What happened: The D.C. Council maintained funding for the Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund, the nation’s first publicly funded program intended to raise the pay of child care workers in the district and provide them with free or low-cost health insurance.

The back story: In the face of a $700 million budget shortfall, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser proposed cutting the $87 million program to replenish the city’s diminished reserve fund. The final budget passed by the council in June keeps the $70 million of the funding in place. The budget was unanimously approved by the 13-member council on June 12.

What’s next: Several proposed rule changes are also expected to pass that could save money for the fund, including capping participants at 4,100 and limiting the program to workers with a child development credential or higher, said Adam Barragan-Smith, advocacy manager at Educare DC, which operates two centers in the city. Advocates are pushing to keep the salary increases and health benefits for child care workers in place, but expect to learn more about how the cuts will impact the program by September 3, when a task force is set to present its recommendations.

“We know some things are going to be cut, we just don’t know exactly what. We’re trying to keep it as whole as possible,” said LaDon Love, executive director of SPACEs in Action, a nonprofit organization that supported the fund.

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During the pandemic shutdown, daycare owner Roxana Contreras sold her house when her income evaporated overnight. Maria Teresa Manrique nearly lost her business, and her life, when a family brought Covid into her home daycare.

As an education reporter and editor in Boston during the pandemic, I was struck by the starkly disparate treatment of the state’s strongly unionized K-12 teacher workforce and the less-organized child care workforce, which includes Contreras and Manrique. Those caring for the youngest children frequently had no guaranteed income when their businesses closed; far less access to protective equipment and supplies, like air filtration devices and free, regular Covid testing; and they were pressed to return to in-person work — the kind of hands-on work where social distancing was impossible — many months before the first vaccines were available.

“We were asking those with very low pay … to do these extraordinary things,” Martha Christenson Lees, former director of the Smith College Center for Early Childhood Education, told me at the time.

Nearly all of the half dozen women I interviewed for my 2021 story had been seriously debilitated by Covid in some way: financially, emotionally, medically. And this spring, three years later, with a new report from the RAPID Survey Project at Stanford Center on Early Childhood showing that child care providers are suffering from record rates of anxiety and depression, I decided to check in with this dedicated group of caregivers. Nationally, an estimated 1 million paid caregivers provide child care out of their homes to about 3 million children.

The two I reached, Contreras and Manrique, both immigrants living and working in the Boston area, have had mixed experiences trying to rebuild their businesses over the last four years. The women, who speak Spanish, were interviewed with the help of interpreter Iris Amador.

‘We have learned to value life’

For Contreras, business has slowly but steadily improved over the last three years. With no money coming in from families after mid-March 2020, she was forced to sell her house in Medford, Massachusetts, also home to her daycare, Gummy Bears, to support her family. She began rebuilding Gummy Bears from the basement of a nearby rental in the summer of 2020, yet struggled for over a year to recruit families reluctant to return to group care, and to hire assistants, many of whom, she says, switched in the pandemic to more highly paid jobs as nannies.

A turning point came in late 2021, when she and other Massachusetts child care providers started receiving monthly operations grants distributed by the state. Contreras used the money to increase pay for assistants, making it easier to hire them; and with the worst danger of the pandemic past, more families returned to group care.

Contreras had enough interest from families by early 2023 that she made plans to add a second site, Gummy Bears 2. It opened in another Medford rental space last September. Across the two locations, Gummy Bears serves 16 children. Although someday she hopes to be licensed for 20 across the two sites, “I am content and I am happy with the number we care for now, and I provide employment to other people who need it,” Contreras said. The continuation of the monthly grants since the fall of 2021 has been crucial to rebuilding and growth, she said.

Contreras has a new problem: turning away families. Gummy Bears’ current wait list stretches out to 2026, with families offering deposits on future spots. (Contreras doesn’t accept them.) There’s an increased demand from pre-pandemic days, possibly as a result of fewer child care spots overall, she said.

The pandemic’s major effect on Contreras was giving up home ownership; high interest rates and housing prices have put reclaiming that goal out of reach for now. But there have been gains, too. She is grateful every day for her health. “We have learned to value life,” she said. 

Elusive road to stability

For Maria Teresa Manrique, Covid’s devastating effects lingered, repeatedly upsetting her financial stability — and her health. She was hospitalized in late 2020 with a severe case of Covid and never fully regained her strength. “I am vulnerable now to infections in a way that I wasn’t before,” she said.

Manrique, a single mother of a teenage daughter, reopened in February 2021, spurred by financial duress. Twice since, she picked up Covid from a child or parent at her daycare. Most recently, in December, Manrique closed for a little over a week after contracting Covid. She not only ran out of the sick day allotment for providers who serve lower-income children on vouchers — meaning she got no pay for some of the time — but lost two students whose families were impatient about the closure. She now enrolls a total of five children.

