The new Title IX rule, which goes into effect Aug. 1, requires districts to promptly investigate complaints, even if they occur off school grounds, and to extend those protections to LGBTQ students. Districts must also train school employees about their obligations to address sex discrimination.

”These regulations make crystal clear that everyone can access schools that are safe, welcoming and that respect their rights,” said Education Secretary Miguel Cardona. “Title IX’s prohibition of sex discrimination includes all forms of sex discrimination. No one should have to give up their dreams of attending or finishing school because they’re pregnant. No one should face bullying or discrimination just because of who they are or who they love.”

Left unresolved, however, is a second, and more controversial, rule that applies to transgender students’ participation in school sports, which some observers speculate the administration is until after the election.

That did not dampen partisan objections to what they did include, which is expected to fuel a new wave of litigation. Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx, who chairs the House education committee, questioned the inclusion of transgender students under Title IX and said the rewrite rolls back protections for women.

“This final rule dumps kerosene on the already raging fire that is Democrats’ contemptuous culture war that aims to radically redefine sex and gender,” she said in a statement. “The rule also undermines existing due process rights, placing students and institutions in legal jeopardy and again undermining the protections Title IX is intended to provide.”

President Joe Biden pledged to overhaul Title IX even before he won the 2020 election, when he said that prevents discrimination against LGBTQ employees on the job guarantees students the same protections at school. But it took over two years for the department to release an initial draft describing its new approach. A proposed rule concerning trans students’ participation in sports followed in early 2023, but has yet to be sent to the White House for final review.

Officials have attributed the delays on both rules to the hundreds of thousands of comments it received from the public. But there’s also been intense backlash from Republicans, who say allowing transgender women to compete on teams consistent with their gender identity upends the original goal of Title IX. 

Advocates and in Congress argued the delay left victims at risk and discouraged some students from reporting incidents because they thought schools wouldn’t respond.

“For many students, a weakened Title IX harassment rule is all they’ve known through their college and high school experience,” said Shiwali Patel, a senior counsel at the National Women’s Law Center. “Extremist politicians have increasingly attacked the rights of LGBTQI+ students, especially, transgender, nonbinary, and intersex students, attempting to codify discrimination through legislation and other policies.”  

On Friday, advocates welcomed the end of this first phase. Even so, many school districts might not be prepared to take the proactive approach that the rule requires. 

“It’s jaw-dropping to see things are still lax and so backwards,” said Sandra Hodgin, founder and CEO of Title IX Consulting Group, a Los Angeles-based firm. Some districts, she said, have outdated policies or don’t inform students how to file a grievance. 

Districts will have to act fast, she said, to ensure they have a Title IX coordinator who is up to speed on the new requirements and can “help them navigate all of it.” She noted a that found Liberty University, a Christian college, discouraged students from reporting sexual violence. “K-12 systems are going to be looking at things like that and hopefully say to themselves, ‘We don’t want to be that example.’ ”

In addition to requiring districts to promptly investigate any “sex-based hostile environment” in education programs both in and outside of school, the revised rule also removes the requirement for live hearings with cross-examination for sexual misconduct investigations. Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos added to protect the due process rights of male students who argued they’d been unfairly accused of harassment or misconduct. 

Catherine Lhamon, assistant secretary of education for civil rights, dismissively noted the 2020 rule required schools to be “no more than not deliberately indifferent” to harassment.

The Biden administration has expected districts to comply with its applying Title IX protections to LGBTQ students even as Republican states filed litigation challenging that interpretation. Twenty-two states sued in 2022 over guidance from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees school nutrition, stating that programs receiving federal funds must follow or risk being reported to the Department of Justice. 

Max Eden, a research fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said he expects “lawsuits from state attorneys general within days, or at longest weeks.” Some, he said, will challenge the administration’s decision to extend Title IX’s protections to include gender identity.  the rule could violate free speech if an offensive comment or a teacher’s refusal to use a preferred pronoun, for example, is perceived as discrimination. In a Thursday call with reporters, a senior administration official said if such a situation “limits or denies [a student’s] access to education,” the person’s behavior could create a hostile environment.

Sasha Buchert, a senior attorney for Lambda Legal, an LGBTQ advocacy organization, however, said fear of litigation shouldn’t prevent school officials from following the law.

“If I was their council, I would remind them that they’re on the wrong side of the law if they decide to discriminate against LGBTQ students,” she said. “If you want to protect your school against liability, the smart thing to do would be to not choose to discriminate.” 

In a decision this week, a federal appeals court agreed with the Biden administration’s interpretation that Title IX protections for LGBTQ students can apply to athletics. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit blocked West Virginia’s law banning trans students from playing on teams consistent with their gender identity.

focuses on Becky Pepper Jackson, a 13-year-old transgender girl and middle school track athlete, who has identified as a girl since third grade. 

