Recommended but not mandatory at first, the professional development will be created and provided by people with disabilities. Backers believe the law will be the first in the country to empower people who experience ableism to educate teachers about it.

was the brainchild of a group of people with disabilities, along with parents and advocates. After comparing experiences, they realized how often they encountered ableism in schools — even in classrooms supposedly designed for them. An organization founded by parents — many of them immigrants — called the Multicultural Autism Action Network spearheaded the effort to add disability awareness to teachers’ continuing education. The proposal is poised to be among the final measures passed into law before the legislature adjourns May 20. 

A key lobbyist in the effort is Jillian Nelson, community resource and policy advocate at the Autism Society of Minnesota. Recently, she talked to The 74’s Beth Hawkins about the bill, being diagnosed with autism, her own experiences with ableism in school and the job she says was created just for her. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Not too long ago, the very idea of an autistic lobbyist was hard to fathom. How did you end up breaking that barrier?

I have really struggled getting by in life as an autistic person. I had a hard time in employment before I landed here, struggling with different things like relationships and getting the accommodations necessary throughout school and college. The Autism Society of Minnesota has given me the backing to do work I only ever dreamed of. Our amazing leadership team saw my strengths and created a role where I could utilize those in the best way for our community.

I run our information resource hotline. When people are going through challenges or newly diagnosed, I provide insight and help them navigate a world that’s fairly complex. I also do all our resource fair outreach work, which means I get to go out and connect with people.

And then all those conversations, I put them in my pocket and I head up to Capitol Hill, where I work with other organizations to advance disability law and create a great and equitable place here in Minnesota for people with disabilities to not just live and survive, but to thrive and have the same opportunities as everyone else. 

It also really matters to be working in a place where every single person around me is either autistic or understands autism. I can show up to work as myself without having to mask or play games that I don’t understand. 

Can you explain the term “mask”?

Masking is an emotionally exhausting process of pretending or portraying yourself as neurotypical or just like everyone else. People who mask go to great lengths to appear to have no disability or struggle and to just fit in. But when things don’t come naturally — like following every single social cue — it’s incredibly tedious to pick and choose what to say and do at every step of the way. Sometimes you get it right and sometimes you don’t. 

This year, you and your colleagues seem to have gotten a lot right. In less than two months you shepherded a bill addressing issues many people aren’t even aware of through a complicated legislative process where good ideas often go to die. 

This was born out of an opportunity a couple of years ago to bring together people with different types of disabilities to talk to the Minnesota Department of Education about their experience as special education students. One of the topics that came up was ableism and the not-so-great experiences they had surrounding that. 

The response this group received was so warm! But also, it was devastating that so many teachers came up afterward and said, “No one’s ever talked to us about ableism. No one’s ever given us this information. I wish I had known so I could have done better.” 

Children with disabilities, we’re turning them over to a system that doesn’t often recognize their existence as part of a broader culture. There might be bullying or assumptions that a student can’t do something. That presumed incompetence — we don’t give students with disabilities a chance to fail. We keep them in this bubble because we think they can’t succeed because of their disability. 

We want the youngest members of our culture to grow up with less trauma, with this sense of belief that they can do things that people in the past may have told them they weren’t capable of because of their disability. 

I think it’s going to surprise people that educators — especially special educators — aren’t routinely exposed to this information. 

One of the big disconnects is that disability in our education system is seen as a medical condition or a qualifying condition. When we teach about disability, we teach out of medical criteria. A lot of teachers are very familiar with the criteria for different disabilities. They know the laws they’re required to follow in special education. But everything is taught in theories: Here’s a special education learning theory about social-emotional learning, about social skills learning. We teach a lot on how to teach but not how to understand. 

The disability culture is the only group where we currently allow teachers to teach in a classroom that is filled entirely with children from this culture and have absolutely no cultural competency training or requirements. That’s what the ableism and disability justice bill is really about. It’s about creating cultural competency among teachers who are working with children from this really unique and beautiful culture. 

Disability as a culture is a relatively new concept. You have described deaf culture as a model: In 1988, students at Gallaudet University staged what’s known as the Deaf President Now protest, demanding that the school’s next leader be deaf. It seems ridiculous today that a hearing person would be seen as more capable of leading such an institution than any of the people it serves. Yet it was an “aha” moment when teachers heard from former special education students. 

It’s been a slow shift. As our society has shifted toward inclusion, and with the development of social media and technology, people with disabilities from all over the world have been able to connect and identify with one another. We realized that experiences we were having, the things that felt so isolating or challenging in our lives, that we weren’t alone in those experiences.

We stopped being individuals that this was happening to. We started to be a culture of individuals with shared experiences. People with disabilities started asking for what they needed to live full and impactful lives. 

It’s a tall order to help someone whose professional identity is tied up in seeing themselves as a student’s best advocate to see that they’re engaging in ableism. 

In high school, I wasn’t diagnosed with autism. I was a special education student, but for emotional behavioral disorder. My special education transition plan was that I would get a job in customer service or food service, because that’s what they believed I was capable of. Despite the fact that even my special education testing showed I was in the 99th percentile IQ-wise.

I graduated without ever taking the SATs or applying to a single college because the people that were in charge of helping me plan my future as a young person with disabilities never saw that as a possibility. That idea that they knew best and they were protecting me from potential failure was the thing that led to my biggest downfall. By the time I was 20 years old, I was a homeless drug addict. I didn’t see any path for my future or have a whole lot of hope. 

After I got diagnosed, I had a case manager who forced me to go to college. It changed everything. Finally, someone believed in me. She was willing to put me in a position to succeed — while knowing that there was a risk of failure. Instead of saying, “You can’t do this because of your disability,” she asked me, “How can we do this with your disabilities?”

I don’t believe that our education system, our teachers, set out to set students with disabilities up for failure or limit us to a small window of potential. But we don’t know what we don’t know, and when we know better, we do better. That’s really the core. We’ve never given teachers this information or an understanding of this unique and amazing culture. If we can do that, we can inspire them not to try to save us from ourselves, but to help us be the best version of ourselves.

