ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — As their teacher pounded his drums, belting the lyrics to the Native folk rock song “NDN Kars,” middle schoolers Eli, Izzy and Manin rehearsed new guitar chords for an upcoming performance.

“I got a sticker that says ‘Indian Power,’” teacher Luke Cordova sang. “I stuck it on my bumper. That’s what holds my car together.”

Inside a neighboring greenhouse, a group of school staff and volunteers prepared to harvest herbs and vegetables for students to use in medicinal teas and recipes during science lessons on local ecology. Meanwhile, in a 19th century schoolhouse next door, eighth graders in a Native literature class debated the consequences of racism on college campuses. “Remember,” teacher Morgan Barraza (Akimel O’odham, Kawaika, Apache, Thai) told them, “power is not all with the decision makers. You as a community have power, too.”

Once the site of an Indian boarding school, where the federal government attempted to strip children of their tribal identity, the Native American Community Academy now offers the opposite: a public education designed to affirm and draw from each student’s traditional culture and language.

The charter school, NACA, opened its doors in 2006. Today, it enrolls roughly 500 students from 60 different tribes in grades K-12, bolstering their Indigenous heritage with land-based lessons and language courses built into a college preparatory model. High schoolers at NACA graduate at much higher rates and tend to outperform their peers in Albuquerque Public Schools — which authorizes the charter — and throughout New Mexico. Over the past decade, NACA’s academic track record and reputation with families and tribal leaders has spurred the creation of a network of schools designed to overhaul education for Native students across the American West.

At 13 campuses in five states, the NACA Inspired Schools Network supports tribal communities that have found little support in traditional K-12 systems and want academic alternatives that reflect their hopes and expectations for the next generation. Each school approaches that mission very differently, and with varying results. Some have struggled to keep their doors open, testing the Albuquerque-based network’s ability to sustain its success beyond the flagship school. Still, network leaders plan to continue expanding and hope to present the NACA model as a way to grant Indigenous families the self-determination and sovereignty that has been denied to them for generations.

“In 150 years, we moved from a foreign, abusive, violent structure to now, where maybe our communities have something to say about where education is going,” said Anpao Duta Flying Earth (Lakota, Dakota, Ojibwe, Akimel O’odham), the network’s executive director. “We’re leading these schools. We’re in the classrooms. It’s not just maintaining status quo. It’s how we’re pushing the edge of what’s possible.”

Related: 3 Native American women head to college in the pandemic. Will they get a sophomore year?

NACA was born out of an urgent need to reimagine education for Indigenous youth: In 2005, 

three quarters of Native American students graduated on time in the Albuquerque school district, compared to 87 percent of all students, according to state data. Only about 1 in 4 students identifying as American Indian tested proficient in math, while proficiency rates in reading and science hovered closer to 40 percent. A string of suicides in the city’s Native communities, especially among youth, shocked educators.

In response, Native administrators within the district started meeting with families, college graduates and tribal leaders to discuss what a better education for Native students might look like. More than 200 people weighed in, often sharing their poor experiences in traditional schools, such as pervasively low expectations and a lack of cultural awareness among teachers. Community members prioritized three things in their dream school for Native youth: secure cultural identities, college preparation and holistic wellness.

Those conversations prompted Albuquerque Public Schools to authorize NACA as its first charter. Today, courses at all grade levels include Indigenous history, numeracy, land-based science and language classes in Keres, Lakota, Navajo, Tiwa, Spanish and Zuni. About two-thirds of the school’s teachers are Native American, with many alumni now leading classrooms. 

NACA requires students to take at least two college-level courses and earn internship credit. Last year, nearly 80 percent of graduates enrolled in college, up from 65 percent for the class of 2022. The school also tracks college completion rates, with 59 percent of the class of 2012 finishing within six years. Since then, the numbers have slipped to the single digits, with just 5 percent of the class of 2016 finishing within six years, according to a data analysis from the charter school network. (School officials said the decline is due to incomplete data.)

Younger students attend the K-8 campus on the former boarding school site, while the high school is located in a gleaming new tower nearby at the Central New Mexico College.

During a lunch break, 11th graders Joshua, a Navajo Nation citizen, and Tyshawn, from the Laguna Pueblo, volleyed a badminton birdie under the tower’s shadow. Both are recent transfers to NACA — Tyshawn from a private Catholic school and Joshua from a traditional public high school.

“There was nothing like this. No language class, nothing,” Joshua said of his previous school. Discussions of tribal culture were limited to a few isolated craft projects during a history unit and inaccurate portrayals of Indians at the “First Thanksgiving,” he recalled.

“Yeah, not at my school,” Tyshawn agreed, chuckling. “You had to learn that experience yourself.”

“I was the ‘only’ a lot,” added Joshua, referring to his Native identity. “We fill an entire school here.”

Related: Schools bar Native students from wearing traditional regalia at graduation

It’s only recently that the U.S. has fully acknowledged its long history of using education as a weapon against tribes. An investigative report released by the U.S. Department of the Interior in May 2022 identified more than 400 Indian boarding schools, across dozens of states and former territories, as part of a system that directly targeted children “in the pursuit of a policy of cultural assimilation.”

The investigation found evidence of at least 53 burial sites for children. Schools renamed students with English names, cut their hair and punished them — through solitary confinement, flogging and withholding food — for speaking Native languages or practicing their traditional religions. Manual labor was a predominant part of school curricula, but often left graduates with few employable skills.

“We continue to see the evidence of this attempt to forcibly assimilate Indigenous people in the disparities that communities face,” U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, a citizen of the Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico, said at the time of the report’s release.

According to a 2019 national survey, close to half of American Indian and Alaska Native students reported knowing “nothing” or only “a little” about their cultural heritage. A majority — between 83 percent and 91 percent — of fourth and eighth graders in the survey said they could not speak or read in their heritage language, or reported knowing a few words or phrases at most. Other studies have found significantly higher child poverty rates, lower graduation rates and lower performance on standardized exams for Native students.

As the state of education for these children continued to languish, the U.S. Department of Education in 2018 pushed for the expansion of high-quality charter schools meant to serve Native communities, among other groups it deemed educationally disadvantaged and underserved by the existing charter sector. It later published, in partnership with the National Indian Education Association, a guide to help founders and supporters of new Native American charter schools.

“The word just hasn’t gotten out about the ability to do this,” said Todd Ziebarth, a senior vice president of state advocacy and support at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

In its tally of about 4,300 charter schools with at least one Native American student, the Alliance counts at least 16 schools specifically dedicated to Native American cultural affirmation. Only a handful offer classes taught in an Indigenous language.

Related: College tuition breaks for Indigenous students spread, but some tribes are left out

In one of those schools, about 90 miles northeast of Albuquerque, a dozen students walked into the front office of Kha’p’o Community School with stacks of books teetering in their hands.

They’d just cleaned the shelves at the Santa Clara Pueblo library, grabbing their favorite titles in Tewa, one of the languages spoken by the Pueblo people in New Mexico. The third graders juggled the books as they traversed a courtyard ringed by adobe houses-turned-classrooms, with teacher Paul Chavarria trailing them.

Back in their classroom, Chavarria, a first-year Tewa language teacher at Kha’p’o, commenced a lesson on the language. It’s a traditionally oral language, and speakers frown on any written form. Chavarria, though, scribbled a rough translation for “stone,” “trees” and “plants” on a whiteboard to help the students learn their heritage language.

For decades, the school (then known as Santa Clara Day School) was run by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Education, or BIE, which today operates 183 schools on 64 reservations. But in 2014, after the government-appointed principal barred a Tewa teacher from campus, tribal leaders took control of the school from the federal government, said Porter Swentzell, the school’s executive director and an enrolled member of the Pueblo. That same year, the school officially joined the NACA-inspired network as a K-6 charter school with a dual language immersion model. Today, it enrolls about 90 students. 

“In our hands, language is a sacred obligation. Our job is bigger than math or ELA,” Swentzell said.. “Our story doesn’t begin with us, and it certainly won’t end with us.”

Swentzell, who served on the school board when it shifted to tribal control, recalled a rocky start for Kha’p’o. The BIE withdrew the bulk of its support, he said. Teachers and staff had to reapply for their jobs, which no longer offered salaries at the federal level. In terms of school policies, technology systems, contracts and more, “we were starting from scratch,” Swentzell said.

Then, during the pandemic, Kha’p’o’s principal left, and enrollment plummeted from 120 students to 73, as multigenerational households kept their children at home. Half of the school’s teaching positions were unfilled, largely because of its remote location and lower salaries, according to Swentzell, who took over as head of school in 2022. 

Kha’p’o wasn’t the only school in the network to lose its leader during the pandemic. And each has since struggled to get academics and operations back on track, said Flying Earth, head of the charter network. The network has tried to help: In 2022, it created a fellowship program to nurture new leaders like Swentzell, a former professor at the Institute for American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. The fellows meet regularly on Zoom and gather in person once a year, along with a lead teacher or executive team member who could potentially become principal one day.

Related: How one Minneapolis university more than doubled its Native student graduation rate

Indeed, as the network has grown, it has confronted the difficulty of recreating the “NACA sauce” — as the flagship’s principal called it — in each new tribal community.

Six Directions Indigenous School opened the same year as Kha’p’o, in the western region of the state near the Navajo Nation and Zuni Reservation. Data from the New Mexico Public Education Department shows that 1 in 5 students at the charter school tested proficient in science. About 1 in 10 students perform on grade level in math, with a slightly better rate in reading, at 14 percent. 

Aside from academic problems, students at Six Directions have protested what they view as the school’s failure to fulfill its charter of serving Native youth. “It’s right there on all the signs: ‘This is an Indigenous school,’” said Caleb, a 14-year-old Hopi freshman. “This is supposed to be an opportunity for us to know our culture. These teachers weren’t doing that.”

At the start of the school year, in August, Caleb and other high schoolers at the K-12 campus staged an impromptu walkout to protest what they described as a revolving door of teachers hired from overseas and ongoing vacancies for language and culture classes. As of late fall, the entire school had just one core teacher, in science.

The walkout happened during Rebecca Niiha’s first week on the job as new head administrator of Six Directions. A former teacher who has worked on the Zuni and Navajo reservations, Niiha, who is Hopi, had admired Six Directions from afar. But she described finding its academic achievement and school climate as “degenerative” on day one.

After the walkout, two more teachers quit. Then the school’s current landlord announced it planned to sell the property, leaving Niiha unsure if she’d have to find a new location. In January, Six Directions received a warning from the state about its poor performance. 

