Imagine interacting with an avatar that dissolves into tears – and being assessed on how intelligently and empathetically you respond to its emotional display.

Or taking a math test that is created for you on the spot, the questions written to be responsive to the strengths and weaknesses you’ve displayed in prior answers. Picture being evaluated on your scientific knowledge and getting instantaneous feedback on your answers, in ways that help you better understand and respond to other questions.

These are just a few of the types of scenarios that could become reality as generative artificial intelligence advances, according to Mario Piacentini, a senior analyst of innovative assessments with the Programme for International Student Assessment, known as PISA.

He and others argue that AI has the potential to shake up the student testing industry, which has evolved little for decades and which critics say too often falls short of evaluating students’ true knowledge. But they also warn that the use of AI in assessments carries risks.

“AI is going to eat assessments for lunch,” said Ulrich Boser, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, where he co-authored a research series on the future of assessments. He said that standardized testing may one day become a thing of the past, because AI has the potential to personalize testing to individual students.

PISA, the influential international test, expects to integrate AI into the design of its 2029 test. Piacentini said the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which runs PISA, is exploring the possible use of AI in several realms.

• It plans to evaluate students on their ability to use AI tools and to recognize AI-generated information.
• It’s evaluating whether AI could help write test questions, which could potentially be a major money and time saver for test creators. (Big test makers like Pearson are already doing this, he said.)
• It’s considering whether AI could score tests. According to Piacentini, there’s promising evidence that AI can accurately and effectively score even relatively complex student work.  
• Perhaps most significantly, the organization is exploring how AI could help create tests that are “much more interesting and much more authentic,” as Piacentini puts it.

When it comes to using AI to design tests, there are all sorts of opportunities. Career and tech students could be assessed on their practical skills via AI-driven simulations: For example, automotive students could participate in a simulation testing their ability to fix a car, Piacentini said.

Right now those hands-on tests are incredibly intensive and costly – “it’s almost like shooting a movie,” Piacentini said. But AI could help put such tests within reach for students and schools around the world.

AI-driven tests could also do a better job of assessing students’ problem-solving abilities and other skills, he said. It might prompt students when they’d made a mistake and nudge them toward a better way of approaching a problem. AI-powered tests could evaluate students on their ability to craft an argument and persuade a chatbot. And they could help tailor tests to a student’s specific cultural and educational context.

“One of the biggest problems that PISA has is when we’re testing students in Singapore, in sub-Saharan Africa, it’s a completely different universe. It’s very hard to build a single test that actually works for those two very different populations,” said Piacentini. But AI opens the door to “construct tests that are really made specifically for every single student.”

That said, the technology isn’t there yet, and educators and test designers need to tread carefully, experts warn. During a recent panel Javeria moderated, Nicol Turner Lee, director of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution, said any conversation about AI’s role in assessments must first acknowledge disparities in access to these new tools.

Many schools still use paper products and struggle with spotty broadband and limited digital tools, she said: The digital divide is “very much part of this conversation.” Before schools begin to use AI for assessments, teachers will need professional development on how to use AI effectively and wisely, Turner Lee said.

There’s also the issue of bias embedded in many AI tools. AI is often sold as if it’s “magic,”  Amelia Kelly, chief technology officer at SoapBox Labs, a software company that develops AI voice technology, said during the panel. But it’s really “a set of decisions made by human beings, and unfortunately human beings have their own biases and they have their own cultural norms that are inbuilt.”

With AI at the moment, she added, you’ll get “a different answer depending on the color of your skin, or depending on the wealth of your neighbors, or depending on the native language of your parents.”  

But the potential benefits for students and learning excite experts such as Kristen Huff, vice president of assessment and research at Curriculum Associates, where she helps develop online assessments. Huff, who also spoke on the panel, said AI tools could eventually not only improve testing but also “accelerate learning” in areas like early literacy, phonemic awareness and early numeracy skills. Huff said that teachers could integrate AI-driven assessments, especially AI voice tools, into their instruction in ways that are seamless and even “invisible,” allowing educators to continually update their understanding of where students are struggling and how to provide accurate feedback.

PISA’s Piacentini said that while we’re just beginning to see the impact of AI on testing, the potential is great and the risks can be managed.  

“I am very optimistic that it is more an opportunity than a risk,” said Piacentini. “There’s always this risk of bias, but I think we can quantify it, we can analyze it, in a better way than we can analyze bias in humans.”

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

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MIAMI — Shiva Rajbhandari doesn’t want you to think there’s anything impressive about the fact that he ran for a school board seat at age 17.

He doesn’t want you to consider it remotely awe-worthy that he campaigned on a platform to turn his Idaho district into a leader on climate change, or that he won, against an incumbent, in the highest-turnout school board election in Boise history.  

What’s impressive, he says, are his Boise public school teachers, who educated him on climate change beginning in seventh grade, not because of any state science guidance but because they recognized its importance. They also “told me every single day that your voice is powerful, that you can make a difference,” he said. 

“This is something that should be accessible to every student,” Rajbhandari, now 19, told an audience at the Aspen Institute’s annual climate event earlier this month. But “not every student has that.”

Rajbhandari, like many of those I spoke with at the Miami event, sees education as fundamental to reducing the harms of a warming planet. By giving young people the skills and resilience to fight climate change, and by harnessing school systems – often among the largest employers and landowners in communities – to reduce their carbon footprint, education can unleash positive changes for a less-apocalyptic future.

“We must recognize that education is the climate solution,” said Rajbhandari, who spoke on a panel organized by This is Planet Ed, an Aspen project that has pushed to get education on the climate agenda and vice versa.

Here are some of my takeaways from the conference, both in terms of how climate change is affecting students and learning, at all education levels, and how education systems can tackle the problem.

Early education:

• Danger lurks for the youngest kids: Kids ages zero to 8 are especially vulnerable to climate change and its harms, such as heat waves; it’s also when kids’ brains are developing most rapidly and laying the foundation for climate resilience is especially critical, said Michelle Kang, chief executive officer for the National Association for the Education of Young Children.
• No need to wait until kindergarten: Kids can be introduced to activities like composting and recycling,and values around a healthy planet, at very early ages, Kang said.
• It’s about access, too: Kang mentioned visiting a child care program in Texas that had lost its shade structure in a storm and no longer had a way to take kids outside safely in the heat of the day.

K-12:

• Money, money, money: The Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal and the Inflation Reduction Act contain hefty financial incentives and support for schools to reduce their carbon footprint through solar rooftops, electric buses and building efficiencies. Many don’t know of those opportunities, speakers said. 
• Confront the topic differently so it’s not just “the polar bears are dying, the seas are warming and the coral reefs are bleaching, and people in sub-Saharan Africa may not in 50 years have enough to eat,” Rajhbandari said. The issue is urgent, immediate and personal, he noted, but students also need to know they can have a positive impact: “The key there is talking about solutions and talking about agency.” 
• Silence won’t help: Laura Schifter, an Aspen senior fellow who leads This is Planet Ed, recalled hearing from a student who’d become alarmed by a U.N. report about climate change and was shocked that no adults in her school were talking about it. “She started to think, am I the crazy one, that I’m so worried and no one else is worried?” Schifter said. 
• A perfect storm: Climate threats are sharpening the focus on other threats to public schools, like expanded school choice and vouchers. Luisa Santos, a Miami Dade school board member, noted public schools in the city serve as hurricane shelters. School privatization could complicate that role if fewer school buildings are district run and are instead led by many different private operators, she noted.

Higher education:

• New world, new needs: Climate change is starting to reshape the workforce, with new opportunities in renewable energy, sustainability and other sectors, speakers said. Higher ed needs to identify these new needs and help prepare students to fill them, said Madeline Pumariega, president of Miami Dade College.
• For example: She noted that her college started a program for automotive technicians focused on electric vehicles: “We can have the workforce so we don’t find ourselves saying, well sorry, we were trying to do this but we didn’t have the workforce to be able to.”
• Changing existing programs: Colleges are increasingly infusing climate studies into an array of fields – culinary students need to learn about reducing food waste, while future nurses need to know about mitigating the health effects of climate change, speakers said.
• Change begins on campus: There’s also a push to incorporate campus sustainability efforts into coursework. At University of Washington at Bothell, for example, students in several majors worked to restore campus wetlands. At Weber State University, in Ogden, Utah, students in engineering and other fields helped make buildings more efficient. And SUNY Binghamton offers a class called “Planning the Sustainable University” in which students have developed dorm composting, improved furniture reuse rates, and more. 

It’s sobering to contemplate climate change, especially from Miami, where sea level rise threatens to swamp much of the city in the coming decades. But I was reminded of messaging I heard at last year’s Aspen conference, from Yale University senior research scientist Anthony Leiserowitz: “Scientists agree, it’s real, it’s us, it’s bad, but there’s hope.”

Important sources of that hope are students, educators and school systems.      

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

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When Sarah Anderson travels to Texas middle schools to teach sex education, she brings props: a toy baby to represent unplanned pregnancy, a snake for bacterial infections, a pregnancy test for infertility, a skeleton for AIDS and cancer. 

The students are told that if they have sex before marriage, emotional risks include depression, guilt and anxiety. They’re taught that condoms — while often labeled as a method for “safe sex” — do not keep them safe from pregnancy or sometimes-incurable sexually transmitted infections. 

Her curriculum for high schoolers, meanwhile, says that people who “go from sex partner to sex partner are causing their brains to mold and gel so that it eventually begins accepting that sexual pattern as normal.” This, the curriculum says, could “interfere with the development of the neurological circuits” needed for a long-term relationship.

Anderson isn’t a school district employee. She works for the South Texas Pregnancy Care Center in Seguin, Texas, a group founded in 2001 to counsel women against getting abortions. The organization is one of dozens of crisis pregnancy centers across the state that send employees into schools to talk to students and, in some cases, teach sex education classes.

These groups, also known as pregnancy resource centers, began to sprout around the country in the late 1960s as states passed laws legalizing abortion. Sex education has sometimes been a feature of their work. But in Texas, which has among the most crisis pregnancy centers of any state and where state health standards dictate that sex education classes emphasize abstinence, those sex ed efforts are particularly widespread. A Hechinger Report investigation identified more than 35 examples of these centers involved in dozens of school districts across Texas, and the actual number is likely higher.

