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

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

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

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

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

Jaleel Gomes Cardoso, Boston

A risky decision

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

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

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

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

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

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

 – Meredith Kolodner

Excerpt:

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

READ ENTIRE ESSAY

Klaryssa Cobian, Los Angeles 

A semi-nomadic mattress life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Olivia Sanchez

Excerpt: 

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

READ ENTIRE ESSAY

Oluwademilade Egunjobi, Providence, Rhode Island

The perfect introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Olivia Sanchez

Excerpt:

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

Francisco Garcia, Fort Worth, Texas 

Accepted to college and by his community

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

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

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

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

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

– Nirvi Shah

Excerpt: 

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

READ ENTIRE ESSAY

Hafsa Sheikh, Pearland, Texas 

Family focus above all 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her perseverance paid off, with admission to Princeton University.

– Olivia Sanchez

Excerpt: 

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

Manal Akil, Dundalk, Maryland

Life lessons from cooking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Olivia Sanchez

Excerpt: 

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

READ ENTIRE ESSAY

David Arturo Munoz-Matta, McAllen, Texas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Meredith Kolodner

Excerpt:

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

READ ENTIRE ESSAY

Kendall Martin, Austin, Texas

Between straight hair and a hard place

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

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

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

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

– Nirvi Shah

Excerpt

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

READ ENTIRE ESSAY

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

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

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. 

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

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.

The post Fearing fires, colleges are starting to clamp down on campus e-bikes appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

At the end of her first day as a full-time teacher, Caitlin Mercado logged out of Zoom and turned off her computer in her parents’ basement.

Then she cried.

Mercado had wanted to be a teacher ever since she’d spent time in high school working with preschool kids.

But the remote lessons she was teaching to second graders at a Silver Spring, Maryland, elementary school didn’t resemble the in-person classes where she learned her craft in college as a student teacher. Preparing for each day required creating an elaborate set of slides that would encompass more than six straight hours of lessons she’d never taught before, with contingencies for any moment a child struggled with technology or school supplies.

“I’d stay up late, wake back up, keep going,” Mercado said, telling herself, “‘I’m just going to push through and do what I have to do for these kids.’”

Still, her second graders would sometimes fall asleep in the middle of the day, tired of staring at the screen or, she guessed, from having stayed up at night playing games or watching videos on their new, school-provided Chromebooks.

On social media, Mercado glimpsed videos of other teachers who were quitting their jobs, including educators with far more experience than she had. A deluge of similar clips ended up in her feed.

She found herself, at moments, wondering whether she had made the right career choice. “This is really not what I thought it would be,” she remembers thinking.

Related: Tackling teacher shortages

The number of people studying for careers in education has been declining for years. At the same time, schools have struggled to hold on to new teachers: Studies indicate that about 44 percent of teachers leave the profession within their first five years.

Then the pandemic came along, hammering teachers and the profession as a whole. Surveys from the National Education Association and the nonprofit research organization RAND Corporation found teachers, both new and experienced, contemplating quitting in greater numbers than in the past. Research from Chalkbeat found that, in eight states, more teachers than usual made good on those feelings and left their jobs during the pandemic. Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics data show a higher rate of people working in education quitting as of February this year than in the same month in 2020. And results from a study released late last year found that teachers were 40 percent more likely to report anxiety during the pandemic than health and other workers.

“The first three years of teaching are really, really hard even in a perfect school system,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. So for teachers who entered the teaching profession at any point during the pandemic, “this has been a helluva ride.”

To learn more about the difficulties facing new teachers in the aftermath of the pandemic, and what’s needed to retain them, The Hechinger Report contacted a half-dozen schools of education to access lists of or data about graduates to see how many remain in the field. Most declined to share the information or said they didn’t keep those records, but Hechinger identified a list of 2020 graduates from the University of Maryland College of Education and attempted to track them all down. Of the 120 teachers who earned bachelor’s degrees in education that year, The Hechinger Report was able to verify that at least 77, or roughly two-thirds, are teaching now.

