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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Matthew Kraft, an associate professor of education and economics at Brown University, was an early proponent of giving tutors — ordinarily a luxury for the rich — to the masses after the pandemic. The research evidence was strong; more than a hundred studies had shown remarkable academic gains for students who were frequently tutored every week at school. Sometimes, they caught up two grade levels in a single year. 

After Covid shuttered schools in the spring of 2020, Kraft along with a small group of academics lobbied the Biden administration to urge schools to invest in this kind of intensive tutoring across the nation to help students catch up from pandemic learning losses. Many schools did — or tried to do so. Now, in a moment of scholarly honesty and reflection, Kraft has produced a study showing that tutoring the masses isn’t so easy — even with billions of dollars from Uncle Sam. 

The study, which was posted online in late August 2024, tracked almost 7,000 students who were tutored in Nashville, Tennessee, and calculated how much of their academic progress could be attributed to the sessions of tutoring they received at school between 2021 and 2023. Kraft and his research team found that tutoring produced only a small boost to reading test scores, on average, and no improvement in math. Tutoring failed to lift course grades in either subject.

“These results are not as large as many in the education sector had hoped,” said Kraft in an interview. That’s something of an academic understatement. The one and only positive result for students was a tiny fraction of what earlier tutoring studies had found.

“I was and continue to be incredibly impressed with the rigorous and wide body of evidence that exists for tutoring and the large average effects that those studies produced,” said Kraft. “I don’t think I paid as much attention to whether those tutoring programs were as applicable to post-Covid era tutoring at scale.”

Going forward, Kraft said he and other researchers need to “recalibrate” or adjust expectations around the “eye-popping” or very large impacts that previous small-scale tutoring programs have achieved.

Kraft described the Nashville program as “multiple orders of magnitude” larger than the pre-Covid tutoring studies. Those were often less than 50 students, while some involved a few hundred. Only a handful included over 1,000 students. Nashville’s tutoring program reached almost 7,000 students, roughly 10 percent of the district’s student population. 

Tennessee was a trailblazer in tutoring after the pandemic. State lawmakers appropriated extra funding to schools to launch large tutoring programs, even before the Biden administration urged schools around the nation to do the same with their federal Covid recovery funds. Nashville partnered with researchers, including Kraft, to study its ramp up and outcomes for students to help advise on improvements along the way. 

As with the launching of any big new program, Nashville hit a series of snags. Early administrators were overwhelmed with “14 bazillion emails,” as educators described them to researchers in the study, before they hired enough staff to coordinate the tutoring program. They first tried online tutoring. But too much time and effort was wasted setting kids up on computers, coping with software problems, and searching for missing headphones. Some children had to sit in the hallway with their tablets and headphones; it was hard to concentrate. 

Meanwhile, remote tutors were frustrated by not being able to talk with teachers regularly. Often there was redundancy with tutors being told to teach topics identical to what the students were learning in class. 

The content of the tutoring lessons was in turmoil, too. The city scrapped its math curriculum midway. Different grades required different reading curricula. For each of them, Nashville educators needed to create tutor guides and student workbooks from scratch.

Eventually the city switched course and replaced its remote tutors, who were college student volunteers, with teachers at the school who could tutor in-person. That eliminated the headaches of troublesome technology. Also, teachers could adjust the tutoring lessons to avoid repeating exactly what they had taught in class. 

But school teachers were fewer in number and couldn’t serve as many students as an army of remote volunteers. Instead of one tutor for each student, teachers worked with three or four students at a time. Even after tripling and quadrupling up, there weren’t enough teachers to tutor everyone during school hours. Half the students had their tutoring sessions scheduled immediately before or right after school.

In interviews, teachers said they enjoyed the stronger relationships they were building with their students. But there were tradeoffs. The extra tutoring work raised concerns about teacher burnout.

Despite the flux, some things improved as the tutoring program evolved. The average number of tutoring sessions that students attended increased from 16 sessions in the earlier semesters to 24 sessions per semester by spring of 2023. 

Why the academic gains for students weren’t stronger is unclear. One of Kraft’s theories is that Nashville asked tutors to teach grade-level skills and topics, similar to what the children were also learning in their classrooms and what the state tests would assess. But many students were months, even years behind grade level, and may have needed to learn rudimentary skills before being able to grasp more advanced topics. (This problem surprised me because I thought the whole purpose of tutoring was to fill in missing skills and knowledge!) In the data, average students in the middle of the achievement distribution showed the greatest gains from Nashville’s tutoring program. Students at the bottom and top didn’t progress much, or at all. (See the graph below.)

“What’s most important is that we figure out what tutoring programs and design features work best for which students,” Kraft said. 