With the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade last summer and the near-total ban on abortion in Texas, crisis pregnancy centers are poised to play an even bigger role going forward. In April, the Texas state legislature approved $165 million over two years for the organizations through its Alternatives to Abortion program (recently rebranded as Thriving Texas Families), more than double the 2019 budgeted amount. The money funds the groups’ overall work, not sex ed, but went to at least 14 of the centers identified by Hechinger as working in schools.* 

“I’m concerned that our state is outsourcing sex education to outside groups with extreme political ideologies.”

Texas state representative and former middle school teacher James Talarico

The growing school-based work of some centers comes despite scant evidence that the sex ed they provide helps reduce teen pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections. According to public health experts, the approaches many of these groups take — such as emphasizing risks, inundating students with statistics and showing graphic pictures of STIs — aren’t effective in preventing or changing behavior. Instead, they can cause students to stop absorbing information that might help them make informed decisions about sex in the future. 

“You’ll tend to see that kind of overload on facts [that] steer into fear,” said Leslie Kantor, chair of the Department of Urban-Global Public Health at the Rutgers School of Public Health, in New Jersey. “We know very very well across many many health issues this is not what changes human behavior.”

Related: If more students become pregnant post-Roe, are we prepared to support them? 

Staff of crisis pregnancy centers argue that their approach works: Their students report directly to them or in internal surveys that they’ve changed their minds about having sex. Staff also say that their connections with schools grew out of a desire to teach young people how to avoid unplanned pregnancies in the first place, intervening before teens need their services. They say abstinence is the best, most effective way to prevent any risks associated with having sex and that they also teach students about healthy relationships and planning for their futures.

“We deal with unexpected pregnancies,” said Jennifer Shelton, the executive director of Real Options, a pregnancy resource center in Allen, which has taught sex ed in more than a dozen public school districts. “The best way to deal with that is at the beginning of the decision-making process.”

In Texas, sex education typically takes up just a few hours of instruction a year in a handful of grades, and many school districts use outside groups and online providers rather than hiring experts in-house or training their own staff. Sex ed curricula are recommended by councils made up primarily of parents and community members. Many pregnancy center programs, which tend to follow a “sexual risk avoidance” approach that in addition to stressing abstinence also includes discussion of birth control and the signs and symptoms of STIs, are offered for free and align with the Texas state standards requiring that abstinence be promoted as the “preferred choice.”

But some health experts, legislators and students say crisis pregnancy centers, which have been accused of offering women misleading or inaccurate information about abortion risks, have no place in public schools. They view the sex ed courses as a stealth way for the organizations to develop connections to teens so the young people will turn to crisis pregnancy centers if they do become pregnant later. 

State representative and former middle school teacher James Talarico has repeatedly introduced legislation to require all Texas districts to teach medically accurate sex education. “I’m concerned that our state is outsourcing sex education to outside groups with extreme political ideologies,” said Talarico, a Democrat who serves north Austin and surrounding areas. “If they are withholding information or emphasizing certain information to push an agenda on our kids, then that’s inappropriate.”

For three years as a student in Lewisville Independent School District, near Dallas, Nimisha Srikanth was taught by staffers of 180 Degrees, the education arm of Real Options. 

When she was in eighth grade, the group gave each student a cup and had them pour water back and forth, she said. The exercise was supposed to represent how easily they could become infected with an STI. Srikanth, who graduated from high school in 2019, said the classmates treated it as a joke and purposefully tried to maximize “infections.” 

In ninth grade, a lesson quickly derailed when the presenter started talking about how abstinence was best, and someone quipped, “I guess it’s too late for me.” The room erupted in laughter. The teacher “lost everybody’s attention after that,” Srikanth recalled.

Each year, she said, the message was always the same: “Don’t have sex before marriage. If you do, bad things will happen,” Srikanth said. “It’s so much fear-based, very opinion-based.” 

180 Degrees is among the state’s most widespread crisis pregnancy center-affiliated sex ed programs, noting on its website that it has sent presenters to 14 districts in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. In 2019, Real Options reached 18,329 students “with education presentations about sexual purity,” according to its federal tax filing.

In an emailed statement, Amanda Brim, the Lewisville district’s chief communications officer, said that 180 Degrees was never adopted districtwide, but individual schools could choose to use the program. In 2022, she wrote, Lewisville adopted a new sex ed program to meet updated state standards, which went into effect that year. 

Shelton, who taught for 180 Degrees for many years, said that her program avoids scare tactics, even if some of the statistics they share may be alarming, and that they are truthful with students about the risks associated with having sex. The program, she noted, covers many different topics beyond abstinence, including birth control, STIs and the emotional side to sex and relationships. 

Shelton said she believes that “no matter what side” people are on, they should agree abstinence is the best choice to prevent pregnancy and STIs. “We believe in raising the standard for young people,” she said. “They can and most likely will rise to that occasion.”

Related: Five things you need to know about sex ed in the US

The sex ed curriculum of 180 Degrees was one of six obtained by The Hechinger Report through public records requests and reviews of school and center websites. All of the pregnancy center curricula emphasize the potential harms of having sex and advocate waiting until marriage, suggesting that doing so will eliminate all risk. 

Seventh graders in 180 Degrees classes, according to a presentation for parents, are taught that there are 27 different STIs and that, with their various strains, the total number of sexually transmitted diseases nears 1,000. The curriculum used by South Texas Pregnancy Care Center, called SHARE, lists the potential consequences of STIs as pain and suffering, damage to organs, damage to babies, death, embarrassment and rejection.

LifeGuard, the sex ed program affiliated with the crisis pregnancy center The Source, in Austin and Houston, includes a series of graphic photos to give “a medically accurate understanding of how these STIs can impact a person’s health.” 

“They just tried to scare us,” said Samuel Ingram, a 2020 graduate of the Leander Independent School District, which says that it has used LifeGuard since 2005. Ingram added that he wished he had been given useful information on safe sex instead of being told “here’s what gonorrhea looks like, and you could have it forever.”

LifeGuard, whose curriculum says that it reaches 15,000 students annually, declined to comment for this article. Staff instructed two school districts not to provide copies of the group’s curriculum in response to Hechinger’s public records request. They also wrote to the attorney general seeking an exemption to the records law on the grounds that release of the material would “cause competitive harm” and that the curriculum contained trade secrets. The exemption was denied.

Alicia Westcot, Leander’s senior director of math, science and humanities, wrote in an email that the district uses LifeGuard because the program follows state health standards and has “created engaging content for our students at all grade levels.” She added that teachers have given positive feedback about having content experts come in to teach the courses.

Four public health experts who reviewed portions of the crisis pregnancy center curricula at the request of The Hechinger Report said the programs frequently fail to provide important context for students to assess the likelihood of various risks and that some parts were biased or misleading, including messaging on contraception effectiveness. 

The South Texas Pregnancy Care Center’s SHARE script, for example, instructs educators to tell students that teens don’t use condoms consistently because their brain is not fully developed. A copy of LifeGuard’s eighth grade curriculum instructs the presenter to read quickly through a list of bullet points about correct condom use to emphasize their number and then say, “Are you getting the idea of how consistent and correct use could be challenging?” 

While research on the effectiveness of sex ed is difficult to conduct, major  medical  organizations recommend comprehensive sex education — which typically discusses the benefits of delaying sexual intercourse along with information on methods for preventing pregnancy and STIs, gender identity and consent. They note that studies suggest such courses are more effective than abstinence-only programs at reducing teen pregnancy rates and increasing condom use if young people do choose to have sex, and that comprehensive sex ed produces other benefits, including improved interpersonal skills.

The sexual risk-avoidance approach that many crisis pregnancy centers use covers some content beyond abstinence. But health experts say the programs’ focus on the negative consequences of having sex before marriage echo strict abstinence-only approaches. 

“When we are able to show them a baby moving in the womb, it becomes a lot more tangible. This baby has its own heartbeat and fingers and toes and eyes and nose and is already developing a personality. When they can see that, suddenly things are different for them. It has planted a seed of life.”

Shannon Thompson, executive director, The Open Door, a pregnancy resource center in Cisco and Breckenridge  

They say this focus misses the chance to impart useful information and skills. Rather than presenting statistic after statistic about the ubiquitousness of STIs, for example, educators should make sure students feel equipped to talk with potential partners about protection, said Kantor. 

“If I have limited time with a young person, am I going to spend that time giving them a bunch of facts that are not very relevant to them in that moment, that frankly, if they were interested, they could look up on their phone?” Kantor said. Instructors “are making an unfortunate decision to spend precious time with a young person who really needs skills giving out what are probably going to be useless pieces of information.” 

In 2020, The Open Door, a crisis pregnancy center in Cisco and Breckenridge, tried something new. Its staff brought a mobile ultrasound unit and a volunteer pregnant woman to a school to perform a live ultrasound in front of students. 

Today, the center works with middle and high schoolers in 15 school districts in central Texas, providing education on sexuality and relationships and in some cases incorporating live ultrasounds into the instruction.

“When we are able to show them a baby moving in the womb, it becomes a lot more tangible,” said Shannon Thompson, The Open Door’s executive director. “This baby has its own heartbeat and fingers and toes and eyes and nose and is already developing a personality. When they can see that, suddenly things are different for them. It has planted a seed of life.” 

The live ultrasounds are part of a larger effort led by Thompson to “change the culture” beyond her organization’s walls, she said, rather than simply waiting for clients to come to them. Her staff tries to reach community members before they engage in “risky behavior,” teaching young people to feel empowered to “say no and mean it,” while also introducing her group as a safe place for people to turn to if they do get in trouble or become pregnant.

“I feel like it was almost a disservice to us. They might have gotten what they wanted and people to practice abstinence, but the people who didn’t weren’t really well-equipped with super good information.”

Samuel Ingram, graduate of the Leander Independent School District and Texas A&M Corpus Christi student 

To that end, The Open Door acquired a curriculum and hired an education liaison to teach sex ed in schools. Staffers have built relationships with school counselors, juvenile departments and camps, and they participate in an annual back-to-school bash.* This year, they adopted an additional curriculum to reach more grade levels and added a second education liaison to their staff, Thompson said. 

Under her leadership, Open Doors’ state funding is rising: In 2022, it received nearly $380,000 via the Alternatives to Abortion program, compared with approximately $102,000 in 2019.