Hechinger spent the past year following four of those graduates: Mercado, 25; Miriam Marks, 26; Sydonne Ignacio, 26; and Tia Ouyang, 25. The reporting revealed how unprepared they felt at times, showed their feelings of anxiety and depression, and explored their thoughts about quitting as well as the moments of joy they experienced — and whether they see themselves teaching for the long term.

Of the 120 teachers who earned bachelor’s degrees in education that year, The Hechinger Report was able to verify that at least 77 are teaching now.

Yet even with teachers, new and veteran, so rattled by pandemic teaching and concurrent culture wars, districts may not be adapting. The effort put into supporting and retaining newly hired teachers rarely matches the lengths districts go with hiring in the first place, experts say. The constant churn in the teaching workforce can be destructive for students — leading to bigger class sizes, fewer class offerings and less-qualified, less-experienced candidates filling vacancies.

Yet teachers are considered the most important factor in students’ success at school.

“That new teacher is in front of our students. That person has the most power to change the trajectory,” said Sharif el-Mekki, the CEO of the nonprofit Center for Black Educator Development. These teachers require a lot of support: additional training, a sense of belonging and the right mentoring.

Many don’t get even some of that.

“If we’re too busy to do that,” el-Mekki said, “we’re too busy with the wrong things.”

Some Sunday afternoons, fifth grade math and science teacher Miriam Marks scours Amazon looking for goodies — squishy animals, sticky toys, slime — to put in her classroom prize box at Weller Road Elementary in Silver Spring. All week long, kids who participate and complete their assignments might snag a popsicle stick from Marks. She tallies them up at the end of the week, and those who have shown the right amount of effort can rake through the box of trinkets.

This is all part of a new routine for Marks.

Because Covid hijacked her final months of college, she missed key experiences before starting a full-time job. After a few months of working closely with another teacher during her senior year, Marks was supposed to take over the class for the final weeks of the semester.

“We never got to that end point,” she said. “I went from teaching the occasional lesson or two a day to Covid to, ‘Here: You’re hired.’”

After the end of the term, and a virtual graduation ceremony, she moved into her own apartment, too afraid of harming her asthmatic father’s health if she moved home. It would mean spending a lot of time alone, with occasional visits with her sister and outdoor walks with a friend before the remote teaching of the 2020-21 school year would kick off.

Once it did, she found herself laboring to make math exciting via Zoom to a group of fifth graders at a high-poverty school, some of whom sometimes failed to log on at all.

Alone in her apartment, she couldn’t simply pop into the classroom next door for quick advice. While she did meet regularly with a supportive mentor teacher assigned to her by the school, Marks struggled to gauge if she was floundering or simply facing similar hurdles as fellow teachers.

The experience stirred up anxiety and depression that she suspects she’d long had. She started to have suicidal thoughts.

“I had to start therapy,” Marks said. “It was that bad — my mental health.”

She added, “If I’m not mentally healthy, how can I be a good teacher?”

Related: What happens when teachers run the school

In addition to regular visits with a counselor, once in-person teaching resumed Marks was able to build a connection with another, more experienced coworker who was also new to the school. His support, she said, along with near-daily kickboxing sessions, have been integral to her persistence.

On a Tuesday in April, in her Weller Road classroom classroom, Marks launches into a lesson on the parts of a plant and photosynthesis, gliding through the classroom in black slip-on sneakers, her hair woven into a side braid that nearly reaches her waist. When students chatter or stop paying attention, Marks quickly steers them back on course.

“You just need to listen,” she tells Re’Niyah James, 11, who is looking down and scribbling. “If you’re too busy writing, you can’t listen.”

Then it’s time for students to label a diagram of a plant and explain how its parts work.

Dozens of clear plastic cups cover the top of bookshelves under the windows in her room. Each is stuffed with seeds nestled in damp paper towels. They are labeled — bush bean, peas, popcorn — along with students’ names.