Average students in the middle of the achievement distribution gained the most from Nashville’s tutoring program, while students who were the most behind did not catch up much

Another reason for the disappointing academic gains from tutoring may be related to the individualized attention that many students were also receiving at Nashville’s schools. Tutoring often took place during frequently scheduled periods of “Personalized Learning Time” for students, and even students not selected for tutoring received other instruction during this period, such as small-group work with a teacher or individual services for children with special needs. Another set of students was assigned independent practice work using advanced educational software that adapts to a student’s level. To demonstrate positive results in this study, tutoring would have had to outperform all these other interventions. It’s possible that these other interventions are as powerful as tutoring. Earlier pre-Covid studies of tutoring generally compared the gains against those of students who had nothing more than traditional whole class instruction. That’s a starker comparison. (To be sure, one would still have hoped to see stronger results for tutoring as the Nashville program migrated outside of school hours; students who received both tutoring and personalized learning time should have meaningfully outperformed students who had only the personalized learning time.)

Other post-pandemic tutoring research has been rosier. A smaller study of frequent in-school tutoring in Chicago and Atlanta, released in March 2024, found giant gains for students in math, enough to totally undo learning losses for the average student. However, those results were achieved by only three-quarters of the roughly 800 students who had been assigned to receive tutoring and actually attended sessions.*

Kraft argued that schools should not abandon tutoring just because it’s not a silver bullet for academic recovery after Covid. “I worry,” he said, “that we may excuse ourselves from the hard work of iterative experimentation and continuous improvement by saying that we didn’t get the eye-popping results that we had hoped for right out of the gate, and therefore it’s not the solution that we should continue to invest in.”

Iteratively is how the business world innovates too. I’m a former business reporter, and this rocky effort to bring tutoring to schools reminds me of how Levi’s introduced custom-made jeans for the masses in the 1990s. These “personal pairs” didn’t cost much more than traditional mass-produced jeans, but it was time consuming for clerks to take measurements, often the jeans didn’t fit and reorders were a hassle. Levi’s pulled the plug in 2003. Eventually it brought back custom jeans — truly bespoke ones made by a master tailor at $750 or more a pop. For the masses? Maybe not. 

I wonder if customized instruction can be accomplished at scale at an affordable price. To really help students who are behind, tutors will need to diagnose each student’s learning gaps, and then develop a customized learning plan for each student. That’s pricey, and maybe impossible to do for millions of students all over the country. 

*Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated how many students were assigned to receive tutoring in the Chicago and Atlanta experiment. Only 784 students were to be tutored out of 1,540 students in the study. About three-quarters of those 784 students received tutoring. The sentence was also revised to clarify which students’ math outcomes drove the results.

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

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MILWAUKEE — On a muggy afternoon in late June, about 20 kindergarten through second-grade teachers sat in a classroom on the third floor of Milwaukee’s North Division High School. The air conditioning wasn’t working properly, but the heat didn’t seem to bother the teachers, who were absorbed in a math lesson.

Danielle Robinson and Alicia Socha, two teachers in the district, led the lesson.

“I went to the store to buy some fruit. I bought five apples and four bananas. How many pieces of fruit did I buy?” Socha asked.

The elementary teachers in the room solved the problem quickly. But the solution wasn’t the point. The teachers spent more time discussing what type of problem this was. Describing and deconstructing it helped the teachers reach a deeper understanding of not only how it works but how to explain it to their youngest learners.

“Put yourself into the mind of a child,” Robinson said.

Teaching counting and basic arithmetic sounds like a simple task. But early-childhood and elementary teachers have the daunting task of introducing abstraction to their students: What is a number? What does it mean for a number to be bigger? What does it mean to be a part of a whole?

Across the hall, Beth Schefelker and Claire Madden, two other math education specialists, led a group of teachers and principals in adding fractions. Since 2022, the district has spent close to a million dollars in Covid-19 relief funds to pay the coaches, principals and teachers to attend these sessions.

Many of these teachers never saw themselves as “math people.” Today, they were surprising themselves. Kayla Thuemler, a first grade teacher, added some fractions using a number line, where fractions are visually arranged along a horizontal line, similar to using a ruler. Thuemler had never seen fractions taught using a number line. But seeing fractions with different denominators on the same number line helped her see fractions as a more coherent system.

“Why am I enjoying myself right now?” she asked colleagues. “I hate math.”

Melissa Hedges and DeAnn Huinker strolled back and forth between the two classrooms. They shared giddy glances when they saw the teachers get excited about math. Hedges oversees all things math for the Milwaukee district’s elementary and middle schools. Huinker, a professor who advised Hedges’ doctorate in math education at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is a legend among Milwaukee’s math teachers.

Huinker led a math education revolution in the district when, between 2004 and 2014, almost every teacher in Milwaukee Public Schools received this type of training. Veteran teachers refer to this era as the golden years of math instruction. New district leaders abruptly ended that work. Ten years later, the teachers gathered on this balmy afternoon are the inheritors of Huinker’s legacy, tasked with preserving a vibrant culture of collaboration and a commitment to helping teachers master math.

“Every teacher wants to learn and do a better job teaching,” Huinker said. “When teachers are learning, students are learning.”

