the Missouri grad, just finished his first year at the University of Virginia School of Law. This summer, he worked at a top law firm and earned more than his mom does in an entire year.

In May, he took his entire family to a soccer game in St. Louis. He bought them jerseys. He gave them his credit card so they could buy whatever they wanted from the concession stand. “It was the first time in my life I’ve ever seen my mom and my stepdad so stress-free,” Brown said. 

“My mom loves me so much… I’m just so happy I can give back to her,” he said, fighting back tears. 

“I feel so blessed, because this is a life I could never have dreamed of growing up,” he said. “I’m just so grateful for my education.”

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

The post Cutting race-based scholarships blocks path to college, students say appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Education vaulted to the forefront of conversations about the presidential race when Democratic nominee Kamala Harris announced Tim Walz as her running mate. Walz, the governor of Minnesota, worked for roughly two decades in public schools, as a geography teacher and football coach. He has championed investments in public education: For example, in March 2023, he signed a bill to make school meals free to all students in public schools.

Harris, a former U.S. senator and attorney general in California, has less experience in education than her running mate. But her record suggests that she would back policies to make child care more affordable, protect immigrant and LGBTQ+ students and promote broader access to higher education through free community college and loan forgiveness. Like Walz, she has defended schools and teachers against Republican charges that they are “indoctrinating” young people; she has also spoken about her own experience of being bused in Berkeley, California, as part of a program to desegregate the city’s schools.

Harris and Walz have been endorsed by the country’s two largest teachers unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, which tend to support Democratic candidates.

We will update this guide as the candidates reveal more information about their education plans. You can also read about the Republican ticket’s education ideas.

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

Early childhood

Child care

Harris has been a vocal supporter of child care legislation during her time in the Biden administration, though the proposals have had a mixed record of success.

During the pandemic, the Biden administration provided $39 billion in child care aid to help keep programs afloat.

The administration lowered the cost of child care for some military families and supported raising pay for federally funded Head Start teachers to create parity with public school teachers.

Earlier this year, Harris announced a new federal rule that would reduce lower child care costs for low-income families that receive child care assistance through a federally funded program. That same rule also requires states to pay child care providers on a more reliable basis. In September, Harris highlighted affordable child care as a key issue on her campaign website and said she would ensure “that care workers are paid a living wage.” Harris also said she plans to cap child care costs at no more than 7 percent of a working family’s income, but did not elaborate on how that would be funded.

Walz has also supported child care programs as governor of Minnesota. Earlier this year, he announced a new $6 million child care grant program aimed at expanding child care capacity, which followed a 2023 grant program that cemented pandemic-era support so programs could increase wages for child care workers. — Jackie Mader

Family leave and tax benefits

As soon as she became the presumptive Democratic nominee in July, Harris reaffirmed her support for paid family leave, which also was part of the platform she proposed as a candidate in the 2020 Democratic presidential contest. Harris provided the tie-breaking Senate vote that temporarily increased the child tax credit during the pandemic and has proposed making that tax credit permanent.

In mid-August, Harris unveiled an economic policy agenda that proposes giving a $6,000 child tax credit for a year to families with newborns. She also wants to bring back and expand a pandemic-era child tax credit that lapsed in 2021. Harris’ proposal would provide up to $3,600 a year per child. 

Walz also was behind Minnesota’s child tax credit increase in 2023, and successfully pushed forward a statewide paid family and medical leave law that takes effect in 2026. — J.M.

Pre-K

In 2021, the Biden administration proposed a universal preschool program as part of a multi-trillion-dollar social spending plan called Build Back Better. The plan ultimately failed to win backing from the Senate.

Earlier this year, Walz signed a package of child-focused bills into law. one of which expands the state’s public pre-K program by 9,000 seats and provides pay for teachers who attend structured literacy training. — J.M.

K-12

Artificial intelligence, education technology, cybersecurity

Harris has played a key role in leading the Biden administration’s AI initiatives, particularly since the launch of ChatGPT. Biden signed an executive order on AI in October 2023, which directed the Education Department to develop within a year resources, policies and guidance on AI and to create an “AI toolkit” for schools.

While Harris hasn’t specifically addressed education technology, in the Biden administration, the Education Department earlier this year released the National Education Technology Plan to serve as a blueprint for schools on how to implement technology in education, how to address inequities in the use and design of ed tech and how to offer ways to bridge the country’s digital divide.

In 2023, the current administration announced several new initiatives to tackle cybersecurity threats in K-12 schools, including a three-year pilot program through the Federal Communications Commission that will provide up to $200 million to help school districts that are eligible for FCC’s E-Rate program cover the cost of cybersecurity services and equipment. — Javeria Salman

Immigrant students

Harris has vowed to protect those in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which delays deportation for undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children. The Biden administration has also used its bully pulpit to remind states and school districts that all children regardless of immigration status have a constitutional right to a free public education. As a senator in 2018, Harris sponsored legislation designed to reunite migrant families separated at the U.S.-Mexico border by the Trump administration, although family separation has continued on a much smaller scale in the Biden administration. In Minnesota, Walz signed legislation that starting next year will provide free public college tuition to undocumented students from low-income families. — Neal Morton

LGBTQ+ students and Title IX

Harris and Walz have both expressed support for LGBTQ+ students and teachers. As a senator, Harris supported the Equality Act in 2019, which would have expanded protections in the Civil Rights Act on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in education, among other areas. In a speech to the American Federation of Teachers, Harris decried the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” laws passed by Florida and other states in recent years. Walz has a long history of supporting LGBTQ+ students in Minnesota, where he was the faculty adviser of Mankato West High School’s first Gay-Straight Alliance club in the 1990s. In 2021, Walz signed an executive order restricting insurance coverage for so-called conversion therapy for minors and directing a state agency to investigate potential “discriminatory practice related to conversion therapy.” Walz signed an executive order in 2023 protecting gender-affirming health care. Earlier this year, he signed a law barring libraries from banning books based on ideology; book bans nationwide have largely targeted LGTBQ+-themed books.

The Biden administration announced significant rule changes to Title IX in 2024 that undid some of the changes the Trump administration made, including removing a mandate for colleges to have live hearings and cross-examinations when investigating sexual assaults on campus. The current administration also expanded protections for students based on sexual orientation and gender identity, which had been temporarily blocked in more than two dozen states and in schools attended by children of members of Moms for Liberty, Young America’s Foundation and Female Athletes United. — Ariel Gilreath

Native students

As vice president, Harris worked in an administration that promised to improve education for Native Americans, including a 10-year plan to revitalize Native languages. The president’s infrastructure bill, passed in 2021, created a $3 billion program to broaden access to high-speed internet on tribal lands — a major barrier for students trying to learn at home during the pandemic. During his time as governor, Walz signed legislation last year to make college tuition-free for Native American students in Minnesota and required K-12 teachers to complete training on Native American history. Walz also required every state agency, including the department of education, to appoint tribal-state liaisons and formally consult with tribal governments.

Walz spent part of his early career teaching in small rural schools, including on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. — N.M.

School choice

Harris, who was endorsed by the nation’s largest public school teachers unions, has voiced support for public schools, but has said little about school vouchers or school choice. Walz does not support private-school vouchers, opposing statewide private-school voucher legislation introduced in 2021 by Republicans in Minnesota. — A.G.

School meals

One of Walz’s signature legislative achievements was supporting a bill that provides free school breakfasts and lunches to public and charter school students in Minnesota, regardless of household income. Walz, who signed the law in 2023, made Minnesota one of only eight states to have a universal school meal policy. The new law is expected to cost about $480 million over the next two years.

The Biden administration also expanded access to free school lunch by making it easier for schools to provide food without collecting eligibility information on every child’s family. — Christina A. Samuels

School prayer

The Biden administration has sought to protect students from feeling pressured into praying in schools. Following the 2022 Supreme Court decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton, the federal Education Department published updated guidance saying that while the Constitution permits school employees to pray during the workday, they may not “compel, coerce, persuade, or encourage students to join in the employee’s prayer or other religious activity.” — Caroline Preston

Special education

As a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, Harris released a “children’s agenda” in 2019 that, among other provisions, called for a large boost in special education spending.

When Congress first passed the federal law that is now called the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, it authorized spending to cover up to 40 percent of the “excess costs” of educating students with disabilities compared to their peers. But Congress has never come close to meeting that goal, and today the federal government distributes only about 15 percent of the total cost of educating students with disabilities. The shortfall is “immoral,” Harris told members of the National Education Association at a 2019 candidates forum.

The Biden administration also has proposed large increases in special education spending, but proposals for full funding of special education have not made it through Congress.

In 2023, the Minnesota Department of Education created a grant program to help school districts “grow their own” special education teachers. The first round of funding awarded $20 million to 25 grantees. In August, a second round of funding provided nearly $10 million to benefit more than 35 districts and charter schools. — C.A.S.

Student mental health, school safety

As California attorney general, Harris created a Bureau of Children’s Justice to address childhood trauma, among other issues. She has spoken out about the mental health toll of trauma, including from poverty, and the need for more resources and “culturally competent” mental health providers. But a 2011 law she pushed for as attorney general allowing parents of chronically absent students to be criminally charged later drew criticism for its toll on families, particularly those who are Black or Hispanic. Harris has said she regrets the law’s “unintended consequences.”

The Biden administration’s actions on student mental health includes expanding the pipeline of school psychologists, streamlining payment and delivery of school mental health services and directing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to develop new ways of assessing social media’s impact on youth mental health.

As vice president, Harris leads the new White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, which was created after lobbying by survivors of school shootings to support gun safety regulations. She has touted the administration’s efforts to prevent school shootings, including a grant program that has awarded roughly $500 million to schools for “evidence-based solutions,” including anonymous reporting systems for threats and training for school employees on preventing school violence. 

In Minnesota, Walz’s 2022 budget called for $210 million in spending to help schools support students experiencing mental health challenges. “As a former classroom teacher, I know that students carry everything that happens outside the classroom into the classroom every day, and this is why it is imperative that our students get the resources they deserve,” he said. — C.P.

Teachers unions, pandemic recovery

The Biden administration has close ties to the nations’ largest teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, the latter of which is the largest labor union of any kind in the country. First lady Jill Biden, who teaches community college courses, is a member of the NEA. Walz, a former teacher, is also an NEA member.

The administration was criticized for discussing with the AFT what kinds of safety measures should accompany the reopening of public schools after the pandemic.

Since 2021, the Biden administration has poured billions into helping public schools recover from the pandemic in various ways: to pay for more staff and tutors and upgrade facilities to improve air conditioning and ventilation, among other things. However, academic performance has yet to rebound, and the recovery has been uneven, with wealthier white students more likely to have made up ground lost during remote classes and Black and Latino students less likely to have done so.

The two unions, which had supported reelecting Biden, quickly threw their support to Harris and Walz. “Educators are fired up and united to get out and elect the Harris-Walz ticket,” NEA President Becky Pringle said after Harris named Walz as her running mate. “We know we can count on a continued and real partnership to expand access to free school meals for students, invest in student mental health, ensure no educator has to carry the weight of crushing student debt and do everything possible to keep our communities and schools safe.” — Nirvi Shah

Teaching about U.S. history and race

Both Harris and Walz have pushed back against Republican-led attacks on K-12 history instruction and efforts to minimize classroom conversations around slavery and race. Shortly after taking office in January 2021, the Biden administration dissolved President Donald Trump’s 1776 commission. In July 2023, Harris criticized a new history standard in Florida that said the experience of being enslaved had given people skills “for their personal benefit.”

As governor, Walz released an education plan calling for more “inclusive” instruction that is “reflective of students of color and Indigenous students.” It also called for anti-bias training for school staff, the establishment of an Equity, Diversity and Inclusion center at the Minnesota Department of Education, and the expansion of efforts to recruit Indigenous teachers and teachers of color. Walz also has advocated for educating students about the Holocaust and other genocides; state bans on teaching about “divisive concepts” in some Republican-led states have chilled such instruction. — C.P.

Title I

Harris’ 2019 “children’s agenda,” from when she was angling to be the Democratic nominee for president, proposed “significantly increasing” Title I, the federal program aimed at educating children from low-income families. The Biden administration also has proposed major increases to Title I spending, but Congress has not enacted those proposals. — C.A.S.

Higher Education

Accreditation

As California attorney general, Harris urged the federal government in 2016 to revoke federal recognition for the accrediting agency of the for-profit chain Corinthian Colleges, which she had successfully sued for misleading students and using predatory recruiting practices. The accreditor’s recognition ultimately was removed in 2022. 

As vice president, Harris has said little about the accreditation system, which is independently run and federally regulated and acts as a gatekeeper to billions of dollars in federal student aid. But the Biden administration has sought to require accreditors to create minimum standards on student outcomes such as graduation rates and licensure-exam pass rates. — Sarah Butrymowicz

Affirmative action

Harris has long supported affirmative action in college admissions. As California attorney general, she criticized the impact of the state’s 1996 ban at its public colleges. She also filed friend-of-the-court briefs in support of the University of Texas’ race-conscious admissions policy when the Supreme Court heard challenges to it in 2012 and 2015.