What hurdles to the bill’s introduction did you anticipate? And what did you actually find? 

I anticipated what we did actually find: teaching lawmakers what ableism is and convincing them why it matters. There were some that jumped right on board. Our chief author in the House of Representatives, Rep. Kim Hicks, has been an amazing champion. She herself is a legislator with a disability and she has children with a disability. 

On the Senate side, though, we faced a number of hurdles. We went to Sen. Mary Kunesh looking for some suggestions, not necessarily expecting her to take it on. I started telling her my story and how ableism had held me back for so many years, and how I often wonder what I would have achieved if they had believed in me in high school. 

She asked me where I went to school. It was the school district where she taught. She looked at us and said, “Do you have the jacket with you? I’ll introduce the bill.” When you realize that this isn’t just happening somewhere else, it’s happening at the place that you teach, that hits home. 

We had to make it very real for people. Not just a theory or an idea, but these are the experiences happening to children now. This is something that has been a generational problem for decades. 

If you received special education services for the wrong diagnosis, you probably experienced a particularly pernicious form of ableism. I’m guessing your behavior, whatever it was, should have been a red flag for a sensory issue. 

Social anxiety, 100%. I went to school, but I didn’t go to most of my classes for my freshman and sophomore years because I was so socially anxious. But I wasn’t the kid smoking behind the dumpster. I was hanging out in the library researching my special interest [an autism culture term for a topic a person enjoys learning about in great depth], or hiding in the art room working on extra credit projects.  

My experience and the services and support I received were a gigantic red flag of ableism. They assumed the things that were holding me back were a choice, versus something I had no control over. I didn’t end up in special education until my sophomore year of high school — well after Asperger’s syndrome was in the DSM (the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). But we weren’t looking at individuals like myself and saying, “This might be autism.” We just assumed that the problem was not that I couldn’t do the things that they were asking me to, it was that I didn’t want to.

I have come to terms with being a later-diagnosed person with autism. But I think about how many things I missed out on. I graduated with a seventh-grade math level. I did special education civic engagement because they didn’t think I could handle the mainstream classroom with my classmates. Funny that I grew up to be a lobbyist. 

I wonder a lot, though, who I could have been if they figured out how to support me to my full potential, rather than to just manage what they thought of as behaviors. I wonder about all the opportunities that were taken from me because I just became a statistic. I think about a lot of the trauma that I endured as a teenager, being educated in classrooms with individuals that had very unmanaged, far more aggressive behaviors than me. 

So the hope is somebody who takes the training would look at a student who hid in the library and see massive evidence of engagement, and wonder, “Why is the student engaging there, instead of the social studies classroom?” 

I had teachers later on that did see that, and that’s where I got to thrive. When I was a senior retaking my sophomore English class — because I missed it, you know — my teacher asked me, “Why are you in my class?” I’m like, “Well, I’m here because the state of Minnesota says I need to be here.”

He turned my sophomore English credit into an independent study. The one assignment I had was to write a college-level paper. He said, “I’m not going to teach you how. If you need help, you’re going to have to ask.” He saw my talents, and he also saw what I actually needed to learn in that class: how to ask for help, how to work independently, how to plan my time. It prepared me for college more than writing a 10th-grade research paper ever would. 

I don’t want those teachers to be needles in a haystack, where there’s one or two. I want every teacher to look at a kid with disabilities with curiosity and ask, “How can we help them succeed?”

How do you introduce people to the idea that there’s joy and pride in a disabled person’s identity — things you would never want to change about yourself? 

One of the biggest things that I hope teachers take away from training about ableism is that we’re okay just the way we are. Feeling shame about disabilities? That’s not ingrained in us from birth. That’s something that we learn from the interactions we have with the world around us. I hope that as teachers embrace anti-ableism, instead of seeing us as a collection of deficits that need to be measured and tracked, they see the beautiful parts of our existence.

One of my greatest gratitudes about being autistic is the level of joy I get to experience in my special interest, in sensory things, in being able to see the world in such a beautiful, unique way that not everyone does. I hope that through this training, we can teach teachers to see that in their students, and we give students the opportunities to grow and learn to love themselves and find things to be proud of about their disabilities, versus just trying to make them conform to the expectations of a non-disabled society.

I got lucky when I landed at the Autism Society. But at the end of the day, I also recognize that all the things that make me so good at my job are because I’m autistic. I want future generations of kiddos with disabilities to grow up finding that pride and that joy in who they are.

The top takeaways mirror what Anna Saavedra and Morgan Polikoff found in a 2022 survey that confirmed the ideological divide fueling the so-called culture wars — but also revealed widespread uncertainty about what students are exposed to in school. Wanting to better understand this seeming disconnect, in September and October 2023 the pair asked a nationally representative sample of 4,000 households to respond to dozens of hypothetical in-class scenarios involving race, LGBTQ topics and opt-out requests. They then correlated the answers with respondents’ more general beliefs about education.        

Nearly 9 in 10 of those surveyed say teaching basic academics is a very important purpose of public education, with smaller pluralities agreeing that protecting democracy, teaching about government and civics, and providing a free education are priorities for schools. Three-fourths prefer spending to improve the quality of public education over paying for low-income children to attend private schools.

From there, however, ideological gaps begin to appear. Teaching children the importance of embracing differences, for example, was very important to 74% of Democrats versus 35% of Republicans. And while 9 in 10 respondents want children taught to treat people equally regardless of skin color, just 14% of Republicans say it is all right to assign a lesson on U.S. policies benefiting white Americans, versus 46% of Democrats. 

The biggest partisan differences involve LGBTQ topics. Most Democrats — 80% to 86%, depending on the scenario presented — support instruction in high school, a rate that falls to 40% to 50% in lower grades. Republicans, by contrast, are comfortable with LGBTQ topics less than 40% of the time at the high school level and less than 10% in elementary school. 