Related: Sign up for a limited-run newsletter that walks you through some of the most promising solutions for helping students conquer math.

Early in her career, Huinker dedicated herself to solving the problem of inequitable achievement in math, whether measured by test scores, grades or more qualitative surveys about students’ attitudes toward the subject. In the early 2000s, she saw a grant from the National Science Foundation as a possible solution for Milwaukee’s public schools.

The NSF, an independent federal agency, offers funding for math, science and engineering education in all 50 states. In 2003, the NSF awarded Huinker $20 million, the largest amount ever awarded to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, to establish a partnership between the university and the local school district.

 Huinker’s proposal was to have math education experts teach teachers more math while getting constant feedback from teachers on obstacles in the classroom. In 2002, a coalition of teachers, professors and administrators led by Huinker announced the Milwaukee Mathematics Partnership.

“It’s like all the stars aligned,” she said. “You had the university professors from education and mathematics, as well as the Milwaukee Public Schools superintendent, who was very supportive.”

The $20 million allowed the district to hire 120 math teacher leaders who would serve as a crucial piece to the system Huinker had imagined. Each of the 120 schools had a teacher leader, who would serve as the liaison between Huinker and her university colleagues and the classroom teachers across the district.

Beth Schefelker was one of those teacher leaders. She was “bright-eyed and bushy-tailed” about the partnership when it started, but she said she quickly ran into roadblocks. While some district administrators were on board, others were less enthused.

Schefelker recalled one meeting with a principal who leaned back in his chair, put his feet up on the desk and said, “Convince me why I need to be a part of this.” Another principal told her, “You’re just another woman asking me to take a leap of faith.”

Schefelker responded, “What we’re doing is not working.”

Before the partnership, the district’s approach to math resembled what math instruction looks like today in many schools across the nation — a patchwork of different methods and approaches. The partnership sought to bring more consistency among educators in a way that reflected the conceptual cohesion of mathematics as a discipline. But none of this would be possible if teachers themselves didn’t understand the math.

While teacher leaders like Schefelker worked in individual schools and Huinker managed the partnership from the university, Henry Kranendonk mediated from the district office. He helped develop a “spectrum” that became the centerpiece of the program.

First, the district’s teachers agreed what students in each grade should learn in math and made sure these learning goals met state standards. Second, teachers and university professors helped develop standardized assessments for each grade level. Teachers within individual schools would then meet to discuss where students were weak and report these findings to Huinker and her colleagues, who would then develop teacher training sessions.

“At the end of the day, it was gratifying,” Kranendonk said. “We weren’t giving them orders. We were collectively trying to figure out the best form of instruction.”

In the classroom, teachers pushed students to reach a conceptual understanding of mathematics, a departure from the “drill and kill” methods of timed tests and memorizing procedures. The goal was to help students understand how different topics within math, everything from whole numbers and fractions to algebraic functions and areas of shapes, are interconnected. Students could then confidently solve unfamiliar problems without relying on formulas or by following the same step-by-step procedures. They would understand that individual problems are just expressions of concepts.

Related: Kindergarten math is often too basic. Here’s why that’s a problem

The partnership also gave teachers a say in how the district taught math. The training sessions went over state standards in detail and helped teachers unlearn their own bad math habits, while dispelling any false ideas a teacher might have about not being a “math person.” The training sessions were designed and improved based on the feedback classroom teachers gave to Kranendonk.

Through this ecosystem, teachers discovered just how fragmented math instruction had been in the district. For example, they realized early on that some students didn’t understand the “equals” sign. Schefelker recalled how some students thought the symbol stood for “the answer is” rather than a symbol that represents balance. They had seen the equal sign only in the context of solving problems, and not as one critical component of the language of math.

“The kids didn’t understand equality,” Schefelker said. “All they were doing was going through the process and not really understanding what they were doing.”

Once Huinker and her colleagues intervened through training sessions, teachers started to teach the equal sign differently, using problems like “5+7=__+6” to show how both sides of the equation need to be the same value.

Once the partnership gained momentum, the benefits became obvious, especially in test score data. According to one University of Wisconsin report, test scores rose by 10 percentage points for some groups. According to a report by Huinker’s team in 2011, one school in the district, 98 percent of whose students lived in low-income households, increased its mathematics proficiency by 40 percentage points. Milwaukee Public Schools became a beacon for math instruction across the country.

A long-term look at the data, however, paints a more complicated picture. In 2004, when the partnership fully launched, about 30 percent of the district’s eighth graders were either proficient or advanced in math, according to Wisconsin standardized test score data. But in the 2005-06 school year, the state created a new standardized test, and scores plummeted for students: That year, only about 10 percent of eighth graders in Milwaukee were either proficient or advanced. That rate for eighth graders peaked in 2012, with about 16 percent reaching proficiency or advanced status. During the partnership, fourth graders saw about an 8 percentage point gain in the rate of students who scored proficient or advanced.