Last June, Harris criticized the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action the same day it was handed down, calling the decision a “denial of opportunity.” Walz, referring to the decision, wrote on X, “In Minnesota, we know that diversity in our schools and businesses reflects a strong and diverse state.” — Meredith Kolodner

DEI

Harris has not shied away from supporting DEI initiatives, even as they became a focus of attack for Republicans. “Extremist so-called leaders are trying to erase America’s history and dare suggest that studying and prioritizing diversity, equity, and inclusion is a bad thing. They’re wrong,” she wrote on X.

As governor, Walz has taken steps to increase access to higher education across racial groups, including offering tuition-free enrollment at state colleges for residents who are members of a tribal nation. This spring, Walz signed a budget that increased funding for scholarships for students from underrepresented racial groups to teach in Minnesota schools. — M.K.

For-profit colleges

Harris has long been a critic of for-profit colleges. In 2013, as California state attorney general, she sued Corinthian Colleges, Inc., eventually obtaining a more than $1.1 billion settlement against the defunct company. “For years, Corinthian profited off the backs of poor people — now they have to pay,” she said in a press release. As senator, she signed a letter in the summer of 2020 calling for the exclusion of for-profit colleges from Covid-era emergency funding. — M.K.

Free college

The Biden administration repeatedly has proposed making community college free for students regardless of family income. The administration also proposed making college free for students whose families make less than $125,000 per year if the students attend a historically Black college, tribal college or another minority-serving institution.

In 2023, Walz signed a bill that made two- and four-year public colleges in Minnesota free for students whose families make less than $80,000 per year. The North Star Promise Program works by paying the remaining tuition after scholarships and grants have been applied, so that students don’t have to take out loans to pay for school. — Olivia Sanchez

Free/hate speech

Following nationwide campus protests against the war in Gaza, Biden said, “There should be no place on any campus, no place in America for antisemitism or threats of violence against Jewish students. There is no place for hate speech or violence of any kind, where it’s antisemitism, Islamophobia, or discrimination against Arab Americans or Palestinian Americans.” His Education Department is investigating dozens of complaints about antisemitism and Islamophobia on K-12 and college campuses, a number that has spiraled since the start of the war. — O.S.

Pell grants

The Pell grant individual maximum award has increased by $900 to $7,395 since the beginning of the Biden administration, part of its goal to double the maximum award by 2029. Education experts say that when the Pell grant program began in the 1970s, it covered roughly 75 percent of the average tuition bill but today covers only about one-third. They say doubling the Pell grant would make it easier for low-income students to earn a degree. The administration tried several times to make Pell grants available to undocumented students who are part of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, but has been unsuccessful. — O.S.

Student loan forgiveness

In 2019, while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, Harris proposed forgiving loans for Pell grant recipients who operated businesses in disadvantaged communities for a minimum of three years. As vice president, she was reportedly instrumental in pushing Biden to announce a sweeping debt cancelation policy.

The policy, which would have eliminated up to $20,000 in debt for borrowers under a certain income level, ultimately was blocked by the Supreme Court. Since then, the Biden administration has used other existing programs, including Public Service Loan Forgiveness, to cancel more than $168 billion in federal student debt.

Harris has regularly championed these moves. In April, for instance, she participated in a round-table discussion on debt relief, touting what the administration had done. “That’s more money in their pocket to pay for things like child care, more money in their pocket to get through the month in terms of rent or a mortgage,” she said of those who had loans forgiven.

But challenges remain. In August, a federal appeals court issued a stay on a Biden plan, known as the SAVE plan, which aimed to allow enrolled borrowers to cut their monthly payments and have their debts forgiven more quickly than they currently can. — S.B.

Workforce development

Last fall, the Biden administration sent nearly $94 million in grant funding to job training programs, including community colleges and programs that partner with high schools. Earlier this year, the administration also announced $25 million for a new Career Connected High Schools grants program to help establish pathways to careers. In addition, the administration invested billions in nine workforce training hubs across the country. 

The Democratic Party platform unveiled at the national convention in Chicago also mentions expanding career and technical education. “Four year college is not the only pathway to a good career, so Democrats are investing in other forms of education as well,” the platform says.

Walz’s education plan as governor of Minnesota also set a goal of increasing career and technical education pathways. In October 2023, he signed an executive order eliminating college degree requirements for most government jobs in the state, a growing trend in states looking to expand alternative pathways to careers. — A.G.

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

The post What education could look like under Harris and Walz appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, are persistent critics of public K-12 schools and higher education and want to overhaul many aspects of how the institutions operate. On the campaign trail, Trump has repeatedly called for the elimination of the federal Education Department, arguing that states should have full authority for educating children. (Abolishing the department has been a long-standing goal of many Republicans, but it’s highly unlikely to win enough support in Congress to happen.)

Trump also supports efforts to privatize the K-12 school system, including through vouchers for private schools. Both he and Vance have launched repeated attacks on both K-12 and higher education institutions over practices that seek to advance racial diversity and tolerance and policies that provide protections to transgender students, among other issues. The candidates have also argued that higher ed institutions suppress the free speech of conservative students; as president, Trump took at least one action to tie funding to free speech protections. 

“Rather than indoctrinating young people with inappropriate racial, sexual, and political material, which is what we’re doing now, our schools must be totally refocused to prepare our children to succeed in the world of work,” Trump said in a September 2023 video describing his education proposals.

We will update this guide as the candidates reveal more information about their education plans. You can also read about the Democratic ticket’s education ideas.

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

Early childhood

Child care

Even though Trump launched his first campaign for president with a child care policy proposal to expand access to care through tax code changes, child care largely took a back seat during his presidency. That said, there were some notable actions: Before the pandemic, Trump signed a tax law that increased the child tax credit from $1,000 to $2,000 per child, although research found higher-income families benefited significantly more from the change than low-income families. In 2018 he proposed cuts to the Child Care and Development Block Grant, a federal program that helps low-income families pay for child care, but ultimately approved funding increases passed by Congress in both 2018 and 2020.

In 2020, in the early days of the pandemic, Trump signed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security, or CARES, Act, which allotted an additional $3.5 billion for the Child Care and Development Block Grant. The supplemental fund was also meant to support the child care needs of essential workers. The CARES Act also provided supplemental funding to Head Start. —Jackie Mader

Family leave and tax credits

Also in 2020, Trump supported a bipartisan paid family leave bill, although it was more limited in scope and benefits than other paid leave proposals. Trump’s 2021 budget proposal called for eliminating the federal Preschool Development Grant program and decreased funding for a federal program that helps low-income college students pay for child care.

Vance has focused on legislation that encourages and supports parents to stay at home with their young children. In 2023, he co-sponsored a bill that would prevent employers from clawing back health care premiums the employers paid during a parent’s time off under the Family and Medical Leave Act if the parent chose not to return to work. He has been a vocal opponent of universal child care and instead has expressed support for more tax credits for parents. In mid-August, Vance expressed support for a $5,000 per child tax credit, an increase from the current maximum of $2,000 per child.— J.M.— J.M.

K-12

Artificial intelligence

In 2019, Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to focus on research and development around AI, and a year later his administration announced that $140 million would be awarded to several National Science Foundation-led programs to conduct research on AI at universities nationwide.

On the campaign trail this year, however, Trump said he will reverse the executive order on artificial intelligence signed by Biden last October, calling it a hindrance to AI innovation. Both Trump and his running mate, Vance, have disagreed with the Biden administration on what AI regulations should look like. While education leaders have called for regulations and guardrails around AI use and development, Vance has called for less regulation. — Javeria Salman

Immigrant, Native and rural students

The Republican presidential ticket and official party platform espouse anti-immigrant positions, advocating for mass deportations of anyone who entered the country without legal documentation. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank behind Project 2025, earlier this year released a set of policy recommendations on undocumented immigrants in U.S. public schools that would directly challenge a long-standing Supreme Court decision requiring states to provide a free education to all students regardless of their immigration status. While Trump has tried to distance himself from Heritage and its policy proposals, his running mate wrote the forward to an upcoming book from Project 2025’s former leader and many former Trump administration officials were involved in crafting the plan.

With respect to Native students, Trump as president released a “Putting America’s First Peoples First” brief outlining his promises to Indian Country, including access to college scholarships for Native American students, creating new tribally operated charter schools and improving the beleaguered agency that oversees K-12 education on reservations. Trump also pitched a 25 percent boost in funding for Native language instruction.

Vance, in an interview before Trump took office in 2017, encouraged the new administration to focus on education as a tool to help struggling rural communities. He said increasing options for students after high school would prepare them for jobs in a “knowledge economy” and give them more choices beyond pursuing a minimum-wage service sector job or going to a four-year college. “There’s no options in between and consequently people don’t see much opportunity,” Vance said. — Neal Morton

LGBTQ+ students and Title IX

In 2017, Trump rolled back Obama-era guidance that offered protections for transgender students to use school bathrooms based on their gender identity. His campaign website says he plans to reverse any gender-affirming care policies implemented by President Joe Biden, who  signed an executive order in 2022 encouraging the Departments of Education and of Health and Human Services to expand access to health care and gender-affirming care for LGBTQ+ students. He has also warned schools that, if reelected, he would cut or eliminate federal funding if teachers or school employees suggest “to a child that they could be trapped in the wrong body.” Vance sponsored a Senate bill last year that would ban medical gender-affirming care for minors, but it has not advanced.

The Trump administration significantly changed how colleges handle sexual assault allegations through Title IX during his time in office, adding a requirement for colleges to conduct live disciplinary hearings and allow cross-examinations in sexual assault cases; this was largely undone by the Biden administration. Trump said he plans to roll back Title IX rules the Biden administration implemented that expanded protections against discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation. Trump has also said he would prevent transgender athletes from participating in sports teams based on their gender identity; school rules on this issue are now decided at the state- or school-level with a Biden administration proposal stalled. — Ariel Gilreath

School choice

Expanding school choice through private-school vouchers has been a key part of Trump’s education policy, but he had little success in getting his most ambitious efforts passed by Congress. One early accomplishment came via the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. His administration made it possible for parents to use their children’s 529 college savings plan to pay for up to $10,000 annually in private school tuition.

His education secretary, Betsy DeVos, a longtime school-choice supporter in her home state of Michigan, made several high-profile attempts to support charter schools and expand private- school voucher expansion. DeVos attempted to set aside $400 million for charter schools and private-school vouchers in the 2018 federal budget, and in 2019, she promoted a $5 billion tax credit program for private-school vouchers, but neither proposal cleared Congress. During a speech in June 2020, Trump called school choice the “civil rights statement of the year.” Later that year, after widespread school closures, Trump issued an executive order allowing states to use money from a federal poverty program to help low-income families pay for private schooling, homeschooling, special education services or tutoring. His campaign website says he supports state and federal level universal school choice, and it highlights programs in Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah and West Virginia. — A.G.

School meals

The Trump administration made several attempts to roll back lunch nutrition standards that had been championed by Michelle Obama, arguing that schools needed more flexibility and the standards were leading to wasted food.

However, in 2020, a federal judge ended the Trump administration’s efforts to ease requirements for whole grains and to allow more sodium in school meals, among other changes. The administration did not follow proper procedures in easing those nutrition mandates, the court ruled. — Christina A. Samuels

School prayer

Trump has been an advocate for what his campaign calls “the fundamental right to pray in school.” As president, he issued guidance intended to protect students who want to pray or worship in school. The outcome of Kennedy v. Bremerton, the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that a football coach had a constitutional right to pray on the field after games, was shaped by the three justices that Trump appointed to the court. Some nonprofit and legal groups have criticized Trump’s positions, arguing that he muddies the separation of church and state and that the real problem is not suppression of religious freedom in schools but children who feel pressured into religious expression. — Caroline Preston

School safety, student mental health

When it comes to school safety, Trump has supported policies that prioritize the “hardening” of schools and strict disciplinary approaches. According to his 2024 campaign website, if reelected, Trump would “completely overhaul federal standards on school discipline to get out-of-control troublemakers OUT of the classroom and INTO reform schools and corrections facilities.” He would also support schools that allow “highly trained teachers” to carry concealed weapons in classrooms and hire veterans and others as armed guards at schools. Regarding youth mental health, his campaign says he would direct the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to investigate the effects of “common psychiatric drugs” and gender-affirming hormone therapy on young people.  

Vance has taken similar positions. During his 2022 Senate run, he said he supported Ohio’s new law that lowered the amount of training required for teachers to carry concealed weapons in classrooms. In Congress, he raised concerns about elements of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the gun safety law passed in 2022 after the mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and co-sponsored two bills that would have altered language in the bill to permit schools to buy weapons for use in archery, hunting and sharp-shooting programs. (A similar bill introduced in the House ultimately passed.) Vance also sponsored a bill that would direct the education secretary to study the use of mobile devices in K-12 schools — a mental health concern — and establish a pilot program to support schools’ efforts to become device-free. — C.P.