Last year, West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrissey asked the U.S. Supreme Court to allow the state’s Save Women’s Sports Act to go into effect, but the court put it on hold. Buchert said she wouldn’t be surprised if Morrissey appeals the Fourth Circuit ruling as well.

In its Title IX draft for sports, the education department attempted to carve out a compromise, avoiding an across-the-board inclusion of trans students on teams consistent with their gender identity. But it didn’t also didn’t ban such policies outright. The draft states that schools and colleges could limit transgender students’ participation in specific sports — particularly at the more competitive high school and college levels. But in the elementary grades, and likely into middle school, most students would be able to play sports consistent with their gender identity.

Buckert said advocates hope the department will “issue a strong rule that provides clarity about where the department stands on those issues.”

, the Republican presidential nominee, has said he won’t “allow men in women’s sports.” If he wins, some observers wouldn’t be surprised to see him rescind any attempt by the Biden administration to allow trans students to compete in sports consistent with their gender identity. 

“We’re looking at a very polarized Title IX conversation,” she said.

In my nearly 20 years of experience in education, working closely with hundreds of teachers and schools, I’ve seen the need for these kinds of reforms up close. As president of , I’ve seen that recruiting and preparing talented, effective, diverse teachers is possible. We prepare close to 1,500 new teachers per year for New York’s public schools. Seventy percent of our graduate students are people of color — a crucial group of new teachers, mentors and role models for the state’s children, the majority of whom are kids of color. With some thoughtful additions, the approaches Hochul and Cardona put forth could not only increase the number of teachers entering the profession, but also address longstanding challenges to diversifying those leading the nation’s classrooms. To do this means focusing on three areas: support, cost and removal of barriers.

Support. Teaching residency programs, like those in medicine, provide new practitioners with hands-on training for one year, working with a mentor to develop the knowledge, skills and mindsets of great teachers. Residencies show with respect to the diversity of the candidates they attract, the retention of those teachers in the profession and the learning outcomes of their students. 

In New York City, for example, is a residency program providing paraprofessionals, teacher aides and parent coordinators with a pathway to become teachers. Nearly all graduates of this “grow your own” approach are people of color, and 100% are already committed education professionals in the communities in which they will ultimately serve as teachers.

New teachers, particularly educators of color joining a predominantly white profession, also need peer and mentor support. In partnership with the Georgia Power Foundation, Relay launched an affinity group for Black male teachers that is in its second enthusiastic year. Participants have called it a sacred space for bonding with others who share their experiences and tackling common challenges. In his research on Black male teacher candidates, , assistant professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley has found that such affinity groups are invaluable for holding candid conversations, building community and solving problems. Also known as in the corporate world, such cohorts are associated with increased job and satisfaction. 

Cost. Teachers should be paid more, which both Hochul’s plan and Cardona’s call to action recognize. But there are also other ways to ease teachers’ financial burdens — for example, by lowering or eliminating the cost of training to ensure they aren’t starting their career with unrealistic debt. Lowering the cost of entry can be achieved in many ways. The New York City Department of Education subsidizes participants’ tuition in teacher residency programs, as do many charter schools. Tennessee is fully funding tuition for its “grow your own” teacher prep programs, and Atlanta Public Schools is utilizing a grant to cover tuition for men of color who are currently special education paraprofessionals.

Beyond supporting the cost of schooling, districts can prioritize embedding their residency programs into their funding model for the long run. For example, Colonial School District in Delaware has worked with the paraprofessionals union to build a pathway to teaching that allows them to maintain their full salary and benefits. Previously, paraprofessionals who wanted to enter the residency program had to resign and take on a different position at lower pay.

Eliminate barriers. Finally, it is essential to remove that keep otherwise successful teacher candidates from entering the field. While high standards for teachers’ knowledge and skills must be upheld, there is evidence that the current gate-keeping systems don’t do this in a way that predicts student success in learning. Moving to multiple pathways to show content expertise, reducing emphasis on tests that don’t correlate with academic achievement () and examining children’s experiences and outcomes with early-career teachers are all vast improvements.

Research and our own experience at Relay prove that there are promising ways to do this work and make an impact. Recruiting and retaining 180,000 teachers will take more than the three solutions I propose here, but they would be a good start. The country can’t afford to throw people into the classroom and hope for the best, bankrupt hardworking teachers or leave promising candidates out in the cold because of bureaucratic and invalid gateways. Prioritizing teachers’ needs can make schools places where they want to work. And approaching the work in this way can also help diversify the profession to better serve all students.

Dr. Mayme Hostetter is president of Relay Graduate School of Education.