“Whenever I achieve some balance, I am still behind,” she said. All of her income goes to cover rent and the family’s basic needs, Manrique added, making it impossible to fully pay off taxes she has owed for the last three years. Two months ago, one of her sisters, who also runs an in-home daycare, was diagnosed with a serious illness, and Manrique helps care for her.

She wanted to close the daycare to support her sister full time, but financially it was impossible.

The whole situation feels untenable — and intractable.

“This has been my work for 20 years and I am used to it,” she said. “It has allowed me to care for my own daughter, as I have been both Mom and Dad to her. But when you have been doing this work for 20 years, there is definitely some exhaustion. … There should be more consideration, I believe, for workers like us.”

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If survival required a special backpack and a portable first aid kit, you’d do well to hear that with enough time to prepare. If wilderness guides knew all this and didn’t tell you, what kind of wilderness guides would they be?

But when a college student enrolls in a course that has a high rate of students earning Ds or Fs or withdrawing – or high DFW rate – the only way they might find that out is through informal warnings from an academic advisor, said Bridget Burns, chief executive officer at the University Innovation Alliance, a group of public research universities that works to increase college graduation rates. Historically, students enrolling in these classes haven’t been equipped with the academic first aid kit they might need to get through the course without becoming part of the DFW statistic. 

Those who run colleges know when a course is a “high DFW” course, Burns said, but their approach is simply to hope that students don’t fail. “And we’re smarter than that, as a sector. We care too much about students to let that kind of posture for our work continue.”

This realization sank in for Burns during the pandemic, when leaders from the University Innovation Alliance began reporting increased DFW rates. Surely Covid itself was a factor, but it was unclear what else was contributing to these students earning Ds or Fs or withdrawing. Factors such as the time of day a class is offered, whether it’s in-person or online, the student demographics and faculty demographics, or the combination of classes a student is taking could all contribute, but there hasn’t been a way of identifying why certain classes have high DFW rates. 

“I was shocked to discover there’s no way of diagnosing DFW rates,” Burns said. “That blew my mind.”

Not surprisingly, students who receive Ds, Fs or Ws graduate at lower rates than their peers, according to a 2021 analysis of data from eight colleges by the Association of Public Land Grant Universities. The report found that 69 percent of students who had never received a DFW graduated in four years, compared to 44 percent of those who had received one DFW, and 22 percent of those who had received more than one DFW.

And students from certain groups get DFWs at higher rates than others, the study found. For example, in 18 of 20 classes analyzed, first-generation students were more likely to have a DFW than their peers. Students from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups were more likely than their peers to have a DFW in 19 of 20 classes. Students receiving Pell grants were more likely to have a DFW in 17 of 20 classes. 

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Burns said the answer should not be to track students into easier classes, but to ensure that all students have enough academic support to succeed in the tough classes and finish their degrees.

“It’s more expensive, it’s a little bit more resource intensive, I get it,” Burns said. “But it’s so much more costly for us to have students getting Ds, Fs and Ws and walking away.”

Over the past few years, Burns has been working to better understand DFW rates, reduce them, and figure out how to help students recover academically after they’ve received a D or F or withdrawn from a particularly tough class.

Burns and leaders at 11 colleges across the country have put together a sort of academic first aid kit, and are testing it on students who have got a D or F or withdrawn from certain classes. The kit includes things like academic coaching, writing assistance, supplemental instruction and tutoring. As a part of the trial, they also re-enrolled students in the courses they’d failed, at no cost. 

According to data from the University Innovation Alliance, about 77 percent of the students in the trial passed the class the second time, compared to 55 percent of students who paid to retake the course and did so without the added support. These figures reflect the outcomes of 311 students who had earned Ds, Fs or Ws in certain classes and then retook them with the support of the University Innovation Alliance last summer or fall.  

The participating colleges are the University of California, Riverside; North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University; the University of Illinois, Chicago; Georgia State University; Purdue University; the University of Utah; Virginia Commonwealth University; Oregon State University; the University of Central Florida; Arizona State University and the University of Colorado, Denver. 

Each college selected courses with high DFW rates, including classes in math, chemistry, biology, psychology and English. 

Burns said that academic support services are clearly helping the students as they retake the difficult classes. And they’re resources that are already available at most colleges. If students are not being connected with these resources before enrolling in these challenging courses for the first time, Burns said, “we are just not giving ourselves the benefit of our own knowledge.”

“Why are we letting students fail when we know that they’re going down a path that is unlikely to be successful?” Burns said. “We’re going to have to interrogate the practices that allow students to consistently struggle with the exact same classes over time. Because it’s not the student that’s the problem.”