The bottom line, Polikoff said in a recent interview, is that in order to find a path forward, Americans need to have more detailed conversations about what children should learn, why and when. 

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. 

I’m curious why you started your report with information about people’s support for education.

We really felt people’s views on the purposes of education do shape their answers to all the more detailed and specific policy questions. For instance, we asked a first broad question about the purposes of education, gave people a bunch of options for answering and asked them to rank their top three. 

It’s obvious but not obvious. The top finding when you ask these kinds of questions is almost always something about the basics of teaching children reading, writing and math. Most people, when they think of school, that is what they think of first.

But by and large, we didn’t see lots of partisan differences, except on one item of teaching children the importance of embracing differences. When we looked at the relationships between the purposes and people’s ratings on other items, we saw that that question was the most predictive. 

You found fewer divides on market forces and choice in education than one might expect, with widespread preferences for spending public money on public schools, 4 in 10 saying competition makes public schools better and a slim majority agreeing that it pushes them to make better use of resources. Why is the partisan gap less stark on these issues?

The average voter doesn’t know very much about education policy. For Republican politicians or people who are in the Republican ecosystem, school choice is their education issue. It has been for a long time, but it really is now. For the rank-and-file voter, it’s not all that salient.

On average, Republicans are somewhat more supportive of choice policies, but those gaps are not really that large because I think lots of Democrats support some of these principles, too. The idea that if your neighborhood public school is no good that you should be forced to stay there forever — it’s not a very appealing argument. And then there are lots of Republicans who like their local public schools and believe in public schools. It just doesn’t cleave very neatly, the way, you know, feelings about trans people do.

That’s a tidy segue. You used scenarios to tee up detailed questions about what, specifically, should be taught about race and LGBTQ people. Why?

In 2022, when we asked questions about LGBTQ topics in the curriculum, we asked very general questions: Should schools teach about sexual orientation? Should they teach about gender identity? But the real question on the table is, what should children be taught and when? 

This time, we tried to craft scenarios that range from very easy — meaning we think most people would be fine with them — to very difficult, meaning we think few people would be fine with them. And to cover a full range of ways in which LGBTQ topics might come up. We have stuff about sex, which is a thing Republicans like to fixate on. And then things we think might be more banal, like a teacher being gay or trans or having a pride sticker on the wall. 

There are enormous partisan differences, compared to race and sex. Gaps in support between Republicans and Democrats on these items are sometimes as large as 50 points. There’s not a single one of the 24 scenarios we asked about that include LGBTQ issues where Republicans support even high schoolers having access. Republicans are so opposed to virtually all these scenarios that something like 20 of the questions have 10% support or less.

Democrats are pretty mixed about elementary school. They support family-related items, like the teacher having a picture of their same-sex spouse on their desk or the book about same-sex penguin adoption, . But on a lot of items, majorities of Democrats aren’t in support in elementary grades, whereas at the high school level they are definitely in support of all items.

Trans-related items are the ones with the largest partisan gaps at the high school level, with Democrats still not over the moon — 67% support — but Republicans very, very opposed. 

Did you identify possibilities or opportunities for a path forward?

I would say we didn’t. But we can draw some conclusions that could inform a path forward. Respondents really seem to have read the items in our survey and thought about them because you see a big range in terms of what they support and what they oppose. That’s important information. We really do need to have a discussion about what’s age-appropriate, what parents want and kids need. And that’s probably not going to be one conversation. That’s probably going to be 50 conversations, one in each state. Or maybe 13,000 conversations, one in each district.

You can’t just say what’s right is the Republican approach, the [Florida Gov.] Ron DeSantis approach, which is to ban this stuff altogether, don’t talk about it at all, which is not really tenable. But the Democratic approach — which is not super clear but seems to be something like, “Let teachers do what they want and if you have concerns, you’re a bigot” — that strategy doesn’t seem to be particularly useful.

People need something to grab onto. We need some reasonable folks to propose different ways of including LGBTQ issues in the curriculum. 

The other thing our results point to is this issue of how schools actually deal with parent concerns. We asked a series of questions about that, and the one-sentence takeaway is people haven’t really thought about this. 

Parents’ right to opt their kids out is easy to support because of course parents should have that right. But the reality is, how are schools supposed to deal with the fact that, with very few exceptions, every classroom is a purple classroom, meaning it has Republican parents and Democratic parents? You could easily have people wanting to opt out on one side or people raising concerns on another and it quickly spirals into ridiculousness. How are schools supposed to deal with this? 

I’m comfortable with some reasonably constrained opt-out provisions for material that parents don’t want their kids exposed to. I think that’s not a crazy relief valve for these particularly hot-button issues. But we need to come up with policies that are actually implementable, that aren’t going to be incredibly onerous on teachers, aren’t going to have kids missing half the days of the school year, that are reasonably constrained in terms of what they allow and don’t allow.

You tested two ways of asking about opting out. What did the results tell you?

We looked at the opt-out question a few ways. We asked people what they thought were reasonable responses from parents who disagree with the content of a lesson and gave, like, 10 different options. Pretty much everyone thinks it’s reasonable to talk about these issues, to voice your disagreement either to your child or the teacher or even at a school board meeting.

There’s much more of a mix in terms of whether you think it’s appropriate to ask the teacher to change the lesson. Relatively few people think that more extreme examples, like un-enrolling your child from the school or organizing a protest, are reasonable responses. 

We asked a question about how people think schools should react when parents express concern. Again, we found that people don’t really have a great answer, because once you start to get down to brass tacks about how you’re going to handle these, it gets really complicated really fast. 

Democrats are more likely to say the school should teach the lesson as planned if a parent objects, but not even a majority of Democrats — only 48%. We asked how, if multiple parents disagree, should the school make a decision? Again, we got a lot of mixed answers. Mostly, though, people say educators or school boards should be the final deciders on these issues.

