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By traditional measures of well-being, America’s children and teens should be doing well. Consider that:

• Over the past two decades, high school graduation rates have gone up.
• Fewer teens are taking up smoking.
• The birth rate among 15-to-19 year olds is at a record low.
• Arrest rates among teens are dropping. Youth drug use is trending down.

Nevertheless, teens report that their own mental health is spiraling: Increasingly, they are anxious, depressed and wrestling with thoughts of suicide. The measures that researchers have traditionally used to gauge adolescent well-being have become sharply out of step with the reality of adolescent life.

“I don’t think my research is saying [other measures] don’t matter, but I don’t think they capture the whole picture,” said Nathaniel Anderson, who explored the disconnect between measures of child well-being and young people’s views on their mental health as part of his doctoral studies in public health at the University of California, Los Angeles. He wrote about his findings for the organization Child Trends.

For decades, researchers have tried to capture a national picture of youth well-being by combining a number of social indicators, such as obesity rates, rates of tobacco use, family access to health insurance, academic proficiency on state tests, graduation rates, drug use and teen birth rates.

Until recent years, those measures and youth reports of their depressive symptoms, captured in a long-running national research project called Monitoring the Future, have mostly moved in tandem. As other measures improved, youth also reported feeling less anxiety and depressive symptoms.

Somewhere in the 2010-12 time frame, that abruptly changed. Many of the other measures continued on an upward trajectory, but teens started reporting that they were growing increasingly anxious and depressed.

What happened then? Researchers have pointed to the introduction of smartphones — the iPhone was introduced in 2007 — and the rise of social media as the culprit. But teasing apart what’s actually happening is difficult. Are teens struggling because smartphone time is leading to less sleep? Or are they exposed to information via social media that is leading to a greater sense of anxiety and depression?

And then there are other social factors, such as economic precarity, a greater societal willingness to talk about mental health, so-called helicopter parenting, and the opioid epidemic, among many others.

“I certainly agree with the emerging evidence that social media and cellphones are playing some sort of role here, and given its predominance in young peoples’ lives it’s potentially a huge one,” Anderson said. “But at the same time, for it to have had this sort of dramatic effect, it probably required other conditions to be in place.”

Unfortunately, researchers don’t have good, long-term, national data on other elements that play a role in helping youth thrive: measures such as a young person’s access to green space, their relationship to their friends and family, or their sense of optimism and hope. More focused, community-based assessments may do a better job at capturing some of these more subjective measures than the large-scale national models currently in use, Anderson said.

NOW WHAT?

There are still plenty of steps schools, educators and parents can take to address the clear problems facing young people.

Schools should support student mental health by building in time to teach skills such as coping with stress, said Ava Havidic, a 17-year-old senior in Broward County, Florida, and a facilitator for the Student Leadership Network on Mental Health and Well-Being, organized by the National Association for Secondary School Principals.

“There’s so many hours in the school day,” said Havidic, who is also the student representative on the Broward County school board, that young people “can’t find another time in the day to practice mindfulness and find these positive outlets to build on mental health.” 

And clamping down on smartphones won’t help youth when they are on their own and out of the direct control of their parents, she said. “It’s always easy to blame some certain outlet, or something students are doing. But the easy way to deal with this is making sure that we have these prevention tools, so it doesn’t matter if they are using their phones — they know how to deal with their stress,” Havidic said. 

Samantha Lott, a mental health coordinator for Communities in Schools North Texas, works in Lewisville — about 30 miles northwest of Dallas — and surrounding communities. Anxiety and depression are present even with younger students, she said, and smartphone use does play a role; students can be bullied via social media, or inappropriate material wirelessly “airdropped” to their phones.

But the adults around them may also be making things worse, unwittingly, she said. Some parents insist their children are doing fine regardless of evidence to the contrary. Educators sometimes increase students’ academic workload and don’t leave time for mental health support. Schools may use isolation as punishment, like forcing children to eat alone in the cafeteria — “lonely lunch” — as a consequence for misbehavior, she said.

“That’s not setting our students up for success. They’re not teaching their children how to interact with each other,” Lott said. “And you can see that with older kids. A lot of the students are so scared to reach out, because they’ve had a bad experience with school.”

Adults taking more time to reach out to the students — and model healthy practices themselves — can help, Lott said. Youth “all could use more support relationships. Take the time to be open and ask them questions, instead of assuming we know the answers.”

This story about teen mental health 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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Mississippi child care workers are strained by low pay and lack of training — but an additional $5 an hour in salary would prompt around half of those workers to stay in their jobs and to seek additional education, according to a new survey by state child care advocates.

The coalition Mississippi Forum for the Future surveyed nearly 700 child care workers, most of whom provide care in centers, to draw attention to the precariousness of the child care sector in the state. Early childhood educators are facing strain across the nation, but Mississippi is in a particularly difficult position: Workers reported an average hourly wage of $10.93 and typically have no benefits. In contrast, a “survival wage” in the state for a single adult is $12.28 an hour, according to the report.

Nationally, child care workers earn $14.22 on average, according to federal labor statistics.

Additional information gathered from the survey:

• Just under 70 percent of child care workers said they worked 40 or more hours a week.

• More highly educated workers earned more, but the differences were not large: Child care employees with a high school diploma reported earning $10.22 an hour on average, but those with a bachelor’s degree or higher said their salary averaged $12.79 an hour.

• Close to half, or 48 percent of the workers surveyed, said they did not have training beyond high school. A similar percentage of child care workers — 47 percent — reported that they are working with children who have mental, physical, or emotional disabilities.

• About 36 percent said they relied on public support programs such as Medicaid or the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps.

• A little more than a third reported they had looked for a new job, and of that group, most of them were looking for jobs out of the child care sector.

In the midst of these stresses, demand for child care in the state is still quite high.

Lesia Daniel-Hollingshead has provided child care services in her community of Clinton, Mississippi, a suburb west of Jackson, for nearly 25 years. After she taught children in public schools, her passion prompted her to open several child care centers. Since the inception of her child care ventures in 2000, more than 7,000 children have received child care at My First Funtime, Funtime Pre-School and Funtime After-School.

During the pandemic, Hollingshead’s facilities suffered a 50 percent decline in enrollment. But by 2021, an overwhelming number of families with infants sought her child care services. In October 2021, to meet demand, she opened My First Funtime, a center for infants and toddlers 6 weeks to 18 months old.

“We opened My First Funtime in October of 2021, by December we had enrolled 66 infants,” Hollingshead said. “My program is currently full — and not because of the number of enrollments but because I have the number of children for the staff that I can maintain.”

The survey findings did not surprise Daniel-Hollingshead, who said she pays her lead teachers $14 to $20 an hour, based on education and experience. Her less-experienced employees are paid $9 to $10 an hour. Families of infants up through 5 year olds pay $184 a week for her center; the rate is among the most expensive in her area, she said.

Biz Harris, the executive director of the Mississippi Early Learning Alliance, said that the state has recently launched an initiative meant to provide extra money to teachers and to provide scholarships for those who engage in additional training.

However, that program is funded through emergency funds that came from the federal government during the pandemic, and thus will sunset when the money is exhausted.

“We would love to see a program like this have the funds to continue, and worry about what will happen to the already struggling child care workforce when it ends,” Harris said. “Other states do provide these kinds of programs for their child care teachers as a workforce investment.”

Daniel-Hollingshead said while that money is appreciated, she still struggles to hold on to employees and has waiting lists at every age level.

“Currently it is extremely difficult to retain staff,” she said. “Due to the pay rates that I have had to increase to keep my best people, we are operating over budget about $25,000 a month which obviously is not sustainable long-term.”

This story about child care wages 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!

Cardi B, the brash and bold New York hip-hop artist, has a rainbow collection of Hermès Birkin handbags that fills a wall in her house — estimated value, half a million dollars.

Would you call that extravagant?

For educators at Clayton County Public Schools in suburban Atlanta, the question is a crafty way to entice middle schoolers — many Cardi B and hip-hop fans among them — into a math lesson about ratios and proportions.

For example, $500,000 in handbags is less than 1 percent of Cardi B’s estimated $80 million net worth. So, how much do students think they need to earn to be comfortable collecting just one six-figure handbag? How could they determine that, mathematically? How would the calculations change if they wanted to buy a $45,000 “iced-out” Rolex? Or, in a more down-to-earth daydream, what salary would be needed to comfortably afford a $7,500 trip to Walt Disney World for a family of four?

Tonya Clarke, the coordinator of secondary mathematics for Clayton County schools, and her colleagues shared the Cardi B lesson at a math convention earlier this fall as an example of a culturally relevant lesson that can lure students into thinking about math in a way that is engaging and exciting.*

“The initial idea draws them in,” Clarke said. “They’re not just calculating finding a ratio for no reason.” Then, after whetting their appetites, she said, “we may hone in on those skills a little closer.”

The Cardi B lesson is still in the development phase at the district, Clarke said; before sharing it with teachers, her staff will add more detailed notes and guidance on how to incorporate it into instruction.

Clayton County educators spoke about their approach to math instruction at the annual National Council of Teachers of Mathematics convention, at a time when the field is deeply concerned about math attainment, particular for students who are Black, Hispanic, or who come from low-income backgrounds. About 70 percent of the district’s students are Black and 13 percent are Hispanic. Twenty percent are from families who live below the poverty line. In 2022-23, 17 percent of the district’s third through eighth graders, on average, scored proficient or above on the state’s math tests, an increase of about 3 percentage points from the year before.

Bringing a “culturally responsive” framework to math instruction was a major focus of the educators’ convention. Such efforts are meant to “position students as owners of their learning” and create a culture of belonging within the classroom, said Shakiyya Bland, math educator in residence at the nonprofit Just Equations, which advocates for educational equity in math instruction.

“At its core, it needs to really help students critically think and accelerate learning. That’s what I look at when I look at lessons. Do the word problems pose questions that help students think critically about themselves or the data that they’re using?” said Bland, who recently published an article on the brain science behind culturally responsive teaching.

The Clayton district’s efforts to develop more engaging and relatable lessons for math instruction began in 2017, Clarke said. Students have used data on New York’s stop-and-frisk policy and the spread of Covid-19 as foundations for project-based math lessons that are part of the “I’m W.O.K.E. Project” Clarke developed. (The acronym stands for Widens Options through Knowledge and Empowerment.)*

The district’s efforts are  in harmony with Georgia’s 2021 revision of its math standards. In those standards, state officials said that students at every grade level should be engaged in “mathematical modeling” — using math to explore the world around them.

Catherine Lawrence, an instructional support teacher in math and science for the district, said middle school students often come into math classes afraid. It’s the “fear of being wrong, fear of not getting in the first time around, fear of not being able to communicate to the teacher that it doesn’t make sense,” she said.