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Tom Brunskill thought he wanted to be a corporate lawyer. 

Now, looking back, he thinks it may have had less to do with his actual skills and interests, and more to do with his devoted consumption of television dramas like Suits and Boston Legal.  

“I used that as my proxy for choosing a career in corporate law, which – shocker – is not a great reason to choose a career,” Brunskill said. 

But Brunskill didn’t come from a family of lawyers. And, though he had studied law as an undergraduate in Australia, he said had no sense of what being a corporate lawyer would actually entail on a day-to-day basis. When he got his first job, it was clear almost immediately that it was not a good match.

“We’ve kind of popularized this idea that you kind of have to be miserable in the early parts of your career as you try and find the role that does align with your skills and interests,” Brunskill said. “That should not have to be the case.” 

So, he set out to change it. He created a program called Forage, which contracts with companies to offer free, virtual job simulations for students and those looking for work. 

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Forage was recently acquired by the education consulting firm EAB, which works with colleges across the U.S. on issues related to enrollment, student success and other institutional goals. The plan is to add Forage’s job simulation resources to other apps that students use regularly, said Scott Schirmeier, the president of technology and partner development at EAB. 

Schirmeier said that although Forage job simulations aren’t a replacement for internships, they can help begin to level the playing field for students who don’t have access to internships and other such opportunities. 

Brunskill said that those students – the ones who don’t have access to robust career networks and internship opportunities – are the ones who stand to benefit the most from these job simulations. They can become familiar with the niche vocabulary and specific tasks associated with the roles they are interested in, and eventually be more confident going into the job interviews. 

“Students that are really well connected or in Ivy League-plus schools, they’re not typically doing our simulations because they already see a route to those employers,” Brunskill said. “There should be no barriers to accessing what those careers look like.”

Related: College leaders refocus attention on their students’ top priority: Jobs after graduation

Brunskill said there are two main goals. One, of course, is to expose students to careers they might not know about (and prevent them from being unpleasantly surprised by their career choice, as he was). The other is to help companies identify candidates who have demonstrated their commitment and interest and who will be likely to stay in these roles for longer periods of time. In the nearly six years since Forage was founded, Brunskill said they’ve found that applicants who go through job simulations are about twice as likely to get jobs at these companies than their peers. 

On the website, students can go through a “job application basics” series, which includes lessons on networking, building a resume and how to prepare for an interview. Or they can go straight into job simulations provided by companies in sectors such as investment banking, life sciences and marketing. 

The simulations, which are self-paced and typically take a few hours, allow students to get an idea of the types of tasks they might be doing. If, for example, they chose to be on the marketing team at Lululemon, they might be asked to create a marketing plan for a new fitness product, and given a list of questions that their plan should answer. After submitting their marketing plan, they’re given an example of how someone actually in that role might have written the plan. 

Brunskill believes that completing these tasks in the simulations makes the students more qualified and competitive applicants. Even if they don’t get the exact job they did a simulation for, they might be more confident in their choice to pursue a similar career at a similar company, and better versed in what that job might actually entail, he said. 

Related: College internships matter more than ever – but not everyone can get one

“The career advice I got from my parents was like, ‘You are an argumentative child. You should become a lawyer.’ That is like literally the extent of what their knowledge was,” Brunskill said. 

“I reckon within like five weeks — I did it for like three or four years — but within about five weeks I realized this is not for me.” 

Avoiding that type of situation also benefits employers, Brunskill said. 

When a student can show that they completed a virtual job simulation, it signals to the employer that the applicant invested the time to get to know the company and the type of work they’d be doing in the job they’re applying for. Brunskill said those students are more likely to be engaged, get promoted and stay with the company. 

By offering job simulations with Forage, companies can also connect with students on far more college campuses than they could otherwise reasonably visit to recruit from, said Schirmeier.

“They have the most to gain from a student making an informed, deliberate career decision,” Brunskill said. 

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

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Jolene Hunt-Fleming did not hesitate nearly 13 years ago when her daughter asked for help with her newborn baby son. She knew her daughter, a single parent, needed full-time child care to finish school and work.

Hunt-Fleming, who has worked for years as a mortgage funder and is certified in human services, also stepped in when the next three grandchildren – now ages 2, 6, and 9 – came along. My daughter “was very skeptical about other people watching her children,” said Hunt-Fleming, who lives in La Habra, California.

Although the work has been a personal joy, it’s also been a financial sacrifice. The grandmother learned quickly from the Children’s Home Society of California that the state offers subsidies for family caregivers, but the pay might well be below minimum wage. At one point, Hunt-Fleming — who cradled her 2-year-old granddaughter in her lap during most of our interview over Zoom — made only $1.79 an hour for the work. She currently earns about $2,800 each month from the state to watch the 2-year-old full time, and her siblings part-time. “If I wasn’t providing care for the children…I’m sure it would be substantially more that I would be bringing in,” she said.