Special education

The Trump administration attempted to roll back a rule that requires districts to track students in special education by race and ethnicity in order to determine if minority students are more likely to be identified for special education, face harsher discipline, or be placed in classrooms separate from their general-education peers. A judge dismissed the administration’s efforts to eliminate this policy on procedural grounds. — C.A.S.

Teachers unions, pandemic recovery

Teachers unions, unlike some other labor groups, did not work well with the Trump administration and do not back the Trump/Vance ticket. Trump’s 2024 platform advocates undercutting some of the protections teachers unions support. It says, “Republicans will support schools that focus on Excellence and Parental Rights. We will support ending Teacher Tenure, adopting Merit pay, and allowing various publicly supported Educational models.”

His administration pushed schools to reopen ahead of the 2020-21 school year but without the kinds of safeguards Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said were essential to get teachers and kids back together, in person. Trump signed two broad relief packages passed by Congress in 2020 that included more than $100 billion in aid for K-12 schools to recover from the pandemic. — Nirvi Shah

Teaching about U.S. history and race

Both Trump and Vance have attacked critical race theory and advanced concerns that K-12 teachers are stirring anti-white bias among students. As president, Trump criticized the 1619 Project, a New York Times history document arguing that the enslavement of Black Americans was central to U.S. history. He established the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission as a rebuke to the project; its January 2021 report called for “restoring patriotic education” and railed against “identity politics.” The Biden administration rescinded the commission, but Trump has pledged to reinstate it if reelected.

Vance, meanwhile, made education culture war issues central to his 2022 run for Senate. On his campaign website, he pledged to cut funding for state universities in Ohio that teach critical race theory and “to force our schools to give an honest, patriotic account of American history.” — C.P.

Title I

During each of his four years in office, Trump submitted budget proposals that would have consolidated more than two dozen programs, including Title I, the largest source of federal funding for schools. The program is intended to support services at schools that educate children from low-income families. Congress rejected the administration’s efforts to consolidate the programs — C.A.S.

Higher education

Accreditation

The Trump campaign has gone after college accrediting agencies, which serve as the gatekeepers for billions of dollars in federal student aid, claiming that the entities are part of the “radical Left” and have “allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist Maniacs and lunatics.” (The fact that some accrediting agencies have added or considered standards related to diversity, equity and inclusion also has drawn ire from many on the right.)

In a video posted to his campaign site, Trump pledges to “fire” existing accrediting agencies. The government does have regulations that these entities must follow, but revoking their recognition would require a lengthy Education Department review.

Trump goes on to say that he would open applications for new accreditors to impose standards that include “defending the American tradition and Western civilization, protecting free speech, eliminating wasteful administrative positions that drive up costs incredibly,” and “implementing college entrance and exit exams to prove that students are actually learning and getting their money’s worth.” — Sarah Butrymowicz

Affirmative action

Both Trump and Vance have taken a hard stance against affirmative action and diversity initiatives. Trump celebrated the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling banning affirmative action in college admissions, calling it a “great day for America.” “We’re going back to all merit-based — and that’s the way it should be,” he wrote on TruthSocial.

Following that decision, Vance wrote a letter to college presidents warning, “The United States Senate is prepared to use its full investigative powers to uncover circumvention, covert or otherwise, of the Supreme Court’s ruling.” Last December, he introduced a bill to create an inspector general’s office to investigate discrimination in college admissions and financial aid, which would take federal aid away from colleges found in violation. — Meredith Kolodner

Community college

Trump has said people don’t understand what community colleges are and suggested they be renamed vocational or technical colleges (though they are not the same thing). He has not supported tuition-free community college, but last year, he pitched the idea of a free online college he called American Academy, be paid for by taxes on private universities. Experts have said this plan is unlikely to take hold. — Olivia Sanchez

DEI

As the agitation about DEI initiatives intensified in 2020, Trump issued an executive order that banned diversity training that was “divisive,” which applied to federal agencies and recipients of federal grants, including universities.

Vance has also criticized DEI initiatives, calling them “racism, plain and simple.” Last December, he wrote a letter to the president of Ohio State University, probing its hiring practices and its curriculum. “If universities keep pushing racial hatred, euphemistically called DEI, we need to look at their funding,” he wrote on X. — M.K.

For-profit colleges and universities

Trump has long been seen as a friend of the for-profit college sector. Before he became president, he ran the for-profit Trump University, which trained students for careers in real estate. He was subsequently sued by former students who claimed the college had misled them; the case was settled with a $25 million payout. While in office, he took several steps to make it easier for for-profit colleges to thrive, and enrollment at those institutions began to rise in 2020. His administration rolled back the Obama-era gainful employment rule, which required for-profit colleges to meet certain benchmarks to ensure that a majority of graduates were making enough to pay back their loans. As president, Trump vetoed a bill that would have provided debt forgiveness to veterans defrauded by for-profit colleges.— M.K.

Free/hate speech

Trump considers himself an advocate of free speech, but he has attacked the speech of others and drawn criticism for comments about immigrants and other groups that some argue amount to hate speech.

In 2019, Trump signed an executive order requiring that colleges and universities commit to promoting free speech and free inquiry to continue receiving research funding from 12 federal agencies. He said this was to protect conservative students from being silenced and discriminated against. “Under the guise of ‘speech codes’ and ‘safe spaces’ and ‘trigger warnings,’ these universities have tried to restrict free thought, impose total conformity, and shut down the voices of great young Americans like those here today,” he said when signing the order.

Vance also has argued that conservative students are being silenced on college campuses. When he was running for Senate, Vance gave a speech entitled “Universities are the enemy” in 2021, calling the institutions corrupt and arguing they disseminate lies rather than truth and knowledge.

In the same speech, he called his alma mater, Yale University Law School, “clearly a liberal-biased place” at the time he graduated in 2013, adding that when he returned five years later to promote his book, “it felt totally totalitarian.” “It felt like the sort of place where if you were a conservative student who had conservative ideas you were terrified to utter them,” Vance said. — O.S.

Pell grants

The Trump administration proposed cutting the Pell grant surplus fund twice, including a proposed $3.9 billion diversion that would have funded several unrelated initiatives, including a NASA plan to take astronauts back to the moon. Though dipping into the Pell reserves wouldn’t have affected students already awarded Pell grants, education advocates argued that it would have imperiled funding for future students. None of these proposals were approved by Congress. A Trump plan to allow students to use Pell grants on short-term programs was unsuccessful.

Trump proposed formalizing an Obama-era pilot program that made incarcerated people eligible for Pell grants. Congress approved this expansion in the FAFSA Simplification Act passed in December 2020. — O.S.

Student loan forgiveness

As president, Trump proposed eliminating the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which wipes out loan debt for people who work in the public sector or nonprofits. During his tenure, the Department of Education also stopped enforcing a regulation that provided an avenue for debt relief to students who had been defrauded by their colleges.

Trump praised the three justices he appointed to the Supreme Court for their votes to strike down Biden’s broad debt forgiveness plan. He has attacked the Biden administration’s continued efforts to cancel debt as “vile” and “not even legal.”

Vance has taken a similar stance on large-scale loan forgiveness, saying on X, formerly known as Twitter, that “Forgiving student debt is a massive windfall to the rich, to the college educated, and most of all to the corrupt university administrators of America.” But he did co-sponsor a bipartisan bill earlier this year that would allow parents to get loans discharged if their child became permanently disabled. — S.B.

Workforce development

Federal funding for career and technical education, which had been stagnant for more than a decade before Trump came into office, rose significantly during his administration. In 2018, Trump renewed the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act — one of states’ primary sources of federal funding for CTE programs – and reduced regulations on how states are required to spend the money. In 2020, he proposed one of the largest-ever increases in funding for career and technical education, even as he sought to cut the overall budget for the Department of Education. 

Trump also established an advisory council tasked with developing a national strategy to train people for high-demand jobs. His campaign website says he plans to provide “funding preferences” for schools that help students find internships and jobs and for schools that have career counselors for students. His website also highlights the Cristo Rey Network — a group of Catholic schools across the country where students are required to work at part-time, entry-level jobs one day a week during the school year throughout high school. — A.G.

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

The post What education could look like under Trump and Vance appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

The proposals in the 2025 Presidential Transition Project — known as Project 2025 and designed for Donald Trump — would reshape the American education system, early education through college, from start to finish. 

The conservative Heritage Foundation is the primary force behind the sprawling blueprint, which is separate from the much less detailed Republican National Committee 2024 platform, though they share some common themes.

Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage and its lobbying arm, Heritage Action, said in an interview with USA TODAY that Project 2025 should be seen “like a menu from the Cheesecake Factory.” No one president could take on all these changes, he said. “It’s a manual for conservative policy thought.”

The fast-changing political landscape makes it difficult to say which of these proposals might be taken up by Trump if he wins reelection. He has claimed to know nothing about it, though many of his allies were involved in drafting it. The exit of President Joe Biden from the presidential race may have an impact on Project 2025 that is still unknown. Finally, many of the broadest proposals in the document, such as changes to Title I and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, would require congressional action, not just an order from the White House.

However, it remains a useful document for outlining the priorities of those who would likely play a part in a new Trump administration. The Hechinger Report created this reference guide that digs into the Project 2025 wishlist for education.

Early childhood

Child care for military families

Project 2025 calls for expanding child care for military families, who have access to programs that are often upheld as premier examples of high-quality care in America. – Jackie Mader

Head Start and child care 

Project 2025 calls for eliminating the Office of Head Start, which would lead to the closure of Head Start child care programs that serve about 833,000 low-income children each year. Most Head Start children are served in center-based programs, which have an outsized role in rural areas and prioritize enrolling a certain percentage of young children with disabilities who often struggle to find child care elsewhere. Head Start also provides a critical funding and resource stream to other private child care programs that meet Head Start standards, including home-based programs. – J. M.

Home-based child care

A conservative administration should also prioritize funding for home-based child care rather than “universal day care” in programs outside the home, Project 2025 says. That funding would include money for parents to stay home with a child or to pay for “familial, in-home” care, proposals that could be appealing to some early childhood advocates who have long called for more resources for informal care and stay-at-home parents. – J. M.

On-site child care

If out-of-home child care is necessary, Congress should offer incentives for on-site child care, Project 2025 says, because it “puts the least stress on the parent-child bond.” Early childhood advocates have been wary of such proposals because they tie child care access to a specific job. It also calls on Congress to clarify within the Fair Labor Standards Act that an employer’s expenses for providing such care are not part of the employee’s pay.– J. M.

K-12 education

Data collection  

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” should release student performance data based on “family structure” — in addition to existing categories such as race and socioeconomic status — Project 2025 argues. Family structure, the document says, is “one of the most important — if not the most important — factor influencing student educational achievement and attainment.” The document goes on to endorse “natural family structure” of a heterosexual, two-parent household, “because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them.” — Sarah Butrymowicz 

LGBTQ students 

Project 2025 advocates a rollback of regulations that protect people from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. It calls for agencies to “focus their enforcement of sex discrimination laws on the biological binary meaning of ‘sex.’” 

The plan also calls on Congress and state lawmakers to require schools to refer to students by the names on their birth certificates and the pronouns associated with their biological sex, unless they have written permission from parents to refer to them otherwise.

The plan also equates transgender issues with child abuse and pornography, and proposes that school libraries with books deemed offensive be punished. — Ariel Gilreath

Privatization 

In place of a federal Education Department, the blueprint calls for widespread public education funding that goes directly to families, as part of its overarching goal of “advancing education freedom.”

The document specifically highlights the education savings account program in Arizona, the first state to open school vouchers up to all families. Programs like Arizona’s have few, if any, restrictions on who can access the funding. Project 2025 also calls for education savings accounts for schools under federal jurisdiction, such as those run by the Department of Defense or the Bureau of Indian Education. 

In addition, Project 2025 calls on Congress to look into creating a federal scholarship tax credit to “incentivize donors to contribute” to nonprofit groups that grant scholarships for private school tuition or education materials. — Ariel Gilreath and Neal Morton

School meals 

The federal school meals program should be scaled back to ensure that only children from low-income families are receiving the benefit, the document says. Policy changes under the Obama administration have made it easier for entire schools or districts to provide free meals to students without families needing to submit individual eligibility paperwork. — Christina A. Samuels

Special education 

Project 2025 says that the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which provides $14.2 billion in federal money for the education of school-aged children with disabilities, should be mostly converted to “no-strings” block grants to individual states. Lawmakers should also consider making a portion of the federal money payable directly to parents of children with disabilities, it says, so they can use it for tutoring, therapies or other educational materials. This would be similar to education savings accounts in place in Arizona and Florida. 