Then we did this cool little experiment. We wanted to see whether we could affect people’s views about opt-out by giving them some information about what the potential impact could be. So we randomly split the sample and gave half of them a paragraph with a little scenario that said the teacher believes all students should participate because learning about content they might not otherwise hear helps them see a new perspective, learn to be a critical thinker or simply learn a new important fact. And it can be hard for a teacher to accommodate every parent’s wishes for every lesson for every child.

And then we asked people who did and did not get that paragraph whether they supported opting out. We saw that exposure to an argument about the potential negative effects of opt-out actually pretty substantially reduced people’s support for opting out.

What I think this tells us is not about the specific language of that proposal, but that this is an issue where people’s minds aren’t 100% made up. Supposing a school had an opt-out policy and gave parents messages about why they think that, “Yes, you can opt your kids out, but we don’t think that’s a great idea for XYZ reasons” — that actually would affect people’s actions. 

People’s views on this are pretty malleable. And people haven’t really thought through the practical consequences. So there is potential to shape attitudes and actions.

It reminds me of the retrenchment that LGBTQ advocates did , where in 2009 voters overturned a law allowing gays and lesbians to marry. To prepare for the 2012 vote that re-legalized same-sex marriage, social scientists figured out that framing the issue as one of rights did not move the needle. But asking a prospective voter, “What does your marriage mean to you?” actually changed the conversation.

Republicans are really good at message discipline and Democrats are not. These are not like sure-thing issues — especially on trans issues. A lot of people don’t understand trans issues and are uncomfortable with them. A lot of people are uncomfortable with having to use different pronouns and things like that.

I’m a real believer that there are ways that you can change people’s attitudes based on how you talk about things. I think the strategy of, “if you don’t do things perfectly then we’re going to ostracize you and call you a bigot” — that’s not a winning strategy. You need to change hearts and minds. 

We did it with same-sex marriage for the most part, though you know lots of Republicans are still opposed to that. But we won the policy battle, at least for now. And I think that we can do that on some of these LGBT- and race-related issues in schools. But again, it’s not clear.

There are arguments you can make on some of these topics where it’s not clear there’s a right answer. Another example would be schools getting information about a child and hiding that from the child’s parents. That’s an issue where I certainly can understand why schools might feel the need to do that. At the same time, I can understand why parents will be very upset If they learned that that was happening. There’s just lots to unpack here.

But to get back to your question, yes, the messaging clearly matters. You need to figure out what messages are resonating with people, what arguments will work to persuade them. I’m sure they exist.

She was the CEO of the Chicago Public Schools when Saga Education, a nonprofit offering in-person tutoring during the school day, had remarkable results with ninth and 10th graders in the city who had fallen behind in math. scored higher on tests, got better grades and passed classes at higher rates.

“Right away, I saw excitement from our principals,” she told The 74. “It was a phenomenal program.”

There was one problem: At the time, it cost $2,600 per student. “The finances didn’t work,” she said.

Three years after she stepped down from her position in Chicago, Jackson chairs the board of Accelerate, a position that grants her a national perspective on K-12 tutoring needs.

Only about 1 in 10 students who need high-dosage tutoring get it, despite evidence of persistent learning loss, according to released last year. To address the challenge, Accelerate recently brought researchers, providers and state leaders to Washington to discuss how to spread effective programs to more students.

Over a day and half, they discussed innovative models, the potential of AI in tutoring programs and the need for clearer data on its impact.  

“We already have decades of research that shows tutoring frequency matters, the teacher matters, the alignment to curriculum,” said Jackson. “What we don’t know is how to do that in this new learning environment. like virtual and small groups.”

But tutoring isn’t the only thing on Jackson’s mind. As she becomes more prominent nationally, she remains a “critical voice” on issues facing the district she once led, said Daniel Anello, CEO of Kids First Chicago, an advocacy organization that helps parents understand education policy.

“She’s a parent, she went through the system,” he said. “And from a racial equity standpoint, she’s always been very laser focused on ensuring that families that are the most marginalized are centered in decisions.”

In December, she spoke up when the district’s appointed school board passed a that embraced neighborhood schools but also signaled a desire to move away from school choice. 

In , she called the resolution “wrong” and accused the board — appointed by Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former teachers union organizer — of pursuing an anti-charter agenda. 

“There is no justification for taking away the rights of parents and putting the interests of their children at risk,” she wrote.

In an interview, Jackson said while she’s not opposed to neighborhood schools, she feels Chicago’s families have been left out of discussions about the future of their district. She also discussed her work as head of Hope Chicago, an initiative that offers free college to low-income students and parents, and elaborated on her vision for expanding high-quality tutoring.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

The 74: High-dosage tutoring has become the most-recommended strategy for helping students recover from learning loss. Can you talk about your experience with tutoring in Chicago? 

Janice Jackson: The study that everyone cites was the [a nonprofit that provides high-dosage tutoring in math]. Right away, I saw excitement from our principals. It was a phenomenal program, but it cost us $2,600 per student at the time. The finances didn’t work. Today, a lot has transpired in this space, which is why I was attracted to Accelerate. I’m excited about being able to do this at scale and cheaper, because that’s what’s going to make it sustainable. That is what is going to help low-income districts that don’t have enough money. 

We have about 50 studies underway. To really see what’s working allows us to move a little bit faster than education typically moves.

At Accelerate’s recent conference in Washington, there was a lot of talk about how to continue providing students extra support when federal relief funds run out. If you were still running a district, how would you approach that?

I’d leverage online and tech tools a lot more than we did pre-pandemic. We did some things during the pandemic because we were forced to, but I’ve been out in the field and I’ve seen a lot of ways we can leverage technology that aren’t as dependent on humans. It frees up the teachers and frees up other staff members to do the real work, which is to get in front of kids and families and figure out what it’s going to take for them to come to school regularly.