Thompson said her group doesn’t engage in scare tactics, but rather focuses on “empowering” students to make smart decisions and recognize their self-worth by postponing sex.

“Student education has become a very, very important part of our focus,” Thompson said in April during a panel on her organization’s work at the annual meeting of Heartbeat International, a national network of pregnancy resource centers. “It’s a great way for us to begin to instill and teach and to educate these individuals on the pro-life message.”

Related: Inside the Christian legal campaign to return prayer to public schools

Other pregnancy center sex ed programs also use talking points associated with the anti-abortion movement and encourage students to visit their clinics.

The LifeGuard eighth grade curriculum, for instance, includes a game about fetal development in which students guess whether certain developmental milestones — such as the heart starting to beat and the brain beginning to function — occur at four, six or eight weeks. 

LifeGuard programs direct students to the affiliated clinic, The Source, if they need pregnancy tests or STI testing. “There are places like The Source that can provide all the information needed to make an informed decision about an unexpected pregnancy,” the curriculum reads. 

The Source received nearly $1.4 million in Alternatives to Abortion funding in 2022. Yet LifeGuard describes itself to parents and students as an “apolitical” program that doesn’t take a stance on controversial issues. Indeed, none of the crisis pregnancy center school curricula reviewed by The Hechinger Report contained explicit religious or anti-abortion content. 

But the groups do emphasize their religious values in other aspects of their operations, sometimes stipulating that job applicants be Christian and hold certain values. A LifeGuard job ad for a curriculum specialist noted that the new hire must have a “strong commitment and dedication to the sanctity of human life and sexual abstinence.” A job posting for an abstinence educator from 180 Degrees listed the top qualification as: “Pro-Life, Christ follower, and believes that the Bible is the inerrant word of God.”

“There is no public school district in the state of Texas that can legally screen educators based on their political beliefs. The fact that these organizations are hand-picking people that align with their extreme ideology should be incredibly concerning.”

James Talarico, Texas state representative and former middle school teacher 

Shelton of 180 Degrees said that while religion is “very important to us personally,” staff never bring “religious rhetoric” to the classroom or discuss abortion pros and cons, out of respect for students and a recognition that many come from different backgrounds. Similarly, Thompson said her group shares the “pro-life” message as “one option” but doesn’t take a “political stance” in schools. 

Speaking at the Heartbeat International conference, Thompson noted that it was, in fact, important for organizations like hers to avoid alienating young people with an anti-abortion, religious message. 

“If young women who could be your clients see you waving the pro-life flag loud and proud, remember they could feel like they can’t come to you,” said Thompson. “They are more likely to open up with you when they have a relationship with you, when they feel comfortable with you and feel like they can trust you.” 

Talarico, meanwhile, says it’s not enough for organizations to simply say that they are unbiased in the classroom. “There is no public school district in the state of Texas that can legally screen educators based on their political beliefs,” he said. “The fact that these organizations are hand-picking people that align with their extreme ideology should be incredibly concerning.”

The South Texas Pregnancy Care Center assures parents and educators that the religious beliefs that drive the group’s work do not influence its education program, SHARE.

“There is overlap between the message of abstinence from a health standpoint and the message of abstinence from a faith standpoint,” Anderson, the program’s lead teacher, said in a presentation to the Yorktown school district’s School Health Advisory Council, or SHAC, in spring 2022. “But that doesn’t discredit its value as the best message to give young people when it comes to their health,” she added. (Anderson declined interview requests for this story, but wrote in an email that many school districts had vetted and were happy with the SHARE curriculum and that it complied with state health standards.)

Related: Five things you need to know about sex ed in the U.S.

Part of Anderson’s job is to travel across central Texas attending SHAC meetings and pitching members, most of whom are district parents, on the advantages of choosing her sex ed program. The councils then make official recommendations to their school boards. 

And she’s been successful. South Texas Pregnancy Care Center’s SHARE program started in three schools in 2016; by the 2021-22 school year, two years after Anderson joined, its teachers were presenting in 10 schools.

After the 2022 meeting in Yorktown, she convinced the district to use SHARE, and this year added Seguin to the program’s growing list of districts. 

“It makes me so angry to see that crisis pregnancy centers are leading sexual education in the state and not healthcare professionals. They are taking advantage of one of the most vulnerable populations we have, which is young people.” 

Molly Davis, student, Texas A&M Corpus Christi

In that school district, Anderson plays an additional role — she serves on the SHAC. In April, at the group’s regular meeting, she encouraged its members to vote to endorse her SHARE curriculum, noting that it was one of just two under the council’s review that aligned with the state health standards. Moments later, council members voted to winnow their choices to those two, and a month later decided to officially recommend Anderson’s program. 

The case was one of two identified by The Hechinger Report of a pregnancy center employee who serves on a SHAC voting in favor of her own course, in what Talarico said appeared to be a “clear conflict of interest.” He said he plans to raise the issue with his colleagues to explore whether it needs to be addressed legislatively. 

Sean Hoffman, communications officer for the Seguin district, said that there was no evidence that Anderson had undue influence on the decision. 

“School districts and school boards have to rely on the pulse of their communities,” he said, adding that it can be difficult to find enough people to serve on SHACs and that the process of evaluating sex ed curricula took more than a year. “When folks come forward and say they want to serve, we’re going to accept them with the knowledge that the intent is to come on and do what’s best.” 

Related: Child care, car seats and other simple ways to keep teen moms in school 

Like many pregnancy resource centers, the South Texas Pregnancy Care Center has been expanding its work in the wake of the fall of Roe. This spring, it started construction on a new building, supported, in part, by donations from Seguin nonprofits and agencies. A construction class at Seguin High School is building the interior walls. 

Demand for its services is rising too. The center previously averaged around 20 pregnancy tests a month. In January 2023, it administered 41 tests, Janice Weaver, the group’s executive director, said at a city council meeting in February. “There is a big need in Seguin, and we are so excited about the possibility of a new building,” she said.

Other groups, including The Open Door, are starting prenatal care units, to position themselves as a resource for more women who need medical help. Open Door’s Thompson said the group is located in a medical desert, and it will help provide transportation for pregnant women to prenatal appointments and other support. “Abortion basically being outlawed in the state of Texas did not change the circumstances of the women who find themselves pregnant and scared and not knowing what their future looks like,” said Thompson. “If anything, it’s increased the need.” 

“Abortion basically being outlawed in the state of Texas did not change the circumstances of the women who find themselves pregnant and scared and not knowing what their future looks like. If anything, it’s increased the need.”

Shannon Thompson, executive director, The Open Door, a crisis pregnancy center that works with 15 school districts

Molly Davis is a senior at Texas A&M Corpus Christi and president of the college’s Islander Feminists club, which is leading a campaign against a crisis pregnancy center that’s expanding near campus. She said she’s troubled by the growing role of the groups in Texas and sees their work in schools as being of a piece with their larger efforts to persuade people, sometimes through misinformation, to carry pregnancies to term. 

“It makes me so angry to see that crisis pregnancy centers are leading sexual education in the state and not healthcare professionals,” said Davis, who has classmates who were taught by the groups. “They are taking advantage of one of the most vulnerable populations we have, which is young people. … They are teaching young people things to specifically lead them down roads they want them to walk down.” 

Related: Overturning Roe created new barriers, not just to abortion, but to OBGYN training

Texas has the ninth-highest teen birth rate of any state, 20.3 births per 1,000 females ages 15 to 19. And while teen birthrates have been falling in the U.S. as a whole since 1991, they remain among the highest in the developed world. 

Ingram, the student from Leander, recalls that several of his classmates went on to become pregnant in high school. 

“I feel like it was almost a disservice to us,” Ingram, now a senior at Texas A&M Corpus Christi where he is also a member of the Islander Feminists, said of the sex ed he received. “They might have gotten what they wanted and people to practice abstinence, but the people who didn’t weren’t really well-equipped with super good information.” 

Srikanth, meanwhile, says she didn’t learn useful information until she got to college at Texas A&M University and joined the campus group FREE (Feminists for Reproductive Equity And Education) Aggies. 

On a Monday morning in May, Srikanth spent two hours giving out free condoms, dental dams, pregnancy tests and Plan B in the student center. She assured people stopping by the table that they were in a “no judgment zone,” mindful that some of them likely had also had years of messages that sex was dirty and would give them a disease. 

Those middle and high school experiences helped shape her career plans: This fall, she began a master’s program at Yale University and hopes to work in the areas of sexual and reproductive health and justice.

She said, “I want people to have better information than I did growing up.” 

*Correction: This story has been updated with correct information on the Alternatives to Abortion program’s funding details and rebranded name. It has also been updated to clarify The Open Door’s involvement with the back-to-school event.

This story about sex education curriculum 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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The landscape of sex ed in the United States is confusing. What students are taught, and in what grades, varies widely from one school district to another. In many communities, how to talk with kids and teens about sex is hotly debated. Educators, parents, outside groups and state regulations all play a role in shaping sex ed curriculums.

Here’s what you need to know to understand the different kinds of sex ed programs and what’s taught in your district.

What are the different types of sex education?

There are four broad categories of sex ed: abstinence only, abstinence plus, sexual risk avoidance and comprehensive sex education. The first three typically promote postponing sexual activity until after marriage to avoid risks including pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections, while comprehensive sex education focuses on equipping students with skills for staying safe when they do choose to have sex.

That said, there is no single, agreed-upon definition for any of these terms. Designers of sex ed curriculums are responsible for labeling their own programs, and the distinctions between them can be blurry. For example, comprehensive sex education programs often present abstinence as the surest way to eliminate risks, while programs in any of the categories may include information on contraception, STIs and healthy relationships.

Related: ‘They just tried to scare us:’ How anti-abortion centers teach sex ed inside public schools

What are some of the main points of contention between different types of sex education?

The main differences between the various types of sex education are in the degree of emphasis on abstinence and the ways in which teen sex and premarital sex are discussed. But there are other differences as well. For example, comprehensive sex education often includes lessons on gender identity, while other forms of sex ed typically leave that information out.