With a of over 1 million daily COVID cases reported on Monday and more than this week temporarily closed or pivoted to remote instruction, educators and families are being thrust back into the existential struggle over keeping schools open.

The second half of the 2021-22 school year began with a growing list of shutdowns, including major urban districts such as Atlanta, Milwaukee and Cleveland. In Philadelphia, leaders on Monday night announced that on Tuesday, though stopped short of shutting down the entire district.

Other top school systems such as New York City and Chicago have moved forward with plans to reopen in person, but have hit snags along the way: In New York, nearly a third of students did not show up for classes on Monday, and in Chicago, a late night vote Tuesday held by the teachers union demanding to teach remotely Wednesday.

The reactions from weary parents ranged widely. “It’s chaos,” National Parents Union President Keri Rodrigues The New York Times, pointing out that when schools nix plans for in-person learning at the final hour, it leaves families scrambling for child care options. 

On the other hand, with the Omicron variant rampant post-holiday, Cleveland parent Tiffany Rossman was glad schools stayed closed to start the new year. She and her teenage daughter both tested positive for the virus in December, and she fell quite ill despite her vaccination, she told The 74. The mother worried that opening classrooms after the holidays could lead to infected kids spreading the virus.

Rossman acknowledged, however, that “if I had small children and needed to go into the office then I don’t know what I would do.”

While a handful of school systems had planned before the winter break to be remote for short stints in January or to close for testing, the vast majority of announcements were made last minute as record-high COVID case rates came into view. Yonkers Public Schools started classes this week remotely after of students who took rapid tests over the holidays were COVID positive. Detroit announced that school would be closed Monday through Wednesday after rapid testing revealed a positivity rate. Districts are open for in-person learning in and , but officials there had to shut down eight and 12 school buildings, respectively, for lack of staff.

“A lot of it was last second, and it continues to be,” Dennis Roche, co-founder of the K-12 data tracker Burbio, told The 74.

The , and school systems are exceptions to the trend, he noted, as each district had planned before the holidays to take a handful of days in the new year for students to receive rapid tests. As it currently stands, classrooms are set to open in all three districts in the coming days. Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest, does not re-open until Jan. 10, but has said it intends to test all students before it does.

Over the weekend, Roche watched Burbio’s jump from 1,591 to 2,181, and again on Tuesday to 3,556. Shutdowns were concentrated in the Northeast and Great Lakes regions, where current COVID rates are among the .

Amid the chaos, the Biden administration has maintained that schools should keep their doors open wherever possible and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention extended booster eligibility to two separate groups of children this week.

“I believe schools should remain open,” the president said during a on the current Omicron surge. And in fact, despite some conspicuous closures, the vast majority of the nation’s roughly 98,000 public schools have returned from the holiday break in person. 

Hedging slightly in a conversation on Fox News Sunday, U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona added: “We recognize there may be some bumps in the road, especially this upcoming week when superintendents, who are working really hard across the country, are getting calls saying that some of their schools may have 5 to 10 percent of their staff not available.”

“For anyone who has gone remote, we want to similarly keep on engaging with them, and make sure that they can come back as quickly as they can,” a senior White House official told The 74 Tuesday.

Federal policymakers underscore that districts can draw on American Rescue Plan dollars as well as multiple other devoted to helping K-12 facilities stave off COVID through purchasing tests and other mitigation measures.

To help schools stay open, the CDC in December endorsed “test-to-stay” practices allowing students and staff who may have been exposed to the virus to remain in the classroom if they test negative for COVID. 

The federal agency also took the controversial step on Dec. 27 of reducing its recommended quarantine timeline for infected individuals, including teachers and students, from 10 to five days. The move divided many health experts, leaving numerous observers to wonder whether the CDC was after .

But several school officials appreciated the chance for teachers and students to return more quickly to the buildings.

“Anything that will help the schools to stay open is welcome,” Dan Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators, told The 74.

Nationwide, pediatric COVID and are at a pandemic high. But top infectious disease experts say that the vast majority of serious infections are among unvaccinated youth. Under a quarter of children ages 5 to 11 have received a single dose of the COVID vaccine, and just over half of adolescents ages 12 to 17 have been fully immunized, according to data published by the .

​​“Most of our pediatric population is still undervaccinated,” said Kristina Deeter, a physician at Renown Children’s Hospital in Reno, Nevada. Even though the Omicron variant has generated more breakthrough infections, the pediatrician assured that the vaccines continue to be successful at their key function: preventing severe illness and death.

“We’re still so much safer having received the vaccine,” she told The 74.

For youth who have received both shots and are ready for a booster, the Food and Drug Administration on Monday and, on Tuesday, the CDC recommended an extra shot for , five months after the initial two-dose series.