Culturally relevant teaching, along with other teaching tools and techniques the district uses such as manipulatives — objects like counting blocks or fraction tiles — can help break through that apprehension, she said.

But it does take work, and ongoing training, to make sure that teachers can assist students to bridge that gap between something concrete and tangible — the price of a handbag, or data about arrests — to more abstract math knowledge.

“During collaborative planning we talk about implementation,” Lawrence said. “How do we make sure we get the meat and potatoes, and we don’t get stuck in the dessert.”

For Clarke, the Cardi B lesson helps demonstrate to teachers that infusing cultural relevance in math classes is achievable, with the right support system in place.

“We’re still struggling through the process of getting teachers to fully buy into it, because we’re still trying to get teachers to understand math is not just about the numbers — math is about the problem solving,” Clarke said. While some teachers find the lessons time-consuming and difficult, she said, overall, teachers are trying the new methods.

“The process is implementable. It’s not as heavy a lift as a lot of them think that it is,” she said.

*Correction: This story has been updated to correct Clarke’s title and to note that she is the developer of the I’m W.O.K.E. Project.

This story about culturally responsive math 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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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. 

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CHANTILLY, Va. – In Fairfax County, Virginia, thousands of middle school students experience what most of their peers leave behind in elementary school — recess.

The break is only 15 minutes long. But at Rocky Run Middle School, about 25 miles west of the nation’s capital, the seventh and eighth graders make the most of one of the few stretches of time in school that they can truly call their own. Fairfax County schools, a district of around 181,000 students, has taken an unusual step in mandating recess for all its middle school students.

On a day in early fall, a large group of students tossed their backpacks in a messy pile and made a beeline towards the school’s blacktop for pickup basketball and soccer games. A kickball game started up on the baseball field, with a teacher handling pitching duties to keep the action moving. Smaller groups of students headed to the school’s gym, while others peeled off towards the cafeteria to play board games, get in some extra study time with their Chromebooks, or just chat with their friends.

“It’s a break after all this other stuff you have to do,” said 12-year-old Colin Bigley, a seventh grader playing the board game Sorry! with three friends. “Playing outside is also nice. You have the option of what you’re going to do.” 

Aminah Naqvi, a 13-year-old eighth grader, loves the social time. She was hanging out with friends on the blacktop, shooting baskets. “You might not get to see your friends if you don’t have the same lunch,” she said.

Even the school’s principal, Amy Goodloe, agrees that play is important. “There’s really high value for students and, I will underscore, teachers to have that break in the day,” she said. “We underestimate how important that is as a partner to academic learning.”

“All of our students need some time to rejuvenate.”

Ricardy Anderson, Fairfax County, Virginia school board member. 

But Fairfax County is an exception. In most communities, opportunities for play and playful learning tend to recede in middle school, replaced by direct instruction, competitive sports and tightly structured academic time. Educators and researchers say students pay the price. Young adolescents go through profound physical, emotional and physiological changes; play inside and outside the classroom can provide one way for kids to develop healthy bonds with friends and become more self-confident.

“I teach at a K-8 school, and when I look at these seventh and eighth graders, they’re no different than the kindergarteners,” said Robert Lane, a STEM teacher at the Sierra Verde STEAM Academy in Glendale, Arizona. “They get excited when I bring out Play Doh and googly eyes.” 

Lane’s class is entirely built around playful learning. For example, the modeling clay and other crafts were used as part of a stop-motion animation project in his classroom. Other activities for the school’s older students included creating cardboard roller coasters to be judged by the school’s second graders and building a robot that can move without wheels.

“I break them into groups where they don’t know each other and they just go all in,” said Lane, who also hosts a podcast as “Mr. Lane the STEM Guy.” The activities also give his students a chance to learn how to cooperate, accept failure when it happens, and solve problems as a team, he said.

“I want these kids to have all these soft skills as they get ready to go to high school and to college,” Lane said. 

Related: Study: Boosting soft skills is better than raising test scores

In addition to developing soft skills, recess is a tool that can get adolescents moving more at a time of life when they become much more sedentary.

A 2008 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association used accelerometers to capture the activity levels of youth from ages 9 to 15. Nine-year-olds, on average, engaged in three hours of moderate to vigorous activity on weekends and weekdays, well above the recommendation of 60 minutes a day from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The researchers found that activity levels plunged as children reached adolescence. By age 15, they were getting an average of 49 minutes on weekdays and 35 minutes on weekends. 

With benefits that appear so clear, why does middle school seem to mark an end to both unstructured play time and playful learning? There are several competing challenges, both logistical and social.

Middle schools generally have more students than elementary schools, and the students themselves are taller and heavier. It’s challenging for school leaders to find enough space and teacher supervision to manage hundreds of children during a break time. The supervision is particularly important because, while middle schoolers crave time with their friends, unstructured time like recess, lunchtime and passing between classes often offers fertile opportunities for bullying. 

Fairfax County educators had to come up with new solutions. “The logistics were a little bit hard to figure out,” said Cynthia Conley, the principal of Washington Irving Middle School in Springfield, Virginia. Irving, with about 1,200 students, is one of the Fairfax County schools that has added recess to its schedule. 

“We have four lunch shifts, and we had to figure out how to have four breaks,” said Conley. To accommodate all the students on break at any given time, administrators have opened up several different recess areas for students, including the gym, the blacktop, and the library, which features chess sets, card games, and an exercise bike with a built-in bookstand.

“As soon as their feet hit the outside they are shooting, throwing, whatever they have in mind,” Conley said. “I’ve heard people say, why do they need a break. If you can, find me an adult who doesn’t need a 15-minute break during their work day. Everybody takes a break, to look away from the screen a little bit.” 

An additional challenge is that middle school students don’t think like younger students. Some athletic equipment won’t be enough to engage all, or even most of them. 

Rebecca London, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has studied what happens when educators add break or recess time for middle school students. In the middle schools she observed, the sports activities were often dominated by older boys. Younger boys and girls, even athletes, tended to spend break times walking and talking unless schools made an extra effort to set up activities that would attract them.

One powerful way to do that is for adults to play alongside students, even if adolescents sometimes act as if they want to get away from adults.

“As soon as the adults start playing, the kids want to play,” London said. “Kids inherently crave that. It’s an opportunity for kids to be seen as an expert or a leader.” A warm adult presence also makes the situation feel safer for students who may not be sports stars. 

“For all those reasons, it’s great to have adults out there leading games, connecting with students in different ways,” she said. 

Related:  Middle school’s moment: What the science tells us about improving the middle grades

Fairfax County piloted a middle school recess break for the 2021-22 school year. Last April, the school board voted to make the break mandatory for all the district’s middle schools, starting in 2022-23. District policy for elementary students requires at least 30 minutes of recess a day over two segments. There is no recess policy in the district for high school students. 

Advocates for the change say it filled a real need. “All of our students need some time to rejuvenate,” said Ricardy Anderson, one of the champions of the recess policy on the school board and a former middle school principal. “We have middle school students that get into the building at 7:15 in the morning and they don’t leave the building until 2:30.” 

Anderson said that’s why it’s essential for students “to have a little bit of freedom to do what they’d like to do — to be free of the noise of the cafeteria. just to get some fresh air, just to have a little break in the day. The outdoors component is even more critical.”

Research has found 9-year-olds engage in about three hours of moderate-to-vigorous exercise daily. By the time they are 15, that plunges to about 49 minutes on weekdays and just 35 minutes on weekends. 

Parents of elementary school children are often the driving force behind recess policies, but London, the sociology professor, hasn’t seen that same level of energy behind break times for older students. She thinks the isolation kids experienced during the first phase of the pandemic makes break time even more crucial. “It’s going to take a long time before these kids are fully recovered,” she said. “We may need even more play for older kids.”

Lane, at the Sierra STEAM Academy, said that another barrier may be parents and school administrators who may not see the importance of playful learning.

“Teachers are under so much pressure to get to a certain point,” he said, and they’re also under a microscope. Parents might not understand why class time is spent on playful learning as opposed to more clearly academic pursuits, for example. 

Seventh and eighth graders spend a quarter each year engaged in hands-on projects in his classroom, adding up to a semester of active learning. These activities allow students to explore their passions and also understand why failure is part of learning, Lane said. “That’s a K-8 thing, campus-wide. We don’t get frustrated. We come back, we play smarter. And the seventh and eighth graders, they crave it.”

Despite the difficulties that may come with figuring out how to squeeze play into upper grades, London said school leaders have the benefit of a set of opinionated experts — the students themselves.

“If you’re going to start a recess, you should ask your students what they want to do in that time,” he said. “You can even create a school climate task force; the students who volunteer to help think about that time can be tapped as leaders. They know what they need.” 

This story about playful learning 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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Our reporters have spent the last 10 months speaking with students, parents, teachers and school district leaders around the country about what this pandemic school year has been like.

Few are sad to see it end. This school year was a rocky one, marked by a tough transition back to buildings after months of virtual learning and Covid outbreaks that continued to disrupt learning.

But as spring arrived, some of the difficulties began to ease. In Fayetteville, Arkansas, field days and large, in-person graduation ceremonies returned. In Philadelphia, assessment tests showed that older students had more or less caught up to where they were pre-pandemic, although younger students still lagged behind, said William Hite, the outgoing superintendent of the city’s schools.

“We’re ready to have a really difficult year in the books,” said Eric Gordon, who leads the high-poverty Cleveland Metropolitan School District. “We’re closing the year with a combination of optimism that things are getting better but also an exhaustion of, Wow, this was a really tough year.”

While the educators, parents and students we spoke with predict next year will be easier, they also worry pandemic stresses will leave a lasting mark. Tensions are high, and rancor is spilling into school board meetings, classrooms and hallways. “The people who you thought were nice, normal people suddenly have all these nasty things to say,” said Betsy Bloodworth, a parent in Greenville, South Carolina.

Still, many people we talked to said the last two years had changed them for the better and brought some positives to the education system. More devices got into the hands of students. There was also a greater openness to moving away from outdated attendance rules and curriculum requirements that don’t necessarily engage students, school leaders told us. 

Here are some voices from our third round of interviews, in which we asked people involved with their local public schools for their reflections on how the past year had shaped them, and their predictions for the next school year, among other topics. The interviews have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

RICHMOND, VIRGINIA

Katina Harris, middle school English teacher and president of the local teachers’ union

Next year will be a better year, definitely. We had this year to support our students, and we’ll have summer to support our students academically.

Our district has realized some of our challenges. They have put extra support in place to support us. I wouldn’t say it’s easier, but maybe it’s more digestible for staff. … We have classroom tutors now. Every day there are more adults. Reading coaches hold small groups as well. If the district continues to advise safety precautions and provide mental health support to staff and students, next year will be a year of growth. 