Comprehensive sex education also often includes lessons on consent. While some sexual risk avoidance and abstinence plus programs also discuss this topic, many focus on so-called refusal skills. The concepts are related — both involve teaching students that they can say no to sex. But instruction on consent often includes teaching that people can agree to have sex, whereas proponents of refusal skills say that approach ends up telling teens how to “negotiate” for sex.

What grade is sex ed taught in schools and by whom?

This varies widely. Comprehensive sex education advocates argue that courses should start as early as kindergarten, with lessons on topics like personal boundaries and names for body parts. They also say that sex ed should be taught every year; a few states, like California and Oregon, require this. In many places, however, sex ed is only taught in a few grade levels and not until middle and high school. In some districts, it’s not taught at all.

In schools that do teach it, sex ed typically takes up a small portion of a student’s overall time in school and, when taught by school staff, is often incorporated into health, physical education or science classes. Outside providers of sex education curriculums are also common, including Planned Parenthood, crisis pregnancy centers and online programs.

Related: PROOF POINTS: The research evidence for sex ed remains thin

What types of sex education are most effective?

People on all sides of this question — from proponents of comprehensive sex education to sexual risk avoidance advocates to abstinence-only supporters — say that their approach works best and often point to research. All major medical organizations recommend comprehensive sex education. But it’s difficult to conduct quality research determining which programs succeed at reducing rates of teen sex or high-risk sexual behavior. You can find more on what we do and don’t know about sex ed effectiveness here.

How do I figure out what my kid is learning in sex ed and who is teaching it?

The first step is to ask your school or district what sex ed curriculum they are using, who developed it and who will be teaching it. In some places, including Texas, districts are required to show any parent who asks a copy of the curriculum. Outside providers also often have information for parents available on their websites, and some conduct presentations for parents in advance of teaching students.

Most states allow parents to opt their children out of sex ed, while some, including Arizona, Nevada, Utah and Texas, require parents to opt in. If you live in one of those states and you want your child to participate in sex ed classes, be aware that you’ll have to give permission in order for them to do so.

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

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For 10 days this August, some 150 high schoolers from across the U.S. are descending on a sleepaway camp in Southern Illinois to discuss the fate of the planet — and what they can do about it.

The summer program is run by the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led campaign to halt climate change. Its goal is to teach students the skills they will need to launch an effort this fall using schools as a lever for slowing greenhouse gas emissions and accelerating the green energy transition.

Known as the Green New Deal for Schools, the plan calls for making school buildings greener and safer, advancing high-quality, interdisciplinary climate change lessons, developing disaster plans for schools, providing free lunch for all students and creating pathways to green jobs.

“The Green New Deal for Schools is so important right now in the U.S., where our school buildings are crumbling, where our students are not being adequately prepared to face the realities of the climate crisis, where there are vast inequities across race and class,” said Shiva Rajbhandari, a Sunrise Movement organizer and a 2023 graduate of Idaho’s Boise High School.

The campaign is part of a growing recognition of the importance of schools and young people in the fight against climate change. Heat waves, wildfires, floods and other disasters worsened by climate change are disrupting classes, displacing students, leveling school buildings and contributing to student mental health problems. Some school districts have started to take the problem seriously, by adding more climate change education and investing in electrified buses, composting and renewable sources for heating and cooling. But climate change advocates say schools — community hubs that impart knowledge and rely on billions of taxpayer money — can do much more.

Young people, meanwhile, are significantly more likely than older Americans to be concerned about the problem. They’ve helped shape lawsuits, protests and movements designed to inspire climate action; some, including Rajbhandari, have run successfully for local school boards on climate platforms. Yet many of them receive little to no introduction to climate science in K-12 schools.

The Green New Deal for Schools is meant to focus this climate activism on the education system. At the camp in Benton, Illinois, students will learn about the plan and how to advocate for it, along with participating in typical camp activities like swimming and using the ropes course. Camp organizers hope they’ll turn their schools into centers for climate action and press school administrators and legislators for new policies and investments.

Related: How some Mississippi teens are saving their town from climate change

Aster Chau, a rising sophomore at the Academy of Palumbo in Philadelphia, had an awakening about climate change in world history class, when they were introduced to a book called “1,001 Voices on Climate Change: Everyday Stories of Flood, Fire, Drought and Displacement Around the World.” Learning about the warming planet left Chau feeling like they were “being suffocated,” they said. Signing up for her school’s environmental justice club and being connected to Sunrise, they said, “made me feel less alone.”

This past winter, Chau attended a precursor event to the camp in Philadelphia, at which students got an introduction to the Sunrise Movement and climate advocacy. This month, in Illinois, they are part of the program’s art team. Students are making banners, stickers, signs and even a zine to help inspire action on climate change, Chau said.

“The Green New Deal for Schools is so important right now in the U.S., where our school buildings are crumbling, where our students are not being adequately prepared to face the realities of the climate crisis, where there are vast inequities across race and class.”

Shiva Rajbhandari, 2023 graduate of Boise public schools, in Idaho, and Sunrise Movement organizer

Chau said they’re particularly troubled by the ways climate change is exacerbating racial and socioeconomic inequities in her district. Philadelphia schools are chronically underfunded, with notoriously decrepit school buildings; many, including Chau’s sister’s school, lack air conditioning. Some years, the district has had to let kids out early and delay the start of the school year because of high temperatures. 

Meanwhile, some parts of the city that are predominantly Black and Hispanic tend to be hotter than whiter neighborhoods, because those formerly redlined areas tend to have dark, flat roofs and fewer trees. “It’s difficult to acknowledge, until you see it,” Chau said.

Related: One state mandates teaching climate change in almost all subjects — even PE

Rajbhandari, who plans to study public policy and math at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill this fall, said that racism — not politics or funding — has proved the biggest obstacle to climate action on the school and district level.

“Black and Brown students in our cohort have the toughest time getting their hubs off the ground because their principals are suspicious of the organizing they are doing and don’t want them to start a club, or their schools don’t have a model of student engagement that exists in many other public schools, or their school district is so dramatically underfunded,” he said.

In New Orleans, Gerard Isaac, a rising sophomore at New Harmony High School, said he sees that dynamic play out in his district. His current school, which he said is more racially integrated than those he previously attended, has a focus on environmental studies, but he said some schools have few activities and clubs beyond sports and band.

At the Sunrise camp this summer, Isaac said he hopes to focus on solutions to the climate crisis. He said he wants educators to emphasize solutions, too. In his freshman world geography class, he said, students sometimes felt overwhelmed by the climate catastrophe, leaving them depressed and despairing.

 “It would leave a bad taste in their mouth, like they can’t do anything to help,” he said. Isaac added: “I literally signed up for an environmentally based high school, and I want to help.”

There are reasons to be optimistic. Rajbhandari said he’s witnessed a big shift in the level of advocacy for schools and climate since he attended his first Sunrise event in 2019, a protest at the Idaho state capitol. “There’s a ton of momentum right now for comprehensive action on schools,” he said. “The groundwork has been laid by students across the country working in individual schools. Now it’s time for a coordinated strategy, and to bring a more massive federal investment for states and at the federal level to decarbonize schools.”

At The Hechinger Report, we’ve been covering the climate crisis from many school-related angles, including its mental health impact, risks to school infrastructure, how it’s taught (or not), greening campuses, advancements in climate education, and much more. With the start of each school year, the problems seem more intense and immediate. As this new academic year begins, we want to hear your thoughts on how climate change may be altering your communities and schools.

Do you have questions about how climate change is affecting schools? Have you seen climate-related effects on classrooms near you? Do you have solutions in your communities? Let us know by writing to me at preston@hechingerreport.org. And thanks for reading.

Correction: This story has been updated to correct the photo credit and pronouns for one student.

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

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One day this spring, Victoria Trice’s high school students in downtown Louisville, Kentucky, peered through virtual reality headsets as part of a lesson on Afrofuturism. 

In Philadelphia, Sharahn Santana encouraged her tenth graders to reflect on what might have happened if Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court ruling upholding racial segregation, had been decided differently.  

In Norfolk, Virginia, the juniors and seniors enrolled in an African American history class taught by Ed Allison were working on their capstone projects, using nearby Fort Monroe, the site where the first enslaved Africans landed in 1619, as a jumping off point to explore their family history.   

These teachers all have one thing in common: their devotion to deeply exploring the history of Black people in America — a topic that has often been downplayed, or simply left out of, general history lessons.  
 
Such classes are under a microscope after the political skirmish set off when Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida rejected portions of an African American studies course piloted by the College Board, saying that the Advanced Placement class teaches concepts specifically forbidden by the state’s ban on teaching “critical race theory” and “divisive concepts.” At least five other states are examining the course to see if it is contrary to similar state laws. In July, DeSantis’s administration again stirred criticism when it released new state standards for Black history that critics say are incomplete and downplay the harms of slavery and racism. For example, the standards direct that students be taught that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”  

“When we think about the history curriculum, white people have been told that they’re the most historically important people in the world. So when they’re not centered in that narrative, or their ideas are not centered, then they tend to say this is not of educational value.”

LaGarrett King, founder and director of the Center for K–12 Black History and Racial Literacy Education at the University of Buffalo 

The controversies have had subtle reverberations for the classrooms in Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Virginia too. In Philadelphia and Norfolk, it has strengthened educators’ resolve to teach comprehensively about the subject and added to their sense of urgency. But in Kentucky, Trice, the only educator in the state to teach the pilot A.P. course targeted by Gov. DeSantis, has grown increasingly skeptical that the class will spread to other Kentucky schools, even as her politically liberal district doubles down on a commitment to African American history it made as part of a curriculum revamp in 2018.  

It’s important that school districts not shy away from offering Black history courses despite the recent attacks on the subject, says LaGarrett King, founder and director of the Center for K–12 Black History and Racial Literacy Education at the University of Buffalo. He adds that it’s not surprising that Black history classes make some people uncomfortable. 

“When we think about the history curriculum, white people have been told that they’re the most historically important people in the world. So when they’re not centered in that narrative, or their ideas are not centered, then they tend to say this is not of educational value,” said King. 

Related: Why students are ignorant about the Civil Rights Movement  

Adults who learned U.S. history through a particular lens may have a hard time comprehending that history classes are taught differently, or contain different perspectives, than when they were young, he said.  