The network’s support of struggling schools, like Six Directions, can only go so far. It does not directly authorize any charter and has limited ability to hold the schools accountable. 

Still, the network dispatches experts on finance, community engagement, student experience, curriculum and professional development. On a weekday last year, a team from the network met with Niiha to discuss options for the school’s location, training for teachers and an upcoming charter reauthorization. The network also recently partnered with AmeriCorps to place Indigenous educators in schools to offer classroom support, tutoring and mentoring, and has worked with individual tribes to certify teachers in heritage languages.

“Once a school’s created, we’re in it for the long haul together,” said Ben Calabaza, Kewa – Santa Domingo Pueblo and a spokesperson for the charter network.

Ultimately, the network wants to avoid being forced to close another of its member schools, as happened last year when Denver Public Schools shuttered the American Indian Academy. That school opened in fall 2020, at the height of the pandemic, and suffered from low enrollment and poor finances, according to the charter’s board of directors.

Flying Earth acknowledged the challenges of running a charter network that spans schools in several states. He said the charter model isn’t, on its own, a solution for poor educational outcomes for Native students. But he added that the NACA-inspired network has done what it promised: offered tribal communities a chance to have agency in building a dream school for their Native youth.

“How do we use the structures of education today, including charter schools, to lift up the genius that’s always been there, since time immemorial?” Flying Earth said, referring to the “genius” of traditional ways of knowing in Native communities. “The namesake school of NACA serves as an example of how one community did it.”

Many students, long after graduation, continue to contribute to that community. Some have returned as teachers and school staff. Emmet Yepa Jr., Jemez Pueblo, commuted two hours each way to attend NACA in downtown Albuquerque when he was in high school. Now, at 30, he sings every year at the school’s annual feast day — a traditional celebration among New Mexico pueblos.

“What attracted me to NACA was just the community,” he said. “They really emphasize your culture and holistic wellbeing.”

Yepa earned a Grammy Award as a child and later graduated from NACA as part of its inaugural class in 2012. From there, he went on to the University of New Mexico and now works for an Albuquerque nonprofit that includes land-based and outdoor education in civic leadership programs for young people.

Based on his positive experience, his siblings enrolled at NACA. His younger sister graduated  last year and now attends UNM, while his younger brother is a sixth grader.

“It’s hard to get into NACA now because there’s a waiting list,” Yepa said. “Thankfully he got a spot.”

This story about NACA 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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OAKLAND, Calif. — Teacher Yasmin Kudrolli sat on a low chair and lit a candle to start the morning meeting in her prekindergarten classroom in Oakland. Speaking quietly to her 4-year-old students, she picked one boy from the group to count his classmates: 22.

California mandates one adult for every 12 students in what it calls “transitional kindergarten,” so there’s an aide standing by the door, ready to take any child who needs to use the bathroom into the main building. Families from Oakland’s higher-income neighborhoods have been drawn to the transitional kindergarten program in her school, which had a waiting list at the beginning of the school year.

Across town, but in the same school district, teacher Alicia Simba leads 13 students, all 4-year-olds, in a breathing exercise in her classroom. Her 14th student is crying in the reading nook. She wants to go home.

“You’re going to be okay, sweetheart,” Simba says soothingly. She brings out a basket of percussion instruments and the crying child smiles broadly.

When a boy says he has to use the bathroom, Simba asks him to hold it until lunch, which is 30 minutes away. She should have an aide to take him, but she doesn’t. The school where she works can’t afford to hire extra staff due to very low enrollment.

It’s the second year of California’s uneven four-year rollout of universal transitional kindergarten, an ambitious, multi-billion dollar initiative to make high-quality education available to each of the state’s 4-year-olds, an estimated 400,000 children.

The plan is that the $2.7 billion program will be fully implemented by the 2025-26 school year across the nearly 900 districts in the state that include elementary grades. It will be the largest universal prekindergarten program in the country.

But like the children in these two classrooms — some of whom are ready for school and others who aren’t even potty-trained — some districts are on schedule and some are not.

There are teachers who should have aides, but don’t. There are districts, like rural Mendocino, where some transitional kindergarten classrooms don’t have attached bathrooms and where school playgrounds aren’t designed for 4-year-olds. Many districts can’t hire enough staff for afterschool programs to accommodate the new transitional kindergarten students, forcing working families to scramble for care. The state has not provided learning expectations for this new grade. Handling toileting issues for young pupils is a headache.

Related: Alabama aims for huge pre-K enrollment boost by 2025, despite pandemic setbacks

Some, but not all, of these kinks might be worked out by the time the program is fully implemented in 2025. The state is slowly increasing the number of children who are eligible based on birth month, an approach that has been confusing for parents but which buys districts time to set up appropriate spaces to meet demand. In the 2023-24 school year, children who will turn 5 by April 2, 2024, were able to enroll. This coming fall, children who have a fifth birthday by June 2, 2025, can enroll. By the 2025-26 school year, all children who are 4 years old by the beginning of the school year in September will be eligible. That year classroom ratios will also go down, requiring one adult for every 10 students.

By offering free, high-quality transitional kindergarten in public schools, California will go a long way to help level the playing field for children entering kindergarten, officials say. Regardless of income, families will have access to top-notch early schooling. Additionally, officials say the state’s massive investment will shine a light on the earliest years of education and make it more likely that districts will align curriculum from preschool through third grade.

That’s the hope. In the meantime, districts are figuring out how to serve this new, and quite different, age group without a unifying roadmap.

“There’s a new grade out there and no clear guidance yet from the state as to what should be covered in it,” said Alix Gallagher, Director of Strategic Partnerships for Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), based at Stanford University.

On the one hand, Gallagher said, the state could be criticized for not having clear guidance about what transitional kindergarten should look like when it started the expansion, especially since some districts had been offering transitional kindergarten for a decade before the statewide mandate.

“On the other hand,” Gallagher said, “making a new grade and requiring universal access is not something that is always politically available.”

In this case, politics favor early childhood advocates. They have a powerful ally in Gov. Gavin Newsom, who campaigned on his support for early learning and announced his intention to propose universal preschool, which includes transitional kindergarten, in a 2020 legislative master plan.

So ready or not, California’s transitional kindergarten classrooms are open for business.

There is little disagreement among early childhood advocates that California’s investment in early childhood education is good policy. High-quality transitional kindergarten is seen as a bridge between preschool and kindergarten. Done right, it gives children time to develop the emergent literacy, social-emotional and fine motor skills needed to succeed in kindergarten.

The bill Gov. Newsom signed in 2021 to expand transitional kindergarten to all districts calls specifically for high-quality programs. A 2017 study of California’s pre-expansion transitional kindergarten programs found that children who attended were better prepared for kindergarten than those who didn’t. But another, more recent, report found that early benefits did not lead to improved test scores in grades three and four.

That’s why it’s critical that districts ensure that their early-grade teachers collaborate to develop a vision for the grades from pre-kindergarten to third grade, so instruction and assessments are linked, said Steven Kellner, director of program sustainability and growth at California Education Partners. A 2021 report by the educational law firm Foresight Law and Policy notes that California schools are only held accountable for student learning outcomes, in the form of standardized test scores, from grades three and up.

“The statewide incentive system doesn’t promote districts to focus on the early grades,” Kellner said. “They’re untested on the state dashboard, and under No Child Left Behind, but they’re the most essential.”

Related: More schools are adding pre-K classrooms. But do principals know how to support them?

It’s significant, he said, that the state’s initiative requires that transitional kindergarten teachers be fully credentialed and have at least 24 units in early childhood education, childhood development or both. Essentially, California has added a new grade: Teachers working with 4-year-olds are now part of an elementary school’s teaching staff. Keller said that the presence of these new teachers, and students, in schools, may have the effect of linking high-quality early education to success at higher grades — a perspective that isn’t front-of-mind for many administrators.

“If you want kids to be reading at grade level in third grade, you can’t start that work in third grade,” Kellner said. “But if students reach third grade at grade level, they have an outstanding chance of maintaining that [rate of progress] all the way to graduation.”

The state has yet to release an update to its Preschool Learning Foundations, which will spell out what students are expected learn in transitional kindergarten classrooms. Experts say the best curriculum should be play-based. Districts are deciding for themselves which curriculum to use.

“Can students in TK learn their letters? Absolutely,” said Noemi Valdez, director of early childhood education in Oxnard School District. “But not necessarily by writing. They can tear tissue and use glue to paste the letters to paper.”

Oxnard, a district of about 14,000 students 60 miles from Los Angeles, began offering transitional kindergarten in 2017 when it became clear that most of the district’s kindergarteners weren’t ready for school. When the district’s first transitional kindergarten classrooms opened, some 60 percent of its kindergarteners had not been to preschool. Today, the district has more than 700 transitional kindergarten students.

Many transitional kindergarten activities are designed to help children develop their fine motor skills so they will be able to hold a pencil steady for writing, Valdez said. Stations where children can play with dough and sort through buckets of rice to find scattered paper clips will help students attain these skills and meet the goals of cutting with scissors on their own and drawing a straight line, she said.

“All of our centers are manipulated by the teacher for a certain goal or learning experience,” Valdez said. “Play-based is not a free-for-all. It is a context for learning.”

So, what does high-quality transitional kindergarten look like? California requires a transitional kindergarten classroom to have no more than 12 students with one teacher, or up to 24 students with one teacher and an aide. It shouldn’t be a combo class with kindergarten.

The room should have space for children to rotate through learning centers that might include tables with puzzles and manipulative toys, drawing and painting, musical instruments and building blocks. Objects should be labeled with their names in every language spoken by children in the class. Bathrooms used by kids in preschool, transitional kindergarten and kindergarten, the state says, should be accessible only to those students.

But for 4-year-olds, using bathrooms independently is often a major milestone.

Before Sara LaPietra’s son Theodore started transitional kindergarten in San Diego in 2022, LaPietra was worried he might not be completely ready to use the bathroom on his own. It turned out that he was ready, but the bathrooms themselves weren’t.

“It just seems like the state overlooked some details that seem obvious as a parent,” she said. “A 4-year-old needs to be able to reach the toilet and the paper towels.”

Toileting, it turns out, is a big issue in transitional kindergarten classrooms. Coming out of the social isolation many children experienced during the height of the pandemic, some 4-year-olds are developmentally behind. Some kids in transitional kindergarten aren’t fully potty trained, which leads to staffing issues. Kirstin Hills, director of early learning and care for the Mendocino County Office of Education, would like to see bathroom assistance added to the job description for transitional kindergarten teachers.

“When you work in a licensed child care center, you have to supervise the kids every minute they are in your care, including when they use the restroom,” Hills said. “In a TK-12 system, it’s not in the job description to assist with toileting. Same kids, but totally different approach.”