A lot of the damage of Covid, though, you will see for the next 10 years. Some of our students lost both parents or they lost grandparents. The health problems, the inflammation in our children who are exposed to it. We’ve had staff who’ve had Covid, and now they have effects from long Covid. We are going to see the effects for a while. As we open everything back up and start to remove masks, we will still be impacted by it. It’s out there, it’s still present.     

Jason Kamras, superintendent

Honestly, students aren’t in a great place. The social and emotional toll of the pandemic and now of this horrific shooting in Texas, the massacre in Buffalo, we’ve seen rates of suicidal ideation go up, bullying go up, abuse, referrals to child protective services go up, shootings in our own community go up. It’s a very tough time.

Going into next year our focus is really about providing stability to our kids, some sense of routine, some sense of normalcy. … We’re spending about $3 million of our federal stimulus on that, and then of course we will continue to be extremely focused on our academic efforts, in particular early literacy. We feel that for really the next 10 years that’s very important.

I think there’s a funding cliff that comes with the federal money that’s going to be a massive problem for public education. … I’ve said previously that out of the pandemic our schools need a Marshall Plan-like investment, and I just don’t see it. I don’t see the political will. 

REDMOND, OREGON

Ben Lawson, band and choir director at Redmond High School

Things are back to normal. Like, we’re acting like things are normal. There’s no masks, there’s no restrictions. We can plan events like we always had before. But it’s just kind of weird trying to put the year back together. We’re trying to make up for lost time. And I think we’re kind of working ourselves to exhaustion trying to return to normalcy, and not really remembering: “Well, the first six months was just obscene.”

I’m definitely worried about mental health, and there’s a lot of kids that have depression and they joke about it a lot: “Oh, yeah. You know, my depression, my anxiety, my ADHD meds.” It almost becomes like a normal occurrence.

I’ve seen an improvement in the [students] that are around me, but there are definitely multiple kids that were in my program two years ago, and they kind of just trickled along and then they just disappeared. I have no idea where they’re at or what they’re doing. …

Those are the type of kids that really needed to be in high school and be in that community and have something like band to get them through. And I don’t know where they went. I can’t speak to the kids I don’t see. Those are the ones I’ve worried about.

Kami Karr, senior at Redmond High School

There are just so many weird things happening one after another. Even when we were in elementary school, like with the stock market crash, everyone moved. I moved. All my friends would have lost their houses. And then you get into middle school, and then, like, the internet starts becoming a thing. You have to start dealing with that as a young child. Kids are growing up really fast because of the internet, and then you get to high school and Covid happens.

PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA

Sharahn Santana, African American history and English teacher at Parkway Northwest High School 

The students are adjusting. You can certainly see the growth that’s happening. … When we first came back, I was begging the students to say something, and now it feels more like a normal classroom again.

Next year, there are new variants, but I must say, I don’t think teachers, parents or stakeholders will address it the same way. It has kind of just become the new normal, living in the pandemic. We are trying to just get on with it. 

The pandemic made me take myself and my students not as seriously. It made me really put things in their place and prioritize things. It’s really difficult to get me upset, whereas prior to the pandemic I was a bit more rigid and strict. Now I am much more trusting of my students.

I’ve had such wonderful relationships with my students that I’ve never experienced before, and I think it’s because of me seeing them so vulnerable, me being so vulnerable. I care about my students first as people.

William Hite, superintendent

We are seeing young people settle in and settle back into school. For many of our young people, particularly in the city of Philadelphia, they feel like schools for them are the safest place. It doesn’t mean fights don’t happen or students don’t misbehave. It just means they don’t feel like someone is going to open fire on them from a moving vehicle, and they do worry about things like that on their way to and from school.

That’s sad, that’s a sad state of what many cities are dealing with right now. We are going to have to continue to provide those social-emotional supports for young people and adults alike.

Anna Phelan, kindergarten teacher at Overbrook Educational Center

I am really hoping that next year is as normal as possible and as close to three years ago as possible. Realistically probably it won’t be, in the winter, but I’m hoping next year is as normal as possible.

The pandemic made me realize the importance of preschool, of early learning. I wish the country could do preschool and it could be free for everybody.

It was easier for teachers to recover from early learning academic losses, but social-emotional losses were a lot harder for us to recover from. The academics can be made up for, but the social-emotional is much more difficult. I will now spend a lot more time than I already did on social-emotional and making sure they know how to read and emotional skills and conflict resolution.

GREENVILLE, SOUTH CAROLINA

Betsy Bloodworth, parent of an eighth grade student and a college student

My general trust of people, I’m afraid, is lower. … Pandemic precautions and just general behaviors and attitudes — I think that it’s changed a lot of people. … The people who you thought were nice, normal people suddenly have all these nasty things to say.

My husband is an internist, and we were at a big internal medicine conference a couple of weeks ago in Chicago. The president of the internal medicine association said that the one greatest thing we have learned through the pandemic is that public health is no match for partisan politics, and I think that sums the whole thing up.

[Next year is] going to be another tough year for the schools. … The school has lost a bunch of teachers, but three of my son’s core subject teachers — English, social studies and science — have all left since Christmas. If every school has that much attrition of teachers, I don’t know how they’re going to have the staff to even staff the schools next year.

Anne Tromsness, drama teacher at the Fine Arts Center

I think the biggest change has been change, if that makes any sense at all. There’s just so much that’s been shaken up in our country, in our culture, in our education system. I think what’s changed about me is that I don’t want to go back without honoring what’s happened. I don’t want to return to normal … and now I don’t want to return without reflection.

CLEVELAND, OHIO

Jessica Boiner, home-based child care provider and parent of a preschool-age girl and a second grade son

Next year, I think, for my daughter, it will be good. I’m going to keep her at her private school. It is absolutely a financial sacrifice for my family. But I think it’s worth it because she’s been so happy.

I’m a little nervous about my son. One of the teachers at his school passed away suddenly over winter break. She was young. That’s the class he would have been going to next year, and he really liked her. It was kind of heartbreaking for his class and the teachers. I’m looking to see if the other teacher in the class stays or leaves. It worries me because I don’t know who’s coming in next. It takes him a while to warm up. My son has autism, and it took him almost to the end of the year to say something when he was in kindergarten.

Eric Gordon, superintendent

I’ve been in Cleveland 15 years, and 11 of them as the superintendent. I’m proud of the work we’ve done, but I would characterize the work we did pre-pandemic as rapid, continuous improvement. The work we’re trying to do now is much more transformational. That really arose out of the pandemic.

Kids just expect a much more engaging experience, and I’m trying to lead from a lens of, We can deliver on that. We can do more complex tasks kids care about. … We can make a more fun environment for learning. And we can use those tools to get better gains for all kids. It’s an approach I’ve always believed in, but as I’ve looked back, I’ve stayed more in the confines of the seat-time, credit-accumulation system. I’m challenging us to challenge those rules more aggressively than I was doing pre-pandemic.

TAOS, NEW MEXICO

Orion Salazar, graduating eighth grader, Taos Middle School

Last year I was not paying attention in school because I had my TV and phone and all that. This year, I didn’t have anything to distract me. It was pretty cool to learn.

It started off a little slow because of the pandemic, but my math teacher helped me a lot. … Kids just need someone to pay attention to them, to show them they are listening.

Mark Richert, social and emotional coordinator, Taos Municipal Schools

I heard from quite a few teachers around February or March that they noticed, as far as academics, that kids were not doing well and they didn’t care that they were not doing well. That’s something new and I heard that message quite a bit.

Traditionally, teachers are always trying to connect and find a way to recognize the value of materials, activities and learning. And it seemed like a lot of teachers ran into some roadblocks with that.

There’s the idea of normal and people are talking about the new normal. I would say, Let’s forget the idea of normal and just reinvent things. That’s my hope.

FREMONT COUNTY, WYOMING

Troy Zickefoose, superintendent

We had a little bit of a blowout in our community about adding eight days to our calendar. You would have thought the world had come to an end. … Not once did anyone mention academics. It was all about parent convenience.

People want public schools to be community centers, and day care, and social welfare agencies and feed-my-kid centers. The whole concept of public education being a place to learn — I’m waiting for that to come back again.

[When it comes to next year, I feel] a lot of hope, actually. There is a piece with this [Covid relief] funding that we’ve been able to spend on some curricular things that we’ve wanted to do for some time. The Census drove our poverty rates through the roof here. Our Title I budget [to support low-income students] doubled. If we can find them, we can hire more Title I teachers and interventionists, but that’s still a struggle. With people moving and quitting and trying something different, there’s just nobody to hire. 

FAYETTEVILLE, ARKANSAS

Steven Weber, associate superintendent for teaching and learning at Fayetteville Public Schools

I definitely think we’ve learned to be more adaptable. We’ve learned more scenario planning and not just to plan for one or two outcomes. We’ve learned communication and how to communicate through multiple channels. We’ve learned, from an instructional standpoint, that we can use devices. But when we came back we were using the devices too much, so we’ve had to find a balance.

I believe some students got into some bad habits during the Covid pandemic related to attendance, and so we need to work with students and families to increase school attendance and make sure they’re on campus and they show up on time.

I certainly think focus groups help. A counselor can have a focus group, work through and talk to them. Quite often kids or parents will talk to you and say, This is what’s making me late. And then we can help them with transportation or whatever it is.

Maranda Seawood, student support specialist at Washington Elementary School

I’ve seen more trauma in the littles than I’ve seen in a long time. … Even now, with our pre-planning [for next year], I know the first few weeks of school, even though they want us to jump into curriculum like they did this year, we’ve got to really build relationships.

We’re prepared to make sure we love on them, first of all, when they get here. And then we’ll have a full week of routine procedures and building relationships. We’ve got to get back to that. I know what the administration wants, but we as teachers know what kids need, because we’re the ones in the building with them.

Evan Garner, father of four and rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church

In our parish, we’ve had several members of our church who are not going back to in-person schooling because their children have flourished with virtual schooling. And they discovered that, and have maintained it. Not the majority, a handful. But in some ways it’s helped us either reaffirm what we know to be true about our children or maybe discover things that we didn’t know about how they can best learn.

I predict that [next year] our school system will have almost zero change, interruption, policies that anticipate or respond to local outbreaks, other than to ask people to stay at home when they test positive, and perhaps to have hand sanitizer. But it is almost impossible for me to imagine our local school system saying “we’re going virtual” or “virtual is a likely option.” … It feels like that ship has sailed.

PRINCE GEORGE’S COUNTY, MARYLAND

Alvaro Ceron-Ruiz, 16, junior at Eleanor Roosevelt High School and student member of the Prince George’s County Board of Education. He was recently elected to a second term as student member, which he will serve during his upcoming senior year.