King, who created a framework to teach Black history at the K-12 level that’s being used in Trice’s district, said the core of a good Black history course goes beyond surface-level instruction on slavery and Civil Rights to explore concepts of institutional racism and anti-Blackness. It gives students the knowledge and skills to draw connections to present-day events such as the Black Lives Matter movement and the police killings of George Floyd, Michael Brown and other Black Americans, he said. And it eschews what he calls “hero worship” — overly simplistic portrayals of Civil Rights leaders and others — for more critical, complex thinking and narratives. 

Different states, school systems and individual schools have taken wildly different approaches to incorporating Black history, with some making its study a graduation requirement and others deprioritizing it and relying on textbooks that haven’t been updated for years. This year, The Hechinger Report spent time in three different high school classrooms where teachers have prioritized Black history in this contentious political climate, to learn how African American history studies has changed over the years and what it might look like for students to receive a substantive, nuanced education on the topic.  

LOUISVILLE 

Just blocks from where hundreds of protestors gathered near the Ohio River waterfront after the death of Breonna Taylor in 2020 sits Central High School.  

The school is steeped in history: It was the first African American public school in Kentucky, and counts boxer Muhammad Ali among its alumni. Because of its history, it’s not surprising that Central High was the only school in the state selected by the College Board to pilot its new A.P. African American Studies course. Seventy percent of the school’s students are Black or African American, and a little over six percent are of Hispanic descent. 

There are just 25 students enrolled in the course at Central High, offered in two sections and taught by Trice, who once walked the halls of Central High herself, taking part in the school’s quiz bowl Black history team as a student in the mid-2000s. On the Wednesday following the A.P. exam, Trice promised her students that the lesson would be on a lighter note — “no more annotations,” she told the class.  

Before Trice introduced the topic of Afrofuturism, she asked her students to think about the dreams they have for the future. Then she asked them, “Where do you think we will be collectively as a Black community? Everybody included, whether your people have been here 300 years, or they’ve been here for three.” 

The students, all of whom are Black, grew serious. There were a few “hmmms” and murmurs as they pondered the question. 

Trices explained that Afrofuturism, one of the course’s final topics, is about “centering Black folks,” their identities and stories, in ways that blend the past and future. She cited the film Black Panther as one example, combining images of various African cultures with advanced technology. She then showed her students the music video for an early 1990’s song “Prototype,” by AfroFuturism Hip-Hop duo OutKast. 

Next she handed out VR headsets and asked her students to grab their cellphones and head to her Google classroom, where she had posted three different experiences that showcase Afrofuturism: an Afrofuturism art museum, a short VR film and a musical performance. Later, students were asked to create a piece of afro-futuristic art, using a photo of themselves, that reflected their past and their hopes for the future. 

“At the crux of Black Futures is this concept of dreaming and how can we turn those dreams into realities. And that’s a beautiful concept,” King said.  

Related: States were adding lessons about Native American history. Then came the anti-CRT movement 

Trice’s students have spent the better part of the year immersed in learning about early African societies, the great West African empires, the transatlantic slave trade, Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Movement and more contemporary topics, such as reparations and Black Lives Matter.  

They’re also acutely aware that they are the only students in Kentucky taking a course that has become controversial nationally. “I’m not surprised,” said Jeremiah Taylor, a junior. He said while there’s still a lot of hostility toward Black history, being in this class gives them the opportunity “to do a deep dive into Black history,” which he says he wouldn’t get in another history class. 

According to Trice, last year the course attracted a limited number of students — all Black and Latino — because the College Board didn’t offer college credit during its pilot year of African American studies. While she’s glad that next year’s course has attracted more interest, the close-knit nature of her class has allowed for open discussions, she said.  

“We’ve been able to kind of create an environment where the kids feel safe to say what their opinion is. It’s not always the same, but we’ve been able to have some really good discussions just in general about racism, about issues of otherism, issues of financial differences,” Trice said. “We talked about the economic impact of slavery to go from being money to trying to catch up with everyone else, who was given that opportunity of reaching this ‘American dream,’ and having 300-400 years of being someone else’s money.” 

“We’ve been able to kind of create an environment where the kids feel safe to say what their opinion is.

Victoria Trice, who teaches the pilot A.P. African American history course in Jefferson Public Schools, Kentucky 

Those kinds of discussions also require a supportive school culture and administration, she said. Many of the students’ families are unlikely to complain about the history curriculum, Trice said, in part because of Central High School’s demographics. 

Given the political environment right now, she’s skeptical that other schools in the state will pick up the course once it becomes available in the fall of 2024.  

Trice said without support from school administrators, teachers may be scared or unprepared to teach the course for fear of parent and community backlash. “I don’t know how you really cherry-pick what you’d like to cover in an A.P. class. You can’t skip the slavery unit, or you can’t think to skip Harriet Jacobs’s primary source of her narratives of a slave girl, where she’s talking about being sexually harassed by slaveholder,” she said. “Those are tough topics; teachers may not want to cover the possibility of sexual assault, the history of that when it comes to Black women during enslavement.”   

Maeva Pozoko, a junior in the class, said everyone should have the option to take a comprehensive Black history course in high school. 

“It’s important to know how it happened, what is the effect of that because we still live with the effects of what happened,” she said.  

Pozoko said while the backlash to the course felt at times “like a slap in the face,” the experience has made her want to continue learning about the subject. She is signed up to take another Black history course in the fall, she said.  

PHILADELPHIA 

Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson was on the screen at the front of the classroom, laying out the judge’s then-losing argument that segregating people by race in rail coaches was unconstitutional.  

Standing before her students, Santana, their history teacher, wanted to know: What did it mean that the 1896 Plessy case had offered a chance for America “to move up the timeline for racial reform,” as public interest lawyer Bryan Stevenson put it? How would our lives be different today?  

The tenth graders in Santana’s class lobbed answers. 

“Things would be better because it would have fast-forwarded rights for Black people,” said one student.  

“We would have more respect,” said another.    

“There wouldn’t be a large racial wealth gap,” said a third.  

In every high school in Philadelphia, there’s an African American history class like this one. That’s because, in 2005, Philadelphia began requiring that students take African American history to graduate, the first big city to do so. In this school system, in a politically liberal city in a swing state where more than half of students are Black and nearly a quarter are Hispanic, there’s been little of the pushback or controversy over African American history that has roiled other school districts and states.  

“In kindergarten and middle school, we only ever talked about Rosa Parks and Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King.”

Haajah Robinson, student, Parkway Northwest High School for Peace and Justice, Philadelphia 

“We have a duty to expose our children to multiple ideas and perspectives and allow them to wrestle with ideas and be part of the larger dialogue,” said Ismael Jimenez, a former classroom teacher who now serves as the director of social studies in the district’s Office of Curriculum and Instruction. Black history, he said, “is arguably just a counternarrative to the larger mainstream story which we’ve been indoctrinated with.”  

That said, the district has had its struggles with the mandatory course. It’s difficult to find enough teachers with the subject-area knowledge to teach it, and over the years, many of the teachers who’d initially received professional development in the subject had left, Jimenez said.  

In 2021, when he joined the district’s central office, the Philadelphia school system committed to investing in training for teachers and revamping the curriculum to include more primary sources, among other changes. The district also began holding workshops on Black studies for all educators, featuring speakers such as scholars Hasan Jeffries and Bettina Love. 

Related: Inside Florida’s ‘underground lab’ for far-right education policies 

Santana has been teaching the course at Philadelphia’s Parkway Northwest High School for Peace and Social Justice since 2019. Unlike many of the teachers who teach the course, she has a background in the topic, having taken African American history classes as an undergraduate history major at Fisk University. And, also unlike most teachers of the African American history course in Philadelphia, she’s Black, which she said helps some students at her majority-Black school feel more comfortable opening up.   

Until now, the students said, the African American history they’d been taught in school tended to be superficial.  

“In kindergarten and middle school, we only ever talked about Rosa Parks and Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King,” said Haajah Robinson, 15, speaking during an interview in the school library. “But Ms. Santana goes deep.” She had her students read David Walker’s Appeal, Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, stories from the abolitionist paper The Liberator and more.    

“It’s important that you know what I’m giving you is facts. I know Black history is challenged a lot and looked at as a controversial thing,” she said. “I don’t want you guys to think, ‘Oh, Ms. Santana is pro-Black. She’s just saying that.’ ”  

She added, “I want you all to know what our people went through because you guys have a torch to carry. … When you leave my class, I want you to feel proud.”  

By contrast, Santana, 43, said that as a K-12 student, “I learned about Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Thoreau, and just slaves. No names. Blacks were just slaves. And Lincoln freed you,” she said. “It never sat well with me, and it was the catalyst to want to research more and was why I went to study history in the first place.” 

“I want you all to know what our people went through because you guys have a torch to carry. … When you leave my class, I want you to feel proud.”

Sharahn Santana, who teaches African American history in Philadelphia public schools 

To Santana’s students, the recent controversy around teaching about racism was confounding. The idea that white children — who make up about 13 percent of students in this district — shouldn’t be exposed to conversations about America’s racist past lest it make them feel uncomfortable or guilty felt counterproductive.  

“A lot of these bad things happened, but it happened. This is really what went down,” said Zaniyah Roundree, 15. “You might have to sit there and feel bad for a little bit in order to come up with a solution about how we can improve our society based off the things that happened in the past.”  

Jimenez said the current controversies over African American history have deepened the Philadelphia district’s commitment to prioritize the subject. Topics that have drawn the most ire from conservatives, such as Black Lives Matter and intersectionality, aren’t part of required instruction, he said, but they are included in the course’s suggested learning experiences.  

For her part, Santana said she doesn’t flinch from exploring connections between historical events and contemporary realities such as housing and school segregation. But she also doesn’t tend to cover very recent topics such as Black Lives Matter. Her class begins around 2000 BC with lessons about ancient African kingdoms and extends through the Civil Rights era.  

“I try not to get too political,” she said. “I try to stick to the accomplishments, the work, the experience, the laws, the changes that were made, the watershed moments, and I let the kids make their own decisions.”  

NORFOLK 

Newspaper clippings and student assignments cover the walls of Ed Allison’s classroom at Granby High School in Norfolk, Virginia — a testament to the years that he has spent at the school teaching history, including an African American history elective that he helped create. 