In transitional kindergarten classrooms where there is an aide, they can help, but whether the aide actually goes into the bathroom with children depends on district guidelines. The state has not weighed in. Simba, one of the Oakland teachers, had to hold a class meeting with her students recently to talk about how much toilet paper they are using, because the toilet was getting clogged. Without an aide, Simba has to let the children use the bathroom on their own. She can’t leave the classroom unattended.

“If they are toilet trained, who can take them to the bathroom?” said Simba, who has her master’s degree and is fully credentialed. “Who should take them?”

Related: Behind the findings of the Tennessee pre-K study that found negative effects for graduates

Access to care outside of school hours is another barrier to family participation in transitional kindergarten. In Fresno, for example, nearly 2,000 children attend transitional kindergarten and the district offers afterschool care at all school sites. But the district can’t keep up with demand, even after more than doubling staff.

“Addressing students on the waitlist [for afterschool programs] is ongoing work,” said Jeremy Ward, assistant superintendent of college and career readiness for Fresno Unified Schools. “As soon as we’re able to provide more staffing for an elementary school to take students off the waitlist, more step forward wanting access.”

Offering after-school care is a big priority in Fresno, because so many students come from working families where a full day of care is a necessity. The district has focused on reaching families of English-language learners to inform them about transitional kindergarten and to support their attendance, said Maria Ceballos Tapia, executive officer of the district’s Early Learning Department.

But there’s a staffing shortage for after-school programs. Although districts have money to pay for staff — in 2021 California allocated $4.6 billion for expanded learning opportunities, including afterschool and summer learning programs — in many communities there simply aren’t enough people applying for the jobs.

Willits Unified School District, in rural Mendocino County, puts transitional kindergarten students who need after care on a bus and takes them to a private daycare center for the last half of the day.

“Fast food restaurants are paying $20 an hour and we’re paying $17 or $18 an hour to work with kids,” said Kim McDougal, executive director of the YMCA’s child resource service in San Diego. “[The staffing shortage has] been severe post-Covid and it’s become even more challenging.”

In San Diego, the YMCA operates after-school programs at nearly 30 elementary schools. One site has the capacity to serve 150 students, McDougal said, but is only serving 85 because they can’t hire enough staff.

“After care is the real sticking point,” said Kellner, of California Education Partners. “If we’re looking for the kind of enrollment that Newsom and the legislature predicted, the key is after care. The good news is the funds were appropriated. Now it’s really about marshaling human capital.”

Universal transitional kindergarten will be a success, experts say, if classroom instruction is high-quality and if after-school programs are available to all families who need it. But other early childhood education advocates worry that successful transitional kindergarten programs will come at the expense of private child care and preschool.

California child care providers are operating at 50 to 80 percent of their enrollment capacity because families have taken their 4-year-olds out, said Dave Esbin, executive director of Californians for Quality Early Learning, a nonprofit that supports child care educators.

For years, child care providers have struggled to maintain staffing levels in daycare centers and preschools, Esbin said. Now, low enrollment of 4-year-olds is a bigger problem than retaining staff.

“The child care ecosystem was already very fragile coming out of Covid, and even before that,” Esbin said. “It’s a challenging business model. Now it’s really tipping the scale toward becoming a non-viable business model.”

By the 2025-26 school year, California plans to have transitional kindergarten programs available to all 400,000 of the state’s 4-year-olds.

Caring for infants requires one caregiver for every three babies, he said, while preschools have a 1-12 ratio of adults to children. Caring for preschoolers helps subsidize the more expensive infant care, so losing 4-year-olds could have a major impact.

School districts are also struggling to predict where 4-year-olds will go. While officials in districts like Oakland and Fresno study birth rates to anticipate which schools will have full transitional kindergarten classrooms, parents may be unaware that transitional kindergarten exists or are confused by the age requirement.

“It’s quite complicated for parents to know if their 4-year-olds are eligible,” said Kellner, “and for districts to know how many 4-year-olds will come. That’s why progress has been so uneven.”

Messaging about the program isn’t reaching everyone, or every group, equally. A recent survey conducted by Stanford University’s Center on Early Childhood found that most California families with young children are aware of free transitional kindergarten and plan on enrolling their children. But there are discrepancies: While just over 90 percent of surveyed middle- to upper-income families had heard of transitional kindergarten, only about 60 percent of lower-income parents knew about it.

“By 2025-26, when every 4-year-old is welcome,” said Kellner, “we’ll get a much better sense of how this will play out.”

Teachers of students who are enrolled in transitional kindergarten now say that it is making a positive difference, even amid the statewide challenges.

“You can tell the children who haven’t been to preschool. They aren’t used to the socializing and the routines,” said Kudrolli, one of the Oakland teachers. “Last year there was one boy who stood in the middle of the room for the first month and just soaked it all in, like ‘What happened? Where am I?’ By the end of the year he was completely adjusted.”

This story about transitional kindergarten 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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DERRY TOWNSHIP, Pa. — On a bright fall morning last year, a shimmering, human-sized Hershey’s Kiss with bright blue eyes greeted delighted children and their parents outside of the first early childhood education center launched by the Catherine Hershey Schools for Early Learning.

Inside the new nearly 51,000-square-foot facility, built to accommodate 150 students, children funneled into their bright, well-stocked classrooms. They were welcomed by teachers who had spent 12 months in paid professional development, unusual in a field where teacher training varies greatly. The young students, ranging in age from 6 weeks to 5 years, went about their day in well-stocked, spacious classrooms, playing and learning in small groups. The ample staff provided low student-to-teacher ratios and allowed for large amounts of individual attention.

The day featured visits to the center’s “STEM Garden,” where children could learn about gardening, nature and animals from several interactive displays that offer child-appropriate introduction to science, technology, engineering and math. The kids had abundant time to run, climb and pedal bikes in one of several outdoor play spaces. And they gathered with their classmates to enjoy several family-style meals and snacks, such as fresh fruit and vegetables, Southwest turkey chili and tuna casserole.

On paper, this child care program seems like it would cost parents tens of thousands of dollars a year, rivaling college tuition, as many early learning programs do. But here in picturesque Hershey, Derry Township’s best known community, it’s all free: the first brick and mortar of a new initiative cooked up by stewards of the Hershey billions.

The early learning center, located in a town that engenders Willy Wonka vibes with street names like “Chocolate Avenue,” street lights shaped like Hershey’s Kisses and a faint scent of sweetness that wafts through the air, is one of the most recent examples of billionaires launching child care programs.

Similar efforts to provide free early care and learning are sprinkled throughout the country, including “Montessori-inspired” preschools in six states funded by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, as well as several programs sponsored by hotel magnate Harris Rosen in Orlando, Florida. In Pennsylvania, the Hershey early learning program is one of what will ultimately be six free early childhood education centers around Pennsylvania, at a cost of $350 million, funded by the Milton Hershey School Trust. (Catherine Hershey Schools are a subsidiary of the Hershey-based residential Milton Hershey School.)

Related: Will the real Montessori please stand up?

In a country with exorbitantly priced child care and a lack of available, high-quality options, initiatives like these provide a new opportunity to see the effect that free or heavily subsidized high-quality child care — something that is already the norm in many other wealthy, developed nations — could have in America. The fact that robust federal child care funding legislation has repeatedly been killed by legislators means that foundation funding may be among the few — and the fastest — ways to launch and test certain programs or approaches to the early years.

The hope is that ultimately, private investment will help a community “invest in something and push it forward and … help it move to the point where it gets public attention,” as well as public funds, said Rena Large, program manager at the Early Childhood Funders Collaborative (ECFC), an organization that helps philanthropists invest in the early years.

In the past few years, private foundations have taken on an outsized role in early learning programs and systems, funding initiatives that raise staff compensation, support existing or new programs and provide emergency funds. Nationwide, the amount of grants aimed at early childhood has increased significantly, from $720.8 million between 2013 and 2015, to $1 billion between 2021 and 2023, according to data compiled by the collaborative from the nonprofit Candid’s philanthropy database. (Data is self-reported and categorized by funders.)

Within the early childhood collaborative, membership numbers have tripled since 2016. “The pandemic brought more people to the table,” said Shannon Rudisill, executive director of the funders collaborative. “There’s been a real blossoming of innovation.” Many of those funders are hopeful that their efforts will lead to federal investment, as well as “policy and systems change,” she added.

At the same time, philanthropic involvement in education overall, including in early learning, raises questions around best practices. Are philanthropists adequately considering the needs of communities? How can and should a philanthropy involve community and existing efforts in the field? Are philanthropies listening to research and experts as they go forth and create? Should philanthropies reinvent the wheel or invest in what already exists?

Some in the early childhood community have criticized Bezos’ efforts, for example, arguing the billionaire should have supported existing, research-backed early learning programs and systems rather than creating “Montessori-inspired” schools based on what he thought children needed. And there could be unintended downstream effects of philanthropic programming or influence. For example, Hershey’s salary and benefits package is comparable to that offered by local school district, which may draw child care employees away from local programs that pay less.

Related: Who should pay for preschool for the middle class?

Hershey’s latest endeavor came from a clear community need identified by officials at the early childhood center. In Hershey — a community about 95 miles west of Philadelphia — and surrounding areas, child care is scarce and poverty is high. Over the past decade, teachers at the nearby Milton Hershey School, a private K-12 boarding school, noticed their youngest students were coming in markedly behind previous cohorts.

“The needs of the children enrolling at 4 and 5 and 6 were more pronounced than they ever were before,” said Pete Gurt, president of the Milton Hershey School and Catherine Hershey Schools. They needed more support with social and emotional, academic, language and even life skills, like potty training.

“When you look at the landscape [of child care] in Pennsylvania, it’s no different than anywhere else. You’ve got high demand, short supply, and of the supply, not as many organizations would be identified as high quality,” he added.

When I visited the Hershey school in October, friends and colleagues delighted in the idea of chocolate billionaires funding child care:

“Do they give them chocolate all day long?” (No, they do not.)

“I hope they give them dental screenings, ha.” (They do, for free.)

“Is it secretly a training pipeline for future Hershey employees?” (Not that I could tell, although officials from Hershey’s hospitality division were in the school’s lobby one morning to provide career information for parents.)

In addition to the trained educators, low ratios and research-based curricula, the Catherine Hershey Schools offer free transportation to its building, free diapers and wipes in classrooms, occupational and speech therapy, an in-house nurse, community partnerships, a parent resource center with individual parent coaches, external evaluators and an in-house researcher from the University of Pittsburgh who is tracking the school’s outcomes to see if all of this is working.