It took a bit for all of us to get back into the flow of things, but we are back to how things were before. It definitely feels more normal. Obviously the pandemic is not over, but it isn’t playing as active a role in our conversations as a school board. I’m glad we’re able to get some normalcy back.

I chose to run for student school board member again because of the passion I was able to develop over this year, and the awareness that one year really isn’t enough. A lot of your time in your first year is spent learning the procedures, practices and responsibilities of a board member. In the second year, you get a lot of time to do the governing.

The first thing I want to look into is our food — that’s something that students always want to see changed, but we never really see action. With the second term, I actually want to get on it. We’d bring in our food and nutrition department, different professions, individuals from the private sector who may be willing to offer better food. A lot of what our students were eating every day was pizza and french fries. 

With Covid fading away, I feel more hopeful and more optimistic on what you can do in the school system. A lot of the limitations that you have are lifted, in a way.

This story about the end of the year was produced byThe Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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DOVER, Del. — Nearly 150 years after its founding, the end was near for Wesley College.

A fixture of Delaware’s state capital, the private liberal arts institution had a reputation for offering a close-knit and supportive atmosphere for its students. Even so, its enrollment had dwindled from a high of 2,250 students in 2003 to about 1,000 by 2020.

But a rescue, of sorts, was just a mile and a half away. Delaware State University, the state’s only historically Black college or university, saw in Wesley College an opportunity to meet its own ambitious expansion goals.

Delaware State officially acquired the 50 acres of land and 21 buildings of Wesley College last July in what was a notable muscle flex in the HBCU sector, which supporters say has been underfunded and underappreciated.

“Our culture has been ‘heads down, do the work, support, educate, graduate kids,’ ” said Tony Allen, the president of Delaware State. The pandemic intensified that mission. “HBCUs in particular have done a yeoman’s job in taking care of their students during this crisis.

“But there have been opportunities that have emerged in front of us that we all think are time-limited, so it really is about seizing this unique opportunity and time.”

Melanie Carter, the director of the Center for HBCU Research, Leadership, and Policy at Howard University, agrees with Allen that HBCUs find themselves in a more powerful and positive position than they have had in the past.

For one thing, they have recently benefited from philanthropic largesse, including billionaire MacKenzie Scott’s $560 million in unrestricted donations to 23 historically Black universities, including Delaware State, which received $20 million.

Carter believes that George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter movement also created “a tipping point,” as she put it. “Black people, for example, really felt like they needed to have their institutions close — that they are safer there. There has been a Black agency around being vocal about our institutions, and other people have felt the need to join that.”

In Delaware, 47 percent of bachelor’s degrees earned by Black students are awarded by Delaware State University.

And indeed, students have recently shown more interest in HBCUs. Several of the largest and best-known institutions have reported enrollment gains since 2019, despite the pandemic.

The Trump administration made explicit overtures to HBCU leadership, establishing a President’s Board of Advisors on historically Black colleges. Trump also signed a bipartisan bill making $255 million in funding permanent for STEM programs at HBCUs and other institutions that serve high numbers of Black, Hispanic, and Native American students.

That support has continued in the Biden administration. In a commencement speech given to South Carolina State University, President Joe Biden, a Delaware native, said he won his first election to the Senate thanks to organizing at Delaware State. Allen chairs Biden’s advisory board on HBCUs.

Related: Many HBCUs are teetering between surviving and thriving

And yet times are not perfect. The FBI is investigating a recent spate of bomb threats against HBCUs, including 13 different threats made on Feb. 1, the first day of Black History Month. And the Build Back Better infrastructure bill in Congress, which would have increased funding for HBCUs and other universities serving high numbers of Black and Hispanic students, is likely dead after Sen. Joe Manchin said he would not support the $2 trillion package. Had Build Back Better passed, it would have included money for long-overdue campus infrastructure improvements at many HBCUs; university leaders are now asking Congress to allow them to use a portion of their Covid relief funds for that purpose.

Many smaller HBCUs are struggling with the same forces that led to Wesley’s closure, and are trying to combat underfunding. A 2019 report from the American Council on Education and the United Negro College Fund found that between 2003 and 2015, when federal funding decreased for all colleges and universities, public and private HBCUs faced the sharpest drops.

That same report noted that public HBCUs depend on tax dollars for 54 percent of their funding, while non-HBCU public colleges and universities get only 34 percent of their funding from public sources.

States have only recently started to address some of these funding and underinvestment issues. In March 2021, the governor of Maryland settled a lawsuit by agreeing to provide $577 million over the next decade to the state’s four historically Black colleges. The colleges argued successfully that predominantly white institutions in the state had been allowed to duplicate the HBCUs’ academic programs, thus drawing away potential students and tuition dollars.

In Tennessee, a bipartisan committee released a report finding that Tennessee State University, an HBCU in Nashville, had been underfunded by the state since the 1950s. In his latest budget proposal, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, proposed giving the university $250 million for infrastructure improvements in his fiscal 2023 budget.

 In 2002, the state of Mississippi reached a settlement in a lawsuit about the underfunding of its historically Black colleges. As part of the agreement, the state agreed to distribute $503 million over 17 years to Alcorn State University in Lorman, Jackson State University in Jackson and Mississippi Valley State University in Itta Bena. The final distribution is scheduled to be made this year.

HBCUs also lag behind predominantly white universities when it comes to endowments. While the top 10 endowments among predominantly white institutions total $200 billion, the 10 largest HBCU endowments in 2020 added up to just a fraction of that — $2 billion, according to the Brookings Institution.

Related: At some HBCUs, enrollment rises from surprising applicants

Despite those persistent financial challenges, graduates of HBCUs report being happy with their choices. A 2022 Strada-Gallup Education Survey found that HBCU graduates were more likely to report that they received a “high-quality education” and that they learned “important” skills than were Black students who attended non-HBCU colleges where at least 40 percent of the student body is Black.

 “It’s not that HBCUs don’t have great stories — they don’t have enough storytellers,” said Allen, at a presentation sharing the Strada findings.

Delaware State rewrote its own story when it stepped up to bid for its struggling neighbor.

“There has been a Black agency around being vocal about our institutions, and other people have felt the need to join that.”

Melanie Carter, director, Center for HBCU Research, Leadership, and Policy at Howard University

Wesley had not immediately considered Delaware State as a potential partner, Allen said, despite its proximity. “We are literally a mile and a half from Wesley, and they shopped themselves kind of all around us.”

So, on his first day as president in January 2020, Allen had breakfast with the president of Wesley, Robert Clark II.

“I said, ‘I’m watching you try to save the institution, I appreciate that,’ ” Allen said. “ ‘But Delaware State wants an at-bat.’ ” The University of Delaware in Newark had been in talks in Wesley in 2019. Saint Leo University in Tampa was reportedly another potential merger partner.

The acquisition, which will cost Delaware State $15 million over the next 3 years, will serve Allen’s goal to roughly double enrollment over the next several years, to 10,000 students. Delaware State also gained access to Wesley’s health sciences programs, as well as a site for the university to expand and consolidate its early college high school.

One of the reasons Allen believes the Wesley acquisition was a logical step for Delaware State was because of similarities in the students attending each institution.

Although Wesley College, founded by the Methodist Church, was not created to serve students of color, over time it became racially and economically diverse. In 2019, just before Wesley’s last year as an independent institution, its student body was 39 percent Black, 37 percent white, 8 percent Hispanic and 7 percent multiracial. Sixty-one percent of its students were receiving Pell Grants, and its six-year graduation rate was 29 percent.

In comparison, Delaware State’s student body is 71 percent Black, 9 percent white, 7 percent Hispanic and 6 percent multiracial. It has a similar percentage of students with Pell Grants — 55 — but its six-year graduation rate is 48 percent, and it awards fully 47 percent of the bachelor’s degrees earned by Black students in Delaware, though the college enrolls only about a quarter of the state’s Black undergraduates.

But the deal has not been free from tension. Delaware State said it offered positions to 60 percent of Wesley’s staff and all of its students, but it discontinued the smaller college’s Division III sports program, a disappointing move for some. Also, a group of Wesley faculty sued to stop the acquisition, saying that it was a breach of faculty contracts. That lawsuit is ongoing.

“I’ve had to correct more than a few people on the fact that this is an acquisition [not a merger]. I think that’s because there are still some perceptions about what’s possible for institutions like ours.”

Tony Allen, president, Delaware State University

Allen’s ambitions don’t stop with the Wesley acquisition. Last year, Capital One bank gave Delaware State a 35,000-square-foot office building in Wilmington, the largest city in Delaware. Allen envisions that space as a location for graduate studies and a business incubator.

As Delaware State navigates its future, it remains to be seen whether other HBCUs will be able to seize opportunities to strengthen themselves. Allen hopes his institution’s actions will open people’s eyes to the power that HBCUs have in their larger communities.

“I’ve had to correct more than a few people on the fact that this is an acquisition,” Allen said. “Even though it’s been written about, and we’ve been clear in all of our communications, people have still wanted to think about this as a merger. I think that’s because there are still some perceptions about what’s possible for institutions like ours. And I think anything is possible. We just put our heads up, got focused, saw a unique opportunity and seized it.”

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

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LANHAM, Md. – Close to 700 days after her youngest children last set foot in a school classroom, Monica Rodriguez faced a decision she dreaded: Should she let them return to in-person learning?

For months, her youngest, Daniel Lewis-Coleman, a fourth grader, started his school days just as he had in March 2020, perched at a small table in the family’s kitchen. Steps away, his older brother, David Spriggs, 14, spread his work out on the dining room table. Tiny security cameras mounted throughout their home allowed Rodriguez to monitor her children to make sure they were at their Chromebooks during school hours, not wandering the house or surfing the web.

“[Daniel] being in virtual learning and my eighth grader being in virtual learning is a blessing,” Rodriguez said. The virtual option was particularly helpful for her older son. “There’s no one around to distract him,” Rodriguez said.

“Those students who aren’t progressing — give them the opportunity to go back to school if that’s what their parents want,” she added. “My children are just fine.”

Rodriguez is among thousands of American parents who were happy with remote learning as the Covid-19 pandemic ebbed and flowed — or, if not happy, at least willing to put up with virtual classes rather than send their children to school buildings where their safety was less assured than at home.

The push to return to a pre-pandemic normal put those parents resolve to the test. Many districts ended hybrid and virtual options during the fall, and more recently mask requirements have ended in even the most Covid-cautious places, like New York and New Jersey, after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention loosened its mask restrictions in February.

Related: As schools reopen, will Black and Asian families return?