Ivana Miranda, 10, hands in her assignment, then peers at the cups.

“Ms. Marks,” she exclaims, “the bean sprouted.”

Next it’s time for a math lesson on quadrilaterals. It’s where Marks wants to be especially sure the kids follow along, given how difficult she once found math to be.

In high school, she despised the subject. But one year, after being placed in a class for lower-performing students led by a teacher who wasn’t particularly engaged, Marks surprised herself by discovering that she had just enough of a grasp on the material to assist her classmates.

That experience catalyzed her interest in teaching. Marks said she summons her recollections of distaste for school when she teaches.

“How can I prevent that from happening?” she said later. “I relate so much more to my kids who struggle than my A+ students. I understand, and can, on a more personal level, be more real with those kids.”

The students, she said, show resilience. Many lived through countless Covid-related traumas, but “they’re still coming to school, sometimes with a smile on their face.”

Marks, too, is still finding her way. “When a kid is yelling about how much they hate your class, that’s really hard.”

She’s working on developing her skills dealing with that kind of behavior and communicating with families. 

“You do your best to build empathy,” she said, “your best to build kindness and respect. It doesn’t go through to everybody.”

Since Covid, teaching has become more challenging, in part because the troubles students bring to school have grown more intense. Misbehavior in class is on the rise, according to surveys of teachers. Tens of thousands of school-age children lost parents or other family members to Covid. National test scores show that students have backslid in many subjects. Classroom teachers at all levels of experience are under enormous pressure to make up that ground.

Despite those difficulties, and the challenges many districts have faced in filling open teaching positions, there’s been little investment in hanging on to the teachers already on staff, said el-Mekki, a veteran principal and teacher himself.

“Speaking to school and district leaders around the country who recruit, recruit, recruit, when we ask about their retention plans,” el-Mekki said, “we get blank stares.”

He said that, too often, new teachers spend little or no time with their principals, lack effective mentors, or have no feeling of community at their jobs.

They may also need help with practical skills — organization, managing students’ behavior, and communicating with parents. “It’s one thing to have it from a theoretical perspective” in college, el-Mekki said. It’s quite another to suddenly contend with the grading and family interaction for say, more than 100 students.

While the teachers in the program at Maryland noted that they started spending time in classrooms as college sophomores, “most people don’t have a whole lot of student teaching,” Weingarten said.

The quality of those experiences vary widely, but when student teaching is done right, research shows it can give a novice teacher the same kind of effectiveness as someone with far more experience.

Most new teachers, however,even those whose degrees required a lot of in-person teaching experience, which is usually unpaid, haven’t communicated with families while in training. That’s left to the teacher supervising them.

Related: Why a team approach to teaching is taking hold

And despite federal laws ensuring that employers treat mental health conditions just as they do physical health concerns, many state and local government workers, including teachers, have health plans that limit treatment or have strict preauthorization policies. A bill passed by the U.S. House last year was intended to bolster access to mental health care for educators and students, but it wasn’t taken up in the Senate.

With roughly 1,200 U.S. teacher preparation programs, more than any other country, it’s difficult to assess whether or how they are adapting to a new era of teaching. The National Council on Teacher Quality concluded in a 2022 report that undergraduate elementary preparation programs were spending 19 percent more time on math content even ahead of the pandemic and the bite it took out of students’ math skills.

“The first three years of teaching are really, really hard even in a perfect school system.”

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers

And at Maryland, there are other types of shifts. For instance, the College of Education’s avatar lab is used far more regularly, said Ebony Terrell Shockley, an associate clinical professor and executive director of educator preparation. It simulates a classroom and exposes students to situations they’ll face as full-time teachers, both common situations and the outliers they may face but may not be exposed to as part of their student teaching.

One of those is how to interact with families or work through a meeting about a plan for a student with disabilities — things they might experience when they are the primary teacher in their own classroom, Terrell Shockley said. Real actors play the role of students in real time, said Brentt Brown, vice president of sales for education for the company behind the technology, Mursion. Using the virtual classroom, teachers in training can work through situations that might be difficult, but in a psychologically safe environment.