I was mostly curious to see if free child care is as life-changing as many early childhood experts think it could be in America, especially for low-income families — Hershey sets income limits for families at 300 percent of the federal poverty level, or $77,460 for a family of three.

Nearly two weeks after the first center launched, I met with Tracey Orellana, the mother of two toddlers at the school. Orellana was delivering packages for Amazon one day when she saw the early learning center, then under construction. She had been considering putting her two youngest children in child care so her husband, who works nights, could rest during the day while she was out working. The potential to get free child care made the decision a no-brainer.

“We were juggling. We were juggling so much,” said Orellana, who also has two school-age daughters. At the time, the family had incurred a mountain of debt and was struggling to afford basic needs like groceries. Now that the toddlers are in child care at no cost to their family, Orellana has been able to increase her work hours to full time, adding to her income and stability. The family is now able to afford food and has almost caught up with bills.

The school “provides the opportunity to build a life for our kids and keep them out of whatever the situation may be, streets, poverty, keep them clothed, keep them fed, keep the electric on, the heat on,” she said. Her daughters also have opportunities they wouldn’t have at home, Orellana added, such as getting to ride bikes, play games and make new friends.

“It gives them a childhood,” Orellana said.

Related: Five elements of a good preschool  

Other parents say they’ve been able to access a higher quality of care for their children now that money isn’t a factor. Allyson Anderson, the single mother of a preschooler, had to return to her job as a therapist at a rehabilitation center a year after giving birth to her daughter, Lilah. When Anderson went back to work, she chose child care using a method familiar to many American parents: “Honestly, just an open space.”

The programs her daughter ended up in were mediocre, Anderson said. While caregivers generally kept Lilah safe, classrooms lacked structure and Anderson was disappointed with the low level of attention Lilah received during the day.

But she had few other options. During Lilah’s first few years, money was tight and Anderson was struggling to cover her mortgage, bills and child care, which cost “the same as a mortgage payment” each month.

At Hershey, Anderson is most impressed by the experience and training of teachers, as well as by the fact that there are three teachers in a classroom capped at 17 children, far lower than the state mandated ratio. “They have more teachers in the classroom. They can pay more individual attention to each kid,” Anderson said. She is no longer concerned about the level of care Lilah receives.  “I don’t really have to worry. I know she’s in good hands.”

Downstairs in a classroom for preschoolers, I watched 3-year-old Lilah, who was hard to miss in a bright red jumpsuit featuring one of her favorite characters (at that moment), the Grinch.

“Did you hear what happened to me this morning?” one of the teachers asked the children who sat, riveted, in front of her for morning circle time. “I woke up and I came downstairs and guess what?”

“What?” a child asked.

“My dog had chewed one of my shoes!”

Several children gasped.

“I was so upset because they’re my favorite shoes. So, I started crying. Then I was so mad at my dog, and I started yelling. Do you think I made a very good choice?”

“No,” the children said in low, disappointed voices.

“What do you think I should have done?”

“Take a deep breath,” one child suggested. The teacher nodded.

Related: How to bring more nature into preschool

While philanthropically-funded programs can benefit those lucky enough to access them, without receiving public funds or partnering with others to expand, experts caution that the reach of these programs will be limited and exist only in areas with willing funders.

Some philanthropically funded early childhood programs, like Educare, have developed a model of launching centers using philanthropic dollars, then pulling in public funding later, a more sustainable model for allowing replication, said Rudisill from the early childhood funders collaborative. Funding sources need to “fit together to solve the problem,” she said. “You could scoop up all the private philanthropy in America … and you cannot make up for the fact that in our country, we don’t fund an early care and education system.”

Senate Alexander, executive director of Catherine Hershey Schools for Early Learning, said he hopes the centers will ultimately become a model that can be replicated — once the program has the data to show it’s working to improve kindergarten readiness skills and outcomes for families.

“We thought about not wanting to fan out too far and too fast, we’re just starting this,” he said. “We want to get it right … we want to perfect the model.” In the meantime, the program’s first school has invited other local child care programs to attend training with Hershey staff in an effort to share resources and possibly expand their reach.

While Hershey’s funding is limited in scope to programs within the state of Pennsylvania, Alexander said replicating the model in its entirety in other parts of the country is not out of the question. That could bring free childcare and extensive resources to more children. All it will take are a few more willing billionaires.

This story was produced with support by the Spencer Education Journalism Fellowship at the Columbia Journalism School.

This story about Catherine Hershey Schools for Early 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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Next year will mark seven decades since the U.S. Supreme Court declared racially segregated public schools to be unconstitutional. Even the current Supreme Court’s conservatives have embraced that Brown vs. Board of Education decision.

Yet, 70 years after Brown, a key obstacle to racial equality in education continues to be white resistance to racial integration and to adequate funding for the education of Black and Latino children.

In the 1950s and 1960s, white resistance took the form of a revolt against integration and busing.

Private “white academies” — also known as segregation academies — sprang up to preserve the advantages held by the previously white-only public schools.

Today, one form of ongoing resistance is what scholars label “hoarding opportunities.” By using zoning and districting to create and perpetuate overwhelmingly white spaces and declining to share resources with Black and Latino children, white Americans limit the reach of integration and perpetuate inequality.

Related: Reckoning with Mississippi’s ‘segregation academies’

Not surprisingly, in 2022, the Government Accountability Office declared that school segregation continues unabated. The agency reported that even as the nation’s student population has diversified, 43 percent of its schools are segregated, and 18.5 million students, more than one-third of all the students in the country, are enrolled in highly segregated schools (75 percent or more of the students identify as a single race or ethnicity).

The Midwest — with 59 percent of all schools classified as segregated — is the leader in segregation.

The same GAO study showed that when new school districts are formed, they tend to be far more racially homogeneous than the districts they replace.

A key obstacle to racial equality in education continues to be white resistance.

Direct evidence of white resistance to racial equity in education can be seen in a survey experiment my co-authors and I conducted in 2021 that closely replicated findings from earlier periods. The study shows that white Americans continue to be reluctant to support increased funding for schools for Black children.

In our experiment, 552 white Americans were randomly assigned to one of two groups. The first group was asked: “Do you favor or oppose expanding funding for pre-kindergarten programs so that it is available for poor children nationwide? The $24 billion a year cost would be paid for by higher taxes.”

The second group was asked the same question, except that “poor children” was replaced by “poor Black children.”

About 75 percent of respondents in the first group said they favor spending tax dollars for such a program. However, in the group asked about “poor Black children,” just 68 percent were in favor. This is a significant gap in support.

The experiment suggests that among white Americans, support for public education funding for poor children is robust. But less so for poor Black children.

White resistance to desegregation and school funding for Black students has severe consequences for racial equality and the economy.

Related: OPINION: Our education system is not setting up students for success

Research published this month shows that Black students who attended Southern desegregated schools in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s experienced positive lifelong cognitive effects.

And data from the U.S. Department of Education still shows “substantial” racial gaps in reading and math competencies, high school graduation rates and, inevitably, college entry.

A recent Brookings report estimated that if the racial gap in education and employment had been eliminated, the U.S. GDP from 1990 to 2019 would have been $22.9 trillion larger. This would benefit us all.

The great promise of Brown was one of equal access to high-quality education. The hope was that income and other social disparities among white, Black and Latino people would dissipate over time. White resistance contributed to America not keeping this promise.

Policymakers, funders and education advocates must overcome white resistance to strengthen support for programs geared toward Black and Latino children.

This will help America’s quest to fulfill the promise of Brown. It’s time.

Alexandra Filindra is an associate professor of political science and psychology at the University of Illinois Chicago and a Public Voices Fellow through The OpEd Project. She is also the author of “Race, Rights and Rifles.”

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

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JACKSON, Miss. —  Each year, more than 30,000 third graders in Mississippi gear up to take a statewide reading test, part of the state’s Literacy-Based Promotion Act.

A little more than 75 percent of students passed the test on their first try earlier this year, according to the Mississippi Department of Education. They are among the thousands of children who started fourth grade this month.

But for Issiah and Tyler, two 9-year-olds from Jackson who did not pass the reading test either the first time around or during a retest, the question of what grade they would attend was a little more complicated. 

“Tyler did not enjoy reading at first. So, when he took the test the first time, he got tired of reading and just started clicking answers so he could finish,” said his mother, Kawanda Caldwell. Tyler did better when he took the test a second time, but still needed to work on his reading speed and comprehension, his mother said.

Tynisha Sumrall’s son, Issiah, who was diagnosed with autism, also took the test two times. Sumrall said she wishes her child’s school had done more to prepare him.

“Going into this test, I knew Issiah would need help because he has autism and some things are harder for him to process — instead of him writing the answers, he uses illustrations,” she said.

That need for help is where organizations like the Mississippi Children’s Museum step in.

The state allows students to take the test up to three times before school officials decide if they can be promoted to fourth grade with a “good cause exemption,” or held back for a year of intensive reading instruction. Two of those tests are given during the school year. The second retest is offered during the summer break.

To prepare students for that last chance to take the test, the museum, in partnership with Jackson Public Schools, held a Read to Succeed summer reading camp this June — the eighth time it has held the now-annual event.

The camp was held in the large open room of the museum’s education center, where excited children, separated into groups, called out answers to their teachers. Some of their activities included read-alouds, vocabulary reviews, and identifying parts of speech, such as verbs and adverbs.

One of the teachers was Connie Williams-May, a veteran reading and language arts teacher with Jackson Public Schools.

“I transitioned from the corporate world to use my talents to cater to students who looked like my children — who were receiving their education in that school district at the time,” said Williams-May, who is Black. During the camp, she uses all of her teaching skills to keep the students focused.

“I try to keep my students engaged in ways that they will remember,” Williams-May said. “The first day, we worked on ‘multiple meaning words’, so I brought them M&Ms candy. I might sing, rap or even do a cartwheel if that’s what it would take for them to comprehend what I teach.”

Related: Mississippi made the biggest leap in national test scores this year. Is this controversial law the reason why?

Mississippi’s elementary reading policies, signed into law in 2013, have drawn national attention. They include improved literacy training for elementary teachers and reading coaches for the state’s lowest performing elementary schools.

For decades, the state trailed the national average in reading scores, but by 2022, 63 percent of the state’s fourth graders scored at or above basic in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the Nation’s Report Card. That beat the national average of 61 percent last year.

But one of the more controversial aspects of the state’s reading initiative is its retention policy. In Jackson, a third of students did not pass the test during its initial administration this spring, compared to about 24 percent statewide.