The blueprint also calls for rescinding a policy called “Equity in IDEA.” Under that policy, districts are required to evaluate if schools are disproportionately enrolling Black, Native American and other ethnic minority students in special education. Districts must also track how these students are disciplined, and if they are more likely than other students in special education to be placed in classrooms separate from their general education peers. Current rules, which Project 2025 would eliminate, require that districts that have significant disparities in this area must use 15 percent of their federal funding to address those problems. — C.A.S.

Teaching about race 

Project 2025 elevates concerns among members of the political right that educating students about race and racism risks promoting bias against white people. The document discusses the legal concept of critical race theory, and argues that when it is used in teacher training and school activities such as “mandatory affinity groups,” it disrupts “the values that hold communities together such as equality under the law and colorblindness.” 

The document calls for legislation requiring schools to adopt proposals “that say no individual should receive punishment or benefits based on the color of their skin,” among other recommendations. It also calls for a federal Parents’ Bill of Rights that would give families a “fair hearing in court” if they believed the federal government had enforced policies undermining their right to raise their children. — Caroline Preston

Title I

This program, funded at a little over $18 billion for fiscal 2024, is the largest federal program for K-12 schools and is designed to help children from low-income families. The conservative blueprint would encourage lawmakers to make the program a block grant to states, with few restrictions on how it can be used — and, over 10 years, to phase it out entirely. Additionally, it says, lawmakers should allow parents in Title I schools to use part of that funding for educational savings accounts that could be spent on private tutoring or other services. — C.A.S.

Higher education

Affirmative action and diversity, equity and inclusion 

The document calls for prosecuting “all state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers” that maintain affirmative action or DEI policies. That position matches the views expressed by Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, about the use of race in college admissions and beyond. — Liz Willen 

Data collection 

In higher education, the proposal argues that college graduation and earnings data need a “risk adjustment” that factors in the types of students served by a particular institution. While selective colleges tend to post the highest graduation rates and student earnings, they also tend to enroll the least-“risky” students. A risk adjustment methodology could benefit community colleges, which often have low graduation rates but enroll many nontraditional students who face obstacles to earning a degree. It would also likely benefit for-profit colleges, which similarly tend to accept most applicants. Historically, for-profit schools have received scrutiny under Democratic administrations for poor outcomes and for allegedly misleading students about the value of the education they provide. Republican administrations typically have supported less regulation of for-profit institutions. — S.B. 

Parent PLUS loans and Pell grants 

The blueprint calls for the elimination of the Parent PLUS loan program, arguing that it is redundant “because there are many privately provided alternatives available.” Originally created for relatively affluent families, the PLUS loan program has become a crucial way for lower- and middle-income families to pay for college. In recent years, it has sparked criticism due to rising default rates and fewer protections than are afforded to other student loan borrowers.  

At present, interest rates for private loans are significantly lower than Parent PLUS rates, but they come with fewer protections, and it is more difficult to get approved for a private-bank loan. Project 2025 would also get rid of PLUS loans for graduate students.

If the federal PLUS programs were eliminated, it could stem one portion of the rising tide of families’ education debt, but it would also make the path to paying for college more difficult for some families. 

Project 2025 does not call for a change to the Pell grant program, which provides federal funding for students from low-income families to attend college. Some advocates have called for doubling the annual maximum allotment, which is $7,395 for the 2024-25 school year, far below the cost to attend many colleges. — Meredith Kolodner and Olivia Sanchez

Student loan forgiveness 

Project 2025 would end the prospect of student loan forgiveness, which has already been largely blocked by federal courts; the Biden administration, in a sort of game of Whac-a-Mole, has proposed still more forgiveness programs that are being fought by Republican state attorneys general and others. Project 2025 would also dramatically restrict what’s known as “borrower defense to repayment,” which forgives loans borrowed to pay for colleges that closed or have been found to use illegal or deceptive marketing. Largely restricting the Education Department to collecting statistics, Project 2025 would shift responsibility for student loans to the Treasury Department. — Jon Marcus

This story about Project 2025 was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. 

The post How could Project 2025 change education? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Deciding what to disclose in a personal essay for college applications has plagued students since, perhaps, the essay first became required. How should they present themselves? What do they think colleges need to know about them? Should they try to fit their whole life story onto a page and a half? Should they focus on the worst thing that’s ever happened to them, or their greatest success? 

In the first year after the Supreme Court banned the consideration of race in college admissions, how students chose to present themselves in their essay became of even greater consequence. In years past, students could write about their racial or ethnic identity if they wanted to, but colleges would know it either way and could use it as a factor in admissions. Now, it’s entirely up to students to disclose their identity or not.

Data from the Common App shows that in this admissions cycle about 12 percent of students from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups used at least one of 38 identity-related phrases in their essays, a decrease of roughly one percent from the previous year. About 20 percent of American Indian and Alaskan Native applicants used one of these phrases; 15 percent of Asian students; 14 percent of Black students; 11 percent of Latinx students and less than 3 percent of white students. 

To better understand how students were making this decision and introducing themselves to colleges, The Hechinger Report asked newly accepted students from across the country to share their college application essays with us. We read more than 50 essays and talked to many students about their writing process, who gave them advice, and how they think their choices ultimately influenced their admissions outcomes.

Here are thoughts from eight of those students, with excerpts from their essays and, if they permitted, a link to the full essay.

Jaleel Gomes Cardoso, Boston

A risky decision

As Jaleel Gomes Cardoso sat looking at the essay prompt for Yale University, he wasn’t sure how honest he should be.  “Reflect on your membership in a community to which you feel connected,” it read. “Why is this community meaningful to you?” He wanted to write about being part of the Black community – it was the obvious choice – but the Supreme Court’s decision to ban the consideration of a student’s race in admissions gave him pause.

“Ever since the decision about affirmative action, it kind of worried me about talking about race,” said Cardoso, who grew up in Boston. “That entire topic felt like a risky decision.” 

In the past, he had always felt that taking a risk produced some of his best writing, but he thought that an entire essay about being Black might be going too far.

“The risk was just so heavy on the topic of race when the Court’s decision was to not take race into account,” he said. “It was as if I was disregarding that decision. It felt very controversial, just to make it so out in the open.”

In the end, he did write an essay that put his racial identity front and center. He wasn’t accepted to Yale, but he has no regrets about his choice.

“If you’re not going to see what my race is in my application, then I’m definitely putting it in my writing,” said Cardoso, who graduated from Boston Collegiate Charter School and will attend Dartmouth College this fall, “because you have to know that this is the person who I am.”   

 – Meredith Kolodner

Excerpt:

I was thrust into a narrative of indifference and insignificance from the moment I entered this world. I was labeled as black, which placed me in the margins of society. It seemed that my destiny had been predetermined; to be part of a minority group constantly oppressed under the weight of a social construct called race. Blackness became my life, an identity I initially battled against. I knew others viewed it as a flaw that tainted their perception of me. As I matured, I realized that being different was not easy, but it was what I loved most about myself.

READ ENTIRE ESSAY

Klaryssa Cobian, Los Angeles 

A semi-nomadic mattress life

Klaryssa Cobian is Latina – a first-generation Mexican American – and so was nearly everyone else in the Southeast Los Angeles community where she grew up. Because that world was so homogenous, she really didn’t notice her race until she was a teenager.

Then she earned a scholarship to a prestigious private high school in Pasadena. For the first time, she was meaningfully interacting with people of other races and ethnicities, but she felt the greatest gulf between her and her peers came from her socioeconomic status, not the color of her skin. 

Although Cobian has generally tried to keep her home life private, she felt that colleges needed to understand the way her family’s severe economic disadvantages had affected her. She wrote about how she’d long been “desperate to feel at home.”

She was 16 years old before she had a mattress of her own. Her essay cataloged all the places she lay her head before that. She wrote about her first bed, a queen-sized mattress shared with her parents and younger sister. She wrote about sleeping in the backseat of her mother’s red Mustang, before they lost the car. She wrote about moving into her grandparents’ home and sharing a mattress on the floor with her sister, in the same room as two uncles. She wrote about the great independence she felt when she “moved out” into the living room and onto the couch. 

“Which mattress I sleep on has defined my life, my independence, my dependence,” Cobian wrote.

She’d initially considered writing about the ways she felt she’d had to sacrifice her Latino culture and identity to pursue her education, but said she hesitated after the Supreme Court ruled on the use of affirmative action in admissions. Ultimately, she decided that her experience of poverty was more pertinent. 

“If I’m in a room of people, it’s like, I can talk to other Latinos, and I can talk to other brown people, but that does not mean I’m going to connect with them. Because, I learned, brown people can be rich,” Cobian said.  She’s headed to the University of California, Berkeley, in the fall.

– Olivia Sanchez

Excerpt: 

With the only income, my mom automatically assumed custody of me and my younger sister, Alyssa. With no mattress and no home, the backseat of my mom’s red mustang became my new mattress. Bob Marley blasted from her red convertible as we sang out “could you be loved” every day on our ride back from elementary school. Eventually, we lost the mustang too and would take the bus home from Downtown Los Angeles, still singing “could you be loved” to each other.

READ ENTIRE ESSAY

Oluwademilade Egunjobi, Providence, Rhode Island

The perfect introduction

Oluwademilade Egunjobi worked on her college essay from June until November. Not every single day, and not on only one version, but for five months she was writing and editing and asking anyone who would listen for advice.

She considered submitting essays about the value of sex education, or the philosophical theory of solipsism (in which the only thing that is guaranteed to exist is your own mind). 

But most of the advice she got was to write about her identity. So, to introduce herself to colleges, Oluwademilade Egunjobi wrote about her name.

Egunjobi is the daughter of Nigerian immigrants who, she wrote, chose her first name because it means she’s been crowned by God. In naming her, she said, her parents prioritized pride in their heritage over ease of pronunciation for people outside their culture. 

And although Egunjobi loves that she will always be connected to her culture, this choice has put her in a lifelong loop of exasperating introductions and questions from non-Nigerians about her name. 

The loop often ends when the person asks if they can call her by her nickname, Demi. “I smile through my irritation and say I prefer it anyways, and then the situation repeats time and time again,” Egunjobi wrote. 

She was nervous when she learned about the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision, wondering what it might mean for where she would get into college. Her teachers and college advisors from a program called Matriculate told her she didn’t have to write a sob story, but that she should write about her identity, how it affects the way she moves through the world and the resilience it’s taught her. 

She heeded their advice, and it worked out. In the fall, she will enter the University of Pennsylvania to study philosophy, politics and economics. 

– Olivia Sanchez

Excerpt:

I don’t think I’ve ever had to fight so hard to love something as hard as I’ve fought to love my name. I’m grateful for it because it’ll never allow me to reject my culture and my identity, but I get frustrated by this daily performance. I’ve learned that this performance is an inescapable fate, but the best way to deal with fate is to show up with joy. I am Nigerian, but specifically from the ethnic group, Yoruba. In Yoruba culture, most names are manifestations. Oluwademilade means God has crowned me, and my middle name is Favor, so my parents have manifested that I’ll be favored above others and have good success in life. No matter where I go, people familiar with the language will recognize my name and understand its meaning. I love that I’ll always carry a piece of my culture with me.

Francisco Garcia, Fort Worth, Texas 

Accepted to college and by his community

In the opening paragraph of his college application essay, Francisco Garcia quotes his mother, speaking to him in Spanish, expressing disappointment that her son was failing to live up to her Catholic ideals. It was her reaction to Garcia revealing his bisexuality. 

Garcia, 18, said those nine Spanish words were “the most intentional thing I did to share my background” with colleges. The rest of his essay delves into how his Catholic upbringing, at least for a time, squelched his ability to be honest with friends about his sexual identity, and how his relationship with the church changed. He said he had strived, however, to avoid coming across as pessimistic or sad, aiming instead to share “what I’ve been through [and] how I’ve become a better person because of it.” 

He worked on his essay throughout July, August and September, with guidance from college officials he met during campus visits and from an adviser he was paired with by Matriculate, which works with students who are high achievers from low-income families. Be very personal, they told Garcia, but within limits. 

“I am fortunate to have support from all my friends, who encourage me to explore complexities within myself,” he wrote. “My friends give me what my mother denied me: acceptance.”

He was accepted by Dartmouth, one of the eight schools to which he applied, after graduating from Saginaw High School near Fort Worth, Texas, this spring.

– Nirvi Shah

Excerpt: 

By the time I got to high school, I had made new friends who I felt safe around. While I felt I was more authentic with them, I was still unsure whether they would judge me for who I liked. It became increasingly difficult for me to keep hiding this part of myself, so I vented to both my mom and my closest friend, Yoana … When I confessed that I was bisexual to Yoana, they were shocked, and I almost lost hope. However, after the initial shock, they texted back, “I’m really chill with this. Nothing has changed Francisco:)”. The smiley face, even if it took 2 characters, was enough to bring me to tears. 

READ ENTIRE ESSAY

Hafsa Sheikh, Pearland, Texas 

Family focus above all 

Hafsa Sheikh felt her applications would be incomplete without the important context of her home life:  She became a primary financial contributor to her household when she was just 15, because her father, once the family’s sole breadwinner, could not work due to his major depressive disorder. Her work in a pizza parlor on the weekends and as a tutor after school helped pay the bills. 