Training like that might help teachers like Marks, the fifth grade teacher. “Fifth grade, they like to be the class clowns,” she said. “They don’t teach you this in college.”

Nothing will keep all teachers, or graduates with teaching degrees, in the classroom, however.

Maryland graduate Tia Ouyang loved her early experiences with a program aimed at recruiting more science and math teachers by drawing in students majoring in those fields.

Ouyang was a sophomore chemistry major when she added education as a second degree to ensure she would get a job after graduation. After working with middle school students, she felt high school would be a better fit.

In the classroom, she enjoyed talking about science and answering students’ questions — even planning her lessons. But Ouyang felt that the high school students were reluctant to trust her, an accented Asian woman. Her science instinct kicked in as she recalled this though, noting she had no real evidence that this was the case.

When public schools switched to remote instruction, and there were no more of those engaging conversations about science with students, she lost motivation.

With online instruction, “All you are doing is talking,” Ouyang said.

At home, disconnected from her own schooling and the high school students, she ended up applying as her final semester ended to a program at the University of Delaware Lewes in chemical oceanography.

Related: Uncertified teachers filling holes in schools across the South

Ouyang, now enjoying her doctoral program, said she never let go of the idea of being a teacher. She wants to encourage young people to study chemistry and nurture future scientists and environmental leaders — but as a college professor.

“I feel happy about my life.”

Ouyang’s choice is especially painful for the profession: Losing science and math teachers to other work is a longstanding problem for districts across the country, making these some of the hardest roles to fill. And just 2 percent of the U.S. teaching workforce is Asian.

Other Maryland College of Education grads The Hechinger Report tracked down left science and math teaching jobs too, in one case to work for an international science and medical equipment company.  Another member of the class of 2020 works as a customer service specialist for a Miami-based financial services company. One chose to work at her family’s bakery. Yet another owns a dance studio. One calls herself a former educator who left teaching after two years in search of “a remote position to pursue a more healthy work-life balance.”

Sydonne Ignacio, like Ouyang, never intended to be a teacher. When she enrolled at the University of Maryland, she was an aerospace engineering major embracing her love of science and math. But by the end of sophomore year, she was limping along.

“I was completely miserable,” said Ignacio, who also worked two jobs for much of college.

Although her advisers tried to persuade her to stick it out, Ignacio said she wasn’t sure it was worth sacrificing her mental health for her major. She chose education instead, with many of her credits neatly aligning with a middle school math and science degree.

Ignacio said she chose middle school in part because it’s such a pivotal time in children’s lives. And because she loathes the refrain “I hate math.”

“I love math. I love science. I love learning,” said Ignacio, who eventually wants to return to school and complete her engineering degree. “I want to instill that passion in my students — so maybe math sucks a little bit less.”

Ignacio, who’d wanted to teach math after graduation, ended up with an offer to teach science at the school where she student taught, Buck Lodge Middle in Adelphi, Maryland. She considered working elsewhere but said she valued the familiarity, given how much the pandemic upended everything else in her life.

Nevertheless, remote teaching that in her district dragged on for essentially all 10 months of the school year drained her. Her classes included two sessions that were a mix of students with disabilities and lower-performing students, a group with more average skills and an honors science course. Each class required a distinct set of lesson plans.

Even though she was familiar with Buck Lodge staff, Ignacio’s mentor taught math, not science, so she couldn’t go to her for lesson planning help. In addition, Buck Lodge is a Title I school, meaning many students are from low-income families. With that in mind, Ignacio tried to devise experiments that involved items almost any family would already have at home.

“I didn’t want them to have to go out and buy anything,” she said, but crafting those lessons took a lot of time-consuming research. And as a new teacher, she had no old lesson plans to fall back on or adapt from.