I would pay a lot more attention to accelerated learning. We don’t talk enough about that. We keep talking about recovery, and that is a huge deal, but we can use technology to accelerate learning. In traditional neighborhood schools, there are always a handful of kids who could take advantage of an incredibly rigorous curriculum. Maybe they can’t offer that in the school because of the budget, or maybe they don’t have enough students, but you can access that through technology, through districtwide courses. 

Is Accelerate supporting research on the tech side of tutoring as well? 

Yes. The thing that really excited me about Accelerate was the idea that we were going to actually research some of these virtual options. Like so many educators, I saw the proliferation of all these tools, and there’s a lot of crap out there. Don’t make that the headline, but that’s the truth. There are some good tools, too. We need to be able to assess that with rigorous evaluation models. I care a lot about education, but I care even more about quality education.

You also care a lot about college access. What are you learning from your work with Hope Chicago?

Our goal is to narrow the economic and wealth gap for Black and Latino families, and we do that by offering them debt-free college. It sounds simple, but why don’t we do that in this country? We made a lot of progress in Chicago with and . One of the biggest things we learned is that our students and families are more discerning around the financial risk of college than we give them credit for. I remember one student said to me, “If I go to college and I don’t graduate, I’m going to be worse off financially than the person who just sat at home.” That’s a very true —and smart —insight.

With Hope Chicago, we’ve seen students select more competitive schools, and then we also allow one parent or guardian to go to college with them. Last fall, we had 93 parents enrolled in college. 

Are other cities looking at what you’re doing?

We haven’t had anybody else say, “Hey, we want to totally adopt this and take it to another place.” But I want to be clear, I signed up for this for the opportunity to really disrupt higher education. I think we’ll get free community college, but I would love to see, in my lifetime, free college. The United States is behind in education. What if every state in America had a free four-year option, if you make below a certain amount? That is doable, and I would argue is actually necessary for this country. 

At the turn of the 20th century, only about 9% of Americans had a high school diploma. We created a higher education system because America was emerging as a superpower. You needed an educated populace. America is reaching that same inflection point. We’re not going to maintain our same global positioning if we continue on the path we’re going. The demographics of this country are changing. We know in 2045, the majority of the people in America are going to be Latino. But they’re not being educated at the same rate as white Americans.

People would actually go to college in much higher numbers if it wasn’t so expensive. This country can afford to do more.

As you take on these broader challenges, you’re still very connected to the Chicago schools and you’ve had a lot to say about how the school board’s recent resolution affects Chicago families. Why did you write that op-ed?

This is the thing that really angers me. People think it’s OK to tell poor Black and Latino people where their kids need to go. Nobody would ever question a person of means about where they send their children. Nobody questions white people about where they send their children. But we continue to do this.

If we pushed the button today, and everybody had to attend their neighborhood school in Chicago, Black kids would benefit the least from a system like that, and they actually exercise choice at a higher level than any other group. I don’t speak on behalf of the entire community, but I am a leader in the Black community, and I feel like it’s my responsibility to lift my voice up around this issue. 

You think the timing is wrong?

We’re getting ready to make a decision that literally impacts everybody. If you really believe in participatory democracy and an elected school board, why is an appointed school board making this decision? If people vote for board members and they support this and that’s the way it goes, I believe in that.

Let’s not pretend like a resolution is not important. I don’t know where people can rightfully lift up their voices to say, “This isn’t right for my community or let’s have a discussion.” 

Will this resolution hurt enrollment even more?

Black people are — largely working class and middle class Black people, so that has changed communities in a lot of different ways. We think people aren’t paying attention. They may not find time to sit on Twitter all day and argue about it, or come to the city council meeting, or come to the board meeting, but what they do is vote with their feet. They just leave.

There’s a moratorium on school closures until 2025, but it’s likely closures will take place in the future. How did you approach that process when you were in leadership?

Let me talk about Englewood, because that’s indicative of how I think Chicago should deal with enrollment. We had four comprehensive high schools in Englewood that in their heyday, probably had 4,000 students across all four high schools. When we took action, they had maybe [a total of] 400 students. We put out a plan to close those four high schools and consolidate them into one big comprehensive high school and build a brand new building. 

A school is the most well-resourced institution in these communities. When you take that away, you need to put something back. Slapping a name change on an existing building is not going to do it. You have to create a new investment and opportunity. Don’t get me wrong, they called me every name under the sun, but I worked with the community. I didn’t stop showing up. To me, we needed to do that in about seven neighborhoods in Chicago. Ultimately, we didn’t start that plan, because COVID happened. 

I am against a large-scale closing. It should be planned. It shows respect when you lay out a five- or 10-year plan and people know what’s going on. 

This resolution, concerns about enrollment loss — it’s all happening as the city is about to elect school board members for the first time in almost 30 years. How is the community preparing? 

If a mom from Englewood ends up on the board, I’m all for that. But I just haven’t seen that happen. It’s usually special interests versus the union, or the reform community versus the union, and neither group represents the parents. There should be a media campaign. If you walk down the street in Chicago and ask 10 parents, they probably could not tell you anything about what’s coming, and that is a problem.

This is a big change. Parents should be informed, they should be engaged and that’s on the city to do that. 

Disclosure: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Walton Family Foundation and Overdeck Family Foundation provide financial support to and The 74.

As for its other mission — to work with state legislators to fix the problem — founder Rebecca Sibilia now admits that EdBuild did this “very, very poorly.” In 2020, after just five years, the group closed up shop. 

Sibilia, who previously worked on school finance with Washington, D.C., schools and for the education reform group StudentsFirst, remembers that at the time she and others at the organization decided that while they’d done much to raise consciousness about the problem, they lacked the tools to move the issue forward.

As it turns out, the move coincided with the COVID pandemic, which threw school budgets into chaos nationwide. If anything, the need for clear, actionable information on funding now is greater than ever. “One of the biggest things that has come from the COVID era is that we have realized how much the data sucks,” she said.

Policymakers “have been making guesses in the dark about how to fund our schools.”