According to Huinker and Schefelker, however, test scores were only the most public-facing sign of improvement. Grades, student interest and teacher satisfaction skyrocketed during those years.

Buy-in from teachers was one reason the Milwaukee Mathematics Partnership worked, Huinker said. The second reason for the partnership’s success was more bureaucratic. Huinker, not the district, controlled the purse strings. Leaders at financially strapped districts like Milwaukee Public Schools constantly juggle competing priorities, and, according to Huinker and Kranendonk, district leaders were tempted to allocate some of the money to other areas of need. Huinker ensured that the money would be spent only on math instruction.

“The external funding really gave us a leverage point,” Huinker said. “We were accountable to the National Science Foundation for keeping track of how the money was spent towards the clear goals of the project.”

All this created a tight accountability structure that allowed everyone involved to stay focused on the goal of improving math achievement in Milwaukee.

The NSF money lasted nearly a decade, and the successes continued. When the federal money ran out, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction funded the partnership for two years.

Despite receiving national and statewide praise, the Milwaukee Mathematics Partnership ended in 2014, when a new superintendent and curriculum director decided to terminate the district’s relationship with the University of Wisconsin.

Huinker, Kranendonk and Schefelker recalled that the new district officials wanted to have complete district control over math instruction. The end was sudden, a contrast to the amount of time that had been invested into making the partnership work.

“They broke it,” Schefelker said. “It took years of work to thread that needle. It took months to unravel.”

Related: Teachers conquering their math anxiety

Today, about 12 percent of students in the district, compared to 41 percent statewide, are proficient in math, according to standardized test score data. Wisconsin administers its state tests to students in grades three to eight and grade 10. Hedges, the current math curriculum director for the district who held several positions during the partnership, recalled a colleague who had once called math the “crown jewel” of Milwaukee Public Schools. “If you look at our test scores now, we might not be able to say that,” Hedges said.

After the partnership ended in 2014, standardized test scores in math continued to rise incrementally. From 2016 to 2019, overall math proficiency in Milwaukee rose about 1 percentage point, to reach 16.2 percent. Hedges said some teachers remained committed to the partnership’s methods.

“We had such a strong leadership base,” she said. When the partnership ended, “there were 120 math teacher leaders out in the district, and some of them went back into classrooms.”

Huinker continues to train teachers for the district. Since the partnership ended in 2014, district leadership changed again, and there’s been more openness to collaborating with the university. The sessions for early-childhood educators, which meet for four hours a day for about two weeks, include both lessons in math and open forums for teachers to air grievances. The format of these meetings reflect the structure of the Milwaukee Mathematics Partnership, with its focus on math content and fostering collaboration between teachers who need more help teaching math.

Today, Milwaukee Public Schools is reckoning with fiscal mismanagement, changes to leadership, clashes with the state and tension between administrators and teachers. On top of all that, the district will implement a new math curriculum across its schools this fall. Teachers feel unprepared and lament that they’ll only see it a week before the school year starts.

Although another systemic overhaul is unlikely in the near future, the people who were around during the Milwaukee Mathematics Partnership are trying to pass down everything they’ve learned to the next generation of educators. The focus on the youngest learners is encouraging for newer teachers who got into the profession partly to avoid math.

Danielle Robinson was one of the teachers in the district who helped lead the sessions for early-childhood teachers. She wasn’t around during the partnership, but she adheres to the same goals and methods. Her job, she said, is to translate research in education and childhood development for teachers.

“I felt like I never really learned math, until I was able to learn” from Huinker and Hedges, Robinson said. “I always thought that social studies and literacy were more of my thing. These ladies really did change my life.”

Phoebe Goebels contributed reporting for this story.

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

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Environment and Sustainability in Enlightenment France. Modeling for Energy and Infrastructure Project Finance. Adirondack Cultural Ecology. Perspectives on the Amazon.

These courses, offered at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania; Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley; State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry; and Duke University in North Carolina, respectively, illustrate how institutions are rethinking the study of sustainability at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

The new Higher Ed Climate Action Plan from the Aspen Institute’s This Is Planet Ed (where, full disclosure, I’m a senior advisor) identifies the need to educate and support students as a top priority. No surprise there. 

The plan further calls for this learning to be broad, interdisciplinary and future-oriented, giving students a path to a sustainable workforce.

“The scale of the challenges we face demands that all people have baseline understanding” of climate, the plan says. “[H]igher education must advance a learning agenda…with cross-disciplinary educational offerings.”

In a 2022 global survey, 60 percent of higher education institutions said that climate-related content is found in fewer than 10 percent of their courses. But a vanguard of colleges and universities are looking to change that. Each of these diverse institutions has their own unique method and mission. They are all taking the strategy of integrating sustainability content as widely across the curriculum as is feasible. They are breaking out of traditional silos and disciplines, and ensuring that these courses are encountered by as many students as possible.