Amid the widespread concern and flurry of new pandemic policies, a bit of good news regarding the giant spike in cases also surfaced on Sunday. In South Africa, where the Omicron variant was first identified, the surge in infections driven by the hyper-transmissible strain has , giving health experts hope that the U.S may follow a similar course in the weeks to come.

Still, other mutations of the virus may arise further down the road, Deeter pointed out. The only long-term path to move beyond the pandemic, she said, is getting immunized.

“If there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, it’s going to come through vaccination.”

Parents and community members know Kimberly Robel, principal of San Bernardino’s North Verdemont Elementary School, as an unshakably enthusiastic leader. The administrator gives off “a cheerleader energy because she’s just so gung-ho, rah-rah,” said district spokesperson Maria Garcia.

But last week, Robel was anxious.

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She was planning for her school’s Aug. 2 reopening, when the full 516-student body would return in person to classrooms. For the entirety of the past school year, the 47,000-student San Bernardino City Unified School District had remained fully virtual with no face-to-face instruction. Aside from a cohort of young people who participated in a three-week summer program at Robel’s elementary school in July, none of her learners had stepped foot inside the building since March 2020.

Fears replayed in her head like a song she couldn’t quite get out.

“We worry about our kids getting sick, worry about adults getting sick,” Robel told The 74, wondering, “Is the Delta variant going to devastate us again? Are we going to have to shut down again?”

Yet come Monday, the school was again filled with the long-awaited buzz of students, and to the great relief of many, the day went off without a hitch, according to Garcia. Across the district, some and North Verdemont reported no COVID cases.

“It’s something that we have missed so much,” said Robel. “The little faces and eyes smiling over the mask … it just makes your heart kind of explode.”

After a summer that brought renewed pandemic worries amid a surge in Delta variant infections, and with children under 12 not yet eligible for coronavirus vaccines, the return to full-time, in-person learning that appeared all but inevitable this spring as schools embraced reopening is now shadowed by doubt.

Hallways across the country are beginning to once again echo with excited conversations and the squeak of new sneakers. Among the first to go back are districts like San Bernardino and some others that took a conservative approach to COVID mitigation by remaining fully remote or hybrid last year. Their first-out-of-the-gate experiences may prove a bellwether for what’s to come this fall.

“They’re the ones to watch whether they open traditional (in person, five days a week), because they haven’t been traditional in over a year,” Dennis Roche, who has tracked school reopenings through the pandemic as co-founder of the website Burbio, told The 74.

Schools that reopened fully last spring, “they’ve already rode this train,” Robel admits. But as her district marches forward with the return to classrooms, the principal is confident that they will rise to any challenges that may unfold.

“The people here are resilient,” she said of her community, which weathered a mass terrorist shooting in 2015 that claimed the lives of 14 individuals and seriously injured another 22.

Clayton County Public Schools, a suburban district just south of downtown Atlanta, also returned to the closest it’s been to normal schooling since March 2020 when it reopened Monday. After the majority of its students remained remote through the last school year, about 95 percent of the district’s 52,000 students returned to in-person learning this week.

“We are ready,” Teffany Bedford, a third-grade teacher at Fountain Elementary School, told The 74. “We feel safe. I think it’s going to be great getting back to those face-to-face interactions, which is what we’re used to.”

At her school, only about half of families came back to school last spring, Principal Jamilah Hud-Kirk told The 74, while this August, all but eight families have chosen to attend in person.

“We’re excited to welcome them,” said Hud-Kirk. “We missed our scholars and they missed us.”

With the Delta variant , masks are required in her building and across Clayton County schools, as they are in San Bernardino. The California district has also installed air filters and updated ventilation systems in each of its schools.

But additionally, the administrators at both Fountain and North Verdemont have put a premium on communicating their reopening plans clearly with families. Both held virtual information sessions for community members to learn about their school’s reopening plan and ask any questions. Last week, teachers at Fountain directly called the households of every student in their classes. Ms. Bedford, as her students call her, was able to connect with the families of every single youngster on her list.

“You have to meet your community where they are,” said Hud-Kirk.

Not all school systems, however, were able to respond as readily to parent concerns. Tucson Unified School District, which ended last year in a hybrid learning scheme and returns students to classrooms Aug. 5, had planned to begin the year without requiring face coverings due to an Arizona state law banning mask mandates. That edict stands even after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated their school guidance with a recommendation for universal teacher and student masking in late July, and despite State Superintendent Kathy Hoffman calling on the governor’s office to . Gov. Doug Ducey doubled down instead, calling the CDC’s new guidelines “.”

At a school board meeting in late July, a steady stream of public comments prompted Tucson Superintendent Gabriel Trujillo to remind viewers that “the decision of whether or not to mandate masks in any Arizona school or school district is no longer in the hands of any school governing board, superintendent or principal.”