So four years later, Sibilia is debuting a new venture, EdFund, which goes live today. She spoke this week with The 74’s Greg Toppo about the need for better funding research and dissemination — and a new model for collaborating not just with legislators and policymakers, but for underwriting researchers, journalists and others to help make sense of the data. Sibilia plans to issue EdFund’s first request for proposals shortly.

She expects to eventually have “many more proposals than what we have money to fund.” At the moment, the new organization has three main funders — the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation and the Peter and Carmen Lucia Buck Foundation — providing about $1.5 million annually. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

The 74: Thinking about EdBuild, you focused so much on unequal funding. I wonder: What’s the evolution? What’s next?

Rebecca Sibilia: EdBuild was really constituted with two missions: The first was to raise national awareness around the problem, which we did pretty well. And the second was to work with legislatures to actually fix it, which we did very, very poorly. And so at the end of the five years, we were like, “I’m not sure there’s much else to tell. We’ve raised the collective consciousness on what the problem is with school funding in terms of local funds. But we certainly aren’t structured, we certainly don’t have the tools to move this forward. And so, we need to shut down.” That was why we shut down.  

Four years later, what’s your focus? 

We need much more policy-relevant research because for 60 years, we’ve been arguing about whether or not money matters, and it is the dumbest debate of all dumb questions that exist in the world. Because at the end of the day, states exist in a limited-resource environment. What we don’t need is an answer to an ethereal question about endless resources and what they’ll do for student achievement. What we need are answers to practical questions, like “Where should I put a marginal dollar when I have it?” Or, “What are the right tax policies that states should be setting around local dollars in order to create more equitable, but also adequately funded systems?”

This complete disconnect between research and policy has led us to a place where policymakers have been making guesses in the dark about how to fund our schools, and I frankly believe that’s one of the reasons why very few legislators actually understand their funding formula. There’s very little science behind it because we just haven’t provided that.

So who is your audience?

We’re trying to bridge the gap between research and policy. So we see our stakeholders as three groups, with two very different workstreams: the research community, advocates and journalists. I would love to be able to say that policymakers are the endgame on this, but really, advocates and journalists are the ones who are going to be able to interpret this work, and get the overall thrust of what is new and what it means for kids, into the hands of policymakers. I should also mention that we’re a 501(c)3 [nonprofit].

When you talked to The 74 in 2020, you said the next step wouldn’t be through a 501(c)3. It sounds like you’ve changed your mind.

I have not. I’m just not the one to do it. There is an organization that you may have heard of that recently started up with some seed money from the Gates Foundation called . They are at the Southern Education Foundation and they’re shaping up a litigation strategy for school district borders and school funding and integration. So they’re kind of pulling on both of those strings. I’ve given up on legislators actually making a fundamental change to the system. I really think that that’s going to happen through the courts. But in the meantime, the research has to inform what we’ve got in place right now, because that endgame in the courts is in 10, 15, 20 years.

Your “exit interview” with us happened right as COVID hit. And I wondered: What have the past four years done to this issue?

One of the biggest things that has come from the COVID era is that we have realized how much the data sucks. School finance data sucks. It sucks, it sucks. And it’s one of the biggest restrictions to good research in this field, and certainly timely research that could inform better decisions. We had a focus group of about 40 or so graduate and Phd students, and we asked them if they were studying school finance. They said, “No.” We asked them, “Which of these 10 factors would make you more likely to study school finance?” And 80% of them said, “Better data.” 

The second thing is that we’re understanding a lot more that school districts tend to invest in the things that do matter for raising student achievement, and that’s human capital. Whether it’s teachers, tutors, guidance counselors, etc. It’s human capital. This question of whether putting an additional dollar into a school district will raise student achievement —what Kirabo Jackson will tell you is, “Yes, just the dollar will.” What EricHanushek will tell you is, “Well, it depends on how it’s spent.” And the answer that we’ve learned through ESSER funds is that it tends to be spent on the people in the school, which means that everyone’s right. So those are kind of the two things that have come out of COVID.

Let’s go back to the first issue: How can you make the data suck less? Is this what your RFP is about?

Yes, in part. Let me go through the four C’s of who we are: We’re going to curate a policy-relevant research agenda. So instead of letting funders determine what they’re going to fund and making researchers chase that money, we’re instead going to go to policymakers and say, “What are the questions you’re going to have to grapple with in the next five years,” and then fund research to answer those questions. We’re going to curate a policy-relevant research agenda. That was the first thing we did. That’s why we’ve been quiet for the past six months.

The second thing we’re going to do is commission research against that policy agenda. That’s the RFP that we’re releasing this year. We hope to double the size of the investment next year and so on. And what you’ll see in the RFP is that we say: In some cases, we are flying so blind as it relates to school funding, that just putting together a data set will move the entire research field forward. So if students want to do this, if journalists want to do this, if policy organizations want to do this, in some cases collecting better data is just part of the solution. 

O.K. 

And then the third thing that we’re hoping to do is communicate the research that does exist and will come out of these RFPs in a way that it’s friendly for policy audiences — journalists and advocates primarily. We’re going to do so by white-labeling stuff. What we’re going to try to do is put together interactives and graphics and briefings and that sort of stuff, but it’ll all be available to advocates through an [an embeddable element on a website], and they can just stick it straight on their website. Or we’ll have podcasts that someone can send to a policymaker to listen to. We’re really trying for this to become an opportunity for advocates to learn what the research says, and a way for advocates to actually incorporate that into their everyday work so that everything is just more grounded in research. 

Then the fourth is connect. I got a call just the other day: There is a state that we happen to have been linked to in the past that happens to be moving school funding reform this year. And they were like, “We need somebody who can come down and talk about this one element of our funding formula.” So we sent one of our board members down, because he is an economist and has studied the issue. He can talk about that and educate policymakers on what his research says. We’re hoping to do more of that — just make those direct connections.