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

Toddi Steelman, former Stanback Dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke, was a member of  the Aspen Institute’s This Is Planet Ed Higher Ed Task Force. Duke introduced a wide-ranging climate commitment in 2022 that spans operations, research grants and partnerships, including with the New York Climate Exchange.

But “education is our superpower,” Steelman said. “We want every major to be a climate major. Our responsibility is to ensure we have educated our students to capably deal with these challenges and identify the solutions. Whatever they do – preachers, teachers, nurses, engineers, legislators – if they have some sort of background in climate and sustainability, they will carry that into their first job and the next job.”

Accordingly, each of the ten schools within the university is working to define for itself what it means to be aligned with what Duke calls a “fluency framework.” The framework spans skills, behaviors and attitudes that uphold climate and sustainability understanding.

Allowing each school to find its own way, rather than mandating a shift to climate content by fiat, will take time. Steelman is advocating for fluency for all undergraduates by 2028, she said, but “We’re working through a committee process and we’ll see what sticks.”

The hope is that this process, honoring faculty expertise, results in more ownership and more meaningful integration of climate content. Steelman says the schools of nursing and medicine have been out in front, along with, fascinatingly, the French department.

“They are introducing climate change issues into conversational French,” she said. “They are also thinking about research about how you conjugate verbs. The way you talk and think about the future has consequences for climate change.”

Related: COLUMN: What does it look like when higher ed actually takes climate change seriously?

SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse was ranked number one in the nation (along with two other schools) for its sustainability curriculum in 2023.  So it’s perhaps surprising that it doesn’t have a single course that focuses solely on climate change. At least not yet.

“We don’t necessarily teach specifically about climate change, at least at the introductory level,” said Stephen Shaw, the chair of the Environmental Resources Engineering department.

“We definitely teach the fundamentals that let people understand the science of it, and what it means to do climate adaptation, and mitigation,” he added. Students can even work with one professor to directly build instruments that measure greenhouse gases in the field.

The faculty, said Shaw, is now debating adding an interdisciplinary, introductory course that answers questions like: “What is the basic science? What are the impacts? What are the impacts to people? What are the impacts to habitat, recreation, all across the board?”

Related: Changing education can change the climate

Dickinson, a liberal arts college of just over 2,000 students in Pennsylvania coal country, mandated in 2019 that every student take at least one sustainability course as a requirement for graduation. In practice, said Neil Leary, Dickinson’s associate provost and director of the Center for Sustainability Education, “over 50 percent of students who graduated this past May had taken four or more such courses, and one in four had taken more than six.”

Dickinson offers more than 100 sustainability courses per semester, in departments from business to architecture. The college’s “Mosaic” courses, offered once or twice a year, are of particular interest. They are co-taught by professors in different disciplines and often include an independent study and a travel component. In a recent offering, on the energy transition in Germany, students studied representations of the environment in German literature and culture, and also traveled to Germany to see its adoption of solar and energy efficiency in practice.

Like Duke with its fluency framework, Dickinson follows a broad definition of sustainability, Leary says. He cites the Global Council for Science and the Environment, a nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to advancing environmental and sustainability education and research, which has identified five key competencies in the field: Systems thinking, future-thinking, collaboration skills, strategic thinking and values-thinking.

“This is not value-neutral education,” Leary said. “Sustainability has a set of values that includes taking all people’s needs into account.”

Related: COLUMN: Colleges must give communities a seat at the table alongside scientists if we want real environmental justice

For now, institutions that go all-in on sustainability are rare enough that it can serve as a selling point in the competition for students, faculty and donors. Leary says 40 percent of undergraduates Dickinson surveyed recently agreed that this was a major factor that brought them to the college.

But if leaders in the sector have their way, an all-sustainable curriculum will shift from a nice-to-have to table stakes. Bryan Alexander, author of Universities on Fireand an educational futurist with a particular focus on climate change, said, “My slogan is, climate change is the new liberal arts.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You might even take delight in solving the problem yourself.

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

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

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The other day, one of my students told me that she’d been assigned the lyrics of Kendrick Lamar for her high school English class. It was the first time I had encountered a high school English assignment involving an author with whom I was wholly unfamiliar.

But can we even call rapper and songwriter Kendrick Lamar an author, his lyrics literature? Call me a snob, but I would argue that we cannot and should not, especially at a level so introductory to the English literary canon as high school. High school curricula are meant to present a broad and foundational overview of the important tenets of each core field of knowledge: mathematics, science, literature, history and language.

Related: TEACHER VOICE: How the sad shadow of book banning shuts down conversations and lacerates librarians

Many high school students are already consuming Kendrick Lamar and Taylor Swift on a daily basis without the intervention of the education system. In my view, using course time to analyze the lyrics of these popular artists not only precludes students from uncovering new knowledge but also encourages them to consider the fleeting music of our time — most of which, I predict, will be forgotten in the span of a generation — as great literature.