Related: Two campaigns are trying to keep teachers in the classroom

Most of the week, she was exhausted, and at times it was hard for her simply to get out of bed. “Sometimes I would teach from my bed,” Ignacio said. “I would have my camera off, just going through the motions.”

Even when the work day was over, she couldn’t unwind. “You couldn’t go out anywhere,” she said, without risking getting herself or her family sick.

“Thinking back on it, the only relief I felt was when the year was over: We’re finally done,” she said.

Ignacio also experienced the kind of heartbreak that often comes with teaching, pandemic or not. She powered through teaching the day her grandmother was admitted to the hospital; her grandmother died a few months later. (“I don’t want my students to ever see me in a moment of weakness.”) And when one of her former students discovered that his father had died by suicide, his attendance plunged, despite Ignacio and other teachers pressing him to come to school and checking on him as much as possible. He wound up arrested along with his older brother on an armed robbery charge. The student rarely attended after that.

“Sometimes I would feel so helpless: I can’t follow him after school and make sure he’s doing the right thing,” she said. Other students have chaotic home lives, she said. One is homeless. “If I could buy them a house, I would.”

“That’s one of the downsides. You want to do everything for the kids, but you can’t.”

Ignacio herself still lives with family, unable to afford to move out.

Still, she finds room in her budget to stock her room with Takis, granola bars and Cup Noodles, rewards for attending school all week. 

In addition to traveling and practicing yoga, one of the ways she copes is blasting R&B, dancehall reggae or as she described it, “really vulgar rap music” on the drive home.

“It depends on what comes on in the shuffle.”

Ignacio said she’s unsure teaching is what she will do forever. “The mental wear and tear is a little bit too much for me,” she said. “I don’t know if I can do this for 20 years.”

But for now, she’s tried to turn her difficult experiences into a positive: This fall, she’s set to be the Buck Lodge science department chair. And she still gets a thrill when her teaching results in a concept clicking in her students’ minds.

One lesson this spring for her sixth graders during a unit on states of matter — solids, liquids and gases — dealt with condensation. At first they didn’t understand.

When they finally did, they regaled Ignacio with their discoveries.

“When I come in from outside, my glasses get foggy,” one of them told her. “This is the water vapor in the air that is cooling into liquid.”

Exactly.

For Mercado, there have likewise been small moments as a teacher when she thought, “‘this is really not what I thought it would be.” But she said she now believes she’s found what she’s meant to do.

She too turned to therapy, in the fall of 2021, to help manage her stress. The therapist offered concrete ways to keep from getting overwhelmed. For instance, if five students swarm her desk, she asks them to take a seat and tells them she will come to their desks to answer questions instead. She started taking lunch breaks instead of working right through them. A diffuser pipes the scent of lavender into her room. Bright fabric that mimics the clouds and sky covers the fluorescent rectangles of light on her classroom ceiling.

During her second year of teaching, Mercado also recognized she needed to take another dramatic step to survive: work at a different school with fewer low-income, high-needs students. She requested a transfer and got her wish for the upcoming school year. Mercado said it is a prime reason she has stuck with teaching.

Historically, new teachers are more likely to get jobs in high-poverty schools than low-poverty ones, which also tend to have more turnover.

At her old school, “the students need a lot of support. I didn’t feel like I had enough experience to do that,” she said.

Related: How one university is creatively tackling the rural teacher shortage

Now, she is in her element in a second-grade classroom at Ritchie Park Elementary in Rockville, Maryland, but she also makes time for her boyfriend and dance — Mercado was on the college dance team — in addition to preparing her lessons each day.

For a recent assignment, her students – preschoolers when the pandemic hit – had to reflect on each year of their schooling so far. They take turns sharing their experiences about trying to learn online as kindergartners and getting to be together, sort of, as socially distant first graders.

Chris DiFrancesco, 8, stands up to share how things are going this school year.

“I feel like Covid is gone,” he says.

“Maybe put an emotion in there,” Mercado replies. “Do you feel hopeful?”

“I feel hopeful.”

Mercado does too.