Family, friend and neighbor caregivers, often referred to as “informal” care, are both underpaid and too often unable to access the money they are entitled to, according to a new policy brief from Early Edge California, which supports quality early learning opportunities for children from birth; the brief was produced in collaboration with several other groups. Between a third and a half of all children under the age of five receive informal care from a family member, friend or neighbor, making it the most common child care arrangement for this age group outside of parental care. Many of these caregivers are grandparents, like Hunt-Fleming.

In many states, informal caregivers are eligible for some form of funded support for their work, the most common being child care subsidies for children from low-income families. There are also state and locally-funded models for support. But nationally, less than 20 percent of the more than 4.5 million informal caregivers receive the subsidies or related payment, according to a 2022 report from the BUILD Initiative, which provides support to state leaders for early childhood programs. In California about one in four of informal caregivers go unpaid, the Early Edge report noted.

The California effort is just one example of growing momentum across the country to provide more resources and support for these caregivers, who have only become more essential after the pandemic contributed to a devastating loss in licensed child care spaces in many communities. In Colorado, a recent law makes it easier for immigrants and undocumented caregivers to access the subsidies, according to the BUILD Initiative report. Meanwhile, Louisiana has simplified the process for informal providers to become registered. And New Mexico took steps to provide them with significantly more public funding.

California is unusual in that informal caregivers can be part of the collective bargaining unit for home-based child care providers in the state, as long as the children in their care are eligible for subsidies. That said, they have historically been less organized and visible in policy debates than licensed home-based providers. “We saw the need to give them a voice,” said Patricia Lozano, executive director of Early Edge.

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

Scores of California caregivers don’t receive the state subsidies they are entitled to for a variety of reasons. “Many times there are language barriers,” Lozano said. And some caregivers “are afraid that their immigration status will impact whether they can get subsidies.”

The policy brief described several of the key barriers, including: mistrust over interacting with the government; fear of losing access to other government benefits; challenges navigating the enrollment system; and a lack of awareness.

The state needs to let more people know that financial support is available, Hunt-Fleming said. “It could start in the doctor’s office or the schools.”

The policy brief also provided recommendations for change and ramped up outreach. Those could include making multilingual posters and brochures available at libraries, parks and recreation services; technical assistance in navigating digital applications; and tax guidance so the caregivers don’t have to worry about jeopardizing other forms of government aid to access the subsidies.

“It’s important to acknowledge them and make them part of the system,” Lozano said. In California there’s a real need to raise the reimbursement rates for all types of child care providers, including informal ones, who currently receive 70 percent of what licensed family child care providers get, she added. “We can raise everybody,” she said. “The bar is so low right now.”

Hunt-Fleming doesn’t think she could make it work financially without a husband who brings in regular income. Besides the low pay, the reimbursement process can be slow. The state never processes subsidies toward the end of the month, when most people have rent and other payments due, she said. “That’s hard because I have bills,” she said.

Hunt-Fleming spends whatever hours she can on advocacy work for her colleagues through a program called California Leading from Home. After more than a decade spending her days changing diapers, taking kids to doctor appointments and helping the older ones with homework, she wants others in her situation — and policy makers, too — to view the work as more than a gesture of love. She wants them to see it as a real job.

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Robert Fitzer was watching news footage of New York City firefighters rescuing people from a Manhattan apartment building on fire, a fire started by a lithium-ion battery in an electric bike. 

Fitzer, the associate vice president for public safety at Fordham University in New York, looked at the calendar. It was late 2022. With winter holidays — and the year’s biggest gift-giving season — around the corner, it was possible students would return to campus in January with their own battery-powered transit devices in tow. Fearing that the same kind of fire could occur in a campus residence hall, Fitzer crafted a policy to ban the bikes not only from buildings on Fordham’s Bronx campus but even from the university grounds — an option made possible by gates walling off its perimeter.

Since the entire length of the Bronx campus takes a mere 10 minutes to cross on foot, he said, there was little justification for needing an electricity-powered bicycle to traverse it. 

The kind of fire that spurred Fitzer to act has happened hundreds of times across the country, and especially in New York City – including on Feb. 23, in a Harlem apartment building where The Hechinger Report’s data reporter Fazil Khan lived.

It cost Khan his life.

Fordham, some other universities and some cities, including New York and San Francisco, are creating policies to regulateor ban e-bikes and their siblings, e-scooters and hoverboards powered by similar batteries, in the absence of federal or state legislation. 