In 2008, a dark-haired Barack Obama, then a Democratic candidate for president, visited his class to tell students to set high expectations for themselves. Other articles commemorate the work he and his students did in 2021 with the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO, which has worked to memorialize and shed light on the slave trade. About 12 miles away from the school is Fort Monroe, once known as Point Comfort, where the first documented enslaved Africans landed in 1619. Some of his students presented at a U.N.-sponsored Global Student Conference on Point Comfort’s history. 

To Allison, it is all much to be proud of — and all just a part of teaching a complete story of the United States, past and present.   

“We teach factual stuff that has been documented in history,” Allison said. “Is it a tough history? Yes. But is it critical for people to understand the history? Yes.” 

While African American history classes have faced recent controversy, in Norfolk, the electives have been in place for years. In 2019, then-Gov. Ralph Northam convened a panel that helped develop a Virginia African American history elective that is offered statewide and is one of the classes that Allison teaches. This coming school year, he’ll be teaching the A.P. African American history course. 

In Virginia, one of Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s first acts after he was sworn in was signing an order banning the teaching of so-called “divisive concepts,” which his administration said “instruct students to only view life through the lens of race and presumes that some students are consciously or unconsciously racist, sexist, or oppressive, and that other students are victims.” Allison said the order has not yet affected his course, which was developed by teachers within the state. However, Virginia is among the states that says it is “reviewing” the advanced placement Black studies course that will be offered nationally. At least three districts in addition to Norfolk say they plan to offer the advanced placement course in the 2023-24 school year.   

Related: Inside the Christian legal campaign to get prayer back in public schools 

Virginia’s African American history elective spends time on enslavement, the Civil War, Reconstruction, race relations and other “heavy” topics. But there are also sections on music, art, entrepreneurship and other achievements, Allison said.   

Like many students, Alexander Bradshaw took field trips to Fort Monroe when he was a younger student. The historical site is a popular field trip destination, but it was only during Bradshaw’s time in Allison’s class that the significance of the location was clear to the 17-year-old junior. He is now digging into his own family tree — genetic testing shows the family has roots in modern-day Congo and Benin, he said.  

Bradshaw, like the other students, said he’s aware of the controversy around the course. But the class “helps you feel more comfortable in yourself — you feel confident knowing where you came from and the history behind it. I feel like everybody should be able to know that.”

“Often I go home and I always have something to tell. I’m telling my family what I’ve learned. I just feel like that’s a very crucial part for us.”

Carrington Smith, high school student, Norfolk, Virginia 

Carrington Smith, also a 17-year-old junior, ended up in the course by accident — “to be honest, when I first got my schedule, I didn’t know what it was,” she said. A guidance counselor had made the schedule. 

But now she appreciates the course, especially the section on Black artists. 

“I just feel like a lot of people should know about this class,” Smith said. “Often I go home and I always have something to tell. I’m telling my family what I’ve learned. I just feel like that’s a very crucial part for us.” 

Katrina Acheson, an 18-year-old senior, enrolled in the African American history course because she needed a history credit. As a white student, she started off feeling that she might be “intruding — that I was taking away space from other people and that I wasn’t supposed to be here because I’m white.” 

“We teach factual stuff that has been documented in history. Is it a tough history? Yes. But is it critical for people understand the history? Yes.”

Ed Allison, African American history teacher, Norfolk, Virginia 

During the year-long course, that feeling went away for her, she said. “I’ve been really welcomed. It is emotional to everyone in the room, but I think it’s very important that it is taught. Being uncomfortable is an emotion that everyone experiences.” 

Allison said he hopes “like-minded people” will embrace, as his students have, this broader view of the American story. 

“Just let me teach history. That’s all. That’s it,” Allison said. “And what they decide to do with it …  you’re making it political. You’re saying ‘critical race theory,’ you’re saying ‘woke’ — that’s  them. And I think fair-minded people have to understand that’s not what it is.” 

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

The post How do we teach Black history in polarized times? Here’s what it looks like in 3 cities appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

BOSTON — Taryn Snyder’s third graders were leaning over their desks, scratching out short essays on what they’d done over the weekend. It was the first lesson in a school week that would take her kids through memoir writing, an introduction to division and research on Indigenous history, each activity carefully curated by Snyder.

But teaching wasn’t the only thing on Snyder’s plate. The next day, she’d meet with other teachers and a counselor to discuss their students’ academic progress and wellbeing. She would also lead an upcoming meeting on the school’s finances, including how to spend federal pandemic relief dollars. And she was running for the school’s governing board.

The Boston Teachers Union Pilot School, where Snyder has worked since 2012, is a “teacher-powered” school. The term refers to schools that are collaboratively designed and run by teams of teachers, who have the freedom and authority to make decisions on everything from curriculum to budget and personnel.

The pandemic and travails of remote learning walloped the education profession, worsening teacher morale and contributing to more people exiting the field. At the same time, teachers around the country have watched their autonomy erode, due to such factors as standardized testing mandates, laws governing what can and can’t be taught and growing demands for “parental rights.” 

Supporters of the teacher-powered model see it as an important antidote to these trends, as well as to the micromanaging by school districts and administrators that has contributed to more young people shunning the profession. It turns a top-down approach to education on its head, asserting that teachers are most familiar with the needs of students and know best how to help them learn, and that decisions made with little input from teachers can hurt kids and make schools less vibrant, creative places.

Since the pandemic, interest in the teacher-powered model has increased, with schools in a handful of districts taking steps to adopt it for the first time, according to Amy Junge, director of teacher-powered schools at Education Evolving, a Minneapolis nonprofit that supports schools following the model. Some data suggests giving teachers more authority can help with teacher satisfaction and retention: Teachers at teacher-led schools are roughly half as likely to leave their jobs as those at other schools, according to initial findings from a forthcoming analysis of 45 teacher-powered schools conducted by Education Evolving.

Today, Education Evolving identifies roughly 300 schools that follow the teacher-powered model.

“In general, teachers don’t have the kind of voice that other professionals typically do,” said Richard Ingersoll, a professor of education and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. “I’m a former high school teacher, and professors have a lot more say in the decisions that impact their jobs,” he said. “Schools vary, but in schools where teachers have more voice, there is better retention.”

That said, even the model’s most ardent proponents acknowledge that it carries challenges and may not be right for most schools. “Certainly, there are excellent educators who might not thrive in this environment or choose to be in it,” said Junge, citing the extra demands on teachers and their time.

Related: In one giant classroom, four teachers manage 135 kids — and love it   

The first schools to take a teacher-led approach emerged in the 1970s at a time of growing interest in the worker cooperative model, in which employees share ownership of an organization, according to Junge. During the 1990s, teacher-led schools began to gain traction in Minnesota, in particular, with the state’s passage of a charter law that allowed teachers to serve as the majority of a school’s governing board. Today, Junge’s group, which coined the term “teacher-powered” in 2014, identifies roughly 300 schools nationwide that follow the model.

The term teacher-powered is loosely defined; schools under its wide umbrella take different approaches. In some cases, schools employ leaders who focus primarily on administration, not teaching, although decision making still happens collaboratively with teachers. In other cases, teachers lead the school while also juggling teaching loads. At Avalon Charter School, in St. Paul, Minnesota, for example, there are four “program coordinators,” all teachers who still have classroom responsibilities, who take on additional administrative tasks. Carrie Bakken, a social studies teacher and program coordinator who has been with the school since 2001, said the model appeals to younger workers and has helped the school avoid hiring challenges.

“We are really experiencing a teacher shortage here in Minnesota,” said Bakken. But at Avalon, she said, “we are pretty much fully staffed.”

The model at Boston Teachers Union Pilot School, which serves kindergarteners through eighth graders, has evolved since the school’s 2009 founding. (The school, located in an aging brick building in the city’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood, was established at the urging of the Boston Teachers Union, hence its name. Today its relationship with the union is limited to having one union official on the school governing board.)

Berta Rose Berriz, a bilingual and special education teacher who was hired to run the school as one of its first “co-leads,” said she was drawn to the job because in prior positions she was always finding herself at odds with her principals. They couldn’t understand why she wanted to use books that included images of people like her Spanish-speaking students or why she might pause in the hall to chat with kids. “They didn’t know anything about teaching,” she recalled. “They didn’t get it; they didn’t get what I was doing.” 

She and her co-lead, Betsy Drinan, were paid slightly more than other teachers at the school but less than some principals in the district, enabling them to put more money toward instruction, they said. It was important that they be seen not as bosses but as peers. To that end, they taught regular classes — one year Drinan led a seventh grade English Language Arts class, but more often she taught reading intervention. Nearly every decision was reached in collaboration with the school’s entire teaching staff; a single “thumbs down” could kill a proposal.

But as those early leaders retired and the school grew, the demands on the co-leads’ time became overwhelming. Then came Covid, and its added administrative burdens. Today, the school is led by Lauren Clarke-Mason and Rebecca Gadd, two educators with classroom experience whose current teaching responsibilities are limited to running clubs, providing instructional support and covering for absent teachers. 

The door of their office is marked with a placard that reads “Co-Leads Abyss.” Students often swing by to chat, and the co-leads regularly visit classrooms and coach teachers. Meanwhile, teachers help make decisions about the school’s future in their roles on the different committees — personnel, instructional leadership, scheduling, budget and finance — that meet monthly. The threshold for approving proposals is now 85 percent, not 100.

“What we really want to do is make teachers’ lives easier,” said Clarke-Mason, who’s worked in Boston Public Schools for 28 years, most recently as an instructional coach. Gadd, a former teacher in New York City’s public schools, said, “It’s not a top-down model. We don’t just decide things and tell teachers they have to go along with it.”

Related: TEACHER VOICE: In tough times for teachers, let’s change the way we talk about our work

Most teachers in the school’s lower grades have been on staff since its founding. For them, the teacher-led model is what keeps them at the school. But the Boston school hasn’t been immune from teacher turnover. During the pandemic, some teachers in the upper grades left, and this year the school has several new staff members. Phung Ninh is one. A first-year teacher, she joined the Boston Teachers Union Pilot School this fall as an ELA and social studies teacher.

Ninh, a former community organizer who was drawn to the school for its collaborative ethos, said she has flexibility to shape her lessons in ways that other new teachers may not. “Some of my friends at other schools, they’re handed a curriculum and are told, teach this,” she said one day last year during a break between classes. But learning how to teach two subjects, along with participating in so many high-level decisions at the school, is very taxing. “I think this work is more fulfilling in the end,” she said. “But right now, it feels overwhelming.” 