If you or someone you know is having suicidal thoughts, you can call The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or reach the Crisis Text Line by texting HELLO to 741741.

Juana Castillo contributed research to this story.

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

The post These would-be teachers graduated into the pandemic. Will they stick with teaching? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Abbey Clegg watched the Manchester school board meetings online in the summer of 2020, slowly coming to terms with what was happening.

New Hampshire schools were not going to reopen in the fall.

Clegg, her husband, Rich, and their six children were all at home together. She and her husband were trying to work and her older kids were trying to tap into online classes.

“It was a disaster for our family. They’re sending home these packets. They’re trying to do Zoom and we don’t have enough broadband,” Clegg recalled.

Clegg, who works with the New Hampshire program for foster and adoptive children, and her husband, a Baptist pastor, didn’t have strong feelings about what type of schools their kids attended. Their eldest was enrolled at a private Christian school, while their four younger school-aged kids were attending a local public school, two of them in special education.

But six kids at home for months on end was not going to work.

Nearly a decade earlier, New Hampshire had created a private school voucher program wherein state taxpayers and businesses get a credit that lowers their state taxes in exchange for donating money to the program. Clegg applied for the 2020-21 school year, enrolling two of her younger kids at a Catholic school that was open for in-person classes.

When New Hampshire lawmakers created a new voucher program in the spring of 2021, joining a list of states tapping into frustration with pandemic schooling to advance school choice measures, Clegg applied again. The additional financial support proved essential: It meant the kids could stay in their private schools.

Over the past two years, more than 20 states have started or expanded voucher-type programs, steering taxpayer money to help families afford private schools, pay for books and other materials for homeschooling, and cover the cost of services such as speech or physical therapy for kids who aren’t attending public schools. Some states tweaked long-standing programs. Others created entirely new, expansive programs with few or no limits on who can access public dollars — including students already enrolled in private schools — and minimal oversight on how the money is spent. Many states, red and blue, also acted to boost charter schools in some way, such as by adding millions in state dollars for charter school buildings and per student funding.

More than 20 states have started or expanded school voucher or similar programs over the past two years.

Often, politicians and advocacy groups backing the new programs cited parental concerns about remote schooling, along with the teaching of systemic racism and other topics ensnared in the culture wars, as reasons for pushing through school choice measures.

“The educational choice movement has done everything possible to build the best surfboard for parents. This was the right wave,” said Robert Enlow, president and CEO of the advocacy group EdChoice, referring to the pandemic. “The timing was perfect – unfortunately perfect.”

But it’s far from clear how much support the new programs will get from parents.

Despite parental anger that has continued to simmer and evolve since the start of the pandemic, polling about parents’ interest in private school vouchers provides a mixed picture. Support for vouchers for all students, and even for vouchers limited to kids from low-income families, actually declined over the last few years, to about 45 percent, according to a 2021 poll by the journal Education Next, though polling conducted this year for some choice lobbying groups found strong support for private school subsidies.

Related: Opinion: After two decades of studying voucher programs, I’m now firmly opposed to them

The drive to create voucher-type programs is part of a broader strategy by some choice advocates: Libertarian think tanks and D.C.-based advocacy groups, which offer model legislation for state lawmakers, are among those lobbying for these measures and some aggressively attack legislators who don’t sign on. School choice advocates are trying to motivate parents to vote, especially given parents’ role in helping to elect a conservative Republican who campaigned against school closures in last year’s Virginia gubernatorial race. In some states, pandemic restrictions at statehouses may have offered legislators the opportunity to pass measures without the large-scale in-person protests led by teachers and others in the past.

Last year, a manufactured conflict over instruction about so-called critical race theory fueled parents’ anger, adding to frustration about pandemic schooling. One of the underlying goals of those trying to rile parents is the privatization of public education.

“Too many parents today have no escape mechanism from substandard schools controlled by leftist ideologues,” conservative activist Christopher Rufo wrote earlier this year. “Universal school choice — meaning that public education funding goes directly to parents rather than schools — would fix that.”