So why have we swapped out Shakespeare, Chaucer and Dickens for figures who are — at best — ancillary to literary study? Shouldn’t we teach students about the works of the Shakespeares and the Chaucers that English literature is based on — rather than present them with the words of contemporary songwriters such as Kendrick Lamar and Taylor Swift, whose works might belong entirely to a different category?

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

As educators, the fate of tomorrow’s change-makers rests in our hands, and it is our goal to rear the next generation of successful thinkers. There is no better way to teach students to think than to encourage them to wrestle with the sort of complex ideas that we find in time-tested literature. We must not, therefore, alter our intellectual standards or deem literature unimportant and pretentious, especially for students who are at such a crucial period of their intellectual development. It is our job to guide students to aspire to intellectual mountaintops rather than confining them to more familiar valleys.

At a certain point, we do need to start distinguishing between foundational literature and the musical byproducts of our contemporary culture. New York University can offer as many Taylor Swift courses as it wants, and there might be nothing wrong with studying Taylor Swift as literature — but that should not happen until students have attained a robust understanding of the literary tradition.

At the high school level, we should challenge younger generations to understand the core facets of the humanistic tradition by presenting them with an accurate picture of what the field of literary study has always been: a profound exploration of the human condition through words and stories. These stories, expressed through vivid works of literature, will, in turn, compel them to think critically.

I teach writing to high schoolers through my college consulting firm. When preparing students to write their college essays, I always lead with literature — Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, Fitzgerald, for instance — for I believe that developing strong communication skills lies in understanding the writing styles and messages of these great thinkers and writers.

Many of my students, who will soon be sending in applications to America’s elite educational institutions, can no longer string a coherent sentence together without using AI tools such as ChatGPT or Grammarly. While there might be nothing wrong with using these tools as guidebooks and coaches, doing so must not come at the expense of developing strong writing skills, which are the cornerstone of strong communication. A generation that has lost the ability to write will lose the ability to effect meaningful societal change, for great change lies in effectively sharing ideas with others.

The students I work with are our future doctors, engineers and lawyers, among many other professions. In diluting their high school English curricula, we are collectively abandoning humanistic study as a society, letting go of our dedication to creating strong thinkers and visionaries. While not all teachers have swapped out Shakespeare for Swift, the presence of rappers and songwriters on an English syllabus is a telling sign that we have begun to change the standards of critical thinking and no longer emphasize the value of enduring communication.

I always prompt my college-bound students to challenge themselves intellectually. Instead of endlessly scrolling through Taylor-Swift TikToks, why not pick up a copy of Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”? As I send my students off to college every year, many of them look back and thank me for encouraging them to make it through this literary behemoth, for there is a certain ineffable satisfaction to challenging yourself to engage critically with ideas: It makes us all stronger thinkers and communicators.

And I guarantee you that any 15-year-old can comprehend serious literature with the right mindset and the right mentorship.

As English teachers, our goal is to challenge our students to think critically in order to create the strong communicators of tomorrow — and hope that in the process, they will view literature not as pretentious but as beautiful and profound.

Liza Libes founded her college consulting startup, Invictus Prep, in New York City. Her writing has appeared in The American Spectator, Kveller, Jewish Women of Words and elsewhere.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some examples:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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Math education is living under a spell. Most classes and curricula operate under a pervasive and unspoken assumption; its benefits are widely accepted, but its flaws are all too hidden.

The assumption is that you learn math by solving strings of successively harder problems. At each stage, the teacher decides how hard to make the problems; that is, where to set the “difficulty dial.” The ideal is to gradually turn the difficulty dial from left to right, easy to hard, at just the right speed. For example:

There’s truth in this way of thinking, but when I start treating that slice as a whole loaf — when I catch myself thinking of where to set the difficulty dial as the only choice, or even the primary choice, that a math teacher faces — that’s when I slap my face, dump ice water on my head and write two crucial inequalities on my hand:

Focusing on “easy” vs. “difficult” can become a trap. The two appear to stand opposed, and so teachers can fall into the idea that we must pick one or the other.

But who really cares about “easy” and “difficult”? They are only proxies for two higher virtues, the actual qualities of successful instruction.

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

First, math class should be welcoming. Students need to feel comfortable in the intellectual work of mathematics. Teachers need to help them feel capable not just of solving an “easy” or dumbed down problem, but of tackling the real stuff.

Second, math class should be challenging. It should sharpen and deepen students’ thinking. They should master new skills and practice solving unfamiliar problems.

Unlike easy vs. difficult, welcoming and challenging aren’t opposites. We don’t need to choose between them. The best math instruction braids the two together, in puzzles that are clear yet subtle. A good math lesson, like a good sudoku, can welcome and challenge students simultaneously — welcome them by challenging them.

As a classroom teacher, one of my favorite instructional moves is “give me an example.” At any level of K-12 mathematics, it offers agency and freedom — and it’s easy to come up with such questions.