Monique Ealey, the director of programs and education for the Mississippi Children’s Museum, co-founder of the reading camp, and a former first grade teacher, said that as a teacher in Jackson’s Public Schools she saw the struggles children experienced when the mandatory reading test started in 2015.

Ealey and other educators created the curriculum for the camp, aligning their materials with the state’s standards. Since the program began, the camp has added an interventionist and five additional teachers/support staff to provide more one-on-one help for the students, Ealey said. The students are also provided resources like take-home literacy kits which cover comprehension, vocabulary, and phonics. All the teachers in the museum’s program are licensed and have at least five years’ experience.

“After noticing the low scores and the number of students who didn’t pass, we as educators knew we had to come together and help,” Ealey said. “One way of doing that was partnering with our local school district and bringing in some of those third graders and just seeing if having them here for a week would make a difference,” she said.

In early 2020, Mississippi’s students switched to virtual learning and state testing was paused. That summer, the museum camp changed its focus from third-grade reading and became an in-person academic camp for reading and math for K-5 Jackson students.

“Even during the pandemic when the test wasn’t mandatory, we still held the camp, just in a different way,” Ealey said.

This year, students were referred to the summer camp by the principals of three nearby Jackson elementary schools — Boyd, Spann and McLeod.

The children chosen to participate were in need of just a little boost, said Delacy Bridges, the principal of McLeod Elementary, which both Tyler and Issiah attend.

“We wish that we could help and send all students; however, we don’t have that ability at the moment,” said Bridges.

Bridges said the reading coaches at her school have assisted teachers with hands-on tools and resources to improve their teaching abilities.

“The coaches that I had the privilege of working with have been very personable and have come into the school and have gone all in with our scholars and staff — they’re in the fight with us,” Bridges said. “They’ll come into the classrooms and teach or co-teach, perform pull-outs with teachers for specific training, and/or teach whole groups for the greater good.”

But, even with extra assistance through the school and through programs like the museum camp, some students will still be retained. Bridges said retaining students should not be looked at as failure but as an opportunity for them to excel and succeed.

“Retention gives us educators an opportunity to see what are the true deficits to fill those gaps,” she said. “Obviously sending them to the next grade level while they’re underperforming can harm the child and hinder their growth, and we don’t want that,” she said.

Related: How Mississippi made some of the biggest leaps in national test scores

Recent research suggests that Mississippi students who were held back end up outperforming their peers in language arts in later grades.

Researchers Kirsten Slungaard Mumma and Marcus Winters examined the progress of third graders in 2014-15 who came close to passing the test but fell short and were retained, and compared this to students that year who barely passed the test and were permitted to move on to fourth grade.

By sixth grade, the retained students scored higher on reading tests than their classmates who had just managed to pass the test. Being retained had no effect on absentee rates and retained students were no more likely than their non-retained peers to be referred for special education.

The retained students, however, showed no improvement in math. Even though the retention policy is intended to boost student literacy, Winters said that studies in other states have shown retained students improve in both areas, so the fact that Mississippi students did not is worth further research.

“Often kids that are struggling in reading are kids who are really struggling in math,” Winters said. “We’d expect to see some positive effects in math.”

The results of the study suggest that retention can be a tool for boosting reading achievement, but it has to be considered in the context of other state efforts, Winters said. Even the prospect of retention may have effects that researchers are still working to measure, he said — for example, by prompting educators to work harder so that fewer children will get to the point where holding them back is a possibility.

“It’s important for people to keep in mind that this is one piece of a broader set of efforts,” Winters said.

Related: This Mississippi district says these four strategies are helping their struggling readers

Such efforts include initiatives like the reading camp, which both Tyler and Issiah found fun and educational, according to their mothers.

Each day after camp, Tyler showed his mom all the new skills he learned — especially on homework that included vocabulary and other language learning, she said.

“The camp helped grow his confidence and made learning fun for him. He learned how to break down words and their meanings and when he asked questions, he got immediate answers and encouragement,” Caldwell said.

The camp also helped Tyler with his testing anxiety, his mother said. He was less anxious and more confident ahead of the final exam.

“My son felt like he could ask questions without the embarrassment that can come from asking questions during school,” Caldwell said. “He gained his confidence back.”

Issiah’s mother said the teachers were considerate and adjusted the lessons to accommodate his autism.

“Issiah would get upset at little mistakes, but they were able to calm him down and help him to understand what he was doing wrong and they worked with him through that,” Sumrall said.

After the reading camp, both boys took the comprehensive exam one last time before the 2023-24 school year. Tyler passed the exam and started fourth grade August 7.

“We’re super excited for the new school year; he has developed new study skills, thanks to the reading camp. We’re praying for an awesome school year!” Caldwell said.

Issiah, on the other hand, fell just short of passing the test on his third try. His mother is still happy he attended the camp.

“I know he tried his best because it was only by a few points that he missed it,” Sumrall said. “We plan on making sure he has all the help he needs to succeed for this following school year.”

This story about Mississippi reading tests 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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This podcast, Sold a Story, was produced by APM Reports and reprinted with permission.

There’s an idea about how children learn to read that’s held sway in schools for more than a generation – even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read.

In this new American Public Media podcast, host Emily Hanford investigates the influential authors who promote this idea and the company that sells their work. It’s an exposé of how educators came to believe in something that isn’t true and are now reckoning with the consequences – children harmed, money wasted, an education system upended.

Related: Reading Matters: See more Hechinger coverage of reading instruction

Across the country, school districts are dropping textbooks, state legislatures are going so far as to ban teaching methods, and everyone, it seems, is talking about “the science of reading.” Things have been changing since Sold a Story was released. In this bonus episode, we tell you about some of the changes and what we think about them. 

Bonus Episode 2: The Impact

This podcast was produced by APM Reports and reprinted with permission.

The post Nixed textbooks, bans on faulty methods: How reading instruction is changing appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Melissa Knapp is Harpeth Valley Elementary School’s only literacy coach. It’s her job to guide teachers on how to help struggling readers at the 600-student school. She’s always busy, but this year, Knapp is fielding more questions than usual.

Only a few months remain before Tennessee third-grade students take a state reading test — students who don’t pass could be held back a year. The retention policy is part of a state law passed in 2021 that was meant to boost long-lagging reading scores and stem pandemic learning losses.

State legislators have been scrambling to consider changes to the law, which in its current form could affect well over half of the state’s third graders. And the clock is ticking.

“Here at school, we’re trying to not put the pressure at all on the students, but I know our third grade teachers really feel it,” Knapp said.

This year, Harpeth Valley flagged just 12 third graders as needing extra reading support, but the requirements of the expansive Tennessee law could put far more students at risk of retention.

Third graders must now pass the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program, or TCAP, at the end of the year to avoid repeating third grade. The test has four grading levels: below expectations, approaching expectations, met expectations, or exceeded expectations. Students can be retained if they score in the lowest two categories — below, or approaching, expectations.

But some educators say the expectations Tennessee has set for its students are too high. Students could potentially score better on the TCAP than most of their state peers and still be placed in the “approaching expectations” category. If the current law had been in place last year, about 65 percent of third grade students in the state would have been at-risk of being held back a grade because they scored in two lowest categories.

“When we look at our students that are not quite hitting those third grade scores — that could be anywhere between the 41st and the 60th percentile,” said Amy Vagnier, assistant director of Maryville City Schools outside Knoxville. “Those aren’t the students that our third grade teachers would be naturally considering for retention.”

Almost three-quarters of Tennessee third graders are at risk of being held back a grade.

To prepare for the spring TCAP, students have already taken benchmark tests to gauge their chances of passing. Last fall, nearly 80 percent of third grade students in Metro Nashville Public Schools performed below the passing benchmark. Some of those students would be exempt from retention because of disabilities or limited English exposure. But because students will not know how they performed on the TCAP test until the results come back near the start of summer, the Nashville district is encouraging all of current third-graders to register for summer school before fourth grade as a precaution, drawing parent anger.

Knapp’s focus has never been just on third grade classes. Her intent has always been to help teachers with students who struggle the most. But now, more teachers are worried about third graders who get good grades in class but may miss the mark on the standardized test.

“We don’t just look at one assessment, which is going to be hard with the third grade retention law,” Knapp said. “Because it is just one assessment.”

Nationwide, students were hit hard by school disruptions caused by the pandemic. But students who are in third grade now were most affected. In reading, they lost more ground than students in grades four to eight. And though most students are starting to bounce back academically, third graders have been the slowest to rebound. A report from the education nonprofit NWEA suggests they’re struggling more than older students because the pandemic struck when they would have been learning foundational reading skills in kindergarten.

Tennessee’s reading retention law is trying to make up that lost ground. Although much of the law addresses how districts should run summer school programs, parents are upset about a section at the end that says third graders must be held back if they do not pass the TCAP. Some see the measure as a long overdue move toward raising literacy rates; critics say it’s punitive and will do more harm than good to schools that are still reeling from Covid-19.

“We got everybody’s attention. It kind of created a little bit of a firestorm,” said state Rep. Mark White, a co-sponsor of the law.

There are a few exceptions to the law’s retention requirements. In addition to English-language learners and students with disabilities, children on the cusp of meeting the standard may also avoid being held back if they regularly attend summer school and show ‘adequate growth’ — a term that is not defined in the law. Students can also take the test again before the next school year to try and achieve a passing grade.

Another provision allows students to move up a grade, as long as the school gives them tutoring for a full school year. Parents of students who score in the “approaching” category can also file an appeal, but the law does not state the criteria for granting an appeal.

Related: Third graders struggling the most to recover in reading after the pandemic

The retention law is not entirely new: A version has been on Tennessee’s books for more than a decade. But the older law left retention decisions up to districts.

Black, Hispanic and economically disadvantaged students are likely to be affected the most by the most recent version of the law. Parents and teachers have been packing churches, school board rooms and legislative sessions in protest.

In response, lawmakers filed nearly two dozen amendments to the new law. One of those amendments, sponsored by White, would allow districts to consider third graders’ scores on a second state-approved test, but only if the students scored closed to proficient on the TCAP and above the 50th percentile on the second test. The bill would also require students who are retained to receive tutoring.

Ultimately, White said, the state is not going to completely get rid of the law or leave third grade retention up to districts.

“We’re not going to go back to that,” White said. “I will fight that with everything we have, as well as the administration. We can’t go back to where we were because what we were doing is not working.”

Across the country, more than two dozen states have third grade reading laws. At least 19 of those require retention if a student doesn’t meet certain standards. Research says if students are behind in reading by the end of third grade, they are unlikely to ever catch up with their peers.