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Talk of setting standards for the bikes, or more precisely for the batteries that power them, is the goal of stalled legislation in Congress. Lithium-ion batteries in e-bikes can catch fire if damaged, overcharged or overheated, according to the nonprofit National Fire Protection Association, which provides training and standards on fire safety. The fires the bikes start can produce toxic gases and burn so hot that extinguishing them can be difficult. 

The federal agency that could regulate e-bikes, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, is instead pushing companies to adhere to voluntary standards for e-bikes and their batteries, such as those set by UL Standards & Engagement.  “CPSC staff believes that products designed, manufactured, and third-party-certified to this standard, or other applicable voluntary standards, reduce the risk of fire and shock,” a spokesperson, Thaddeus Harrington, said, adding that the agency had no plans to mandate these standards.

At the University of Connecticut, a rule took effect at the start of the fall term about what it calls motorized personal transportation vehicles – they cannot enter any campus building. 

The risk of a fire from an electric bike or scooter is “a clock that’s constantly ticking,” the university’s deputy fire chief Christopher Renshaw said. 

That risk is acute when the vehicles aren’t maintained correctly, Renshaw said, or the wrong kind of battery is slipped in, or a charging cord is swapped. A plug may not meet the rating needed for the battery to charge. Students, however, “they see an outlet, and they think, always, the two are compatible,” he said. “They might not be.” 

In New York City, where the fire department said the batteries have become the area’s primary cause of fires, a law that took effect last September requires any mobility device sold or rented that uses lithium-ion batteries to be certified as complying with UL standards. The city also got a $25-million grant from the federal Department of Transportation to set up nearly 200 outdoor charging stations for e-bikes and more than 50 e-bike storage sites. 

“Most lithium-ion batteries and chargers are safe, and we need to encourage the use of more sustainable transportation alternatives moving forward,” New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said at a press conference last year about the grant. “But we also need to make sure that these micromobility vehicles are stored and charged safely, so that faulty or improperly manufactured batteries don’t put people in harm’s way.”

Related: Remembering our friend and colleague Fazil Khan

Storage and charging, especially in residences, cause many of the fire hazards. In San Francisco, where 58 fires were started by lithium-ion batteries last year, a new law sets limits on how many scooters and bikes powered by these batteries can be charged in apartments and also requires them to have certified batteries. 

It’s in this landscape that some universities are forging their own paths.

Yale and Boston College restrict the bikes, as well as how and where they are charged. Some items, including e-scooters, are banned altogether. Quinnipiac University in Connecticut bans them from its dorms, Mark DeVilbiss, the director of housing, said.

“We definitely restrict any kind of item that’s got a lithium-ion battery,” DeVilbiss said. With 4,500 students living in university housing, his institution’s safety committee speaks often with its insurance and risk management company, United Educators, about adjustments to what’s allowed, and not allowed, in the dorms. 

When air fryers, for instance, became a popular new appliance, the committee consulted with the company and determined they are only permitted in apartment-style housing with kitchens wired for appliances.

With the e-bike restrictions, students didn’t protest much, DeVilbiss recalled, except one who insisted their e-bike was essential for traveling between the university’s two campuses, which are about a half-mile apart. Since shuttles are available for students to get back and forth, the university declined to make an exception. 

“Sure enough, they had brought it inside, plugged it in and left for spring break,” DeVilbiss said. It was confiscated and returned to the student to take home. 

United Educators, which works exclusively with education institutions, including K-12 schools, colleges and universities, advises some of its 1,600 clients how to lower risks, so that they won’t need to invoke their insurance policies. In 2020, it offered suggestions about issues institutions should consider when setting policies about e-scooters. Back then, the primary concern was accidents. United Educators suggested that schools adopt rules about helmets, parking and operating the vehicles under the influence. 

“Indoor charging was not an issue,” said Christine McHugh, senior risk management counsel for United Educators. 

Accidents remain a worry, but now the batteries and the fires they can cause are the primary concern for some college administrators. 

The liability insurance company doesn’t track college policies on the issue, however. “Every year we’re seeing new things, from drones to maker spaces to tech toys,” McHugh said. “Then schools have to wrestle with ‘What do we do with these on our campuses?’”  

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

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LEXINGTON, Ky. — Why do rural students have to “beat the odds” in order to get to college?

That’s the question Jim Shelton asked his fellow panelists during last week’s sixth annual Rural Summit, a gathering focused on addressing the needs of rural students.  Shelton is president of the philanthropic group Blue Meridian Partners and deputy secretary of the Department of Education during the Obama administration.

While rural students graduate from high school at higher rates than their urban and suburban peers, only about 55 percent go directly to college. Those who do drop out at high rates due to financial barriers, transportation, internet connectivity and family responsibilities, noted speakers at the summit.