Perhaps nowhere has the shift back to normal been more jarring than in Prince George’s County Public Schools in Maryland. Though not its original intent, the district set up a massive virtual learning experiment when, in order to placate anxious parents, it extended enrollment in its remote program for K-6 students during last summer’s delta variant surge. Thousands of families decided to choose that option, which the district said would last only for the first semester, when a pediatric vaccine was expected to be approved.

While enrollment fluctuated, as many as 12,000 elementary students, or 18 percent of the district’s kindergarten through sixth grade enrollment, were enrolled in virtual learning — many, like Daniel and David, since the pandemic’s early days. By the time the K-6 virtual program ended Jan. 28, a little over 10,000 students were still enrolled.

That large virtual program made the county an outlier both in Maryland and nationally. As of this past December, 44 percent of the remote learners in the state were in Prince George’s County, according to state figures. And of the 100 large urban districts that are being tracked by the Center for Reinventing Public Education, only Hawaii, with about 10,000 remote learners in all grades, had a similarly sized virtual enrollment, said Bree Dusseault, principal research analyst at the center.

Black and Latino parents were more likely than parents of other races and ethnicities to fear for their children’s health during in-person learning. Prince George’s County, a district of 130,000 students in suburban Washington, D.C. has a student population that is 55 percent Black and 36 percent Latino. Among virtual learners in the district, 60 percent were Black and 30 percent were Latino.

When the district reminded parents that the program would end this January — just as omicron was sweeping the nation — parents here dissented loudly.

The battle over remote learning in Prince George’s highlights the precarious situation districts find themselves in when it comes to keeping parents happy, where any choice is likely to cause anger and parental defections. In some cases, school leaders have lost their jobs. Large numbers of cautious parents still don’t believe that public school is a safe place for their children during the pandemic. Some have found other options such as homeschooling, which has seen a significant increase, particularly among Black families. Prince George’s County has seen student enrollment drop by about 7,000 students since the fall of 2019, which matches national trends, although it is at the high end of the range.

What can districts do to rebuild trust with families? This question is even more pressing as a new subvariant of omicron, BA.2, has started to spread, potentially setting off another wave of parental anxiety. But the experience in Prince George’s County suggests that getting children back in seats may just be a matter of eliminating any alternative.

Vladimir Kogan, an associate professor of political science at Ohio State University, said that parents become more willing to send their children to school when districts are open for full-time, in-person instruction — and remove other options. The continuing reluctance represents a broader failure to explain risks clearly to parents, including the risks of missing in-person school.

“The parents who are demanding the virtual options — I don’t think that’s a reasonable position at this point to have, and it’s been a societal failure of risk communication. Parents don’t get to withhold education from their kids, just like parents don’t get to withhold food or medical care,” Kogan said.

“We have normalized something that before the pandemic seemed crazy,” he added, “which is that parent anxiety is a justification to opt out of compulsory education.”

Prince George’s County, like most school districts in the country, lurched into fully-remote school two years ago to slow the spread of Covid-19. This school year was supposed to be a return to something like normal.

“Nothing can replace that special dynamic that occurs when students and teachers are together in a classroom,” said district CEO Monica Goldson, in a recorded message to parents.

The remote option was scheduled to end in January, just as the omicron variant started to spike. To make matters even more complicated, Prince George’s chose to keep all its students out of school and in remote learning for an extra two weeks after winter break, in an attempt to slow the spread of omicron.

The large enrollment in the temporary K-6 virtual learning program made it clear that, for many, this school year was no time to return to business as usual. (Elsewhere, in places where district-run virtual options weren’t offered, parents found alternatives: Enrollment in virtual charter schools was already growing quickly before the pandemic, and the disruptions accelerated that trend.)

“It irritated me to my core,” Rodriguez said. Two weeks was not enough time to break the spread of the virus, she said, and why was the district still moving ahead with its plan to bring remote elementary school students back, while at the same time saying that students needed to be out of school temporarily?

Other Prince George’s parents also wanted to see virtual learning remain. Danielle Wood, whose son is in fifth grade, said she collected 1,500 signatures on a petition to keep the choice of virtual learning in the district for the rest of this school year, and also organized a small but noisy caravan of parents to circle school board headquarters, honking in support of remote school.

Wood’s son connected with his class via Zoom, and was an honor student last year, she said. And better yet, the family was able to keep Covid out of their household.

“We still quarantine. We never gave up, we never gave in. Why do we have to?” Wood said. “His family has been completely Covid-free and now there’s this constant fear and a high possibility of getting Covid.”

Related: Why Black families are choosing to keep their kids remote when schools reopen

New research is starting to dig into the roots what kind of work and messaging districts can do to address parent concerns about school safety.

Sonja Douglass Horsford, a professor of educational leadership at Teachers College, Columbia University, and the founding director of the Black Education Research Collective, has examined the response of Black parents to the pandemic and to other recent stressors, such as the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. (The Hechinger Report is an independent media organization based at Teachers College.)

Through surveys and focus group interviews, the collective’s report found that the pandemic “just kind of exposed in an explosive way how far away schools are from what Black parents really want,” Horsford said.

“Parents are thinking it’s not worth it to me to just go along with a system that may not be there to support the safety and wellness of our children. Districts need to respect that. The question then becomes what do we do with this information? Are we going to keep learning from this, or are we just going to go back to what we’ve done?” She said districts need to embrace more systemic changes to address these families’ concerns.

Another recent study showed that a text message outlining both safety procedures and the importance of in-person learning can be a relatively simple way for districts to build trust among wavering parents. After receiving that message, more parents said they were willing to return their child to school.

Messages about the value of in-person learning are important, because studies suggest that the pandemic was far from an ideal way to implement effective remote learning. A Maryland Department of Education report from January noted that in nearly all of its districts, across all grades and subjects, the failure rate was nine percentage points higher for virtual students than for in-person students. 

In Prince George’s County, the academic performance of remote versus in-person learners was mixed. County-provided data shows that in-person students performed slightly better in English Language Arts on the Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program administered last fall: 24 percent met or exceeded expectations, compared to 21 percent of remote learners.

But in math, 5 percent of in-person students met or exceeded expectations, compared to 11 percent of remote students.

Even in their protective bubble, Monica Rodriguez’s household was hit hard by the coronavirus in late December 2021. Both children lost their appetites and spent a few days in bed; Rodriguez said she still suffers from aches and an occasional racking cough. But Rodriguez’s mother, who lives in the home and has heart and lung disease, escaped unscathed.

Rather than bringing relief, the experience made had made Rodriguez even more determined to limit her family’s exposure to a virus that she said is changing too fast for experts to track.

But as the deadline to return to school came close, Rodriguez said she was worried that her children’s grades would slip if she taught them at home. Private online school also didn’t seem to be the right fit.

Ultimately, it was her trust in her son’s teachers, and the other educators in the building, that convinced Rodriguez to return her fourth grader to in-person school.

“It wasn’t so much what they said, it was what they did,” Rodriguez said. “And it went from the principal and the staff as well. Nobody wanted to be in person, in my opinion. But the fact that they’re in the building, they’re at risk just like my child. They’re going to do everything they can to make sure they’re safe, so that in turn spills over to my child. He’s going to be as safe as possible as well.”

Still, her soul-searching took some time; Daniel ended up returning to school Feb. 7, a week after the virtual K-6 program ended and most other students returned. David, her eighth grader, has remained a remote learner; Prince George’s school officials said that enough older students thrived during virtual learning to make it a permanent option for students in grades 7-12.

After 693 days out of school, preparing for the first day back was a whirlwind. Rodriguez packed Daniel’s lunch, made sure his double masks were securely in place, and tucked Lysol wipes in his backpack.

“Be the awesome Daniel Tiger that your teachers are accustomed to,” Rodriguez told her son.  

In the end, the vast majority of virtual learners — over 90 percent — returned to brick-and-mortar schools. A district spokeswoman said that soon after the K-6 program ended, 633 students withdrew from the district, and another 130 were unaccounted for.

Rodriguez said she felt comfortable, though resigned.

“There’s no guarantee that he’s not going to come in contact with someone with Covid,” she said. “I’ve had to have those conversations, in talking with his principal, that when my son is at school, he is the most important person there. I need you to understand, the same way I’m the squeaky wheel about his education? I’m going to be on you guys about his safety.”

This story about covid-cautious parents 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 Luring Covid-cautious parents back to school appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Our reporters are spending the year listening to people from across the country who are involved in their local public schools in one way or another. This winter, we talked to a parent in Cleveland, a superintendent in Wyoming and a basketball coach in New Mexico among more than a dozen others.

What we heard was that January 2022 proved to be one of the most challenging months of the pandemic yet in many school districts as they were forced to close schools that could not operate safely due to stunningly high staff absence rates. As omicron infections ran rampant across the country, students lost much of another month of learning. But most of them kept showing up as much as they could.

“I don’t know if we’ve learned anything,” Ben Lawson, a band and choir teacher in Oregon, told us. “But I do have plenty of students and teachers that aren’t willing to just stop and aren’t willing to quit.”

As the spike in infection rates subsides in most of the country and mask mandates continue to drop away, educators, students and parents are wading into yet another phase of pandemic learning. There is cautious hope that it may be the last. In the meantime, as Maranda Seawood, a student support specialist in Arkansas put it, “the juggle is real.”

Here are some voices from our second round of interviews, which have been lightly edited for length and clarity:

(Data note: County vaccination rates are for people age 5 and older and were pulled from The New York Times’ vaccination tracker on February 21, 2022.)

PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA

Anna Phelan, kindergarten teacher at Overbrook Educational Center in Philadelphia

We went virtual the day before winter break. We were supposed to have our gingerbread house making party, and we had a scavenger hunt planned and a Polar Express party planned. And we went virtual at the last minute. I was so upset. Then I thought, ‘OK, we will do it right after break, it’ll be a welcome back party.’ Then we found out late that night that we were going to be virtual again. Now, I think, if it happens, great, but I need to stop getting excited just to get my hopes dashed.

“[My kindergarten students] are thick-skinned, even though I don’t think they should have to be as thick-skinned as they are.”

Anna Phelan, kindergarten teacher in Philadelphia

What’s keeping me going is thinking about April of last year. We did get through it. Even though hybrid was kind of terrible, it was still something. And seeing the strength of students and how excited they get to learn. Even though I personally do not like teaching virtually, seeing them still enjoy learning, even in what I think is a god awful way of learning, seeing them happy to learn this way, I think, ‘If you are happy, I am happy.’ They are thick-skinned even though I don’t think they should have to be as thick-skinned as they are.

Sharahn Santana, African American history and English teacher at Parkway Northwest High School 

Before, if something was due on the 13^th, it was due on the 13^th. Now, hard deadlines, they really don’t even exist, to be honest with you. The deadlines have to be soft because you have to consider what is going on with students mentally, physically, their family. And you have to have a lot of patience and update grades as they get assignments in to you, you have to grade them in real time.