But in many states with retention laws, there are exemptions in place that reduce, sometimes enormously, the number of third grade students who are actually held back. For example, after South Carolina passed its own version of the law, less than 10 percent of the more than 4,000 third graders who failed the test were retained in the law’s first year.

The research on retention is mixed. There is a general consensus among educators that it often leads to negative outcomes for older students, but studies on retention in earlier grades, such as third grade, are more complicated.

Some studies indicate that students who are held back may have short-term behavioral problems while other studies link retention to academic gains that quickly fade out.

“We can’t go back to where we were, because what we were doing is not working.”

State Rep. Mark White

Recent studies have highlighted some positive outcomes. In Indiana, third grade students who were retained were more likely to perform better in math and language arts immediately after retention, and the improvements continued into middle school, according to a study published last year. A study of Florida’s third grade retention policy revealed that English language learners who were held back became proficient more quickly and were more likely to take advanced courses in middle and high school.

But districts that have had positive results when holding students back have not relied on retention alone to help students catch up. They have also invested heavily in literacy supports, such as intensive tutoring, said Umut Özek, a senior economist at RAND and co-author of the Florida study on retention and English language learners.

Proponents of reading retention laws also point to the success of Tennessee’s neighbor to the south, Mississippi.

Education leaders there have credited their third grade reading retention law with the state’s significant growth in reading scores in recent years. From 2017 to 2019, Mississippi had the highest jump in fourth grade reading scores in the nation.

But Mississippi’s law, unlike its Tennessee counterpart, affects students whose reading scores are very low, a much smaller group. The retention rate for Mississippi third graders in 2018-19 was about 10 percent.

Mississippi also provides $15 million every year in funds for tutoring, literacy coaches, reading interventionists, summer programs and individualized reading plans.

“This is not just a third grade teacher’s responsibility — it’s a K-3 effort, and all of those teachers are responsible for getting each of those children ready for third grade,” said Kymyona Burk, a senior policy expert at ExcelinEd who previously helped implement Mississippi’s Literacy-Based Promotion Act. “When we talk about a promotion/retention policy, the goal is prevention and intervention, and retention as a last resort.”

Related: Federal funds to combat pandemic learning loss don’t reflect need

But in Tennessee, it’s unclear how much money the state is providing to support its literacy law. White, who sponsored the retention bill, said the state legislature will likely approve funding needed for summer school programs, but the law says districts can also use already existing Temporary Aid for Needy Families funds to pay for costs associated with economically disadvantaged students.

“Some parts are funded, some parts are unfunded, and I do think it’s disproportionate based on your district,” said Breanna Sommers, a policy analyst with The Education Trust in Tennessee. “We know that, in some cases, maybe an entire third grade class is non-proficient, and [districts are] going to have to really foot the bill for a ton of that.”

“What we need is the interventions and not the retention piece of it.”

Lucy Kells, parent

While reading is a strong predictor of later school struggles, so is poverty. Third grade students who could read proficiently, but who came from low-income families, were still more likely to drop out of high school than students who had never lived in poverty and could not read as well, according to one study.

Even if schools use the best interventions at their disposal, they will never bridge the academic gaps between the lowest and highest achievers if there is not also a focus on fighting the effects of poverty, said Paul Reville, the former secretary of education for Massachusetts and a professor at Harvard University.

Issues such as exposure to violence, lack of health care and food and housing insecurity impede a child’s ability to learn at a high level. “Most governments are doing things in those areas, but what they’re doing is insufficient to be a strong enough intervention to have an effect on the rates at which students learn,” Reville said. “We have to do more.”

When parent Lucy Kells found out from the Nashville school district in December that her daughter might be at risk of retention despite having good grades, she started attending legislative meetings and community hearings to fight back against the law. Kells said she would homeschool her child before letting her be held back a year because of a test.

“We all want our children to be able to read, and we want them to be able to read by third grade, but what we need is the interventions and not the retention piece of it,” Kells said. “If we want to look at retention, it needs to be an earlier grade.”

But for some parents, the law is bringing long overdue attention to struggling schools.

“If school teachers are just now reacting to it, then I question whether or not it’s being taken seriously. Children have been behind in literacy for decades,” said Sonya Thomas, the co-founder of the parent advocacy group Nashville PROPEL. “This is not about retention; this is about holding districts accountable to ensure that children are taught how to read.”

Some 200 miles west of Nashville, in Memphis, about 1 in 3 children live in poverty. Roughly 77 percent of third grade students are at risk of being held back based on last year’s test scores. But some parents say they’re just now learning their children might be at risk.

Kennika Taylor, who has a third grade student in a charter school run by the Memphis Shelby County district, said she’s a hands-on parent. “I’m in the school. When I see something different, I’m trying to find out what’s going on. ‘Why did these grades drop? Why did this grade drop?’”

But Taylor said she hasn’t heard anything from the school about the state’s third grade reading retention law.

“They said she leveled out [on her reading test], but her reading grade went down from an A to a C. This is information I’m trying to figure out. Because I email, I call. Nobody emails or calls back,” Taylor said.

Related: Trial finds cheaper, quicker way to tutor young kids in reading

Sarah Carpenter, the executive director of the parent advocacy organization Memphis Lift, said she frequently encounters parents who say communication with their children’s schools has been poor. This summer, Memphis Lift is bringing in a literacy group, called All Memphis, to meet with parents and screen their children’s reading levels.

“Memphis Lift is focusing all its time, energy and resources toward early literacy,” Carpenter said. “I believe if you’ve got a child in pre-K, you’ve got them in kindergarten, you’ve got them in first grade — you know where those kids are [by third grade]. There shouldn’t be any talk about retention.”

With less than two months left in the school year and changes to the retention law still up in the air, Harpeth Valley Elementary is trying to prepare for next year. There’s much to be proud of at the school, its leaders said: A new reading curriculum has brought down the number of students identified as needing a high level of support. Retired teachers have been brought in to lead before- and afterschool tutoring.

“Our growth projections look great,” said principal Ann-Marie Gleason. But the state standardized test looms.

“We typically project how many teachers will need in the grade level based on how many kids are in the grade level before,” Gleason said. “How do you prepare for that when some of the testing results aren’t going to be available until July?”

This story about Tennessee state standards 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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As veteran educators, for years we have encountered students who struggled with decoding and reading comprehension, yet were continually pushed on to the next grade.

That led to questions: How did they get this far not knowing how to read? What reading program did they use in elementary school? What interventions are helping them catch up? Are parents aware that their child has reading challenges? Is a learning disability at play?

We couldn’t and can’t answer all of those questions, and that’s why we’re with the 650 teachers who drafted a letter to the Hechinger Report, naming frustrations with misguided reading instruction, urging literacy leaders to reckon with research and saying that they wished they had taught better.

So do we.

We know all too well the disparities that exist in education and how they impact students. The latest Nation’s Report Card shows downward academic trends in U.S. schools during the pandemic, especially for historically marginalized students.

Yet we’re encouraged by the growing push to use reading programs that explicitly teach phonics and rely on cohesive materials that build background knowledge and help students acquire new vocabulary — and by the national momentum to use curricula aligned to the science of reading.

We have no time to waste.

All of this made us think about two of our students — for the purposes of privacy, we will refer to them as Brandon and Jazmine.

Jessica worked with Brandon, a charismatic boy who loved Pokémon and Dragon Ball Z, in second and third grade. Brandon excelled in math, as long as it wasn’t a word problem, and loved science. He could participate in deep conversations, but was unable to write a complete sentence.

He often misspelled common sight words as well as his own name, and by the time Brandon was in third grade, he was still reading on a kindergarten level. Jessica worked tirelessly to break Brandon of the habit of relying on repetition and pictures to read the words on a page, but he struggled to remember sound patterns and rules just taught. And he had trouble seeing and hearing differences among letters.

Support grounded in the science of reading could have saved years of struggle.

During two years of working with Brandon, Jessica met with his parents often, trying to describe the difficulties he was having and how far behind he was falling. These conversations weren’t easy. Not only was there a language barrier (Brandon’s parents’ first language is Spanish), but they were reluctant to consider the idea that Brandon may have a learning disability.

Finally, after lots of resource hunting and nudging, Jessica was able to convince Brandon’s parents to try to get him evaluated for a language-based learning disability. But the system got in the way. Brandon’s parents had a hard time finding an appointment that wouldn’t require them to miss work.

They also couldn’t afford to pay for the evaluation, even with assistance. Although Jessica was confident Brandon had a language-based learning disability, she didn’t have the specialized knowledge to help him catch up and fill in the gaps of phonics instruction he clearly needed.

After fourth grade, Brandon changed schools. Jessica thinks about him often. Did he get the support he needed? Did he continue to fall further behind in middle school and high school? Do his new teachers have the knowledge to support him?

Related: NAACP targets a new civil rights issue — reading

Meanwhile, Megan met Jazmine as her ninth grade English teacher in East Harlem in 2009. Jazmine was friendly, well-liked by her peers and soft-spoken. She was a native Spanish speaker. The more Megan worked with Jazmine, the more she knew she needed support. Jazmine rarely raised her hand, her reading fluency was choppy and she scored poorly on assessments. Her academic records said Jazmine had worked hard through elementary and middle school, with good grades.

After months of working in the classroom and after school with Jazmine, Megan still had many unanswered questions about Jazmine’s educational background. Why had seemingly no interventions been made to support her difficulties? Had no one noticed that she was struggling?

Surprisingly, conversations with Jazmine’s mom revealed that she didn’t know her daughter needed extra support.

Megan’s interactions with the family were the first time any teacher had raised concerns about Jazmine’s ability to read fluently.

Jazmine worked tirelessly to complete her high school degree. After five years, she graduated, and recently earned her undergraduate degree after many more years of hard work.

Curriculum and instructional support grounded in the science of reading could have saved years of struggle for Brandon and Jazmine.

Change, hopefully, is on the way. We’re encouraged by efforts in New York City, where we live and work. Mayor Eric Adams, who has struggled with dyslexia, rolled out a plan earlier this year to screen all students for language-based disabilities like dyslexia and provide them with support. All teachers will get dyslexia training, and schools are also shifting to reading resources rooted in the science of reading.

Key questions remain, but we’re grateful for the increased attention to the research around literacy acquisition, largely due to the release of Emily Hanford’s illuminating “Sold a Story” podcast. There is a lot of work to do. But if we stay focused on what we know works, we can help kids become the readers and learners they’re all capable of becoming.

Megan Faughnan is a reading specialist in New York City. She works for Great Minds as an implementation leader.