Despite that, at an emergency meeting called the morning before school opened, the Tucson Unified board did just that, . By doing so, the district joined — two of which are in Phoenix — in defiance of the ban.

“They really do have their hands tied,” Clare Robinson, parent of a 7-year-old in the district, lamented before the board voted to disregard state law. The young mother was already planning on sending her child to school clad with a face covering and, at that point, just hoping other parents would do the same.

But without a universal masking policy, Robinson told The 74 she was worried kids would increasingly skip out on wearing face coverings. At her son’s summer camp, for instance, fewer and fewer kids kept their masks on as the weeks went by, building a social pressure against masking.

Perhaps out of concerns for kids’ safety, slots in the district’s virtual learning program were filling rapidly. On July 20, enrollment had spiked from 700 to 1,200 in just a week. “We are projecting that the numbers will keep going up,” Trujillo said at the time.

Still, the vast majority of the district’s 47,000 students will be attending school in person. As of Aug. 3, only 2,045 students were enrolled in the district’s virtual academy, according to spokesperson Veronica Castro-Vega — that’s slightly below the 5 percent opt-out rates in San Bernardino or Clayton County.

Robinson says many Tucson parents who were uncomfortable with their school’s previous masking policy faced a tough choice, especially if their child struggled with remote learning. On balance, most students tuning in online fared worse than their in-person peers, copious research shows.

“I don’t see [virtual school] as the answer that’s best for the greater good,” said Robinson. For her own family, Robinson had been considering a temporary move to her parents’ home in Berkeley, California, where masks in schools were never in doubt.

U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona seconds Robinson’s stance, advocating for schools to return students to face-to-face learning this fall — .

“We know that mask wearing and mitigation strategies allow [schools] to reopen safely,” the education secretary told National Public Radio Monday. If increased spread of the virus shutters schools, he said “to me, that’s a failure of adults.”

As the new school year unfolds in San Bernardino, where masking is a non-negotiable, Principal Robel has navigated some unforeseen hurdles: staffing is a bit short, and she wishes her school had held a welcome session for first-graders and their families who, while learning virtually last year, never became familiar with the ins and outs of the building. But the bumps are smoothing out and the principal believes her community can face whatever COVID’s next curve may be for the 2021-22 school year.

“I think they’re feeling cautiously optimistic,” she said.

Just your typical summer vacation shenanigans, but with a twist: It’s all at school.

This July, over 11,000 students in Tulsa, Oklahoma — about a third of the district’s total enrollment — have returned to academic buildings for fun-filled programming that explodes the typical conception of summer school.

“I did summer school before and it was really boring,” said Tulsa rising sophomore Jesse Skocny. “This one isn’t. It’s a lot of fun.”

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At his North Star Academy, students tend to an organic garden every morning complete with cucumbers, peppers and tomatoes. Twice a week they take field trips, including a recent visit to a local Mexican restaurant where, in addition to sampling the tacos, students learned what it takes to run a small business.

“It’s a different animal, it’s not all academic,” Mike Easley, assistant principal at North Star, told The 74.

That shift in emphasis is by design, says Tulsa Deputy Superintendent Paula Shannon. After a year that’s been challenging for everyone, the district’s top priority this summer is to help reignite students’ enthusiasm for learning.

“Academics are important. We want to help kids with unfinished learning, but that’s not what we’re leading with,” she told The 74. “We’re leading with fun.”

As national leaders including U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona on the heels of a year marred by the pandemic, and with earmarked for summer enrichment activities, Tulsa Public Schools has seized the moment, delivering learning opportunities to students in tandem with community building and joy.

Its “Ready. Set. Summer!” initiative includes programs at nearly every campus in the city, available at no cost to families, with meals and transportation provided. Over 4 in 5 students served by the school system are economically disadvantaged, and 37 percent of all students are Hispanic, while 23 percent are Black, another 23 percent are white and 17 percent are Asian, Indigenous or multiracial. Enrollment has when the district last held in-person summer school, with a focus on remediation.

‘Connection before content’

With the district’s all-new summer camp-style approach, the goal is to “develop relationships and help [students] ease back to in-person learning in the fall,” Twanna Johnson, a social worker at Memorial High School, told The 74.

At her site, activities range from strength training and yoga to leadership development and writing rap music, on top of opportunities for students to make up credits. One particularly unusual offering, however, stands out: medieval fight club.

With rules similar to tag, students dart after one another bellowing battle cries and chopping with padded swords in a semi-controlled chaos — delighting youth who initially doubted whether they would actually be allowed to joust on school grounds.

“My expectation was to sit down in front of a whiteboard and just learn about history on medieval sword fighting,” rising sophomore Trevor Wilhite told The 74, breathing heavily after coming off the battlefield. “I didn’t know we would actually grab swords and go out.”