It feels like the necessary and right thing. … The whole world has changed in that regard. We are preparing our students for the world we live in. Nowadays if you say, ‘Oh, you have to have something done at this time,’ and not consider that someone’s child may have had Covid. Everyone in my household has had Covid. I’ve had to take care of them. We’ve all had to take off work at different times to take care of each other. That is a part of the new normal. Extending that empathy to our students and their family is in fact preparing them for the world we do live in.

William Hite, superintendent of Philadelphia’s public schools

The uncertainty is the most difficult thing I’m facing. The uncertainty of surges, virtual vs. in person, the staffing. It all causes a great deal of uncertainty when school districts are typically organized with a great deal of certainty. The calendars are done ahead of time. Individuals know when their holidays are. You have individuals to come and support if individuals go out sick.

Eighteen months of virtual worked for some students. For others it was an absolute turnoff. Trying to recover from that is what we are working really hard to do. If we don’t recover, children will just find other options, whether it is work, whether it is whatever is happening in their communities.

Our work now is to come up with something that is better than what individuals left prior to the pandemic. With all the investments from ESSER, ESSER II and CARES, here’s an opportunity to rethink and redo what an educational experience is, particularly for our high schoolers, and think differently about time, think differently about those institutional barriers like hours, courses, Carnegie credits. We need to think about all of those things very differently than we have in the past.

FAYETTEVILLE, ARKANSAS

Evan Garner, father of four and rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church

We FaceTimed on the phone while I ate dinner in my bedroom [where I was isolating after an exposure] and they ate dinner at the dinner table. Today was the first day that our kids had to get up and get ready to go to school without my assistance. It’s hard on [my partner ]. I can hear from the bedroom when it’s hard on her and on them. Thankfully — I know it sounds like something silly — but, it’s a little warmer today and so two of our kids were able to walk to school, so that relieved that pressure.

We got an email from the superintendent of our local schools, that our plan is to continue to meet in person, but it is possible that that would change and the fact that the superintendent is even naming that as a possibility, let all of us know that it’s real.

What we’re having to cope with is not knowing. Cases are rising so quickly. And public discourse doesn’t seem to have changed any. In fact, that seems to be hardening.

My coping mechanism to respond to some of the uncertainty in the larger system is appealing to government or quasi government agencies as well as personal physicians that can help me just know that I’m doing the right thing.

Maranda Seawood, student support specialist at Washington Elementary School

There have been so many people in and out because of the quarantining … I might have two kids out, so I have to create some new lessons for these kids. And then by the time those kids come back, you have other ones out. You have to create another lesson for the next week for those kids.

So it’s a juggle. The juggle is real.

We have a [half hour] block of time every day called WIN. The acronym is for What I Need. We are actually using that time to try to intervene whether it’s in class, whether it’s an essential skill that they need if they’re struggling. We check their grade level and look at the scores and see what their needs are. What we’re learning is that block of time is very essential to us.

I’ve been pushing for teachers to take care of themselves. It never ends. There’s no break. There’s no weekend breaks. You have papers and there’s always something. I will tell any teacher this, anyone in education: Take care of yourself. You can’t take care of anyone else if you can’t take of yourself first. When the weekend comes, you have to take care of yourself and your family and let the school go.

It’s hard. But everyone’s tired. I hoped things would be different and Covid would be going away. The hard part isn’t even the Covid, it’s working around it.

Steven Weber, associate superintendent for teaching and learning for the Fayetteville Public Schools

At one point we had all three administrators out in one school. They were out for Covid or their children were in quarantine. And we had over half of the staff out. When we started getting those kinds of numbers in more than one school it became a safety concern — for lunch duty, hallway duty. You can’t have 26 substitutes doing duties that the regular staff do — they don’t know what to look for and where to go to stand on duty time.

We talked about 10 percent or 15 percent… What number should we have before we make a decision and you can’t really do that because [it’s different] for a school of 200 students versus a school of 2,500 students? We were watching carefully, and schools were giving us updates and we just reached the point [on January 13] where we felt like it would be safer to have students at home.

There’s some fatigue with educators I haven’t seen in the past. I think when we were going into August of this year, people felt like we were going to be able to return to normal and do a lot of things like field trips. There was a roller coaster between August and December. Then during the December break in Arkansas, there was a spike in the numbers and every day, they get higher.

It’s hard to teach class when 50 percent of your kids are absent. They’re out for five days and then they come back and they’re behind. Now another group of kids are absent, or the teachers are absent. Disrupting the daily routine makes it difficult for the students to learn and makes it difficult for teachers to teach all the different levels of readiness levels in the classroom.

It’s a stressful time but anyone working with kids is still being positive. Adults are frustrated and stressed and tired, but when it comes to being at school, they’re very positive for the kids.

FREMONT COUNTY, WYOMING

Troy Zickefoose, superintendent of Fremont County School District #6

Covid’s still a battle. We changed our protocol to follow the new CDC guidelines with the five-day quarantines. At the same time, our state was working on its protocol. They sent new guidelines on Jan. 5, which seemed more student friendly [than the CDC’s]. Wyoming’s guidelines ask — never demand — that we enforce masks, but students can remove them for artistic or athletic activities. Then we ran into an issue with the high school girls basketball team all quarantined. And boys basketball. And boys wrestling.

We’re still keeping kids in school. That has been huge. Enrollment is up a bit from last year, and kids and parents, they want to be here. We gained 130 kids. Out of a district of about 395, that’s a definite success.

Hiring will be the challenge in the next three months. Our assistant principal/AD [activities director] resigned. We’ve only seen a handful of applicants. I don’t know how many are even certified. We have no Spanish as a high school elective, no foreign language at all, so we’ll be trying to hire for that. We just don’t have a lot of applicants. We’re a small, rural school. There’s no reason to drive to or through Pavillion. Last year, we posted three positions and got four applicants. It’s just hard to get people to move out here.

Right now, with lunches and breakfast still being free with some of the CARES Act money, you still run into situations where you want to do something different for a meal. You actually want to give a kid a good meal. But beef’s expensive everywhere right now. Everything’s expensive right now. Just go to the grocery store. We live in a farm and ranch community. If people are going to cull their herd or they have a dry cow and they’re done with it, we’ll take it. Even if it’s an old bull, we’ll turn the whole thing into hamburger. It definitely helps with our food services. Considering where we live, it seems like the right way to ask for help.

Rory Robinson, CEO of the Boys & Girls Club of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe

My club serves four different school districts [including #6]. They’re all rural, but very Native. A lot of our kids live with grandparents, and that’s been my biggest concern. I wish I kept notes, but maybe close to April 2020, I realized this wouldn’t be so hard on kids. At the same time, multigenerational households or grandma and grandpa raising them…we shut down the club out of concern for them. We didn’t open up for regular club until June 2021. And since we opened, we haven’t even had one case traced back to us. They’re talking about shutting things down again, and I’m like, really?

The reservation schools stayed virtual, but we have terrible infrastructure. So we convinced them to let us have kids come and use computers — only four kids at a time, or up to eight from one household. We had a tutor. Our school districts provided Chromebooks. We didn’t have wireless but used Covid funds to put that in and started advertising that we’re open for tutoring.

We had maybe 12 kids a day coming by October. In normal times, average daily attendance is about twice that. We got stalled at 12, and then that started going down.

Our kids are already one to two years behind. Around November, I go to tribal council and say, “This is a big problem, and I know you’re scared of Covid. But the problem you’ll face in two years, five years, 10 years with all these kids not learning. This gap will never get smaller.”

We are really underwater here.

PRINCE GEORGE’S COUNTY, MARYLAND

Alvaro Ceron-Ruiz, 16, junior at Eleanor Roosevelt High School and student member of the Prince George’s County Board of Education.

It was a pretty interesting experience returning to that virtual setting. I know for a lot of students, they didn’t like it the first time around. And then when it came the second time around, they wanted it to be over.

A lot of students were feeling bombarded, because two weeks [after the return to in-person learning] was the end of the quarter, grades were being put in. A lot of students were feeling stressed, I was feeling stressed, coming back and being expected to recall everything you learned in a virtual setting.

But dealing with the Covid cases, with the ‘close contact’ letters and all that, I think it was the best decision [to close.]  We had numbers coming from all over.

For me personally, what has always helped me has been organization—using my schedule and my calendar. And right after school, I take some of that time for relaxing, personally taking that time just like 30 minutes to myself is helpful.

What’s been said is that since omicron is becoming more of a cold in a sense, the worry about it being a pandemic has been lessening. I’m hoping that we stay in school and that seniors aren’t robbed of a graduation and a prom again.

Monica Rodriguez, mother of two 

I’ve been on the principal’s heels and I have a great rapport with my son’s teachers. I began talking with them, asking what the process was in school. One of the teachers, I have her personal cell phone number. She is the one I was most comfortable talking to, knowing that she would give me the truth. I knew that in taking every precaution to protect herself, she would take every precaution to protect my son.

My concern is, I have an honor roll student and he gets principal awards every quarter, and I didn’t want to make decisions solely out of fear. It turns out after much prayer and talking with the principal, we’ve decided comfortably to send him back to in-person learning.

There’s no guarantee that he’s not going to come in contact with someone with Covid.

I’ve had to have those conversations, in talking with his principal, that when my son is at school, he is the most important person there. I need you to understand, the same way I’m the squeaky wheel about his education, I’m going to be on you guys about his safety.

My eighth grader, he does not possess the ability to be at middle school with almost 40 kids in his classroom and focus. The pandemic was the best thing that could have happened for him. He is getting As and Bs, and that wasn’t happening with in-person learning. If he wants to return to in person learning for 9th grade it is solely dependent on his performance in eighth grade virtual learning.

I don’t believe in sugar coating anything. I wish all parents were like that. We all know our children better than anyone.

REDMOND, OREGON

Judy Pickens, community liaison and Spanish-language interpreter

So this year, there are older kids who are not coming to school because they’re taking care of the kids who don’t get to go to daycare [when it’s closed due to Covid]. And then we have the new kids – they never went to kindergarten and started in first grade, so they come in here and they didn’t develop basic skills to start in school.

We have students there right now…they’re not talking one language or the other, just mumbling. [Teachers] call me and say, “Judy, can you tell us if he’s really saying something? Because in English, we don’t understand.”

And also now, they cry all day, because they don’t want to be here. They’re not used to leave home, leave mom, at all. It is difficult for the teachers to have a kid that is disrupting the whole classroom.

They’re getting food in school, you know, twice a day. And then they go home in the afternoon. So I see more people are getting in the routine. And I see people are celebrating. I mean, you know, Quinceñeras, weddings, birthdays and baptisms. The kids tell us. So they’re relaxed now. They feel like they’re safe.