She found it challenging to open up this way, but felt she needed to tell colleges that, although working two jobs throughout high school made her feel like crying from exhaustion every night, she would do anything for her family.

“It’s definitely not easy sharing some of the things that you’ve been through with, like really a stranger,” she said, “because you don’t know who’s reading it.”

And especially after the Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action, Sheikh felt she needed to write about her cultural identity. It’s a core part of who she is, but it’s also a major part of why her father’s mental illness affected her life so profoundly. 

Sheikh, the daughter of Pakistani immigrants, said her family became isolated because of the negative stigma surrounding mental health in their South Asian culture. She said they became the point of gossip in the community and even among extended family members, and they were excluded from many social gatherings. This was happening as she was watching the typical high school experiences pass her by, she wrote. Because of the long hours she had to work, she had to forgo the opportunity to try out for the girls’ basketball team and debate club, and often couldn’t justify cutting back her hours to spend time with her friends. 

She wrote that reflecting on one of her favorite passages in the Holy Quran gave her hope:

“One of my favorite ayahs, ‘verily, with every hardship comes ease,’ serves as a timeless reminder that adversity is not the end; rather, there is always light on the other side,” Sheikh wrote.

Her perseverance paid off, with admission to Princeton University.

– Olivia Sanchez

Excerpt: 

Besides the financial responsibility on my mother and I, we had to deal with the stigma surrounding mental health in South Asian culture and the importance of upholding traditional gender roles. My family became a point of great gossip within the local Pakistani community and even extended family.  Slowly, the invitations to social gatherings diminished, and I bailed on plans with friends because I couldn’t afford to miss even a single hour of earnings.

Manal Akil, Dundalk, Maryland

Life lessons from cooking

Manal Akil explores the world’s cultures without leaving her family’s kitchen in Dundalk, Maryland. 

“I believe the smartest people in all of history were those who invented dishes. The first person who decided to throw tomato and cheese on dough, the first person who decided to roll fish with rice in seaweed,” Akil wrote. “These people experimented with what they had and changed the world.” 

For Akil, cooking is about much more than preparing a meal. It’s about knowing when you have to meticulously follow directions and when you can be creative and experimental. It’s about realizing when you make a mistake, and being mentally flexible enough to salvage your ingredients with a positive attitude. And it’s about marveling at the similarities and differences of humanity across cultures. 

Akil’s parents are from Morocco, but she chose not to mention her cultural identity in her essay. Because she didn’t choose where she came from, she feels it doesn’t reveal much about who she is. In supplemental essays, Akil said she did write about her experience growing up with immigrant parents. In those essays, she wrote about how she understands her parents’ native language, but can’t speak it, and how she had to become independent as a young child. 

But the life lessons Akil has gained through cooking are so important to her that she chose to focus on them in her primary essay instead of sharing a personal narrative. When comparing essay ideas and drafts with her classmates, she realized that most of them were writing much more directly about their identities and experiences. 

She felt her nontraditional approach to personal essay writing was risky, but it worked. She was admitted to eight colleges, and in the fall she’ll enter Georgetown University. 

“​​I have never, nor will ever, regret any time spent making food; all my work in the kitchen has paid off,” Akil wrote. “I enter with ambition and leave with insight on myself and the world. Each plate served, each bite taken, and each ‘Mmmh’ has contributed to my growth.”

– Olivia Sanchez

Excerpt: 

In the comfort of my own home, I have been to many countries from all around the world. Throughout this world travel, I have picked up on different quirks unique to each region, while simultaneously connecting the dots between the world. South Asia with its warm taste profile, East Asia with its wholesome flavors, and North Africa with its savory delights. Thousands of miles apart and all so distinct in regard to culture, yet sharing similar foods, just under different names: Paratha, Diao Lu Bing, and Msemen — all flaky pancakes. I love discovering such culinary parallels that make me say, “This reminds me of that!” or “That reminds me of this!” These nuances serve as a powerful reminder that regardless of our varied backgrounds, we as humans are one because at the end of the day, food is the heart of every civilization. 

READ ENTIRE ESSAY

David Arturo Munoz-Matta, McAllen, Texas

If I’m honest, will an elite college want me?

It was Nov. 30 and David Arturo Munoz-Matta had eight college essays due the next day. He had spent the prior weeks slammed with homework while also grieving the loss of his uncle who had just died. He knew the essays were going to require all the mental energy he could muster – not to mention whatever hours were left in the day. But he got home from school to discover he had no electricity. 

“I was like, ‘What am I gonna do?’” said Munoz-Matta, who graduated from Lamar Academy in McAllen, Texas. “I was panicking for a while, and my mom was like, ‘You know what? I’m just gonna drop you off at Starbucks and then just call me when you finish with all your essays.’ And so I was there at Starbucks from 4 until 12 in the morning.” 

The personal statement he agonized over most was the one he submitted to Georgetown University. 

“I don’t want to be mean or anything, but I feel like a lot of these institutions are very elitist, and that my story might not resonate with the admissions officers,” Munoz-Matta said. “It was a very big risk, especially when I said I was born in Mexico, when I said I grew up in an abusive environment. I believed at the time that would not be good for universities, that they might feel like, ‘I don’t want this kid, he won’t be a good fit with the student body.’”

He didn’t have an adult to help him with his essay, but another student encouraged him to be honest. It worked. He got into his dream school, Georgetown University, with a full ride. Many of his peers were not as fortunate. 

“I know because of the affirmative action decision, a lot of my friends did not even apply to these universities, like the Ivies, because they felt like they were not going to get in,” he said. “That was a very big sentiment in my school.”    

– Meredith Kolodner

Excerpt:

While many others in my grade level had lawyers and doctors for parents and came from exemplary middle schools at the top of their classes, I was the opposite. I came into Lamar without middle school recognition, recalling my 8th-grade science teacher’s claim that I would never make it. At Lamar, freshman year was a significant challenge as I constantly struggled, feeling like I had reached my wit’s end. By the middle of Freshman year, I was the only kid left from my middle school, since everyone else had dropped out. Rather than following suit, I kept going. I felt like I had something to prove to myself because I knew I could make it.

READ ENTIRE ESSAY

Kendall Martin, Austin, Texas

Between straight hair and a hard place

Kendall Martin wanted to be clear with college admissions officers about one thing: She is a young Black woman, and her race is central to who she is. Martin, 18, was ranked 15th in her graduating class from KIPP Austin Collegiate. She was a key figure on her high school basketball team. She wanted colleges to know she had overcome adversity. But most importantly, Martin said, she wanted to be sure, when her application was reviewed, “Y’all know who you are accepting.”

It wouldn’t be as simple as checking a box, though, which led Martin, of Kyle, Texas, to the topic she chose for her college admissions essay, the year after the Supreme Court said race could not be a factor in college admissions. Instead, she looked at the hair framing her face, hair still scarred from being straightened time and again. 

Martin wrote about the struggles she faced growing up with hair that she says required extensive time to tame so she could simply run her fingers through it. Now headed to Rice University in Houston – her first choice from a half-dozen options – she included a photo of her braids as part of her application. Her essay described her journey from hating her hair to embracing it, from heat damage to learning to braid, from frustration to love, a feeling she now hopes to inspire in her sister.  

“That’s what I wanted to get across: my growing up, my experiences, everything that made me who I am.” 

– Nirvi Shah

Excerpt

I’m still recovering from the heat damage I caused by straightening my hair every day, because I was so determined to prove that I had length. When I was younger, a lot of my self worth was based on how long my hair was, so when kids made fun of my “short hair”, I despised my curls more and more. I begged my mom to let me get a relaxer, but she continued to deny my wish. This would make me so angry, because who was she to tell me what I could and couldn’t do with my hair? But looking back, I’m so glad she never let me. I see now that a relaxer wasn’t the key to making me prettier, and my love for my curls has reached an all-time high. 

READ ENTIRE ESSAY

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

The post How did students pitch themselves to colleges after last year’s affirmative action ruling? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

The students were the last to know.

On April 29 – just a week before finals – Wells College announced that it would close. The last-minute decision by the 156-year-old liberal arts college in upstate New York sent students rushing to find new colleges for the fall. And it threw newly accepted students, who had already put down deposits, into a frantic scramble to see if the colleges they had turned down would take them back. Faculty members, having missed the academic hiring cycle, were left facing unemployment. 

But there is mounting evidence that Wells administrators knew for months that the college would close, even as they made public assurances that all was well. 

Wells quietly made student transfer arrangements with another college last fall, according to Wells’ accreditor. And Wells agreed earlier this year to convert the land-use zoning for the campus from institutional to mixed use, which would allow the buildings and land to be used, and sold, for non-educational purposes.

Wells joins a parade of colleges that have been closing this year at a rate of one per week, as enrollment dips and pandemic-era aid dries up. The process is never easy, throwing students’ lives into chaos, ending employment for faculty in a field where jobs are scarce and, in some cases, adding extreme stress to small-town economies. But abrupt closures put this process on steroids.

“What concerns me here is that there’s no accountability,” said Anna Anderson, an attorney at the National Consumer Law Center and a Wells alum. “The students were given just days to pack up and leave … if an institution that’s this respected can do something that’s so horrible, what’s to stop others from doing the same thing?”

Wells has struggled with enrollment declines and budget crunches for years, but recently administrators had assured faculty and local leaders that it was in fine shape. 

In late February, two months before announcing the closure, Wells president Jonathan Gibralter wrote to the board of trustees of the Village of Aurora, where the college is located, that rumors about the college shutting its doors were unfounded. 

“Let me assure you that we are accepting enrollment deposits for the fall semester — our fall to spring retention rate for our students is higher than it has been in several years,” Gibralter wrote in a statement. “We are hiring staff and we are developing an operating budget for the next fiscal year. We are full steam ahead.”

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

One week before the college’s board of trustees voted to close, Wells posted a message on its Facebook account encouraging new students to visit the college for an “admitted students’ day.”

Faculty members say they were never told that the college was in danger of closing, even though they asked regularly about the state of the college at monthly faculty meetings.

“When the budget was presented to us, if you looked at the numbers, it was pretty grim,” said Laura McClusky, who has been a professor at Wells for 23 years. “But if you listen to the narrative, it was, ‘We’re doing great. Retention is up, the number of applications is up.’”

Even as administrators were assuring faculty that the college was in good shape, Wells was already making arrangements as early as last November with other institutions for them to become what’s known as a “teach-out” partner. That designation signals to a student that an accreditor has approved a college as an appropriate place to continue their education when their current college closes.

“There seems to be evidence that they were preparing at that time,” said Nicole Biever, who is the chief of staff at Wells’ accreditor, Middle States Commission on Higher Education.

At the same time, the Village of Aurora’s ad hoc zoning committee was working alongside Wells administrators on a proposal that would convert most of the college’s campus from institutional to mixed-use zoning. The move would allow the use, and sale, of buildings for purposes not related to the college. The village board of trustees voted in favor of the change in March and has submitted the plan to the state for approval.

Wells officials acknowledged its previous agreements with other institutions.

“The College, over the course of many months, prepared itself should the Board make the difficult decision to close the institution,” Kristopher LaGreca, Wells vice president of marketing and communications, said in an email. “The Board and senior leadership worked out confidential agreements with other institutions to support our students in the event of a closure.”

In response to questions about the re-zoning, LaGreca said that Wells had “continuously looked to divest in non-academic properties in order to bridge gaps in annual budgets.”

He added that the decision to close was “centered on what was best for our students, our prospective students, and their families.”

 “Wells College faces significant financial challenges,” Gibralter wrote in a letter announcing the closure. “We conducted a comprehensive review of the institution’s financial health and future sustainability, including an independent analysis, which has led to the necessary conclusion of closure.”

Related: Colleges are now closing at a rate of one a week. What happens to the students?

The college told faculty earlier this semester that there was a new articulation agreement with the American Musical and Dramatic Academy, which would bring in online students. But the deal collapsed and with it went the hope of an enrollment boost.

Members of the board of trustees declined, or didn’t respond to, requests for comment about why the decision was so last-minute, but the vote was not unanimous. The board has agreed to meet with faculty to explain the timeline next week, according to two faculty members with knowledge of the planned meeting.

Abrupt closures can make it much more difficult for students to earn a degree.

“You often see these domino precipitous closures, where students will go to a school that closes and then they’ll be funneled into the school that most wants their money,” said Jessica Ranucci, a supervising attorney for the New York Legal Assistance Group. “The school that most wants their money is a school that’s teetering on the brink, and then that school closes.”

Unfortunately, being an accreditor-approved teach-out college doesn’t necessarily mean an institution will stay open. Middle States had designated Wells as a teach-out school for Cazenovia College and Medaille University, both of which closed last year – forcing students who had just arrived at Wells in the fall to find a new college for the second time. 