Asking such questions invites diverse responses. They’re hard to grade in a standardized, objective way. That’s why textbooks and question banks tend to steer clear of them — and that’s why teachers must not.

Mathematical truth may be black and white, but mathematical thinking is not. We need questions that draw out all the shades and hues of thought.

When I taught sixth grade, one of my students’ favorite activities was writing questions for each other. At the end of each unit, I’d designate two piles on my desk: one for straightforward practice questions (the kind easily placed on a difficulty dial) and one for novel problems or open-ended puzzles (including, but not limited to, “give me an example” questions).

Nothing is more welcoming, or more challenging, than the chance to welcome and challenge one another.

When I first taught high school precalculus, my students couldn’t make heads or tails of piecewise-defined functions. Then I lost a whole lesson to a ramble about federal income taxes — and saw their heads perking up after weeks spent slouched on their desks.

That led me to a suitably welcoming and challenging task: Design your own income tax system. Give a table of brackets and rates; give the tax bill for a specific worker in each bracket; and, trickiest of all, give the tax bill as a piecewise-defined function of income.

I’m not sure if the project was easier or more difficult than the exercises we’d been doing. But it excited them more, and pushed them harder. It welcomed and it challenged students.

Since then, projects have become a staple of my teaching — not as a replacement for quizzes and tests, but as a necessary complement.

Related: Why schools are teaching math word problems all wrong

Kids, being human, prefer easy tasks over difficult ones. When the homework is too difficult, they mutiny; when it’s too easy, they shrug and smile.

But on some deeper level, they don’t want math to be easy. They want it to be rewarding.

I saw this the first time I taught AP calculus. In precalculus the year before, my teaching had certainly not inspired them. But now, as 12th graders, they’d name-drop their math class in the hallway, as if they’d befriended a minor celebrity.

“Can’t talk, guys. I’ve got to do the calculus.” “Hey, have you started the calculus?” “Ugh, I was up so late last night doing calculus.”

I say this with affection, having written a book on the stuff, but calculus has little obvious appeal. It’s unnecessary for daily life and irrelevant to most professions.

Despite this, my students thirsted for it. For these kids in Oakland, calculus’s challenge wasn’t a turn-off. It was a badge of honor.

There’s no way to make calculus easy — but that doesn’t mean it can’t be welcoming.

Ben Orlin is a math teacher who can’t draw. He is the author of “Math with Bad Drawings” (2018), “Change Is the Only Constant” (2019), “Math Games with Bad Drawings” (2022) and, most recently, “Math for English Majors” (September 2024). He has previously taught middle and high school, and now teaches at Saint Paul College.

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

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Inside a small, mural-covered building just outside Indianola, Mississippi, 14-year-old Tamorris Carter made the rounds, bouncing lightly on his heels.

He stopped frequently to explain objects of interest; pictures of class field trips to civil rights monuments, or a poster he made on “social dominance orientation,” a term that describes one’s tolerance for social inequality. Even in moments of pause, Tamorris found a way to remain in motion. He would smooth down the cap on his head, lean forward to pinch the bubbles of a rainbow-printed fidget toy, and trace the words of his poster.

Tamorris was giving a tour of the Sunflower County Freedom Project, an after-school and summertime educational program where he’d been a student for a little over two years. The Sunflower County Freedom Project is one location of the Freedom Project Network, an organization that gives Mississippi students “holistic and liberatory education experiences.”

At the Freedom Projects, students — called “Freedom Fellows” — learn about Black and Indigenous history, math, reading and public speaking. The program also prepares students for college. Freedom Fellows range in age from third to 12th grade.

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Most Freedom Fellows at the Sunflower County location are from Indianola, the county seat. Around 9,000 people live there; 84% of them are Black. Almost a third live in poverty. The town center is ringed by cotton fields, which in July, are low to the ground and bright green. In certain places, neat rows of small plants extend to the horizon. The Mississippi State Penitentiary, a place once described by historian David Oshinksy as “the closest thing to slavery that survived the Civil War,” is a short drive from Indianola. Last year, the town made national news when an Indianola police officer shot an unarmed, Black 11-year-old in the chest.

Other educational programs might prepare students to leave towns like Indianola. But the Freedom Project Network is “not an organization just trying to get kids into college,” emphasized LaToysha Brown, the organization’s executive director. “We are not trying to bring kids in to separate them from the community.”

Instead, she hopes Freedom Fellows will use their education to change their communities for the better.

An education that empowers

By early July, the Sunflower County Freedom Project was wrapping up its summer program. Tamorris and other Freedom Fellows moved from class to class in different parts of the building.

“This is our library,” Tamorris announced, cutting through a small room filled with books on Black history, social critique, philosophy, and young adult fiction. From there, he reached a large open area with mats on the ground. “This room is kind of like a gym,” he said. “This is where we do taekwondo.” He paused briefly to demonstrate a move, a decisive punch to the air.