Jerry Pisani, one of the elementary school teachers, who has been on staff since the school’s founding, was leading his kindergartners through an art lesson on a Monday. That weekend, a parent had emailed him hoping the class could recognize the Indian holiday of Diwali. Pisani had pulled together a brief lesson, something he said he was able to do in part because the school’s leaders don’t dictate what he teaches and when. That’s not the case everywhere: He recalled visiting another school a few years back where each teacher seemed to be following the same script at exactly the same pace. As he moved from one classroom to the next, teachers delivered practically the same sentences at the same time, he said.

Some students notice that their school is unusual. “It feels different not having a principal,” said Ella, a fifth grader with long blond hair who’d transferred to Boston Teachers Union Pilot School three years earlier. “At the school I was at before this, ‘principal’ is a word teachers would use, not to threaten you, but to make you listen to them,” she said, noting that a principal served primarily as an authority figure rather than someone who had relationships with students. “Having co-leads is just much better.”

In Snyder’s class, third grader Wyatt declared the school “pretty amazing.”

“If something is going on, the teachers can also make a decision about that, and I like that much better than just one person deciding,” said Wyatt, who spoke from behind a gray mask.

Wyatt’s mother, Abby Coakley, was at the after-school pickup one soggy afternoon last fall. She had worked in Boston Public Schools as a dance teacher for seven years, until she burned out and decided to train as a nurse. When it came time to send her own kids to school, she thought the teacher-led model might offer something very different from her own experience — and she was right. 

“It seems like the teachers here really want to be here,” said Coakley. “All the teachers seem really, really devoted to the kids.”

Related: PROOF POINTS: The paradox of ‘good’ teaching

Junge’s group is advocating to have at least one teacher-powered school in every district, to give more kids and educators an option. Just as doctors can choose to work for a large health system or start their own small practice, teachers ought to have a choice of working environment, said Lars Edsal, executive director of Education Evolving.

In addition to the school-wide model, there are lighter-touch ways of embracing a teacher-powered philosophy, educators said. Teachers can be given more authority over instruction and more input on some school decisions while the school retains a more traditional administrative structure. 

“We all put in countless extra hours. But I think for all of us, it’s worth it because we feel a certain level of investment. And we build a school around the belief that teachers are the ones who should be making decisions.”

Taryn Snyder, third grade teacher, Boston Teachers Union Pilot School

Since the pandemic, Education Evolving has been hearing from more school districts that are losing teachers and want to explore the teacher-led approach as a possible solution, Junge said. Maricopa County, in Arizona, plans to introduce the model at six schools this fall, while two Washington, D.C., charter schools are also adopting it, according to Junge.

But while school culture is important, it can’t alter some of the structural issues driving people from the profession, such as low pay. Last year, teachers earned just 76.5 cents for each dollar earned by similar college graduates in other professions, and the median earnings for elementary and middle school teachers has declined by more than 8 percent since 2010.

“We do absolutely attract more teachers,” said Avalon Charter School’s Bakken, a fact she attributes to the teacher-led model. “But as someone who is looking at our pay and then at the housing costs in Minnesota, I’m terrified. I don’t know how you ask a teacher to make $43,000 and the rent is $1,600.”

But Snyder, in Boston, can’t imagine being anywhere else. She worked in advertising after college, then went back to school for education and ended up as a student teacher at Boston Teachers Union School. She said she loves being able to adapt her curriculum each year to the needs of her students.

Her classroom is decorated with pink flamingos — plush, fluorescent and blowup versions. She works all the time, but loves vacation, and the flamingos are one attempt to bring a holiday vibe to the classroom.

“It is a lot more work. We all put in countless extra hours,” said Snyder. “But I think for all of us, it’s worth it because we feel a certain level of investment. And we build a school around the belief that teachers are the ones who should be making decisions.”

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

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Evidence is mounting fast of the devastating consequences of climate change on the planet, but college textbooks aren’t keeping up. A study released today found that most college biology textbooks published in the 2010s contained less content on climate change than textbooks from the previous decade, and gave shrinking attention to possible solutions to the global crisis.

The study, conducted by researchers with North Carolina State University, was based on an analysis of 57 college introductory biology textbooks published between 1970 and 2019. The researchers found that coverage of climate change increased over the decades, to a median of 52 sentences in the 2000s.

But that figure dropped in the 2010s, to a median of 45 sentences. That’s less than three pages, according to Jennifer Landin, an associate professor of biological sciences at North Carolina State University and a co-author of the study.

“It’s really a very small amount of content,” she said. “I certainly think we can go into more detail explaining the relationships between carbon, where this carbon is coming from, how it relates to fossil fuels, where fossil fuels come from. There are all these elements that we can address that I think are being glossed over.”

“I realized we all had misinformation or we were lacking information regarding it, in terms of what’s causing it and what actions we can take.”

Rabiya Ansari, a co-author of the study and a recent graduate of North Carolina State University, on her peers

Landin and her co-author, Rabiya Ansari, provided some hypotheses for the decline in climate change content. One reason could be political backlash: Increased media attention on the topic in the 1990s and 2000s, with the Kyoto Protocol – the international treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions – U.N. climate conferences and the film “An Inconvenient Truth,” led to growing controversy around climate change and rising climate denialism. Textbook publishers often try to avoid controversy in order to win approval for their books from education boards, the authors noted. 

Another reason could be the expertise of textbook authors. The share of authors with backgrounds in cellular or molecular biology increased over the last decade among the books studied, whereas those specializing in ecology and science communications (who might be more likely to emphasize climate change) declined, Landin said.

Related: Are we ready? How we are teaching – and not teaching – kids about climate change

The study identified other trends, too. Coverage of climate solutions dropped to just 3 percent of the total content on climate change, from a peak of about 15 percent in the 1990s. Information on climate change was increasingly left to the final pages of textbooks; in books from the 2010s, that material didn’t appear until readers had made it through nearly 98 percent of the text, compared with 85 percent in books from the 1990s.

“That was probably the most depressing part of this study,” said Landin. “If the instructors are going over the book in order, there’s a good chance that that gets dropped or glossed over.” 

Tyler Reed, senior director of communications with the publisher McGraw Hill, whose textbooks were among those studied, wrote in an email that titles published before 2020 are now outdated and have been updated. He wrote that introductory biology classes must cover a “tremendous amount” of material on a range of topics, and that the company has strategies in place, including a peer review process, to ensure that it’s using up-to-date data on climate change.

Ansari, who helped co-author the study while an undergraduate student at North Carolina State, said she was “shocked” by how little space textbooks gave to climate change, although the findings were consistent with her own educational experience.

As a student attending public K-12 schools in Durham, North Carolina, in the 2010s, Ansari said her classes rarely touched on climate change. When she got to college and started talking with peers about global warming, she said, “I realized we all had misinformation or we were lacking information regarding it, in terms of what’s causing it and what actions we can take.”

“If the instructors are going over the book in order, there’s a good chance that that gets dropped or glossed over.”

Jennifer Landin, an associate professor of biological sciences at North Carolina State University and a co-author of the study

The study did identify some ways in which climate change content had improved in recent years, namely in describing the consequences of warming temperatures. Textbooks in the 70s and 80s focused primarily on describing the mechanics of the greenhouse effect, whereas books published in later decades contained significantly more information on harms such as sea level rise, risks to human health, species loss, extreme weather and food shortages. 

Landin said she was encouraged by these changes and wanted to credit textbook authors for adding information on how warming temperatures are reshaping life on Earth. But she urged publishers and authors to focus more on actionable solutions to climate change – which exist and are already helping to rewrite the most dire climate projections.

Ansari, 23, said young people, some of whom feel hopeless in the face of the climate crisis, need greater awareness of tools for alleviating it.  

“They are just like, it’s too late,” she said, referring to her peers and their parents. “And I will say, no, no, there’s always something we can do.”

She added, “But they weren’t given that information in their education system.”

This story about climate change content was produced in collaboration with The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post Coverage of climate change in college textbooks is headed in the wrong direction appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

PENNINGTON, N.J. — There was one minute left on Suzanne Horsley’s stopwatch and the atmosphere remained thick with carbon dioxide, despite the energetic efforts of her class of third graders to clear the air.

Horsley, a wellness teacher at Toll Gate Grammar School, in Pennington, New Jersey, had tasked the kids with tossing balls of yarn representing carbon dioxide molecules to their peers stationed at plastic disks representing forests. The first round of the game was set in the 1700s, and the kids had cleared the field in under four minutes. But this third round took place in the present day, after the advent of cars, factories and electricity, and massive deforestation. With fewer forests to catch the balls, and longer distances to throw, the kids couldn’t keep up.

“That was hard,” said Horsley after the round ended. “In this time period versus the 1700s, way more challenging right?

“Yeah,” the students chimed in.

“In 2022, we got a lot of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” said Horsley. “What’s the problem with it, what is it causing?”

“Global warming,” volunteered one girl.

Two years ago, New Jersey became the first state in the country to adopt learning standards obligating teachers to instruct kids about climate change across grade levels and subjects. The standards, which went into effect this fall, introduce students as young as kindergarteners to the subject, not just in science class but in the arts, world languages, social studies and physical education. Supporters say the instruction is necessary to prepare younger generations for a world — and labor market — increasingly reshaped by climate change.

“There’s no way we can expect our children to have the solutions and the innovations to these challenges if we’re not giving them the tools and resources needed here and now,” said Tammy Murphy, the wife of New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy and a founding member of former Vice President Al Gore’s Climate Reality Action Fund, who pushed to get the standards into schools. Just as students must be able to add and subtract before learning calculus, she said, kids need to understand the basics of climate change — the vocabulary, the logic behind it — before they can tackle the climate crisis.

Related: Teaching global warming in a charged political climate

Historically, climate change has not been comprehensively taught in U.S. schools, largely because of the partisanship surrounding climate change and many teachers’ limited grasp of the science behind it. That started to change in 2013, with the release of new national science standards, which instructed science teachers to introduce students to climate change and its human causes starting in middle school. Still, only 20 states have adopted the standards. A 2020 report from the National Center for Science Education and Texas Freedom Network Education Fund found that many states that didn’t follow the new guidance weren’t explicit in their standards about the human causes of climate change, and a few even promoted falsehoods about its causes and degree of seriousness. Meanwhile, discussion of climate change outside of science class remains relatively rare, educators and experts say.