“To take on students from other places that have closed when you yourself might be closing is just horrible,” said Meghan McCune, a Wells alum and former trustee who is also a professor at Northern Michigan University. “Not to mention, faculty and staff. It’s really hard to find other positions, and it’s completely out of the academic cycle. There’s no way that most people are going to be able to find something. All the hiring is done now.”

Students were stunned by the announcement.

“You don’t think your school is going to close down when they’ve given you a lottery number to choose your room for next year. They’ve let you pick out your classes for next year. They’ve let you order your gowns for next year,” said Olive Blair, 20, who just finished her junior year and is the class president. “It was a shock to say the least.”

A paper proposal for a fall conference was due two days after the announcement was made and she spent the week scrambling to find another college where her credits as an art history major would transfer, not to mention ensuring that the finances would work.

Last year, 82 percent of Wells’ roughly 350 students had federal student loans and close to half received Pell grants, federal aid that goes to low-income students. 

“It doesn’t make sense to me that they had to wait until the week before finals,” said Blair. “Did you just realize we don’t have enough money?  You can’t be that dysfunctional. Something must have been known prior to this.”

People with an inside track were well aware of the problems.

“It was the elephant in the room. We’ve been talking about it for 15 years,” said Bonnie Bennett, who was mayor of Aurora from 2010 until 2022. “But whenever anyone raised the issue of Wells closing, they would deny it. They would say, ‘You’re anti-Wells.’”

Related: Getting a college degree was their dream. Then their school suddenly closed.

Wells was put on probation in 2019 by Middle States, requiring that, among other things, it show evidence of “adequate fiscal and human resources” and proper financial planning. The following year, in the height of the pandemic, a letter was sent to alumni saying that the college could close if it didn’t raise money quickly. The fundraising appeal worked – alumni donated millions of dollars. The college also received $3.5 million between 2020 and 2022 from pandemic-related federal funds. 

In light of the college’s financial struggles, some faculty members and students are upset about the money spent on President Gibralter’s compensation. In fiscal year 2019, just after Wells was put on probation, Gibraltar collected more than $78,000 in bonuses, bringing his total compensation to more than $386,000, according to federal tax filings. The following year, as the college was begging for donations, he took in more than $345,000 and in fiscal year 2021, the last year for which figures are available, his total compensation was more than $368,000. (The college declined to comment.)

CNYCentral first reported Gibralter’s bonuses.

Middle States took Wells off probation in the summer of 2021, despite enrollment having cratered to about 330 that year from about 420 the previous one. 

An independent audit of the college in 2022 also showed that it had been dipping into its restricted endowment earnings. And it was discounting its tuition at an average of 70 percent in the 2021-22 academic year.

When asked why Wells was taken off probation, given its ongoing financial troubles, Biever said Middle States continued to monitor Wells over the next four years, sending teams to visit the college.

“In addition, the Commission required the institution to submit reports including financial information multiple times,” Biever said in an email. “When institutions submit reports, the Commission examines the evidence submitted by institutions and considers that information as part of the multi-level decision making process.”

After Wells announced it was closing, Middle States put it back on probation, citing the abrupt closure and its failure to make plans to ensure the well-being of its students. But the move will have no impact on current students or faculty.

Middle States has yet to approve any of two dozen teach-out colleges announced by Wells even though the college held a campus fair on May 3 with some of the institutions.

The New York State Department of Education said it wasn’t notified about the closure until the weekend before it was announced.

State Sen. Rachel May introduced a bill last week that would require colleges to provide notice of closure at least a year in advance, host public meetings about the decision and provide students with teach-out agreements at least six months in advance.

Students from closed schools usually don’t make it to graduation. Fewer than half of students at closed colleges end up transferring to other institutions, according to a 2022 study, and more than half of those who did transfer left their new college without graduating.

Faculty and staff are scrambling to find jobs, but at this point it’s almost impossible for them to find an academic position for next year. They will lose their health insurance coverage at the end of June (they have an option to pay a COBRA to extend the coverage). The college has said it doesn’t have the money to give them severance payments, although some faculty are wondering about the millions of dollars in assets in the property the college is sitting on. 

“Someone would ask about the financial health of the college at every faculty meeting, but they never said there was any danger of closing,” said Andrew Hunt, who was a visiting assistant professor of theatrical design and technology at Wells. “That’s the complaint many of us have. You should have said something.”

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

The post The story of how one college abruptly closed — and kept everyone in the dark appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

After four years battling a chain of for-profit cosmetology schools in court, and many more years struggling with debts caused by those schools, about 150 students will receive some financial relief.

As part of a settlement finalized this week in a class action lawsuit, La’ James International College, which is based in Iowa, will pay current and former students who joined the lawsuit $1,500 each. It will also discharge debts those students owed to the school and make changes in how it communicates about financial aid.

The suit was brought against La’ James International College in 2020 following a Hechinger Report investigation into cosmetology schools in Iowa. Our reporting showed how the business model of beauty schools can help for-profit schools rake in profits while pushing students deep into debt for an ultimately low-paying career.

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

The lawsuit, which was brought on behalf of current and former students by the nonprofit legal and advocacy organization Student Defense, accused La’ James of delaying financial aid payments and causing them financial hardship in violation of the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act.

“Students rely on their financial aid to stay afloat while they pursue their goals – and La’ James pulled that out from under them,” Student Defense’s litigation director, Eric Rothschild, said in a statement. “When for-profit colleges engage in such practices, hard-working students pay the price.”

La’ James did not respond to request for comment.

Most colleges disburse financial aid each semester, but beauty schools work differently. Students are required to clock a certain number of hours either in class or working in the school’s salon practicing their skills on paying customers. Financial aid payments are supposed to be made after students hit certain hour benchmarks, but students said La’ James often delayed those payments for months, so that they had to take out other loans to meet daily living expenses.

Cosmetology students in Iowa must complete more hours of training than those in any other state: 2,100 hours. (Most states require 1,500 hours.) Many for-profit beauty schools in Iowa have fought fiercely to keep it this way, lobbying hard against proposed changes. The state cosmetology school association has also protected its monopoly in this educational market, suing a community college that wanted to open a cosmetology program in 2005.

Related: Tangled up in debt

Many Iowa cosmetologists told Hechinger reporters that they spent a significant portion of their clock hours sitting around waiting for customers, not learning or practicing anything.

A Hechinger analysis showed that the more time a state requires for cosmetology training, the more debt aspiring hairdressers tend to take on. Yet the median annual pay for a cosmetologist is $35,000. 

According to the most recent federal data, La’ James programs cost up to $20,000, while graduates from their schools make anywhere from $23,000 to $30,000 annually.

The Student Defense lawsuit is not the first time the school has found itself in legal jeopardy. The chain was sued in 2014 by the Iowa attorney general’s office, which accused it of deceptive marketing and enrollment practices. That suit resulted in a settlement in which La’ James forgave more than $2 million in student debt, paid a $500,000 fine and agreed to not make false or misleading statements about financial aid disbursements.

In 2021, however, the attorney general’s office found that the school was misleading students about financial aid, and once again entered into a settlement where the school forgave more than $460,000 in institutional debt.

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

The post For-profit beauty school settles class-action lawsuit appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

The April 18 protests at Columbia University over the war in Gaza and Columbia’s investment in weapons manufacturers and companies doing business in Israel led to more than 100 arrests, and sparked widespread unrest not seen on campuses in decades. Barnard College, which is affiliated with Columbia, suspended at least 53 students and evicted them from their dorms, cut off their meal plans and barred them from campus.

We wanted to learn how the suspensions and evictions felt to students on a personal level, and what the experience meant to them. So we interviewed several Barnard students who were suspended. Most have had their suspensions lifted on the condition that they refrain from unauthorized protest, and to allow them to speak freely we are not identifying them.

A Barnard spokesperson said the college does not comment on confidential student conduct proceedings. The administration said in a statement that it was “committed to open inquiry and expression” and that “students rejected multiple opportunities to leave the encampment without consequence.”

The interviews have been edited for length and clarity.

L.S., who is Jewish, attended the protest on April 18 but said she was careful not to get arrested. Barnard suspended and evicted her from her dorm anyway. Because she is an international student, a long-term suspension could have meant the loss of her visa. She would have had to leave the country within 15 days.

How did you find out you lost your housing?

I was not counting on being suspended. I didn’t know that that was even a possibility. I figured that out when I tried to enter my dorm [that night] – they had my face on a poster in my lobby, with the words ‘ban list’ written on it.

You could only imagine what all could happen in a moment like that in the middle of the night. It’s cold. Some people genuinely had nowhere to go. I was scrambling at 2:30 a.m. to find somewhere to sleep. Luckily, there’s a huge community that was kind of immediately mobilized to help the evicted students.

How do you understand the university’s rationale for the arrests, with concern for student safety?

I don’t think anyone buys the safety narrative. There’s nothing safe ever about evicting students. Barnard is treating us worse than an American court would.

Why is this movement important to you personally?

I think this movement invites a lot of other people to see their own struggles and their own principles in the causes of Palestinian liberation. I’m not a politician. I’m just a student who comes from a background of generations of genocide survivors, and that’s why I’m a part of this.

It’s because I see the struggle of the Palestinians and the struggle of my ancestors as very, very clearly connected. I come from the region. The places I’m from have also been destroyed by war and by empire, and by diaspora and by exile. And so, you know, exile is like a universal experience I think a lot of us can identify with.

No matter what people are saying about us, we will continue to hold our Jewish identity close to our organizing and we will be Jewish even as people continue to deny that.

Is there anything you want people to know that you think isn’t getting covered enough by the media?

It’s horrible what we’ve gone through, and eviction and homelessness of students without due process is unacceptable. But at the same time, we are all going to be okay. The students in Gaza are not going to be okay. There are no universities left in Gaza. And every single bit of media attention we eat up with repeating our same story over and over again – that needs to be that same energy for the people in Gaza. Because the reason that we started all this, the reason that people were willing to get suspended and arrested is because they know that there are no universities left in Gaza, and we do not want to be financially or politically complicit in that.

Related: OPINION: I teach Renaissance literature at Columbia, but this week’s lessons are about political protests and administrative decisions

I.L., a Jewish student from New York City, was arrested at the protest and allowed to return to her dorm that night, but was told she had to leave the next morning.

What happened when you found out you had to leave the dorm?

It was honestly one of really the worst parts about this whole experience. I have two friends who have an apartment off campus. They had an air mattress so they offered it to me and I tried to sleep there, but a lot of students who were suspended and evicted have housing accommodations through our Center for Accessibility Resources and Disability Services. And I’m one of those students.

How do you understand the university’s rationale for the arrests, with concern for the student safety?

It’s absolutely not true. I blame [Columbia President Nemat] Shafik for what’s happening on other campuses with all of these arrests. She normalized calling the cops on her own students. She said that we were a threat when we were just sitting on our campus singing songs [on April 18].

Why is this movement important to you personally?

When October 7 happened, I didn’t really know anything. I went to Hebrew school for 10 years. I was pretty critical when anyone would say anything negative about Israel, because I kind of internalized this conflation between antisemitism and criticizing Israel.

But then I started seeing how Israel responded after October 7th. I basically had another Jewish person swipe up on my [Instagram] story that started the conversation with me. I was like, let me do my research, and I spent a lot of time just reading.

Once I learned, I was like, ‘Whoa, how is any of this about being Jewish?’ I felt like Judaism was being weaponized to somehow support what the State of Israel was doing. I felt like it was absolutely my duty as a Jewish person, and also just an American, because I knew that this was my tax dollars and my family’s tax dollars, that directly funds all of the brutality.

October 7 to me was just a major turning point in the whole rest of my life because I see the struggle of the Palestinians as part of the struggle for liberation of all people, and I become more aware of the other struggles throughout the world.

And so I think that now what’s happening with this encampment is such a beautiful combination of really everything that I believe in. It’s about people coming together.

I continue to bear witness because this is the worst thing that I’ve ever seen in my life. I think how I got here is definitely informed by the fact that I was watching Judaism being kind of twisted to somehow support this. So as an American and a human, that’s why I show up now.

My goal in all of this is a phrase that I’ve really come to in the past seven months. It’s that another world is possible.

Is there anything you want people to know that you think isn’t getting covered enough by the media?

I think overwhelmingly the media doesn’t understand what we’re doing. I’ve been really upset to see the way that the media is focusing on specific individuals who say things that are antisemitic, but they never say anything about the Islamophobia that I see happening every day.

I think that if you actually spend time at the encampments, you’d see that there’s something very beautiful going on. This is about divestment, because it’s the one tangible way that as college students we have the power to change what was happening to Palestinians.

This is because the world does not have to be this way and that other worlds are possible. It’s been the greatest honor of my life to be a part of this.

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

The post Q&A: Barnard students share experiences of suspension and eviction during Columbia protests appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

TOLEDO, Ohio – The sound of his teacher smacking his desk jolted Marquan into consciousness, and his head jerked up. “Wake up,” his teacher said.