I was struck by something you said a couple years ago. You singled out California, New York and New Jersey, arguably three of the most progressive states in the country, that have “the most shameful set of borders around schools.” And it really made me think that if they can’t budge on this issue, what hope do you have for anybody solving it?

The states where all of the school finance reform mojo is happening are in the South! Tennessee their funding formula and went to a very progressive funding system. The Mississippi House , a very progressive funding system. The two co-chairs in Alabama have been talking about it — I wouldn’t be surprised to see them move in the next year or two.

It’s the southern states that are recognizing that the way they’re funding schools through these resource formulas just isn’t aligned with the science. This is one area where we actually can do some bootleg research and it can inform stuff. We used to say all the time at EdBuild that we need to move to a student-based funding formula for two reasons: One, different students have different needs. Two, when you think about how things work in the state capitol, you want advocates to be able to advocate for kids rather than themselves. And so in a resource-based formula, the people who are advocating in the capitol are the nurses association, the teachers association, the superintendents association, the principals. And the people in a weighted-student-formula environment who are lobbying in the capitol are special ed parents and English-language-learner communities and that sort of stuff. That’s really where you start to tilt the system in favor of kids instead of in favor of resources. 

It doesn’t sound like you’re abandoning the border fight. Taking a new approach maybe?

I’ve given up on borders changing through the legislature. The power dynamic just works against school districts that serve predominantly students of color.

I live in Maryland and we have county schools, which is not to say that they’re equal, but I live in a county that’s pretty diverse. I’d imagine somebody like you would say that’s a step in the right direction. Tell me where a place like Maryland sits in this discussion.

New Jersey has just over a million students, and they have over 600 school districts. Maryland has 850,000 kids, and they’ve got 24. That’s where Maryland fits in the conversation. So here’s the deal: What Maryland can do is they can take these enormous inequities in local funds and pool them because they’re sharing them across a much larger geography. The state has to do less to equalize because it’s equalizing at the local level first.

In New Jersey, the state has an enormous burden to equalize because they have to fix things for the 550 school districts that aren’t the bastions of wealth in the state. We can either move to systems that look like Maryland — and I believe that has to happen through the courts — or, short of that, we can change funding formulas to make much more sense as it relates to the way that we’re funding schools. And that’s what we can do through legislatures, policymakers, researchers all talking.

O.K. This is becoming clear to me now.

You can headline it as, “Rebecca Sibilia has given up hope.” [Laughs.]

I’m going to assume that you’re going to be done in five years, because that’s the way you do everything. What would you consider success in 2029? 

You know , right? He’s my ex-husband. And we’re still very good friends. We got engaged trying to change Tennessee’s funding formula 10 years ago. And we got it done last year. We started in 2016 to try to change Mississippi’s funding formula. And this year the House passed something. It takes a decade from the point that you start to educate the legislature and advocates and journalists about how their formula works and what research says for that to translate into policy. I believe that an organization can exist for five years and have a 15-year impact. We are seeing that bear out from the EdBuild time. 

One of the reasons we have these four distinct workstreams is because I think that several can be absorbed in different places. So maybe EdFund continues to run just as a funders’ collaborative. It just takes in money from foundations and puts it out for research, but the people who are curating the research agenda are the National Conference of State Legislatures. And the people who are communicating are at a specialized shop in the Urban Institute. And we’ve already created the bridges. Everyone’s talking and singing “Kumbaya,” so we don’t need to do the connecting anymore.

When you think about the construct of what EdFund could be, it could continue to exist past me. I could peace out and EdFund could continue to exist as it is, or we can start thinking about whether or not it makes more sense for these activities, once they have worked well together for a few years, to be absorbed in different places. Frankly, many other organizations out there in the education space could also afford to think about their work in the same respect.

I couldn’t let you go without asking you about this tweet from you at South by Southwest. Somebody took a picture of you talking to the Education Writers Association and you tweeted, “A bunch of journalists just created a better school funding formula than any current state model. How about them apples? Want more equitable funding? Elect your local reporter.” Thank you, by the way. We won’t take credit for that, but I wonder: Conceptually, is it a simple thing that we are just mucking up, or is it truly a complicated matter? 

There’s a part of every school funding formula called an . If you boil it all down, the state decides how much every school district needs to operate. They subtract out how much they think each community should raise, and then they give the rest. That’s what happens in every state. On the allocation side, people tend to understand how their state allocates: There’s a base amount and then there’s a weight for different kids, etc. That’s a policy that’s kind of easy to understand.

Ohio’s expected local contribution, I’m not kidding, goes for four pages, 12-point font, just in the mathematical equation alone. So if you’re a legislator and you’re looking at your state code and it’s 16 pages worth of, “Divide by, add two, regress four,” you’re just going to be like, “I give up.” But if you boil it down to, “Ohio uses a matrix that starts with the property wealth of every school district and gives a deduction for districts that have lower median household incomes,” I get that. What’s happened in school funding is that we’ve gotten so scared of the way it’s written because the code looks so scary.

It is scary, but we haven’t conveyed the concepts. Why haven’t we conveyed the concepts? Because research is what conveys concepts. And we haven’t had research to do it.

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provide financial support to EdBuild and The 74.

At the time, Susan Enfield was superintendent of the Highline Public Schools outside Seattle, close to the site of the first U.S. outbreak. Like her counterparts in neighboring districts, she was still in disbelief that sending students home was even an option. 

“I’m not sure, at the end of the day, that that was the right decision,” said Enfield, who recently shared her reflections with The 74. “I don’t think we’ll know for a long time how that really impacted all of us.” 

As the debate over reopening that fall intensified, Enfield was outspoken about the no-win situation leaders were in as they struggled to balance the needs of students with the demands and fears of parents and employees. To her, the predicament felt like having “an enormous square peg that I’m trying to squeeze into a microscopic round hole.”