While acknowledging the differences among and the diversity of rural communities in places like Oklahoma, Kentucky, Hawaii and Pennsylvania, speakers made the case that these communities all have the knowledge, talent and systems to help their students succeed academically in college and beyond — they just need the resources.

Education leaders and advocates say one answer is “place-based partnerships,” collaborations among local organizations working together to improve outcomes for students and families.

“Schools are only part of the solution,” said Russell Booker, CEO of the Spartanburg Academic Movement, a place-based partnership in the South Carolina city. He said it takes community partnerships that include the school system, housing, healthcare, the criminal justice system and local government to improve outcomes for rural students.

The summit was hosted by Appalachian Kentucky-based nonprofit Partners for Rural Impact. Dreama Gentry, the group’s president and CEO, said the goal is to bring together people working in pre-K, K-12 and higher ed to discuss the opportunities students need from “the cradle to career spectrum.”

Too often, Gentry said, educators focus on a single indicator — kindergarten readiness, for example — without considering how that relates to student preparedness and success at each stage of their education. “It’s actually taking that holistic look to make sure we’re supporting them at every step,” she said.

Here are a few of the initiatives highlighted at the three-day summit: 

• The Community Colleges of Appalachia launched a Rural Educator Academy in fall 2022 to train faculty and staff to better understand and meet the needs of students in rural Appalachia, particularly those from low-income and underrepresented backgrounds.

The six community colleges in the first cohort worked to identify and alleviate a specific issue facing students on their campuses. For example, Tri-County Technical College, in Pendleton, South Carolina, focused on educating faculty and staff about the barriers preventing students in poverty from succeeding in college, while Mountain Empire Community College, in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, developed a mentorship program to create a sense of belonging among first-generation as well as all incoming college students.

• The Hawaii-based nonprofit organization Kinai ʻEha launched in 2017 with the goal of disrupting the state’s school-to-prison pipeline, primarily for native Hawaiian and Micronesian youth. It runs a trauma-informed program, rooted in Hawaiian culture and language, that works with high schoolers who’ve dropped out of high school, as well as those who’ve experienced homelessness, poverty, incarceration or drug use. Students live and work on a farm, receive food and clothing, attend classes to complete their GED or HISET, and participate in work-based learning or vocational programs. In 2019, Kinai ʻEha helped to secure a state law requiring the creation of a task force to implement a system for evaluating and supporting kids who are struggling with trauma, behavioral or mental health problems and chronic absenteeism.

• Rural alliances in states including Indiana and Texas are providing high schoolers with career and technical education, part of an effort to expand access to post-secondary pathways in rural areas and combat rural shortages of skilled workers. For example, the nonprofit Rural Schools Innovation Zone launched in South Texas in 2019 to bring together five rural districts, five higher ed institutions and workforce groups to create more opportunities for students to access college and careers that are prevalent in their regions. The collaboration has established five career and tech academies at each high school focused on sectors like health and sciences, the military or skilled trade jobs; as of the 2022-23 school year, 54 percent of RSIZ students had received a certification in an industry of their choice. In 2023, the Texas legislature passed a bill to expand the program to other parts of Texas.

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A record share of children – about 35 percent of 4-year-olds and 7 percent of 3-year-olds – were enrolled in a state-funded preschool program last academic year, according to the 2023 State of Preschool report published last month by the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University.

Notably, though, the actual number of 4-year-olds enrolled in state-funded pre-K is lower than pre-pandemic levels due to declining birth rates.

The report also found that overall, states are spending more money on pre-K than ever before: $7,277 per child enrolled, or $11.7 billion total. Much of that funding increase is driven by the $571 million in federal Covid-19 relief aid that 28 states used to boost pre-K dollars. Researchers and advocates are concerned that spending will drop in states that don’t have a plan to replace those funds when they run out this year.

“We’ve seen it in the past: When budget belts tighten, preschool, in many places, is a discretionary program. And discretionary programs are easier to cut,” said Steven Barnett, founder and co-director of NIEER.

That said, states, on average, have not raised the amount they spend per child in pre-K by much over the years: In 2002, that figure was $6,945. And 16 states spent less on pre-K programs in 2023 than in the year prior; six still have no state-funded pre-K programs.

Meanwhile, California accounted for 70 percent of the nation’s rise in pre-K spending by itself last year, said Allison Friedman-Krauss, an assistant research professor with NIEER and co-author of the report.

Only five states (Alabama, Hawaii, Michigan, Mississippi and Rhode Island) met all 10 of NIEER’s quality benchmarks, which include caps on student-teacher ratios and class sizes as well as professional development and teacher licensing requirements. Although D.C. met only four of NIEER’s 10 quality benchmarks, the district was ranked highest in the nation on per child spending and access to programs for both 3- and 4-year-olds.