“The educational choice movement has done everything possible to build the best surfboard for parents. This was the right wave.”

Robert Enlow, president and CEO of the advocacy group EdChoice, referring to the pandemic.

Most of the nation’s kids — about 50 million of them — have stuck with conventional public schools, although school choice advocates say that’s in part because laws need to change to allow more parents to choose those options for their kids. They note that many of the vouchers offered around the country do not cover the full cost of tuition at a private school and regulations about who can open charters and how much money they get can be restrictive too. Currently, about 5 million school aged kids are enrolled in private schools, though that number includes kids from families who don’t use a subsidy for tuition. Another 3.5 million attend charter schools, a number that has ticked up during the pandemic, and the rate of homeschooling has increased too, though it still includes only a few million children.

It’s the potential that tantalizes choice advocates — and scares public school proponents.

“Let’s pretend, we have 55,000 students for the district I’m in,” said Kelly Berg, a calculus teacher who is president of the Mesa Education Association in Arizona. “Now 5,000 students take vouchers and go elsewhere, not in our district. That’s over 100 teachers we have to cut. That could potentially mean a school closure somewhere.”

Those students might return to the public school system within a few months if things don’t work out, but the money wouldn’t follow them back until the following school year, Berg said, and teachers already would have been shifted around or laid off.

“That’s the real rub for me,” she said.

Related: Supreme Court ruling brings a changed legal landscape for school choice

Some of the new programs were created specifically for parents objecting to pandemic restrictions. At the start of the 2021 school year, for example, Florida’s state board of education expanded a small voucher program for students who had been bullied to include students who didn’t want to wear a mask to school or face regular Covid testing — its own form of harassment, the board argued. Only about 100 students in districts that required masks took the state up on the offer.

The New Hampshire program the Clegg family is using gives children from families with incomes of up to 300 percent of the federal poverty limit — or roughly $80,000 for a family of four — as much as $5,200 for private school tuition, homeschooling or educational services, or transportation to an out-of-district public school, among other uses. There’s no requirement that a child attend public schools before applying for a grant. That kind of provision infuriates choice critics, because it means parents can choose private schools without knowing whether a public school might be a good fit for their children. Supporters, however, say that these clauses honor a parent’s choice, whatever that may be, without requiring them to jump through hoops.

Republican Gov. Chris Sununu signed the New Hampshire legislation as part of the state budget in June 2021. By the end of the following school year, about 2,000 students had signed up. He also expanded a separate tuition program for families in rural areas with limited public options, allowing them to use taxpayer dollars to attend religious as well as secular private schools. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states with such programs cannot exclude religious schools, opening the door to more public funding for private, religious education.  

West Virginia and Arizona went the furthest on school choice, creating options that would provide so-called education or empowerment scholarships to most or all of their respective state’s public school students. Both efforts face hurdles: A court challenge has blocked the West Virginia program, at least for now, and a campaign is underway to force the Arizona measure to face voters, which could put the program on hold until at least until 2024.

To be sure, for as many school choice programs that emerged since the pandemic, “lots still failed,” said Sharon Krengel, policy and outreach director at the Education Law Center, which has joined with other public school advocacy groups to form Public Funds Public Schools. The organization works on litigation that challenges vouchers and related programs.

In Louisiana, the Democratic governor recently vetoed a bill that would have created education savings accounts allowing parents to use tax dollars for private school tuition, homeschooling and other expenses. In Georgia, Republican lawmakers earlier this year pulled back a bill that would have provided state dollars for parents who wanted to send their children to private school. In Oklahoma, a bill to create a voucher program failed in the Senate in March, despite a pressure campaign from a D.C.-based lobbying group. Opposition to the bill came from Democrats as well as Republicans from rural areas that don’t have private schools.

Related: I got to choose private schools, but will vouchers really help other kids make it?

Politicians’ motivations don’t always align with what drives families to choose private school vouchers.