Everyone brings a different story of struggles. We have wonderful, wonderful families here in Redmond. And not everyone [in the Latino community] is the same. We might look, we might sound the same, but we’re not. We all have our struggles and stories. Some are beautiful stories. Some of them are really sad. But at the end, we celebrate.

Ben Lawson, band and choir teacher

Just my class time, like the 70 minutes I have in each class, that’s fine. The kids are acting almost like normal. And they’re working, and they’re trying, and they’re doing a good job. But, like, going on field trips, busing, all those things are a struggle.

So Oregon State has a policy that everyone [participating in an upcoming band festival] has to be vaccinated or have proof of a negative COVID test. I need to figure out how can I get my group there, but I can’t go around or just ask each kid, “are you vaccinated?” I have to work through the school nurse and the district office for them to collect those names. And then they might not have enough tests, or I might have to arrange for the kids to get outside testing. And just this whole other layer to get out of the building. And that’s assuming that I actually get a driver.

I mean, everybody’s kind of messed up right now. It’s like, you’re locked at home for 18 months, and you haven’t had to work on a schedule, you could show up to class whenever you wanted to. This could be the generation of kids that weren’t held accountable, that weren’t held to the same standards, were given a free ride or a free pass on some things. And they aren’t seeing why you work so hard. They’re not getting the rewards. Talking about all these [bend festival] events: We work. We spent all this time rehearsing to go to an event because it’s fun and exciting and to get feedback. But the kids haven’t experienced that.

Maybe it’s just that I’m only willing to believe that there is light at the end of the tunnel. I’m just gonna keep on going towards that direction whether it’s there or not. I’m a 42-year-old music teacher. My skills are very specific. I teach teenagers to play music.

Yoselin Viramontes, English language development instructor

Although we just came back from [winter] break, it really feels that our students still need some healing time.

I just started teaching this September. I try to get a lot of my work done at school. So that when I’m home, I can do some self-care. I love to go on walks and kind of decompress. I love spending time with my dogs. And I really tried to give myself grace, and just take it one day at a time. And I do a lot of positive self-talk. I say to myself: ‘It’s not the end of the world. You’ll get through it.’

Some of our students, and especially the students that I serve, have to come home to a very complex home life. And I understand where they come from because I’ve lived it firsthand. I came to this country at a very young age, but I still [had] very traditional Mexican parents. And so it’s definitely about being empathetic with our students.

Our high school definitely brought light to [the emotional and social needs of students] the first two weeks. But I really think that after a year and a half, two weeks doesn’t really cut it. As educators, we also have this pressure of having to cover this material and making sure that our students are academically where they should be. But the reality is that they’re not there emotionally or mentally or academically.

And it’s hard to see an end, right? So it makes me worry about what direction we’re going to take. And I really hope that we learned to put their mental health and their emotional well-being first.

CLEVELAND, OHIO

Jessica Boiner, mother of two and home-based child care provider

What’s keeping me going is that I have to pay bills and being a mother is important to me. I don’t want to fail my children or my family. I just don’t.

My daughter is going to a private school this year. She’s four. Before the pandemic, it was not high on my list; I was going to send her to public school. But I can see how much confidence she’s gained just being there. It’s easier for that school to create a sense of community with students and parents than it is for the public school my son attends. It’s expensive, but I’m going to try to keep sending her there if I can.

“I don’t want to fail my children or my family. I just don’t.”

Jessica Boiner, mother of two in Cleveland, Ohio

My son has been doing really well at his school though. At first, when I received the email and then the call from the Cleveland schools saying they were going back remote, I thought, ‘Oh my gosh.’ I was nervous, because even though he does well remotely, that in-school piece is very, very necessary for him. His teachers are very good at saying, ‘How about you ask a friend if he wants to play?’ I don’t want him to miss out on that, and I can tell when he sees his classmates, he’s excited. But we are coping pretty well. He did well at home. They haven’t had a tremendous amount of cases at the school he attends and we’re doing okay.

Eric Gordon, CEO, Cleveland Metropolitan School District

Cleveland became ground zero for the omicron explosion during the last couple of weeks of December… We had to close schools because we had too many people quarantined or calling in sick. I’m actually working on site at a building now as the on-site administrator because we have too few personnel … [I have been responding with] a lot of bounded optimism. Nobody wants Pollyanna in a world that they don’t believe is bright but they do want to be reassured that things are going to be OK.

Our attendance has not come anywhere close to recovering to pre-pandemic attendance patterns. It looks much more like the attendance patterns we saw in remote and hybrid. I took that to my student advisory committee to say, I know what’s happening, I don’t know why. And one of the four core reasons that they said students are missing a lot of school is that they are still responsible for caring for their families.

They are still working, they are babysitting their brothers, sisters, cousins, and that causes students to miss school. We are still seeing the impact of family need. Family need is driving legitimate decisions that disrupt school.

We’re going to have to be a lot more nimble, particularly at the high school level. School has got to be worth it. Pre-pandemic students tolerated a lot more. It has got to be truly engaging. The days of the strategic compliance, ‘I’ll take the five AP classes because I know it’s the smart thing to do,’ is just simply not going to be enough anymore. Or in urban communities it’s often a more ritualistic compliance, ‘I have to go to school, I’ll get through it.’ I think those days are gone, and I think it’s really going to challenge us as educators that we’ve got to make school really worth it.

GREENVILLE, SOUTH CAROLINA

*Editor’s note: Greenville was not featured in our first installment of this project. It replaces another South Carolina district, Richland County.

Betsy Bloodworth, mother of one

We’ve been pretty cautious. We don’t eat in restaurants. We only eat at home. We’ll do take-out and things like that. We only go out when we’re wearing masks. We don’t go around people that are not in our family without being in masks. I have made our carpool kids wear masks in the car, because we’re in the car for 20 minutes together in very close quarters, and one of them is not vaccinated. And the vaccine matters, but you have plenty of people who are still getting sick, even that are vaccinated. So, you know, we have those kinds of things, but again, that’s not really a substantial change from the way we’ve been managing things all along.

“…all I can do is take care of my family and make the decisions that I’m comfortable with.”

Betsy Bloodworth, mother in Greeneville, South Carolina

It feels sustainable, to an extent. I think I’ve kind of gotten used to the things that I’ve learned about people that I didn’t want to know. It’s even family members and close friends and neighbors, and I’ve just had to come to accept that. A lot of people are not gonna be on board with this, and all I can do is take care of my family and make the decisions that I’m comfortable with.

And you know, that’s just the way it is. I think I’m in as good a place with that as I can be mentally. I’ve had a lot of times when I’ve been highly frustrated with it. And maybe I’ve just reached the point of giving up. Because I realized that there’s some people that no matter what evidence you present to them or tell them, they’re going to hear what they want to hear, no matter what the situation is. And you can’t waste your time worrying about that because you can’t fix it.

Anne Tromsness, drama teacher at the Fine Arts Center

I’m really trying to focus even more on student voice and agency — giving them a place to be able to explore the big feelings and the big thoughts that they’re having right now. Theater is a great place for that, because it is not therapy by any stretch of the imagination, but we do explore our humanity and we explore that through stories.

And I’m finding that the students are really, really eager to be creative and to not be engaged in screen work and a lot of technology. They want to get back to the basics and really connecting with one another through story and exploring doubts, fears, joys, aspirations, all of those things. So I’m coping by continuing to keep my focus on them, trying to find a way to help their creativity proliferate.

I’ve seen with my kids that great hunger for a creative outlet and for that person-to-person connection that we were all missing for so long. I’ve also seen a cost in having to use so much technology. Their attention span is different than it used to be. They pull away and tend to kind of isolate in a different way sometimes than they used to. And so we’re kind of, in the drama classroom, learning how to be together, within safe restrictions. We’re still six feet apart. Masks are optional at our school district, but a lot of us are still wearing those and we’re taking care of one another, but we’re learning how to be in that space together.

For me, all the really great things about theater, which are about engaging with different people’s stories and perspectives, building empathy with one another, and exploring struggles through the distance of narrative and story — all of the great things about theater we really need right now. And I’m finding that our students really need that right now.

RICHMOND, VIRGINIA

Jason Kamras, superintendent of Richmond Public Schools

At the moment [the hardest thing I’m dealing with] is keeping our doors open given the number of infections, quarantines, and the impact that’s having on staff of all different types, whether it’s teachers or bus drivers or principals. I would say that’s one thing. And two is navigating the unique politics of masks here in Virginia … We feel that number one, first and foremost, it’s the right thing to do to keep everyone healthy and safe … And two, we really feel the law is on our side on this one.

Executive order one bans critical race theory. Truth be told I don’t think critical race theory is being taught in any Virginia schools, it’s a graduate level framework. The more concerning part of that order is the ban on “divisive concepts” which is rather ambiguous and feels like a very scary, slippery slope.

I’ve been very public about my opposition to this order and have been clear that at least here in Richmond we are going to continue to study the very difficult history of Richmond and the reality that the Commonwealth and the capital were quite literally built by enslaved Africans and that has profound implications for all kinds of inequities that still exist today.

The pandemic has revealed more clearly to the public at large how many services public schools provide beyond teaching reading and math. In most cities the public school system is one of the largest, if not the largest, provider of food, transportation, mental health support, in many cases physical health support, recreation, child care and lots of other things. Those are very challenging and expensive services to provide. They are more so in the middle of a pandemic especially if you are serving students from low-income communities. My hope, my prayer, is that this is an inflection point for investment, not abandonment.

Katina Harris, middle school English teacher and president of the local teachers union

We’re very concerned about the eviction of some of our students. The Richmond Redevelopment & Housing Authority sent out letters January 1 to notify the tenants who were behind in their rent. We’re trying to prevent that from happening, to make sure that families get support so children won’t be homeless. It would be very difficult to educate children who don’t have shelter. It’s winter and we’re still in the middle of the pandemic and it’s extremely important that we stand with our students and families.

Morale among my colleagues is extremely low. We have a teacher shortage. The superintendent got the central office staff to be substitutes. That has helped but it’s a temporary fix. We need something more long-term. Some parents are keeping their children home, because they believe that it is unsafe. The option of opening up virtual school again would be helpful and it would help attendance.

TAOS, NEW MEXICO

​​Hernando Chavez, interim athletic director and boys’ basketball coach

Our winter sports started in mid-November. All kids are required to wear masks while they play any indoor sports in the state of New Mexico. The kids are doing the best that they can do to follow the guidelines and do their part so that hopefully we can stay face-to-face and they can keep sports and activities alive.