With about two weeks under his belt, his feelings toward the activity are not ambiguous. “If you ever have heard the expression of a child in a candy store, it’s basically that times 1,000,” Wilhite said.

In the midst of the melee there’s room for learning, says Heath Miller, band director and fight club faculty lead. Every so often, he pauses the combat to offer a fact for context on the activity and “trick them into learning something about medieval history,” he said.

As unconventional as the approach may seem, it actually aligns with best practices for summer learning. A 2018 study from the RAND Corporation recommends districts to make sure, first and foremost, that students are engaged and enjoying themselves.

That also reflects the needs expressed by families, says Jennifer Peck, chief executive of the Partnership for Children & Youth.

“It’s been loud and clear from parents,” she told The 74. “They want their kids to have fun.”

Especially coming off a year that took an unprecedented toll on teens’ mental health, schools should work to meet students where they’re at, says National Summer Learning Association CEO Aaron Dworkin. His mantra, he told The 74, is “connection before content.”

Tulsa, it seems, has done well on that front — even among its teenage “knights” and sworn enemies.

Coming in after a session of spirited combat, “we’re still all like a giant dysfunctional family,” Wilhite said.

‘This summer is part one’

The focus on connection with students was enough to entice Branden Grimes, science teacher at Booker T. Washington High School to come back for the summer.

“It’s for the kids,” he told The 74. “I didn’t have to think twice.”

But another key incentive certainly didn’t hurt, added his colleague, English teacher Tametra Jamison: extra pay.

She’s making twice as much as she does during the school year, the educator said. Even after Oklahoma teacher walkouts in 2018 protesting the state’s low wages and poor working conditions — part of the nationwide “Red For Ed” movement — resulted in , Jamison normally has to pick up a second job during the summer to make ends meet. But funding from the CARES Act changes that, allowing the district to boost teachers’ summer stipend rate from about $30 to $40 per hour, Dept. Superintendent Shannon told The 74.

Many teachers volunteered to staff the summer program, says Jamison, but because the school got a late start on promoting the offerings to students, their enrollment did not reach full capacity and they ultimately cut back on certain planned activities.

“It would be really awesome if we’re able to do this again next year, but also kick start the promotion of it earlier so that we have more kids who are signed up,” said Alison Campbell, math teacher at Booker T.

Fortunately for the team of high school instructors, some key players think similarly.

“We will continue to apply the lessons we learned this summer through our afterschool component as we enter the school year and then that will set us up for next summer,” said Shannon, noting that relief funding is designed to last three years. “This summer is part one.”

Into the future, the district is investing in partnerships with community groups, all through a “quarterback organization” called the Opportunity Project that serves as a liaison, so that it can deepen afterschool and summer options for its student body, she said.

In Tulsa and beyond, Peck, of the Partnership for Children & Youth, advocates for the fun-first summer learning model to stick around.

“This shouldn’t be a one-time thing how we’re doing things this summer,” she said. “This should be here to stay.”

As keynote speaker at the National Charter School Conference, U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona made the case to school leaders on Tuesday that building a diverse teaching force should be a key component of pandemic recovery efforts.

It was the first time Cardona had spoken directly to the charter school community since assuming his role as secretary, and he took the occasion to remark on how the White House is working to bolster the pipeline for more Black, Hispanic, Indigenous and Asian educators to enter the workforce — and how charter leaders can help that effort.

The American Families Plan, part three of President Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda, allocates $9 billion to help schools recover from the pandemic, said the secretary, including money earmarked for educator training scholarships at historically Black colleges and universities, grow-your-own paid teacher residency programs and other strategies to recruit and train teachers of color.

“These investments will provide a critical pipeline of well-prepared and diverse educators to students all across America,” said Cardona.

Charter schools already . The secretary’s remarks were pre-recorded and there was no opportunity for audience members to ask questions or interact.

While Cardona himself is seen as more neutral toward charter schools, his boss’s recent relationship with them has been divisive. While President Biden served as vice president during the Obama administration, which was highly supportive of charter schools, he then adopted a more skeptical stance during his 2020 presidential campaign when he promised to . In May, he became the first president since the federal charter school law was passed in the 1990s not to issue a proclamation recognizing the publicly funded independently run schools during National Charter Schools Week.

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, however, read the secretary’s remarks as something of an olive branch. “We are thrilled that Secretary Cardona took time out of his busy schedule and made a point to talk to charter school teachers and leaders today. His appearance alone sends a strong signal,” Nina Rees, president and CEO of the Alliance wrote in an email to The 74. “Obviously, we would love to know more, but believe the Secretary to be sincere in his commitment to serving the interests of all kids — regardless of the type of school they attend.”