Jessica Boisen was an instructional coach and special education teacher in New York City. She now works for Great Minds as an implementation leader. 

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

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BOSTON—The worry nagged at Roxann Harvey from the time her children were in kindergarten. They couldn’t name all their letters, much less equate them with sounds. Teachers offered tepid assurances (some kids take longer than others) and frustrating advice (you should expose them to books).

But Harvey worked in a library, so both there and at home, each child had shelves full of books. Teachers insisted, “‘They will catch up,’” Harvey recalls. “I started to wonder if I was being irrational.”

Yet as kindergarten and then first grade passed by, her children, a girl and her younger brother, two grades apart, never caught up. The gap only grew. For years, Harvey pushed the school to provide her children with help from a specialist trained in a multisensory reading program that helps struggling readers make connections between words and sounds—a scarce resource in many Boston public schools. The entreaties went nowhere. “Let’s give it time,” the teachers told her.

For both of her children, it wasn’t until second grade that teachers finally grew concerned. For her son, the blithe assurances gave way to ominous warnings: “We’ll all be lucky if one day he’s able to read an article in the newspaper,” one teacher told her.

Harvey had already dropped out of her neuroscience doctorate to advocate for her children. Now she took a new job closer to home, too. “Our whole life had to change just to be focused on school and making sure my kids learned how to read.”

An estimated 5 to 15 percent of the population has dyslexia, a disorder that hinders a person’s ability to read efficiently. 

An estimated 5 to 15 percent of the population has dyslexia, the most common language disability, which hinders a person’s ability to read words correctly and efficiently. But in Boston and countless other communities, Black and Latino families have a much harder time than their white peers accessing two key tools to literacy: an instructor trained in how best to teach struggling readers the connections between letters and sounds, or a private school focused on children with language disabilities. Nationally, these teachers and schools are scarce and coveted commodities, generally accessible only to those with time, money and experience navigating complicated, sometimes intransigent bureaucracies.

In recent years, some dyslexia activists across the country have joined forces with Black and Latino leaders distraught over unequal access—jointly positioning “the right to read” as a revived civil rights movement.

“A lot of people have started talking about dyslexia as a social justice issue,” said Nicole Patton-Terry, director of the Florida Center for Reading Research. “And you’re seeing them stand next to Black and brown folks who just want high quality education for their kids.”

Related: Want to help your child to receive better reading help in public school? It might cost $7,500

In Boston, data show that both in the city’s private and public schools, white students have greater access than Black or Latino students to the most intensive, effective reading supports. In the public system, campuses with larger white student populations tend to employ significantly more teachers trained in programs designed specifically for students having difficulty learning to read, according to a Washington Post/Hechinger Report analysis of previously unreleased data obtained through an open records request last spring.

At the handful of schools with a majority white population, there’s an average of 3.5 such specialists. Schools with between 15 and 50 percent white students have two specialists, on average. And schools where fewer than 15 percent of students are white — the district average — employ just one such trained professional on average.

“Our whole life had to change just to be focused on school and making sure my kids learned how to read.”

Roxann Harvey, Boston parent

Overall, 82 percent of white students (excluding those attending schools that don’t have any elementary grades) have access to at least one specialist at their school, compared to 70 percent of Latino students and 61 percent of Black students. More than half of white students attend schools with two specialists, compared to 36 percent of Black and Latino students.

Boston public school students who struggle with reading are hugely reliant on these specialists because the district, unlike many others, has no known language-based programs or schools focused on reading remediation, said Elizabeth McIntyre, senior counsel at the EdLaw Project in Boston. The district does, however, have many separate classrooms for kids with behavior or emotional issues.

“I think the system is set up to identify kids of color who struggle to read as having emotional impairments instead of getting the academic support they need,” McIntyre said.

Dozens of Boston public school educators are currently receiving training in a specialized approach to reading instruction, known as Orton-Gillingham, according to a written statement from a district spokesperson. The goal is that one educator from each school building complete the training, with the district allocating about $1.5 million to pay the full cost and provide a stipend. The district concedes that “this is still a goal” but added that most schools have at least identified an educator to complete the process.

The district declined to make officials available for interviews, but provided information in written statements. In a statement, new superintendent Mary Skipper said, “We’re responding to the need of the moment. One thing the pandemic revealed, in particular, is the further disparities in literacy achievement, which requires that we provide much more explicit evidence-based reading support for all students in every school.”

The focus is on shoring up capacity at “high-needs” schools, according to a district spokesperson. “Over the past two years, the district has been executing on a plan to dramatically improve the delivery of literacy instruction with an emphasis on racial equity,” the district said in a statement.

Nationally, there are persistent racial and socioeconomic gaps in reading performance. White eighth graders outperformed Black ones by 24 points and Hispanic eighth graders by 17 points, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, scores released in October. The reasons are multifaceted: Black and Hispanic students are more likely to attend schools with fewer resources and higher teacher turnover. They are more likely to come from low-income homes where getting basic needs met can interfere with school and learning. And they are less likely to have teachers from their racial and ethnic background, which numerous studies have shown depresses academic achievement.

In recent years, a growing number of experts, advocates and parents have argued that educators are often too quick to blame poor reading outcomes on families, particularly low-income ones, overlooking schools’ own complicity in perpetuating unequal access.

In a May report pushing for stronger reading curricula in New York City schools, as well as an amped-up safety net for those who struggle, leaders of Advocates for Children of New York said that for too long it has been left up to families to ensure their children become literate. “Blame for low literacy rates is placed not on the system itself, but on individual students and their families,” the report stated.

Boston’s uneven safety net reflects a pervasive national problem, said Resha Conroy, founder of the New York-based Dyslexia Alliance for Black Children. “We’ve long talked about book deserts — geographic locations where there isn’t a lot of access to books,” she said. “We can apply this to structured literacy desserts — places where if your child needs a reading intervention or support it’s very difficult to find. You have to go outside of your community.” (Structured literacy includes methodical and explicit instruction in how to build words out of letter combinations.)

The Bronx, with a larger share of Black and Latino residents than any other New York City borough, is one example of a structured literacy desert, she said. It’s the lone borough without an entire school focused on children with language-based learning disabilities. Conroy could find only one private tutor in the Bronx advertising expertise in an evidence-based program for helping struggling readers, compared to scores of such tutors in the other four boroughs.

Conroy became involved in racial equity in literacy after witnessing the treatment of her son, a Black male with dyslexia, by the public schools in New York’s Westchester County. “I saw low education expectations for my son, and I heard loaded language suggesting that it was OK for him not to read,” she said during a 2022 conference focused on literacy. “I saw the stage being set to make the failure to teach him to read acceptable.”

“A lot of people have started talking about dyslexia as a social justice issue.”

Nicole Patton-Terry, director, Florida Center for Reading Research

In Boston public schools, several forces contribute to the uneven distribution of reading specialists. Research has shown that white students are more likely than Black students to be classified as dyslexic, even after controlling for literacy skills and socioeconomic status. That diagnosis typically makes it easier to obtain school-based supports. White teachers may be less likely to suspect dyslexia or another reading problem in Black students because, on average, they hold lower expectations of Black students’ academic potential. When assessing the same Black student, white teachers put their odds of graduating from high school as significantly lower than Black teachers do, according to a 2016 study from Johns Hopkins University researchers. (In Boston public schools, about 59 percent of the teachers are white, compared to about 15 percent of students.)

Moreover, schools that enroll predominantly Black and Hispanic students often face multiple, simultaneous challenges that can make it harder to identify the children who need the most specialized reading help, said Tim Odegard, Chair of Excellence in Dyslexic Studies at Middle Tennessee State University. “You don’t have a context to find those kids who would need the most support, because you don’t have a good base system,” he said. In many of these schools, it’s “not exceptional to fail to read and spell, it’s the norm.”

Related: Leading dyslexia treatment isn’t a magic bullet, studies find, while other options show promise

Boston’s special education system is much more effective at assigning and attempting to remediate behavioral and emotional disabilities than reading problems, according to several special education advocates. “I would see everything addressed for some students except for what really needed to be addressed—which is the reading disability,” said Edith Bazile, who worked as a special education teacher and administrator in the district for 32 years. (The district does have a network of separate classrooms or strands, for students with learning disabilities, some of whom have dyslexia; “many teachers” in these classrooms have training in specialized reading approaches, according to the district spokesperson. But unlike many other districts, Boston does not advertise any of these programs as having an explicit focus on language and reading disabilities.)

District officials have vowed to improve reading instruction across the board. The district has been committed to phonics and the science of reading for years, it said in a statement, including investing since 2014 in Fundations, “an explicit and systemic phonics program” for students in kindergarten through third grade.

The district said it has also significantly expanded professional development in the science of reading, including training over 800 educators in LETRS (Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling) which, among other things, shows educators how students learn to “decode” letters on the page and form meaning from words.

Roxann Harvey suspects that multiple factors influenced how long it took her to get reading help for her children. Her daughter’s second-grade teacher finally endorsed time with a reading specialist, and the girl began 45 minutes of small group instruction with the specialist each day. Her son, however, had behavioral challenges in addition to academic ones, and the school focused overwhelmingly on the behavior. Small for his age, with consistently high energy, he would run out of classrooms and hide under tables or inside recycling bins. Nearly every day, school staff called Harvey, asking her to come pick him up early.

In second grade, school officials recommended transferring the boy, who has both autism and dyslexia, to a program exclusively for kids with disabilities — one which Harvey knew would be more focused on behavior than reading because that’s what exists in Boston public schools. (A state audit chastised the system for sending too many boys of color into such programs.) “By second grade, there was a really strong drive to push him out of [regular] school,” Harvey said. They complained that he wasn’t motivated to learn. “They were trying to build a track record of a ‘problem child.’”

She believed her son’s behavior would improve if he got some help with his reading. But the school, she said, refused to give him the same kind of extra help that her daughter now received. One time, Harvey rewrote the plan the school had produced outlining her son’s special needs and services (called an individualized education program), irate over inaccuracies and language that “blamed the child.”

None of her son’s evaluations suggested that he lacked the intellectual capacity to learn to read. The boy, a Pokémon aficionado, has an unusually strong curiosity and memory, reciting at request the backstory and special powers of the show’s creatures and amassing 600 of the show’s cards.

In the middle of that school year, Harvey’s efforts finally paid off. The same reading specialist who worked with her daughter volunteered to work with the boy during her lunch hour. To Harvey, it wasn’t a coincidence that the woman was one of few Black teachers at the school. She saw the child’s potential in a way that other teachers failed to. With the help of the sessions, Harvey’s son began to progress, learning new letters and sounds every week.