For a number of our athletes here, [sports are] their motivating factor for coming to school. I couldn’t speak highly enough of the coaching staff that we have here at Taos High. [Our coaches teach] not only lessons about their sport, but life lessons as well. I do really believe that things like athletics, and even the ability to come to school every single day – rather than receiving all their instruction remote – I think that’s what really gives them the ability to cope during bizarre, strange and difficult times.

“[Today’s students are] going to be a group that went through one of the most difficult times and challenging times in our nation’s history and found a way to persevere… I am amazed at them every day to be honest.”

Hernando Chavez, interim athletics director in Taos, New Mexico 

I’ve never really felt that the winning and losing was the most important thing, I’ve always felt that the process was the most important thing, right? I even made the analogy with some of the young men that I coach in basketball: ‘Years from now, whether or not you won a state title isn’t going to matter all that much. If you have a wife, and if you have a wife and children, you know, your wife isn’t going to care about whether or not you got a title or anything like that.’

It’s really hard for them right now to realize that.

The one thing I can say about this group of young men and women – they are going to be a resilient group. They’re going to be a group that went through one of the most difficult times and challenging times in our nation’s history and found a way to persevere, found a way to succeed, to continue to succeed, and to not lose sight of their goals. I am amazed at them every day to be honest.

Florence Miera, social worker and homeless liaison

I think we’ve had several [students’] family members with Covid. And, you know, some grandparents who have passed away or family members. And so that’s been one of the biggest pieces that I have dealt with — the kids grieving.

And actually even parents [who are] younger, we’re seeing it a little bit more with 40- and 50-year-olds. As small as we are, if one person dies, and they’re 30, 40, 50 years old, why it can impact quite a few people. Everyone knows each other or is related to each other. And so the impact is big. And what I’ve seen in the kids is, yeah, grief and loss is hard core. The kids are devastated.

We just had our [winter] breaks. And then we had a little bit of time off after [in January]. So getting kids back, like the younger ones, they’re afraid and they don’t want to come back. They’re crying. So we’re dealing with that, but then once we have them it’s pretty amazing.

[The older kids] need to be at school, but now they’re having anxiety and depression and all these things going on, because I feel like they were so used to being at home for almost an entire school year. And then we were back in, and some of them are still struggling.

If they have something to look forward to, like the athletes, the cheerleaders, the ones that are on some sort of sports team tend to do so much better, so much better. My population specifically [that] I work with is the homeless and the doubled up kids [who are living with friends]. And most of these kids really do not play a whole lot of sports or are not very active. And so that’s why what I see is very different than what Mr. Chavez [the high school boys’ basketball coach] sees.

This story about pandemic coping 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 ‘We’re really underwater here’: An oral history of year three of pandemic schooling, Part II appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

When Sasha Shunk first opened a child care center in her Maine home nearly 20 years ago, she knew she would have to stand out among the nearly 3,000 other home-based child care providers operating in the state at the time.

“I always knew there were other child care providers a road away or the street down from me,” said Shunk, who cares for 12 children at $325 a week, each, and has about 40 more children on a waitlist. “I looked for training, I sought out ways to differentiate myself.”

Over the years, she has earned a master’s degree in early childhood education. She’s earned accreditation from the National Association for Family Child Care, an organization in which she is now involved as a state representative. She revamped her program to offer an extensive outdoor classroom. And her center has reached the highest level of quality in Maine’s quality rating and improvement system, or QRIS, a voluntary program that is meant to encourage child care providers to meet high standards and, not incidentally, provide parents a way to find programs that are exceeding the state’s basic licensing requirements.

But the family child care landscape has changed in Maine over the years. There are fewer than 800 care providers in the state now, Shunk said, and with the intense need for child care, those few don’t have any problem attracting clients. Shunk said the dwindling competition has made it harder for parents to find care, and has removed an incentive for providers to pursue quality.

Shunk says more providers must be brought into the industry and given the resources and incentives to improve. That takes time, but is a worthwhile policy goal, she said.

“When you’re entry-level, you are prioritizing the health and safety of the children, but there are different components that you can build upon,” Shunk said. “Just because a program is a level one doesn’t mean you shouldn’t send your child there,” she said, referring to the first step on her state’s child care ranking system. But hopefully, entry-level providers can develop plans to continue their growth, she said.

The need for increased child care access and quality have never been more important, and the child care industry has never been more fragile. The Biden administration’s signature domestic bill, Build Back Better, was the latest attempt by the federal government to increase both the number of child care providers and to ensure those providers offer safe and nurturing environments. But the bill was benched indefinitely in late December, when Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, raised concerns about the overall cost of the legislation.

Now, child care advocates hope the fractures exposed by the pandemic will focus public attention on creating some kind of government support for improving a child care system that is currently on the ropes.

“What we have is breaking us,” said Mary Beth Testa, a policy consultant with the National Association for Family Child Care. “Leaving things as they are is not the answer.”

Related: The racist and sexist roots of child care in America explain why the system is in shambles

Testa’s organization had been particularly enthusiastic about provisions in the bill that would have greatly expanded the number of children eligible for child care subsidies, and that would have required states to base those subsidies on the cost of providing high-quality care. Currently, most states link subsidies to the market rate of child care in a given community, but the market rate can be much lower than the actual cost of a high-quality program.

An increase in funding is necessary because quality improvement efforts have long been grossly underfunded, said Susan Hibbard, the executive director of the BUILD Initiative, a national organization that helps states create systems to measure child care quality. Without sufficient funds, some programs have not been able to survive. For example, in 2017 Mississippi discontinued its QRIS program, citing financial reasons. State QRIS can often end up funneling limited resources to child care programs that are already doing well, Hibbard said, rather than investing in programs that need support to improve.

“You do want to give the three-star centers enough money to be able to maintain their quality,” Hibbard said, referring to centers that meet state measures of high quality. “But you also need to have something for all the smaller programs. That’s more important, and that needs to be the first thought.”

Some states are still energized around the issue of how to appropriately measure and motivate high-quality child care, even without the backing of a bill like Build Back Better, said Terri Sabol, an assistant professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern University. “We see states that even without federal funding seem to want to invest in this,” said Sabol, who studies the factors that lead to healthy child development. “Yes, it would be awesome if there were this federal system that supported it, but absent that there’s great appetite for figuring out how to measure quality.”

Related: After mass closures, too little support, post-pandemic child care options will be scarce

And yet, quality has proven incredibly challenging to measure in a sector that includes everything from a single provider caring for a few children in her home to for-profit entities with dozens of employees. It’s also difficult to nudge providers who are already operating on razor-thin margins to make extensive — and sometimes expensive — changes in their operations. One incentive used in some states is to give a larger child care subsidy to higher-rated centers. But not all providers take public dollars.

“It was very hard for centers to be responsive to any pressures to improve without any resources to put into it,” said Daphna Bassok, an associate professor of education and public policy at the University of Virginia, and a researcher in child care quality measurements.

“There’s a massive amount of instability in child care right now,” Bassok said. The focus from providers is “on a very baseline level of quality — how do I get enough teachers in this classroom every day?”

State and federal government have tried many ways to incentivize quality. What child care advocates liked about Build Back Better is that it included generous federal incentives to increase the number of providers, encourage providers to make quality improvements, and pay for center renovations and repairs.

The bill also would have required that child care workers be paid enough to lift them above the federal poverty line. Child care workers earn less than $14 an hour, on average.

But Build Back Better did not require states to start from scratch when it came to measuring child care quality. States were expected to build on the framework that most of them already have, the QRIS. Nearly every state has a quality system, such as “Great Start to Quality” in Michigan, “Capital Quality” in the District of Columbia, Texas’ eponymous “Texas Rising Star” system, and the “Quality for ME” program in Maine, in which Shunk participates.

Many QRIS frameworks measure quality by combining scores on several different measures, such as teacher-child interactions, staff training, teacher-student ratios and family involvement. The framework then boils all those measures down into a simple four- or five-point scale. A center that meets minimum standards would earn a 1. A 4 or 5 rating indicates a top provider.

Related: A little-known program could be a model for how to spend billions in federal money on childcare

But research has found that while there might be notable differences between a minimally qualified provider and one of the best, it was hard to see meaningful distinctions between centers in the middle — those that might receive a 2 or 3 on a 5-point scale. A 2017 study of Oregon’s QRIS — which has since been revamped — reported that even though providers were ranked on a 5-star scale, there was no difference in observed quality “between programs rated 1 vs 2, or between programs rated 3 vs 4 or 5, or between programs rated 5 vs those rated 3 or 4.”

A bigger problem arose as researchers started to look even more closely at child outcomes. The provider ratings based on these composite scores weren’t predicting how well a child was prepared for school.

In 2013, Sabol was the lead author on one of the first research papers to raise concerns about rating systems that attempted to boil several measures down to one score. A single measure — teacher-child interactions — was more predictive of good child outcomes than the composite scores.

More studies followed, with similar results. A 2019 report, prepared at the request of the U.S. Department of Education, looked at nine states that had conducted their own research on how they were measuring child care quality. That report also found that children who attended higher-rated programs did not have better developmental outcomes than those who attended lower-rated ones.

Measuring quality is still essential, Sabol said. But, she added, “those findings really highlighted the need for a more slimmed-down approach that really focuses on the key elements of quality that matter for the development of young children” — how providers teach, talk with and play with the children in their care.

States are responding to the research, in some cases by revising their child care rating systems to focus even more closely on the interactions between adults and children. Louisiana, for example, invested in a mandatory rating system that requires observers to rate teacher-child interactions in every early childhood classroom. Bassok’s research shows that, over time, those interactions have improved.

Investing in teacher training, however, is difficult in a field where educators may stay just a year or so before moving on. To help address this problem, Bassok is working on a program in Virginia that gives early childhood teachers $1,500 to $2,000 to stay with their employer for a year. The stipend has helped cut teacher turnover.

Sabol said the next generation of ratings systems should try to include even more nuanced measures of the elements that are known to affect young children. For example, ratings focus on an overall score for a center, but individual classrooms at the center could differ considerably. Even within a given classroom, children’s experiences could vary.

“Our work is showing there is just as much variation in kids’ classroom experiences between classrooms as there is between centers,” Sabol said. “We really need to be able to characterize classrooms accurately and not assume kids are having the same experience.”

If a massive federal investment in early childhood education does not make it out of Congress, expanding high-quality child care still has to be a priority, Shunk said.

“Clearly, [Build Back Better] is not going to pass the way we had originally hoped it was going to pass, but I am hopeful,” she said. “I can understand the cost being a concern, but that’s still some short-term thinking. We really have to look long-term to make this a sustainable early childhood system so that parents can be working and children are in quality environments from a young age.”

This story about QRIS 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 We struggle to measure quality child care — and even more to fund it appeared first on The Hechinger Report.