New Jersey is trying to change that, but it’s not a simple task. Like teachers around the country, educators here are exhausted after years of Covid disruptions, and, as elsewhere, some schools face dire teacher shortages. On top of this, many educators don’t feel prepared to teach climate change: A 2021 survey of 164 New Jersey teachers found that many lacked confidence in their knowledge of the subject, and some held misconceptions about it, confusing the problem with other environmental issues such as plastic pollution.

For now, the climate instruction requirements haven’t faced much pushback from climate deniers and conservatives, who’ve trained their attacks instead on the state’s new sex-education standards. But state officials anticipate some criticism as the lessons begin to roll out in classrooms.

A more pressing concern — and one that plagues any education initiative because of local control of schools — is that the lessons are rolling out unevenly across the state. Schools in affluent towns like Pennington tend to have more time and resources to introduce new instruction; schools in poorer communities, like Camden, that are often the most vulnerable to climate disasters, may lack the resources to do so.

“I am happy to see New Jersey as a pioneer of climate change standards,” said Maria Santiago-Valentin, co-founder of the Atlantic Climate Justice Alliance, a group that works to mitigate the disproportionate harm of climate change on marginalized communities. But, she said, the standards will need to be revised if they fail to adequately emphasize the unequal impact of climate change on Black and Hispanic communities or ensure that students in those communities receive the instruction.

Related: Are we ready? How we are teaching — and not teaching — kids about climate change

New Jersey is making some effort to help teachers adopt the standards, setting aside $5 million for lesson plans and professional development, and enlisting teachers like Horsley, who holds a master’s degree in outdoor education and has a passion for the environment, to develop model lessons.

Supporters are trying to ensure that teachers have plenty of examples for teaching the standards in age-appropriate ways, with racial and environmental justice as one of the key features of the instruction.

“It’s not like we’re asking kindergarteners to look at the Keeling Curve,” said Lauren Madden, a professor of education at the College of New Jersey who prepared a report on the standards, referring to a graph showing daily carbon dioxide concentrations. “We’re trying to point out areas where we can build some of those foundational blocks so that by the time students are in upper elementary or middle school, they really have that solid foundation.”

On a recent weekday, Cari Gallagher, a third grade teacher at Lawrenceville Elementary School in central New Jersey, was reading to her students the book “No Sand in the House!” which tells the story of a grandfather whose Jersey Shore home is devastated by Hurricane Sandy. Later, the students sat down to write about what they’d heard, drawing connections between the book and their own lives, world events or other books they’d read.

After the writing exercise, Gallagher directed the students to split into small groups to build structures that would help provide protection against climate change calamities. The kids used Legos, blocks, Play-Doh and straws to create carports, walls and other barriers.

That same morning, a kindergarten class at the elementary school listened as their teacher, Jeffrey Berry, held up a globe and discussed how different parts of the world have different climates.

Related: Climate change is sabotaging education for America’s students — and it’s only going to get worse

At Hopewell Valley Central High School, in Pennington, art teacher Carolyn McGrath piloted a lesson on climate change this summer with a handful of students. The results of the class — four paintings featuring climate activists — sat on the windowsill of her classroom. 

“It felt empowering to see people like me, who reflect me and my identities,” said Mackenzie Harsell, an 11th grader who’d created a portrait of 24-year-old climate activist Daphne Frias, who, like Mackenzie, is young, and is disabled. “This project told me I could do anything.”

Research suggests education does have an impact on how people understand climate change and their willingness to take action to stop it. One study found that college students who took a class that discussed reducing their carbon footprint tended to adopt environment-friendly practices and stick with them over many years. Another found that educating middle schoolers about climate change resulted in their parents expressing greater concern about the problem.

“Education is certainly a way that we could have perhaps slowed down where we are right now in terms of the climate crisis,” said Margaret Wang, chief operating officer with SubjectToClimate, a nonprofit that is helping teachers develop and share climate lessons. More jobs related to climate change are already opening up, said Wang, and kids will need skills not just to discover scientific innovations but to tell stories, advocate, inspire and make public policy.

Back at Toll Gate elementary, Horsley, the wellness teacher, was getting ready to hand off the third graders to their classroom teacher. Before filing back into the school, a handsome brick building that suffered flooding last year during Hurricane Ida, students reflected on the lesson.

Ayla, a third grader dressed in jeans and tie-dye sneakers, said it made her want to “do something” about climate change because “I don’t want it to get so hot.”

Wes, another third grader, said adults could have done more to protect the environment. “I think they’ve done a medium job because they’re still producing a lot of carbon dioxide and a lot of people are littering still.”

“I feel bad for the other animals because they don’t know about it, so they don’t know what to do,” added his classmate, Hunter.

“We know about it,” said Abby, who was wearing a shirt emblazoned with the words “Girl Power.” She said it was up to humans to drive less and recycle and protect other species from climate disaster.

“When I first found out we were going to learn about climate change in gym, I was like, that’s surprising, because normally we learn that in class,” Abby added. “But I’m glad we did it in gym,” she continued. “It was really fun.”

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

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Editor’s note: This story led off this week’s Future of Learning newsletter, which is delivered free to subscribers’ inboxes every other Wednesday with trends and top stories about education innovation. Subscribe today!

It wasn’t even a week into the new school year, and already Marsena Toney’s students were being sent home.

But this time, the reason wasn’t Covid. It was extreme heat, which had pushed the temperature in Toney’s Philadelphia classroom to 100 degrees and led the school district to cancel afternoon classes for tens of thousands of students.

“The students are lethargic, it’s extremely difficult to get them motivated,” said Toney, an autistic support specialist at John S. Jenks, one of 118 Philadelphia schools affected by the closures in the district, which serves predominantly Black and Hispanic students. “They’re sweating and trying their best to keep cool, and you have to hold it together yourself because you’re sweating and trying your best to keep cool.”

It’s a pattern that’s becoming more common across the United States, as climate change contributes to record-breaking heat waves. In just the last few weeks, schools in California, Colorado, Pennsylvania and Maryland have closed for “heat days,” and students have suffered through sweltering temperatures in classrooms without air conditioning while trying to get back into the swing of learning.

Many school systems are gravely unprepared for a warming world. While there’s no comprehensive data on how many schools lack air conditioning, some 41 percent of school districts responding to a 2020 Government Accountability Office survey reported that the majority of their school buildings needed heating and cooling upgrades. Wildfires, floods and other extreme weather events that have worsened due to climate change are also straining school infrastructure and disrupting learning.

Related: Climate change is sabotaging education for America’s students

Excessive heat impairs the brain’s functioning and makes it harder for students to learn. Studies by economists Jisung Park of the University of Pennsylvania and Joshua Goodman of Boston University, among others, show that without air conditioning, a 1 degree Fahrenheit increase in temperature reduces a student’s learning by 1 percent.

High temperatures deepen racial divides. Black and Hispanic students tend to live in parts of the country that are more susceptible to extreme heat, and they’re less likely to attend schools or live in homes that are air conditioned. In a 2020 study, Park and Goodman, along with researchers Michael Hurwitz and Jonathan Smith, found that hot school days explain about 5 percent of the racial gap in PSAT scores.

“Air quality and air flow and the working conditions of classrooms that are not 90 degrees to learn – it’s a prerequisite to successful learning and teaching,” Miguel Cardona, the education secretary, said at a briefing last week. 

Schools can use some of the nearly $190 billion in federal pandemic relief funds they received, in three rounds, for infrastructure improvements such as heating and cooling upgrades. An analysis by FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown University, found that education systems planned to spend about 23 percent of their third tranche of the federal money on infrastructure. 

Some schools, like many in Philadelphia, require electrical rewiring so that they can simply support air conditioning units. And in some cases, school building improvement projects have been slowed down by supply chain issues. 

“The infrastructure of our schools is just very old,” said Jerry T. Jordan, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, which has called for using federal funds to rewire schools and bring air conditioning to every school building. “They have not been well maintained over the years; they are not equipped to even handle a number of window air conditioners.”

Christina Clark, communications officer with the Philadelphia school district, wrote in an email that the district intends to upgrade wiring and add air conditioning in its schools, in part using federal dollars. Given the extent of the work, though, it will take until 2027 before all schools are air conditioned, she wrote.  

But air conditioning units also present a conundrum: It takes electricity to run them, which is often powered by fossil fuels. In many cases, air conditioning also releases climate-warming chemicals known as hydrofluorocarbons.

“It is critically important that as schools look to add air conditioning that they install options that don’t exacerbate our climate problem,” Laura Schifter, a senior fellow with the energy and environment program at the Aspen Institute, wrote in an email.

Switching to renewable sources of electricity, like geothermal power; installing solar panels with battery storage; and converting asphalt playgrounds to green schoolyards are among the ways schools can cool down while lowering their carbon footprint, Schifter wrote.

Ben Hobbs, a principal with the Kentucky-based engineering company CMTA, said the federal pandemic relief funds have helped nudge more school districts to embrace “net zero” emissions. His firm is working with school systems including those in Bath, Casey and Rowan counties, all in Kentucky, to use geothermal to power upgraded HVAC systems, he said.  

Related: How the effects of climate change threaten student mental health

Without significant building improvements, more learning interruptions are expected, a difficult pill for families after years of Covid disruptions. Cat Wade, a parent in Baltimore, spent recent afternoons bringing her two young sons to work with her after their elementary school closed early due to heat. The school is one of nearly two dozen Baltimore City Schools that lacks adequate air conditioning.

“It’s not possible to parent and work at the same time,” said Wade, a health and human performance coach. “It feels like they are either sitting in front of the TV or getting partial attention or they are being asked to be quiet, and that’s a bad feeling.”

Her kids were just adjusting to school and she worried that they would have trouble building rapport with teachers.

Toney, the teacher in Philadelphia, has a similar worry. She works with students who have autism, and establishing routines is critically important. Moving from half days back to full days caused minor chaos in her classroom.

“Many of the students were upset, they were frustrated, they weren’t sure what was going on,” she said. 

“It was just a lot of confusion to start the new year.”

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

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