On the teacher diversity issue, Cardona said charter school leaders can ensure that the sector continues to make further strides.

“You play an important role in advancing efforts that ensure every child is taught by an outstanding teacher,” he told the audience of charter leaders. “I encourage you to support grow-your-own programs that create a community-based pipeline into the profession by including teaching as part of your career in technical education pathways in secondary schools.”

While research shows that all students benefit from having teachers of color — with students of color experiencing the largest gains — the nation’s teaching corps continues to poorly reflect its students. While over half of K-12 students are Black, Hispanic, Asian or Indigenous, the same is true for only approximately 1 in 5 teachers.

over the course of the pandemic have spurred fears of a national educator shortage, but as of yet .

The education secretary also issued a warning, expressing concerns over for-profit charter operators, which tend to serve lower proportions of disadvantaged students and have a history of poor performance.

“When it comes to student success, it’s important that we also take steps to ensure greater transparency and accountability in the charter school sector,” said Cardona.

That means “taking active steps to serve students from diverse racial and socio-economic backgrounds, providing meaningful access to instruction for students with disabilities and multilingual learners and assur[ing]… that none of our resources are used to support for-profit operators.”

But despite the stern footnote — delivered with his usual grin — the former Connecticut teacher and principal stressed his appreciation for educators’ efforts over the course of a trying year and closed on a unifying note.

“We can only do this work well if we do it together.”

Below are the prepared remarks by U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, recorded in advance of Tuesday’s first installment of the Department of Education’s Educational Equity Summit Series. (We’ll be covering today’s event, sign up here to receive our coverage)

Remarks as prepared: 

Thank you, Melito, for the kind introduction, and more importantly, for all you do for the students we serve. You are a shining example of what it means to serve. Eres un orgullo Latino!

And thank you, Dr. Biden, our First Lady, for your inspiring words – but more importantly, for walking the walk. Despite the pandemic and the transition to the role of First Lady of the United States, you continued to teach your students. Your passion for teaching and ensuring that your students have what they need exemplify what it means to be a great teacher. Thank you for your service to our country as a teacher and for lifting the profession and purpose we have as educators focused on equity.

And to my Colleagues who’ve signed up for this important equity summit series, thank you for taking the time to join us. We hope that through your engagement, you will hear strategies that match our collective passion to make sure that we look at this reopening through a lens of equity. I don’t have to tell you that the inequities in education have been a constant since we have been collecting data. I don’t have to tell you that the pandemic exacerbated inequities, not only in education, but in other critical areas such as health and economic stability.

Well, we are here today because we plan to do something about it. This is a moment in education to boldly address the patterns of inequity that have been pervasive in our schools. This is our moment to ensure that we reopen, reinvest, and reimagine our schools differently and better than ever before. If we go back to how it was, we would be returning to a system where you can predict outcomes based on race and place, where the color of your skin and zip codes are better determinants of outcomes than the actual aptitude of our learners.

This is our moment to have the difficult conversations about how to build back better, how to lead transformatively, and how to use every penny provided by the President and Congress to ensure that those most impacted by the pandemic receive the most support. We have often heard, and maybe even exclaimed ourselves, that education is the great equalizer. Well, now is our chance to prove it. The funding is there, the urgency from the President is there. Are we going to lead through this and come out stronger? Or is the temptation of complacency going to dissipate our call to action?

I remember growing up listening to hip hop icons Public Enemy and they encouraged challenging the system and “Fighting the Power”. Well, now, we are the system. It’s on us to make the change we need in our country. In many places, small incremental change is not enough. We will need innovative and creative leadership fueled by urgency. The resources are there. At the federal, state, and local level — we must act.

These next months and years will determine the trajectory of success for millions of students in our care. This is our moment.

President Biden and Vice President Harris have made equity a core priority. It’s why the American Rescue Plan is ensuring that schools not only have the resources to re-open for in-person instruction quickly, but that they are also focused on investing in meeting the social, emotional, mental health, and academic needs of the students most impacted by COVID-19—who are often the same students who were furthest from opportunity before the pandemic.

It’s why the President’s American Jobs Plan, American Families Plan, and the rest of the fiscal year 2022 budget provide unprecedented investments in educational equity: Universal pre-K and free community college. Supporting $100 billion in investments in school infrastructure. More than doubling funding for Title I schools through new equity grants that will incentivize states to address inequitable school funding systems. Investing in our educators and building a diverse pipeline so every student from every background can be supported by teachers, mentors, and staff who share and understand their experiences. Doubling the number of school counselors, social workers, and school psychologists. Taking a huge step towards fulling funding the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. And just last week, we affirmed that Title IX protects students from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, making clear that every student, no matter who they are or whom they love, have equal access to educational opportunities in our schools.