And while some states, like Florida, have a high share of 4-year-olds enrolled in pre-K (67 percent), the amount spent per child is far lower than the national average ($3,142).

“If you’re in Florida, you can have access to the program, but what you’re getting in Florida is not as good as what you’re getting in Alabama, on average,” Friedman-Krauss said.

Another report on pre-K issued last month, from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine and called “A New Vision for High Quality Preschool Curriculum,” made recommendations aimed at improving pre-K curriculum, with a focus on students from marginalized communities. (Research for this report, like the one from NIEER, received some financial support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is also one of The Hechinger Report’s many funders.)

While the researchers found that most pre-K programs in the U.S. use the two most common curricula (The Creative Curriculum and HighScope), the group reviewed 172 existing pre-K curricula.

“Basically none of them were fully meeting the vision that we have outlined, particularly around issues of anti-racist/anti-bias approaches, culturally and linguistically responsive, and the issues of being supportive of children’s home language,” said Sue Bredekamp, an early childhood specialist and editor of the report, during the webinar presentation.

The report, which is 376 pages long, includes more than a dozen recommendations for addressing bias, equity and inclusive teaching practices in pre-K curriculum.

This story about preschool enrollment 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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Two years ago, when I visited Westwood High School in Mesa, a suburb of Phoenix, every incoming freshman started the year in a very unusual way.

Back when my mom attended Westwood in the early 80s, students made the typical walk from class to class, learning from one teacher in math and another for English or history or science. (My mom was one of two girls in Westwood’s woodworking class.) Flash forward a few decades, and in 2022, I observed four teachers and 135 freshmen – all in one classroom.

The model, known as team teaching, isn’t new. It dates back to the 1960s. But Arizona State University resurrected the approach, in which teachers share large groups of students, as a way to rebrand the teaching profession and make it more appealing to prospective educators.

Now, team teaching has expanded nationally, and particularly in the American West. The number of students assigned to a team of teachers tops 20,000 kids – an estimate from ASU that doubled from fall 2022. Mesa Unified, the school district that runs Westwood and the largest in Arizona, has committed to using the approach in half of its schools. And the national superintendents association last year launched a learning cohort for K-12 leaders interested in the idea.

Brent Maddin oversees the Next Education Workforce Initiative at ASU’s teachers college, which partners with school districts trying to move away from the “one teacher, one classroom” model of education.

“Unambiguously, we have started to put a dent in that,” Maddin said.

The Next Education Workforce Initiative today works with 28 districts in a dozen states, where 241 teams of teachers use the ASU model. It will expand further in the next two years: A mixture of public and philanthropic funding will support team teaching in dozens of new schools in California, Colorado, Michigan and North Dakota.

ASU has also gathered more data and research that suggest its approach has made an impact: In Mesa, teachers working on a team leave their profession at lower rates, receive higher evaluations and are more likely to recommend teaching to a friend.

Early research also indicates students assigned to educator teams made more growth in reading and passed Algebra I at higher rates than their peers.

“Educators working in these models — their feeling of isolation is lower,” Maddin said. “Special educators in particular are way more satisfied. They feel like they’re having a greater impact.”

Last year, the consulting group Education First shared its findings from a national scan of schools using different models to staff classrooms like team teaching. Among other groups, their report highlighted Public Impact, which supports schools in creating teams of teachers and has reached 800 schools and 5,400 teachers.* Education First itself works with districts in California to use a team structure with paid teacher residents and higher pay for expert mentor teachers.

In North Dakota, team teaching has caught the attention of Kirsten Baesler, the state superintendent of public instruction. Her office recently sent a group of lawmakers, educators and other policymakers to Arizona to learn about the model. Later this fall, Fargo Public Schools will open a new middle school where students will learn entirely from one combined team of teachers.

Jennifer Soupir-Fremstad, assistant director of human capital for the Fargo school district, recalled Mesa teachers telling her how much more supported they feel – by administrators and their fellow teammates. “That was a game changer,” she said.

The district’s new middle school will include a competency-based model where students can learn and work through content at their own pace. Five core teachers, whom the district refers to as mentors, will split responsibility for students in all three grades. Enrollment will be capped at 100 students for the first year, with plans to add more teams and serve up to 400 students in the future.

When my mom read my Hechinger Report story about what’s happening at her high school now, she questioned whether teachers could stay on top of 100-plus teenagers who just want to socialize. But she loved the idea of seeing her classmates more.

“I would have loved to be with my friends more,” she said. “We were separated for most of our classes. I think it’s awesome.”

*Clarification: This story has been updated to clarify the description of the work of Public Impact.

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What makes a first-generation college student? Well, that depends on who’s doing the defining.

Yes, there’s the federal definition: a student is first-generation if neither parent has a bachelor’s degree.  