Marquan hadn’t slept much the night before, and the words came out before he was fully coherent. “Watch out before you make me mad,” he said. 

His teacher turned and asked if that was a threat. The 16-year-old said no, he was just startled, but it was too late – he was sent out of the classroom and given a two-day suspension. 

What the teacher heard as a threat was, for Marquan, an instinctive reaction, and he had failed to code-switch in that groggy moment.

“I wasn’t threatening him; it was just loud and all of a sudden,” said Marquan, now 17 and a sophomore at Jesup W. Scott High School in Toledo, Ohio. (His last name is being withheld to protect his privacy.) “That was the most unfair thing.” 

In Ohio, Black students like Marquan are suspended for incidents like this far more frequently than their white peers. In the past six years, Ohio has issued close to 885,000  suspensions and expulsions for comments and misbehaviors tagged as disobedience or disruption. Nearly half of those dismissals have been for Black students, even though they make up only 17 percent of the public school population. Black students in Ohio are, on average, kicked out of classes for these offenses at four and half times the rate of white students.

A Hechinger Report analysis across 20 states found that these types of categories are cited as justification in nearly a third of all suspension and expulsion records. In many states, including Indiana, Maryland and Rhode Island, Black students are suspended more often for these kinds of incidents, which can include dress code violations, talking back to teachers and being too noisy in class.

States use different terms to describe the offenses – disrespect, insubordination, defiance – depending on their discipline code. But what they all have in common is the subjective nature of an educator’s decision; experts say that’s what leads to racial disparities. What seems disrespectful and threatening in one classroom can be entirely acceptable in another, depending on who’s listening and who’s speaking. That’s when racial and cultural differences between educators and students can come into play. Bias also plays a role.

“Disobedience is identified, by and large, by lived experiences,” said Jennifer Myree, who was a principal and assistant principal in Cincinnati for seven years and now works for the Ohio Department of Education. “If you have a child who comes from a home where they’re allowed to speak out about injustices, for example, saying ‘That’s not fair,’ and the classroom teacher, or the administrators, don’t believe that the child should speak out on things, they can consider that disobedience.”

Researchers say that racial disparities inside schools tend to reflect what’s happening in society as a whole and that income level does not explain the discrepancies.

“Teachers are no more biased than other people, but also no less biased,” said Russell Skiba, a professor in the school psychology program at Indiana University and director of its Equity Project. “Race is the much more important predictor of whether a kid gets suspended rather than poverty.”

Related: When typical middle school antics mean suspensions, handcuffs or jail

A spokesperson from the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, Lacey Snoke, didn’t respond directly to questions about the state’s racial disparities. Snoke, the chief communications officer, said the department “supports schools and districts as they address non-academic barriers to learning.” The Indiana Department of Education said that school discipline policies were set at the local level. Rhode Island said that it helps school districts in setting discipline policies that “are conducive to a safe and nurturing environment that promotes academic success.” Maryland’s state education agency said only that it makes annual data available for school districts to analyze.

Snoke also noted that the state requires schools to use a student support system known as Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, or PBIS. “When implementing PBIS with fidelity, schools and districts see a reduction in out-of-school suspension and exclusionary discipline,” she said.

Like many of America’s school districts, Toledo’s public schools have struggled with keeping discipline racially equitable for years. In 2020, following a federal civil rights investigation, the district agreed to a settlement with the federal Department of Justice “to address and prevent discriminatory discipline of students based on race or disability.” Last spring, the government extended its monitoring for an additional year after finding that the district was not in full compliance with the settlement terms. 

Part of the problem in Toledo, the fifth-largest school district in Ohio with more than 21,000 students, is that teachers and administrators haven’t figured out what’s at the root of the disparity, according to a federal monitoring report sent to the district last May and obtained by The Hechinger Report as part of its investigation into the widespread use of suspension for things like defiance and disruption around the country.

“Speculative answers about the reasons for why disciplinary referrals would be greater for Black students when compared to white students ranged from blaming the students’ underperformance in math and English language arts to blaming ‘parents who don’t take pride’ or are otherwise uninvolved in their children’s lives,” according to the report. “Educators at one school opined that they are not using strategies that engage kids of color; those at another school said they needed to develop activities for students to feel more of a sense of belonging.”        

Last year, there were more than 12,000 suspensions in Toledo public schools for defiance or disruption and more than 7,700 were given to Black students, up from 7,000 the year before. Black students received 65 percent of defiance and disruption suspensions last year, even though they make up about 46 percent of the student population in Toledo.

Related: Preventing suspensions: Tackle discipline problems with empathy first    

The reason for the high numbers is multi-faceted, and the solutions need to be as well, said Amerah Archer, acting executive director for the Department of Equity Diversity and Inclusion in the Toledo Public Schools.

“We understand there’s sometimes a cultural mismatch between teachers and students and their backgrounds,” Archer said. “So we offer culturally responsive training, to help our teachers understand how to build relationships and students across cultures.”

The district has also brought in outside mental health providers and — in all 57 of its schools — it has set up social-emotional wellness teams to examine discipline data and look for trends, including racial disparities within schools and classrooms. Educators receive training on how to respond to students who have endured trauma and may be acting out as a result, with responses that can lead to alternatives to suspensions.

Sheena Barnes, president of the school board until January this year, points to a culture that views some children as more dangerous than others. She’s also concerned about educators who have trouble appropriately interpreting a child’s behavior.

Barnes, who is Black, got a call last year to come to her child’s school immediately. Her son, who is on the autism spectrum and was in third grade at the time, had been trying to mix paints to make a specific color. The teacher accidentally took one of the colors away, frustrating the boy, who threw his paintbrush and splattered some paint. After Barnes arrived and helped de-escalate the situation, she said the teacher asked her if they could talk. 

“’He just scares me,” she said the teacher confessed to her. 

“So I asked her, ‘What did he do? Did he bite you, kick you, did he throw something at you, cuss at you? I’m going through all the list of things that could make you scared of a 9-year old, my baby.’ And she says, ‘It’s the way he looks at me.’

“And I just crumble,” Barnes recalled. “If you’re scared of him in third grade, what the hell are you gonna do to him in ninth grade?”

Moments like these – when adults see children as threatening – can influence decisions made in a heated classroom situation. The Department of Justice report on Toledo schools last spring concluded that “subjective infractions that are prone to bias, such as ‘Disruptive Behavior’ and ‘Failure to Follow Directions’” play a role in racial discrepancies when it comes to discipline.

Related: Hidden expulsions? Schools kick students out but call it a ‘transfer’

Toledo school officials noted that the report said that the district had “made significant progress” in some areas and that the Covid-19 pandemic had “hampered and delayed the District’s ability to execute certain provisions in a timely manner.”

Barnes, who remains on the school board, said she welcomed the continued monitoring by the government, because, she said, “we still have work to do.”

“There’s not a bad child – there’s a child reacting to a bad situation,” she said, sitting in a cafe in downtown Toledo, and noting the many serious issues faced by young people, such as gun violence and food insecurity.

“Maybe I can’t read. So, I’m gonna disrupt the class, because I don’t want to get embarrassed,” said Barnes. “Or if you ask me where my homework is, I’m gonna make some silly jokes and get kicked out, because I don’t want people to know that I didn’t have a home to sleep in last night, or I couldn’t do my homework, because we didn’t have power.”

Sometimes disruptive behavior starts with a small incident – like a student calling out in class. If a teacher has trouble redirecting the child, it can escalate, and the classroom can become chaotic. Teachers sometimes conclude that removing the child who is being loud is in the best interest of the whole class.

Experience and training can provide teachers with tools to address student conduct without suspensions.

One study in California published last year found that it was often the least-experienced teachers who relied on removing disruptive students from the classroom, and that even three years of teaching experience led to a substantial drop in the number of students referred for discipline.

The same study found that, among teachers who removed students from class and sent them to the principal’s office for disciplinary action, the top 5 percent did this so often that they accounted for most of the racial gaps in these referrals – effectively doubling those gaps.

Those gaps are largely driven by incidents that require a more subjective call, such as for “defiance,” rather than more objective categories like drug use or skipping class, according to Jing Liu, an assistant professor of education at the University of Maryland and one of the study’s authors. 

Related: Civil rights at stake: Black, Hispanic students blocked from class for missing class

Other researchers argue that stressful environments can bolster racial inequities.

“When people are stressed out, when they are under pressure, when they don’t have the time to think through a response, they are more likely to rely on racial biases,” said Juan Del Toro, a professor in the psychology department at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, who has studied the impact of discipline policies on Black students. 

Del Toro argues that more support for teachers could bring down the number of suspensions for low-level offenses, which in turn could help more students perform well academically. His research showed that when students committed minor misbehavior infractions, those who were suspended experienced significant negative academic consequences, compared with students who were just written up for the same kind of offense. 

In Toledo, Jamarion, a 10th grader at E. L. Bowsher High School, was serving an in-school suspension last December for getting in an argument with another student when he was assigned an additional three days for talking in the suspension room.

“We were just talking about the way we were feeling, bored and all that. You’re just sitting there all day staring at the wall or doing your homework,” said Jamarion, who is 15. (His last name is being withheld to protect his privacy.) “You should at least get a warning or something.”

“It’s not fair,” he said. “I was mad, upset.” And he said he was concerned about missing more math classes and falling behind.

Related: How career and technical education shuts out Black and Latino students from high-paying professions     

Educators and administrators emphasize that simply banning suspensions for low-level offenses would not change school culture or help educators find alternatives. “It could fix the data,” said Myree, the former Cincinnati principal, “but it might not fix what’s going on in the building.”

Some districts in Ohio, such as Cleveland Municipal, reduced the number of disobedience suspensions of Black children over the past year, but the number in Ohio overall climbed to more than 78,400 in 2022-23, up 16 percent from the previous year.

Izetta Thomas spent 18 years as an educator in Columbus public schools in Ohio and is now the education justice organizer for the Columbus Education Association, the union that represents Columbus educators. 

She believes individual teachers have a responsibility for their actions, but that teacher-prep programs and the school system itself could do more to curb the overuse of suspensions. 

“It’s hard for educators because a lot of us might feel like this [discipline decisions] is not what I signed up to do, this is not what I learned in my college classroom,” said Thomas. “But why isn’t it a part of teacher training in colleges? Why isn’t understanding of our own biases and lenses and those that are different from ours, why aren’t we taught early on what that is?”

“Everybody needs Band-Aids, she added, “but Band-Aids only last so long.”

Editors’ note: The Hechinger Report’s Fazil Khan had nearly completed the data analysis and reporting for this project when he died in a fire in his apartment building. Read about the internship fund created to honor his legacy as a data reporter. USA TODAY Senior Data Editor Doug Caruso completed data visualizations for this project based on Khan’s work.

This story about racial disparities in school discipline was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

The post ‘It was the most unfair thing’: Disobedience, discipline and racial disparity appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

A Rhode Island student smashed a ketchup packet with his fist, splattering an administrator. Another ripped up his school work. The district called it “destruction of school property.” A Washington student turned cartwheels while a PE teacher attempted to give instructions. 

A pair of Colorado students slid down a dirt path despite a warning. An Ohio 12th grader refused to work while assigned to the in-school suspension room. Then there was the Maryland sixth grader who swore when his computer shut off and responded “my bad” when his teacher addressed his language. 

Their transgressions all ended the same way: The students were suspended.

Discipline records state the justification for their removals: These students were disorderly. Insubordinate. Disruptive. Disobedient. Defiant. Disrespectful. 

At most U.S. public schools, students can be suspended, even expelled, for these ambiguous and highly subjective reasons. This type of punishment is pervasive nationwide, leading to hundreds of thousands of missed days of school every year, and is often doled out for misbehavior that doesn’t seriously hurt anyone or threaten school safety, a Hechinger Report investigation found. 

Districts cited one of these vague violations as a reason for suspending or expelling students more than 2.8 million times from 2017-18 to 2021-22 across the 20 states that collect this data. That amounted to nearly a third of all punishments recorded by those states. Black students and students with disabilities were more likely than their peers to be disciplined for these reasons. 

Many discipline reform advocates say that suspensions should be reserved for only the most serious, dangerous behaviors. Those, the analysis found, were much less common. Violations of rules involving alcohol, tobacco or drugs were cited as reasons for ejecting students from classes about 759,000 times, and incidents involving a weapon were cited 131,000 times. Even infractions involving physical violence — such as fighting, assault and battery — were less common, with about 2.3 million instances. (Learn more about the data and how we did our analysis.)

Because categories like defiance and disorderly conduct are often defined broadly at the state level, teachers and administrators have wide latitude in interpreting them, according to interviews with dozens of researchers, educators, lawyers and discipline reform advocates. That opens the door to suspensions for low-level infractions.  

“Those are citations you can drive a truck through,” said Jennifer Wood, executive director for the Rhode Island Center for Justice. 