Last week I visited Harvey Milk High School in New York City. There I heard from students about what they want to see in our education system. They spoke of wanting a system that is free from discrimination for students who are LGBTQ, students who have disabilities, or students from different racial backgrounds. They spoke about a system where all students had access to tools needed for learning, like broadband and technological devices. We know that many rural communities and poorer communities still do not have that. Collectively, we own the students at Harvey Milk High, and every student across the country, exactly that – a school that promotes equity and access in its DNA.

Equity in education is about providing all students, from all backgrounds and all parts of the country, with the resources and supports that they need to succeed and thrive in our society. It’s about providing them pathways to contribute to their communities, and to make the world a better place. Equity is not a passing buzzword, but an ongoing, continuous effort to make sure that every student feels supported in their classrooms and in every educational environment. That’s why this summit isn’t a one-time event for us – but something that will be infused in all of our work at the Department and across the Administration for the next four years.

To advance equity, we must innovate, share promising practices, and work together to create the education system that all of our students deserve, a system where students are at the center – while recognizing that for far too long, we haven’t lived up to that promise.

I hope you find that spirit and unwavering support in the Department of Education’s Equity Summit series.

U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said Monday he wants “families at the table” as schools prepare for the fall, offering welcome news to parents who have felt shut out of efforts to help their children recover from the pandemic.

Last week, his staff took steps to fill up the guest list by contacting the , a network of advocacy groups that has been critical of distance learning, especially for low-income and minority students, and has pushed for schools to reopen.

On April 28, Christian Rhodes, chief of staff for the department’s Office of Elementary and Secretary of Education, met with Keri Rodrigues, National Parents Union’s founding president, and Marisol Rerucha, the group’s chief of strategy and partnerships.

Since then, the group’s representatives have been asked to work with the department’s School Climate and Discipline Work Group and the Office of Parent Engagement and Communication, and to be involved in a meeting regarding federal relief funds later this week.

“They feel like we represent a really important constituency,” Rodrigues said. “We were very clear with them. We’re not here just to be disseminating information from [the department]. We need to be informing policy.”

The department’s invitation to the organization to be part of its “kitchen cabinet” follows accusations that the have had greater access to the secretary and the administration than other interest groups. The National Parents Union represents groups that have largely blamed unions for slowing down the reopening process and say schools have failed their children during the pandemic. Parent organizations were not represented during Cardona’s March 24 reopening summit, and in early April, Rodrigues said she was “furious” that the department had not yet reached out to any groups within the network. With states facing a June 7 deadline to submit plans to the department for spending American Rescue Plan funds, some of those local groups now want to have more say in how districts spend that money.

“States are looking at revisiting what it means to have families engaged,” Cardona said at the Education Writers Association’s annual conference. “This pandemic taught us that we have to be nimble, we have to be flexible and we have to meet families where they are.”

As part of his “Help is Here” tour to local schools, mostly in the Northeast, the secretary has interacted with some parents who don’t represent particular advocacy groups. And Rodrigues said her group is directing the department to other organizations “doing important work.”

Rachel Thomas, a spokeswoman for the education department, said working with parents is “critical” to addressing academic inequities made worse by the pandemic.

“It’s with parents’ partnership that we can build our education system back better than it was before, and make sure our schools are welcoming environments that work for all students, not just some,” she said.

In his comments to reporters, Cardona added that it’s important to ensure the relief funds are used for students that were the most negatively impacted during school closures.

The National Parents Union is working with the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington to create “a checklist” that families can use to track how districts are using relief funds. The materials are expected to be released next week.

“The questions are oriented around whether students are getting the individualized supports they need and whether parents are getting individualized information about their child’s progress,” said Robin Lake, director of the center.

Rodrigues suggested many of the local groups that have been advocating for reopening schools will now become “watchdogs” to track the funding.

“It’s safe to say that until the pandemic, many parents never really gave much thought to how the school system operated, or how they used their funds,” said Christy Hudson, a member of Open Fairfax County Schools, a parents’ group in Virginia. With the relief funds, she added, “it’s more than likely that parents are going to stay involved, and keep an eye on the school systems.”

Founded in early 2020, the National Parent Union receives funding from reform-oriented and pro-charter foundations. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the group has polled parents monthly on topics such as school reopening, parents’ preferences for in-person or remote learning, and how prepared they think their children are for the next grade level.

The organization’s most show 58 percent of parents want both in-person and remote options this fall — an issue where Cardona’s expectations and parents’ preferences are likely to diverge.

Some districts and state leaders say they plan to limit or eliminate this fall, and Cardona said he doesn’t want “a system where students who were underserved in the past select remote learning, because they don’t feel that that school is welcoming or safe for them.”

Disclosure: The Walton Family Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation and The City Fund provide financial support to the National Parents Union and The 74.