Sounds simple enough. But it doesn’t account for those who had a highly educated parent who wasn’t involved in their lives, or those whose parent got a college degree in another country, with an academic system unlike ours, or those who have one degree-holding parent, but are being raised in a single-parent household.

Researchers argue that many students like these are still meaningfully less advantaged compared to students who have two parents with degrees. Despite the narrow federal definition, many believe these are students who need to be identified and given added resources and support both to get through the college application process and to thrive once they get on campus.

New research from Common App shows that expanding the definition of first-generation expands enrollment data, and thus can tell a different story about who is ready for college.

According to 2022 data from Common App, about 450,000 applicants that year met the federal definition, meaning that neither parent had a bachelor’s degree, including about 300,000 students whose parents had never attended any college. But if the definition is expanded to include applicants who had one parent with a bachelor’s degree, the population increases to more than 700,000. And, according to the report, changing that definition changes other things, too, such as college readiness, socioeconomic status and the number of colleges students apply to.

Brian Heseung Kim, director of data science, research and analytics at Common App, said there isn’t one right way to define first-generation students; the question should be, “What kind of disadvantage are we trying to measure?”

After the Supreme Court ruled against the consideration of race in college admissions last summer, Kim said he was interested in looking at many different aspects of diversity in college applicants, including first-generation status. He said this analysis might help colleges that want to understand the diversity of their applicants; how certain home contexts and hardships might affect how competitive students appear in the application process; and how to support students from all different backgrounds.

“It would be great if everyone could kind of align on one definition for first-generation, it’d be so wonderful if we had that clarity,” Kim said.  “But the reality is that different contexts kind of require different identification methods.”

Related: Sick parents? Caring for siblings? Colleges experiment with asking applicants how home life affects them

The Common App’s analysis shows that, depending on the definition, the percentage of students identified as being part of an underrepresented minority group can range from 45 percent (for those who have one parent who earned a bachelor’s degree) to 58 percent (for students whose parents did not attend any college). And the percentage of those students from low-income families varies from 48 percent (for students who have one parent who earned a bachelor’s degree) to 66 percent (for students whose parents did not attend any college).

Sarah E. Whitley, vice president of the Center for First-generation Student Success, said most colleges define first-generation students as those whose parents do not have bachelor’s degrees or those whose parents did not earn bachelor’s degrees in the United States. She said the center doesn’t use one universal definition, and instead works with colleges to identify the definition that makes the most sense for them.

Whitley said the purpose of identifying students as first-generation is to understand whether they have people in their family who can support them with college-going knowledge, but that’s often harder to determine than asking simply “Are you the first in your family to attend college?”

Whitley discourages college from using this language because students may not categorize themselves as first-generation if they had an aunt or uncle or older sibling who attended college. She said it’s better to ask specific questions about parental education, as Common App does, but it can still be difficult to capture everyone. For example, asking about the education of biological parents might not capture students who had a highly educated birth parent but were raised by a stepparent, she said, or students who were raised in a family with two moms or two dads.

The Common App research found that there could be more than 100 definitions, considering the different combinations of parents and caregivers, whether they attended college or graduated, what degree they and many more factors. The analysis considered eight definitions:

• Neither parent earned a bachelor’s degree (the federal definition)
• No bachelor’s degrees among living parents (to focus on those who can provide support to the student)
• No bachelor’s degrees among caregivers (considers others in the household beyond biological parents, such as a stepparent)
• No domestic bachelor’s degree among caregivers (because degrees from other countries may be less relevant in helping students in the U.S. higher education system)
• No bachelor’s degrees earned by caregivers before the student was born (excludes those who earned degrees more recently and may not yet have “accrued some of the more socioeconomic benefits of a college degree,” according to the report)
• No associate degrees, either parent
• No college attendance, either parent
• One parent earned a bachelor’s degree

Yolanda Watson-Spiva, president of the advocacy group Complete College America, said it’s also important to think about the social capital that students have if both their parents went to college, such as access to college alumni and professional networks. She said there are big differences in resources between students who have one parent who earned a bachelor’s degree and students whose parents, grandparents and great-grandparents all went to college.

It makes more sense to think of first-generation status as a spectrum, she said, rather than a yes or no question.  Using only the federal definition of first-generation is too narrow and constrictive, she said.

Watson-Spiva’s mother earned a bachelor’s degree and her father went to community college, but one of her grandmothers only had an eighth grade education. She doesn’t identify as a first- generation student, but said she could imagine how someone in a similar situation might, even though they don’t meet the federal definition.

“Many of those folks still struggle,” she said. “There are still big variations between that person and a person who’s had like four generations of family members that are legacies, that went to college.”

This story about first-generation students was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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