In Boston, families of color also have dramatically less access to private schools focused on reading remediation — and not just because they are less likely to be able to afford the tuition. The Carroll School and the Landmark School, the two largest and best known programs for Boston-area children with language disabilities, enroll just a handful of Black students, according to the most recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics. Both schools are in predominantly white Boston suburbs, though they enroll children from all over. At Carroll, 3 percent of the school’s 442 students were Black in the 2019-20 school year, and at Landmark, 4 percent of its students were Black that same year. Hispanic students constituted 7 percent and 3 percent of the schools’ populations, respectively. (Landmark said 16 percent of students identified as people of color last school year. Carroll said that in recent years, a quarter of the school’s new families have identified as people of color.)

Many of the students who attend Landmark get public assistance with tuition. They participate in what’s known as private placement: a federal guarantee that school districts must pay costs at a private school if they can’t meet the needs of a child with a disability. Families often have to spend thousands — even tens of thousands — on private evaluations to prove their child has a disability and then lawyers who can help build a case that the school district has failed to meet their needs.

Jonathan Reovan and his husband have spent more than $50,000 over the last 18 months to get their two Black adopted children—a 9-year-old girl and a 13-year-old boy who both have dyslexia, among other special needs—access to private placement and stronger reading services in Boston. The money has paid for a lawyer, an advocate who charges $150 per hour, neuropsychologists, and an intensive tutoring program for their daughter. The couple hopes to recoup some of it from the school district. But they’ve felt the financial strain in the meantime, especially since Reovan left his job as a financial analyst at Harvard four years ago in order to advocate full time for the children.

“We’ve drained the retirement funds — there’s practically nothing left,” he said. “It’s a terrible equity issue,” said Reovan. When it comes to private placement, “you have to pay to play.”

Even when a school district agrees to private placement, families often discover that they hardly have their pick of private schools. One Boston mother spent years fighting for private placement for her 11-year-old daughter, who is dyslexic, only to learn that the girl “didn’t fit the profile” at Landmark, according to the mother and McIntyre, who represented the family. School officials told the mother that her daughter had spatial reasoning challenges that they could not address but provided no other details, they added.

The parent eventually found a spot for her daughter last winter at Dearborn Academy, a school in a Boston suburb that serves children with dyslexia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, anxiety and other challenges. It’s been going well. But the mother described the search as a “horror show” — rife with the same inequities that Black families like hers face in the public system.

Related: Sent home early: lost learning in special education

Josh Clark, Landmark’s head of school, said it’s true that there’s “a specific profile of students that we think we serve well” at his school, and that includes many students with not just a language-based disability but ADHD. Black and Latino students are more likely on average, he added, to get diagnosed with multiple disabilities due to “an inherent bias in the referral and screening process.” And they are less likely on average to have the resources to access private placement. Both of those factors contribute to the racial disparities in enrollment. “I think that Landmark is earnest in its efforts, and we know that we should do more and will do more to address the vast need across the community.” Landmark is working with more than 50 public school districts, he said, to strengthen their language-based programs.

Reovan has experienced consistent challenges in finding language-focused private schools that will accept his kids. He applied last February for his daughter to attend the Carroll School, planning to pay the $59,000 tuition out of pocket initially, and then sue the school district to get reimbursed. But Carroll officials said the girl’s “cognitive profile” did not align with her peers and refused her admission, he said.

“They are very picky,” he said. “If you have anything beyond simple dyslexia, they tend to reject you.”

Carroll’s chief enrollment and financial assistance officer, Stacey Daniels, said student diversity is a top priority, but she added that the school groups students in cohorts with comparable cognitive, academic, and social-emotional backgrounds. For some applicants, they don’t have an appropriate cohort to put them in. “For the last six years, we have been truly, deeply focused on compositionally changing the student body,” she said. That includes allocating $3.6 million this year in financial aid and training the school’s educators on cultural bias in testing

In October, the Reovans made the difficult decision for Jonathan to move with the children to the family’s second home in rural New Hampshire. “We exhausted so many options for (our son) and we were met with such fierce resistance to helping (our daughter) just learn to read in Boston Public Schools,” Reovan wrote in an email. In Boston, both the public and private systems tried to steer the boy toward a school focused on behavior rather than reading, Reovan said. Meanwhile, the school district denied the family’s request for tutoring reimbursement for the girl, and Reovan has appealed to the Massachusetts Bureau of Special Education Appeals.

“Reading services are very hard to come by, and I’m not sure why,” he said. “Regardless of intentions, there is a lot of unconscious bias and a tendency to write kids off.”

Both of Harvey’s children made steady progress once they got specialized, small group help. Yet the struggle hardly ended. Harvey, who now serves as chair of the Boston Special Education Parent Advisory Council, has had to push back several times against attempts to curtail her kids’ services. “At points in meetings, I heard, ‘They seem to be doing well. I don’t think we need this anymore.’ And I had to be very clear about the fact that they still weren’t reading on grade level.” 

Last school year, Harvey’s daughter passed out of the final level in the Wilson Reading System program, and she’s closing in on grade level reading skills: As a starting ninth grader, she tests at the seventh-grade level. And she loves it: Harvey said she sometimes reminds her daughter not to read while she walks, so she doesn’t trip.

Although she never had the money to pay for private tutoring for her children, Harvey considers herself lucky. She came into her battle with the city’s education bureaucracy with assets that not every Boston public school parent possesses: an extensive education herself, and the flexibility to advocate several hours a day when she needed to. And although, at 12, her son prefers the Dog Man books, he could read a newspaper if he wanted to.

Carr reported this story, part of ongoing coverage on equity in access to reading supports, as an O’Brien Fellow in Public Service Journalism at Marquette University in 2021-22.

This story about dyslexia 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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I am a dad of two teenage sons, the only ones in their respective grades without smartphones. Their images — and “cool factor” — take hits because I won’t let them have these digital drugs.

As a psychologist with decades of experience in the field of addiction, I tell my kids, “I care about your brains, not your images.” Contemptuous eye rolls and sulky withdrawals predictably follow.

Today’s teens spend up to nine hours a day on screens or smartphones, while children ages 8 to 12 are on for four to six hours, according to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Many teens spend more time on screens than they do sleeping, and some even acknowledge they use them too much.

As a practicing clinician, I know that attachment is the most critical ingredient in “healthy” development. Children’s attachment grows in response to where their attention goes. Our 86 billion neurons develop according to the inputs they receive, and neurobiological pathways are refined and mapped out during the teen years.

This is especially alarming given the amount of time teens are spending on their devices.

There’s no shortage of recent and frightening stories and studies about the state of our children’s mental health, from degraded attention spans and poor impulse control to decreases in empathy and significant rises in depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation.

The U.S. Surgeon General declared a national crisis in mental health last December. The correlation between declining mental health and increasing smartphone ownership isn’t lost on me.

The excessive use of digital devices could render an entire generation neurobiologically incapable, as adults, of reading novels such as Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” or processing complex issues that require sustained attention.

Not lazy but incapable— a horrifying calculus.

Our kids are learning to connect through digital devices, an unprecedented phenomenon — and one I’m concerned is radically altering the arc of our ancient brain development.

The alarming state of adolescent mental health is the most glaring symptom, and it fortifies my firewall against giving my kids smartphones.

Related: Proof Points: 10,000 student study points to kindergarteners who may become heavy screen users

About five years ago, as I walked my then-elementary school kids to school, I was bumped and run into by upper-school students glued to their phones — their consciousness taken hostage, essentially. The external “real” world could not compete with the hypnotic lure of their phones. I was pissed, then worried.

I was already aware of concerns around teens’ social media use, but this struck me as very different. It was clear to me that the devices had become overstimulating portals, intoxicating rabbit holes that kids cannot help but go down. Social media and other platforms are tunnels.

Their smartphones are, in essence, digital drugs. Tech and social media companies excel at marketing every advancement related to them as positive and cool must-haves. And because information and data are critical to human survival, it’s understandable that people crave instant access to the millions of bits of information that tech/smartphones offer.

But there are costs. The devices aren’t neutral. The devices want something from us all the time — first and foremost, our undivided attention.

Our kids are learning to connect through digital devices, an unprecedented phenomenon — and one I’m concerned is radically altering the arc of our ancient brain development.

I don’t let my kids gamble or watch violence because they would be riveted and absorbed, their brains electrified by dopamine dumps. Intuitively, I understand that this is both overwhelming and dangerous, and why children’s brains are incapable of integrating such stimulation in healthy ways.

Smartphones, in my view, fall into this same category.

For the past three years, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has conducted longitudinal scientific research focused on the neurobiological effects of devices on brain development, funded by my family’s foundation, through the Winston National Center on Technology Use, Brain and Psychological Development.

We are creating tools for parents, caregivers and teens to make better-informed choices about how they interact with technology and social media.

Our research examines how technology use may be associated with changes in adolescent brain and social development, including increased risk for behavioral health disorders such as depression and anxiety.

In addition to contributing to our research, the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at UNC-Chapel Hill teaches the undergraduate course Social Media, Technology, and the Adolescent Brain, which is consistently one of the most popular courses in the department. The course has sparked a broad community conversation on campus about the perils of device overuse.

More needs to be done to protect the emotional and cognitive development of our children. Tech companies have hidden destructive and addictive elements within smartphones, making them Trojan horses that kids now carry around in their pockets.

Related: Dealing with digital distraction

That’s why we need to raise the alarm with parents, alert them to the dangers of these devices and educate them about their children’s vulnerabilities and about how tech companies are building their bottom lines at the cost of our children’s future.

In a very short period of time, smartphones have been woven into the fabric of almost everyone’s lives. Managed responsibly, they are incredible tools. At the same time, recognizing our children’s natural curiosity and inclination toward novelty makes it even more imperative that we protect their pathways to healthy development.

If we are to conquer this deeply troubling trend, we must do more than recognize the problem. Parents need resources and support to help them navigate the path to appropriate device use for their children.

Like the guidance we have on the safe operation of vehicles or even which movies are developmentally appropriate for our children to watch, we should have protocols in place to help parents make the right decisions for how to introduce and manage our children’s technology use.

Age restrictions for smartphones and even guidance on time limits are good places to start. In fact, that movement has already begun with efforts such as Wait Until 8th, which encourages parents and guardians to delay smartphone purchases for kids until eighth grade.

Parents — and, ultimately, legislators — must act to keep this digital drug out of the hands of young kids who aren’t capable of responsibly managing it.

Jim Winston Jr., a practicing psychologist with extensive experience in treating addiction, is the founder and chairman of the Winston Family Initiative in North Carolina.

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

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