The Hechinger Report also obtained more than 7,000 discipline records from a dozen school districts across eight states through public records requests. They show a wide range of behavior that led to suspensions for things like disruptive conduct and insubordination. Much of the conduct posed little threat to safety. For instance, students were regularly suspended for being tardy, using a phone during class or swearing. 

Decades of research have found that students who are suspended from school tend to perform worse academically and drop out at higher rates. Researchers have linked suspensions to lower college enrollment rates and increased involvement with the criminal justice system.

These findings have spurred some policymakers to try to curtail suspensions by limiting their use to severe misbehavior that could harm others. Last year, California banned all suspensions for willful defiance. Other places, including Philadelphia and New York City, have similarly eliminated suspensions for low-level misconduct. 

Elsewhere, though, as student behavior has worsened following the pandemic, legislators are calling for stricter discipline policies, concerned for educators who struggle to maintain order and students whose lessons are disrupted. These legislative proposals come despite warnings from experts and even classroom teachers who say more suspensions — particularly for minor, subjective offenses — are not the answer. 

Roberto J. Rodríguez, assistant U.S. education secretary, said he was concerned by The Hechinger Report’s findings. “We need more tools in the toolkit for our educators and for our principals to be able to respond to some of the social and emotional needs,” he said. “Suspension and expulsion shouldn’t be the only tool that we pull out when we see behavioral issues.”

In Rhode Island, insubordination was the most common reason for a student to be suspended in the years analyzed. Disorderly conduct was third. 

In the Cranston Public Schools, these two categories accounted for half of the Rhode Island district’s suspensions in 2021-22. Disorderly conduct alone made up about 38 percent. 

Behavior that led to a such a suspension there in recent years included:

• Getting a haircut in the bathroom;
• Putting a finger through the middle of another student’s hamburger at lunch;
• Writing swear words in an email exchange with another student;
• Throwing cut up pieces of paper in the air;
• Stabbing a juice bottle with a pencil and getting juice all over a table and peers; and
• Leapfrogging over a peer and “almost” knocking down others.

Cranston school officials did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Rhode Island Department of Education spokesperson Victor Morente said in an email that the agency could not comment on specific causes for suspension, but that the department “continues to underscore that all options need to be exhausted before schools move to suspension.” 

The department defines disorderly conduct as “Any act which substantially disrupts the orderly conduct of a school function, [or] behavior which substantially disrupts the orderly learning environment or poses a threat to the health, safety, and/or welfare of students, staff, or others.”

Related: In New York state, students can be suspended for up to an entire school year

Many states use similarly unspecific language in their discipline codes, if they provide any guidance at all, a review of state policies found. 

For education departments that do provide definitions to districts, subjectivity is frequently built in. In Louisiana’s state guidance, for instance, “treats authority with disrespect” includes “any act which demonstrates a disregard or interference with authority.”

Ted Beasley, spokesperson for the Louisiana Department of Education, said in an email that discipline codes are not defined in state statutes and that “school discipline is a local school system issue.” 

Officials in several other states said the same.

The result, as demonstrated by a review of discipline records from eight states, is a broad interpretation of the categories: Students were suspended for shoving, yelling at peers, throwing objects, and violating dress codes. Some students were suspended for a single infraction; others broke several rules. 

In fewer than 15 percent of cases, students got in trouble for using profanity, according to a Hechinger analysis of the records. The rate was similar for when they yelled at or talked back to administrators. In at least 20 percent of cases, students refused a direct order and in 6 percent, they were punished for misusing technology, including being on the cell phones during class or using school computers inappropriately. 

“What is defiance to one is not defiance to all, and that becomes confusing, not just for the students, but also the adults,” said Harry Lawson, human and civil rights director for the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union. “Those terms that are littered throughout a lot of codes of conduct, depending on the relationship between people, can mean very different things.”

But giving teachers discretion in how to assign discipline isn’t necessarily a problem, said Adam Tyner, national research director at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. “The whole point of trusting, in this case, teachers, or anyone, to do their job is to be able to let them have responsibility and make some judgment calls,” he said.

Tyner added that it’s important to think about all students when considering school discipline policies. “If a student is disrupting the class, it may not help them all that much to take them and put them in a different environment, but it sure might help the other students who are trying to learn,” he said. 

Johanna Lacoe spent years trying to measure exactly that — the effect of discipline reforms on all students In Philadelphia, including those who hadn’t been previously suspended. The district banned out-of-school suspensions for many nonviolent offenses in 2012. 

Critics of the policy shift warned that it would harm students who do behave in class; they’d learn less or even come to school less often. Lacoe’s research found that schools faithfully following the new rules saw no decrease in academic achievement or attendance for non-suspended students. 

But, the policy wasn’t implemented consistently, the researchers found. The schools that complied already issued the fewest suspensions; it was easier for them to make the policy shift, Lacoe said. In schools that kept suspending students, despite the ban, test scores and student attendance fell slightly.

Overall, though, students who had been previously suspended showed improvements. Lacoe called eliminating out-of-school suspensions for minor infractions a “no brainer.”

“We know suspensions aren’t good for kids,” said Lacoe, the research director of the California Policy Lab’s site at the University of California, Berkeley.* The group partners with government agencies to research the impact of policies. “Kicking kids out of school and providing them no services and no support and then returning them to the environment where nothing has changed is not a good solution.” 

Related: Hidden expulsions? Schools kick students out but call it a ‘transfer’

This fall, two high schoolers in Providence, Rhode Island, walked out of a classroom. They later learned they were being suspended for their action, because it was disrespectful to a teacher.

On her first day back after the suspension, one of the students, Sara, said she went to her teacher to talk through the incident. It was something she wished she’d had the chance to do without missing a couple days of school.

“Suspending someone, not talking to someone, that’s not helping,” said Sara, whose last name is being withheld to protect her privacy. “You’re not helping them to succeed. You’re making it worse.”

In 2021-22, disorderly conduct and insubordination made up a third of all Providence Public School suspensions. 

District spokesperson Jay Wegimont said in an email that the district uses many alternatives to suspension and out-of-school suspensions are only given to respond to “persistent conduct which substantially impedes the ability of other students to learn.”

Some parents and students interviewed asked not to have their full names published, fearing retaliation from their school districts. But nearly all parents and students who have dealt with suspension for violations such as disrespect and disorderly conduct also said that the punishment often did nothing but leave the student frustrated with the school and damage the student’s relationships with teachers. 

At a Cincinnati high school in 2019, Yousuf Munir led a peaceful protest about the impact of climate change, with about 50 fellow students. Munir, then a junior, planned to leave school and join a larger protest at City Hall. The principal said Munir couldn’t go and threatened to assign detention.

Munir left anyway.

That detention morphed into suspension for disobeying the principal, said Munir, who remembers thinking: “The only thing you’re doing is literally keeping me out of class.”

The district told The Hechinger Report that Munir was suspended for leaving campus without written permission, a decision in line with the district’s code of conduct. 

The whole incident left Munir feeling “so angry I didn’t know what to do with it.” They went on to start the Young Activists Coalition, which advocated for fair discipline and restorative practices at Cincinnati Public Schools.

Now in college, Munir is a mentor to high school kids. “I can’t imagine ever treating a kid that way,” they said. 

Parents and students around the country described underlying reasons for behavior problems that a suspension would do little to address: Struggles with anxiety. Frustration with not understanding classwork. Distraction by events in their personal lives. 

Discipline records are also dotted with examples that indicate a deeper cause for the misbehavior.

In one case, a student in Rhode Island was suspended for talking back to her teachers; the discipline record notes that her mother had recently died and the student might need counseling. A student in Minnesota “lost his cool” after having “his buttons pushed by a couple peers.” He cursed and argued back. A Maryland student who went to the main office to report being harassed cursed at administrators when asked to formally document it. 

To be sure, discipline records disclose only part of a school’s response, and many places may simultaneously be working to address root causes. Even as they retain — and exercise — the right to suspend, many districts across the country have adopted alternative strategies aimed at building relationships and repairing harm caused by misconduct. 

“There needs to be some kind of consequence for acting out, but 9 out of 10 times, it doesn’t need to be suspension,” said Judy Brown, a social worker in Minneapolis Public Schools.

Related: Preventing suspensions: Tackle discipline problems with empathy first

Some educators who have embraced alternatives say in the long run they’re more effective. Suspension temporarily removes kids; it rarely changes behavior when they return. 

“It’s really about having the compassion and the time and patience to be able to have these conversations with students to see what the antecedent of the behavior is,” Brown said. “It’s often not personal; they’re overwhelmed.” 

In some cases, students act out because they don’t want to be at school at all and know the quickest escape is misbehavior. 

On Valentine’s day 2022, a Maryland seventh grader showed up to school late. She then refused to go to class or leave the hallway and, according to her Dorchester County discipline record, was disrespectful towards an educator. “These are the behaviors [the student] typically displays when she does not want to go to class,” her record reads. 

By 8:30 she was suspended and sent home for three days.

Dorchester County school officials declined to comment. In 2021-22, 38 percent of suspensions and expulsions in the district were assigned for disrespect and disruption.

Last year, administrators in Minnesota’s Monticello School District spent the summer overhauling their discipline procedures and consequences, out of concern that students of color were being disproportionately disciplined. They developed clearer definitions for violation categories and instituted non-exclusionary tools to deal with isolated minor misbehaviors.

Previously, the district suspended students for telling an “inappropriate joke” in class or cursing, records show. Those types of behavior will now be dealt with in schools, Superintendent Eric Olsen said, but repeated refusals and noncompliance could still lead to a suspension.

“Would I ever want to see a school where we can’t suspend? I would not,” he said. “Life is always about balance.”

Olsen wants his students — all students — to feel valued and be successful. But they’re not his only consideration. “You also have to think of your employees,” he said. “There’s also that fine line of making sure your staff feels safe.” 

Related: Some kids have returned to in-person learning only to be kicked right back out

Monticello, like most school districts across the country, has seen an increase in student misconduct since schools reopened after pandemic closures. A 2023 survey found that more than 40 percent of educators felt less safe in their schools compared with 2019 and, in some instances, teachers have been injured in violent incidents, including shootings. 

And even before 2020, educators nationwide were warning that they lacked the appropriate mental health and social service supports to adequately deal with behavior challenges. Some nonviolent problems, like refusal to put phones away or stay in one’s seat, can make it difficult for teachers to effectively do their jobs. 

And the discipline records reviewed by The Hechinger Report do capture a sampling of more severe misbehavior. In some cases, students were labeled defiant or disorderly for fighting, throwing chairs or even hitting a teacher. 

Shatara Clark taught for 10 years in Alabama before feeling too disrespected and overextended to keep going. She recalled regular disobedience from students. 

“Sometimes I look back like, ‘How did I make it?’” Clark said. “My blood pressure got high and everything.” 

She became so familiar with the protocol for discipline referrals that she can still remember every step two years after leaving the classroom. In her schools, students were suspended for major incidents like fighting or threatening a teacher but also for repeated nonviolent behavior like interrupting or speaking out in class. 

Clark said discipline records often don’t show the full context. “Say for instance, a boy got suspended for talking out of turn. Well, you’re not going to know that he’s done that five times, and I’ve called his parents,” she said. “Then you see someone that’s been suspended for fighting, and it looks like the same punishment for a lesser thing.”

In many states, reform advocates and student activists pushing to ban harsh discipline policies have found a receptive audience in lawmakers. Many teachers are also sympathetic to their arguments; the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers support discipline reform and alternatives to suspension. 

In some instances, though, teachers have resisted efforts to curtail suspensions, saying they need to have the option to remove kids from school.

Many experts say the largest hurdle to getting teachers to embrace discipline reforms is that new policies are often rolled out without training or adequate staffing and support. 

Without those things, “the policy change is somewhat of a paper tiger,” said Richard Welsh, an associate professor of education and public policy at Vanderbilt University. “If we don’t think about the accompanying support, it’s almost as if some of these are unfunded mandates.”  

In Monticello, Olsen has focused on professional development for teachers to promote alternatives to suspension. The district has created space for students to talk about their actions and how they can rebuild relationships. 

It’s still a work in progress. Teacher training, Olsen says, is key. 

“You can’t just do a policy change and expect everyone to magically do it.”

Reporting contributed by Hadley Hitson of the Montgomery Advertiser and Madeline Mitchell of the Cincinnati Enquirer, members of the USA TODAY Network; and Amanda Chen, Tazbia Fatima, Sara Hutchinson, Tara García Mathewson, and Nirvi Shah, The Hechinger Report. 

Editors’ note: The Hechinger Report’s Fazil Khan had nearly completed the data analysis and reporting for this project when he died in a fire in his apartment building. Read about the internship fund created to honor his legacy as a data reporter. USA TODAY Senior Data Editor Doug Caruso completed data visualizations for this project based on Khan’s work.

*CLARIFICATION: This article has been updated to clarify Johanna Lacoe’s title. She is the research director of the California Policy Lab’s site at the University of California, Berkeley.

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

The post Vague school rules at the root of millions of student suspensions appeared first on The Hechinger Report.