Tamorris walked through a door at the back of the gym, which connected to a classroom with blue walls. A third-grade math class was in session, so he dropped the volume of his voice to a whisper. The classroom’s walls were covered in homemade posters left behind from student presentations. Among others, there were posters with information about historically Black colleges, “The Myth of Racial Progress,” and the signs of ADHD.

The Freedom Project Network takes its name from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s Freedom Schools of 1964, whose alums are celebrating the schools’ 60th anniversary this year. The original Freedom Schools opened to educate young Black Mississippians on Black history and political activism. Charlie Cobb, the SNCC member who proposed the idea, wrote that segregated schools in Mississippi were “geared to squash intellectual curiosity and different thinking.” By contrast, Cobb hoped the Freedom Schools would provide Black kids with an education that empowered them. Eventually, these students would use their education to advocate for racial justice in Mississippi.

In 1998, three decades after the last Freedom Schools closed, a group of community members and Teach for America fellows established the Sunflower County Freedom Project.

Related: 7 realities for Black students in America, 70 years after Brown

LaToysha Brown, 28, grew up in Indianola and is a Freedom Fellow at the Sunflower County Freedom Project. From her perspective, the need for the Freedom Project Network was obvious.

“In Indianola schools, students do not receive a quality education,” she said. “When I was a student, we didn’t receive new textbooks, and we weren’t challenged to read many books. Our teachers were amazing with the resources they had. But our schools were under-resourced.”

In Indianola schools, “you’re never going to have an in-depth conversation about enslavement,” Brown said. Instead, the history of racial injustice is limited to “a paragraph or two” in a textbook.

The Freedom Project gave Brown an education she would not have received at school. Now, Brown works with students who attend that same school system — kids like Tamorris.

Filling in gaps

A photo of Tamorris Carter sitting next to a statue of Rosa Parks while on a field trip to Dallas hangs on the bulletin board at the Sunflower County Freedom Project. Photo by Andrea Morales for MLK50

Tamorris became a Freedom Fellow in eighth grade. By that point, he’d already gained an awareness of injustice, even if he couldn’t label it as such. He remembers looking around his middle school one day and noticing something strange — “I thought, ‘all I see is Black people.’”

He suddenly realized all his classmates were Black, as were the teachers and administrators at his school. This didn’t bother him, exactly, but it did make him wonder: Where are the white kids?

Related: As a 6-year-old, Leona Tate helped desegregate schools. Now she wants others to learn that history

After he joined the Freedom Project, a guest speaker gave him the answer he was looking for: Most white students in Indianola still attend the private Indianola Academy, established to maintain segregation in 1965. Each year, around 400 students attend Indianola Academy. In 2012, then-headmaster Sammy Henderson admitted to The Atlanticmagazinethat the school only enrolled nine Black students, but added that “we also have Hispanic, Indian, and Oriental students.”

For Tamorris, learning about Indianola Academy was a revelation. He had suspected his education was shaped by racism, but he couldn’t bring himself to voice those thoughts. “I didn’t want to be one of those guys that makes everything a conspiracy,” he said. But the guest speaker “gave me reassurance.” He felt — or, allowed himself to feel — that the reality of his life had been kept secret.

He began to see racism throughout his education. At school, teachers had barely mentioned Fannie Lou Hamer, who was born and raised in Sunflower County. They had not taught Tamorris about Juneteenth, either.

Indeed, it started to feel as though his entire life had been shaped by oppression. Tamorris’ mother sometimes struggles to afford food; before, this was an unfortunate fact of life. Now, Tamorris understands it as a symptom of a larger system of racial capitalism. “Screw capitalism,” he said with a grin. “Capitalism is what keeps me broke.”

This kind of thought process is a part of the Freedom Schools’ “liberatory pedagogy,” a teaching style that takes for granted that, according to Brown, “People already know what’s happening to them. They just need the language.”

Brown acknowledges that Tamorris is an extraordinary student. Still, she said, “a lot of our students walk into our space feeling like something just isn’t right in their lives. We fill in the gaps. We give them language. We allow them to share their experiences with each other about what’s happening in their community.”

On July 12, Tamorris and a few other freedom fellows gathered to present a project of their choosing to their family members and supporters. Tamorris gave a presentation on social dominance orientation, which he argues plays a role in the continuation of oppressive systems.

These presentations are a major aspect of the Freedom Project’s teaching style; they are intended to get Freedom Fellows comfortable educating their community members. From Brown’s perspective, a student like Tamorris is perfectly capable of analyzing society by himself, without the assistance of the Freedom Project. But to Brown, analysis is only part of the process.

“I said, ‘Great, you have this great big analysis of the world,” said Brown of Tamorris. “‘Now, I want you to apply that. How can you use that analysis to organize with the people around you?’”

Rebecca Cadenhead is the youth and juvenile justice reporter for MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. She is also a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms. Email her rebecca.cadenhead@mlk50.com.

This story was written by MLK50 and reprinted with permission.

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