Pam Lang, an Arizona parent whose son James has autism and struggles to work independently, turned to the state’s empowerment scholarship program, or ESA, when she couldn’t find a public school that could meet his needs. The ESA program was limited to students with disabilities, children of military families and students attending low-performing high schools, but legislation, currently on hold, would open it to all students.

But, even with the scholarship, Lang had trouble finding private schools that could effectively serve her son. Still, with the ESA, “at least I could hire tutors,” Lang said, and the tutors worked with James independently at home. Now that her son is 15, Lang is taking a chance on a new private school for the coming school year.

Despite her own frustration with the teaching and services James received in public schools, Lang at times has criticized the ESA program and argued that money should instead be spent helping public schools better serve kids like her son. “I believe in public schools as an institution even though they were terrible for my son,” she said, her voice breaking. “You have to believe in democratic institutions. It would be wrong not to support them.”

But she said, “I can’t say there shouldn’t be any ESAs, until there is really not a need. I do feel they should only be for kids with special needs like mine.”

Some studies on vouchers don’t make a strong case that they improve kids’ educational achievement, finding that students using the subsidies actually lose ground in reading and math. Others, sometimes paid for by foundations that support vouchers, conclude the students who attend school using a voucher are more likely than peers to graduate from high school or attend college.

“Now 5,000 students take vouchers and go elsewhere, not in our district. That’s over 100 teachers we have to cut. That could potentially mean a school closure somewhere.”

Kelly Berg, calculus teacher and president of the Mesa Education Association, in Arizona

Whatever the research or voters’ will, even the smallest voucher program has a tangible effect on state spending. In Ohio, five state voucher programs that enrolled nearly 80,000 students last school year commanded $552 million, a spokeswoman for the state department of education said, or about 5 percent of total state spending on education. In West Virginia, critics of the new education savings programs — including the state superintendent and president of the state board of education — argued that it was unconstitutional and would decimate public school finances, and a court agreed.

Choice advocates argue public money for education should follow individual students. They say research shows choice programs, such as Florida’s tax credit scholarships, actually save taxpayers money, though advocates of public schools don’t agree.

“We want all families to get all the dollars to go to any potential options. That’s our North Star,” said Enlow, of EdChoice. He noted that in Indianapolis, for example, public school students in third grade would be allocated about $15,000 for their education. About $11,000 would follow third graders to their charter school. But students using a voucher to attend a private school would have only about $4,500 to spend. “It’s not an equal playing field,” he said.

Related: What would actually happen if we gave all parents the chance to pick their children’s schools?

More choice programs, and battles, are still to come.

Some of the options created by lawmakers in 2021, like voucher programs in Missouri and two cities in Tennessee, are just getting off the ground. Others face new pushback. In Ohio, a coalition of groups including about 100 school districts, are suing over the state’s expansive voucher options, a past version of which survived a U.S. Supreme Court challenge.

In Iowa, Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds, who watched as a school choice bill stalled in the legislature earlier this year, helped five candidates who support choice win their primaries in the hopes of a better showing next year. And in Texas, where opposition by rural lawmakers and Democrats has helped kill voucher legislation in the past, some experts predict things could be different in the near future, with Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, facing a tough primary, recently embracing private school vouchers.

Back in New Hampshire, Abbey Clegg is waiting to see whether her youngest, Emilia Jo, will fit in at the Catholic school some of her siblings attend when she starts kindergarten soon, or whether another school will make more sense. “It might not be a good fit for her. She’s a fiery little kid,” Clegg said.

But “being able to keep the kids where they are was such a blessing,” she said, especially after the trauma her family experienced last year, when her son Kaden died from complications related to some long-term conditions. The teachers are loving and warm, Clegg said. Several came to Kaden’s funeral and “loved on our kids so much during that time period.”

“We are huge advocates of finding kids that fit our school,” Clegg said. “We want them to go to a school that helps them academically — and to be a good human, really.”

“Whatever school fits your needs is where your kid deserves to be.”

This story about school voucher programs 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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