Like many families and educators over the months and years that followed, Enfield relocated, leaving Highline in 2022 for the larger Washoe County Public Schools in Nevada, which includes Reno. She described the move then as hitting the “superintendent lottery,” but ultimately, stayed just a year and a half. She to return to the Seattle area.

“I’m really happy to be home,” she said. “I’m taking this moment to breathe and figure out how I can contribute from a different vantage point.”

In an interview, she reflected on the past 48 months and how the pandemic has — and has not — transformed the nation’s education system.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: The Northshore School District, not far from Highline, was the first in the nation to close because of COVID. What comes to mind now as you recall those frantic early days of the pandemic?

Susan Enfield: I’m really in awe of what educators across the country were able to do under really trying circumstances. I’m proud of how we responded. If memory serves, we deployed over 13,000 devices within the first couple weeks of having to close schools. There’s a real sense of pride in how people came together in a time of serious uncertainty and stress and did what they could to take care of our kids.

For those of us that stayed closed for so long, I don’t know if that was the right thing to do. Thousands of kids were out of school for so long, and we know that’s had an impact on them.

Moving from Highline to Washoe, what differences did you see in how the districts approached the closures?

How districts approached it was tied to local politics. The Puget Sound area is the bluest of the blue, whereas Washoe is really purple, politically. Washoe kids came back a year before Highline kids. That was probably the right thing to do.

What Highline was able to do that Washoe wasn’t was device distribution. We had under 20,000 kids, but Washoe had over 60,000, so there’s a magnitude issue. Washoe is a vast geographical area, so it was a challenge for them to distribute devices. Those differences speak to how every district responded as best they could based on their local political context and just the sheer makeup of their district.

Was there anything you would have done differently?

We would all go back and probably do some things differently, but I also had to recognize what was within my control. Our governor mandated schools be closed. I didn’t know at the time that keeping schools closed would be so detrimental. But there was so much fear and uncertainty around the virus, especially for a district like Highline. We have a lot of multifamily, multigenerational homes. The fears people had were very real, very legitimate.

How did the last four years change you personally as a leader? 

It fortified my values as a leader. I’ve always been a big proponent of health and family first, but that was really amplified — not just preaching it, but modeling it. I had to make sure that I was taking care of my people. 

We have a saying out here when it’s a beautiful clear day: “Mountain’s out.” I remember one Saturday. I just tweeted out a beautiful photo of Mount Rainier and said, “The mountain’s out and it’ll be out again tomorrow.” For those of us in leadership roles, we really had to dig into who we were as people, what our values were. The pandemic had an impact, not just on our children, but our teachers and staff as well. They had to re-learn how to be in community with other people after being in isolation for so long.

What are the biggest lessons we’ve learned from the past four years?

During the pandemic, there was so much talk of “We’re not going back to normal” and I was like, “Well, I don’t want to be the voice of doom and gloom, but the muscle memory of a bureaucracy as large as the public education system in the United States is very strong.” I predicted that we would by and large go back to what we knew. 

We learned some things and continue to do some things differently, like the option for virtual meetings. Family participation in [special education] meetings is up because now parents don’t have to take time off work. On the flip side, we still have a digital divide. We still have too many kids that don’t have access to the internet. There’s been some backsliding there.

One of the key lessons is that we can’t focus on instruction without focusing on the overall well-being of our children. We have to make sure that our kids, and staff frankly, get the resources they need to be physically, emotionally and psychologically healthy. For all of the opportunities that technology brought, being in person matters — seeing that face, being hugged, having someone look you in the eye and sit down with you. 

There are various predictions about the chances of another pandemic in our lifetime. If that bears out, how do you think the system would respond? 

We’ve got some playbooks now. We are better prepared because we actually have some blueprints on the logistical part of it. I don’t think it will be the scramble that it was before. And since many of us blessedly lived through the last one, I’m hoping maybe there won’t be the same level of fear and uncertainty that existed before.

I remember doing virtual happy hours with my family in California and a lot of them were literally wiping down their groceries and they weren’t going anywhere. Those of us in school districts couldn’t do that. I don’t think I ever felt that same level of panic and fear because I just couldn’t afford to. I had to help hand out meals.

Do you think schools would close again? 

That’s a really good question. As much as I think closing schools for the length of time we did wasn’t the right thing to do, I know that officials in Washington state have pointed to the very that we had. I don’t know what the perfect answer is.

I was pretty critical of a lot of our elected leaders during that time, but in hindsight, I have more empathy and compassion. I do believe everyone was doing the best they could with what they knew.

In Natasha Sonia Alford’s newly released memoir, American Negra, she describes an early childhood memory of being the new kid at school: “What are you?” another student asked. “I’m Puerto Rican and Black,” she responded, noting these were “the only words I had at the time to explain my identity in terms that made sense.” 

“Language mattered,” she writes, “and yet at this age no one had prepared us to explain who we were accurately.” Her memoir does just that: it is an exploration of her intersecting identities and an explanation of their impact on her experiences as a student, teacher, hedge fund management associate and journalist.

Alford’s story begins with her childhood in Syracuse, New York, where she excelled academically and was ultimately selected as one of three college-bound students to be profiled by the local newspaper during her junior year. After receiving acceptance letters from a number of selective schools, including Howard University, Alford enrolled at Harvard. 

Despite her successes and on-paper credentials, as she calls them, Alford struggled at first to find her passion and her place as the pressures of perfectionism wore on her. 

While American Negra is a study of Alford’s personal identities, it is also an analysis of American society more broadly, with a particular focus on our education system. She writes about the mantra she was taught that for kids of color in the U.S., education is the path out of marginalization. She encourages readers, though, to expand their understanding of this idea: too often, she argues, students are told that in order to be successful in school they must erase parts of themselves and conform. 

“I wanted to unmask the image of the successful, inner-city poster child with this book,” Alford told The 74. “The point is that that pressure to be ‘twice as good,’ if you bring up a child in that culture and with that rhetoric, they may still struggle years from now — even after they’ve left school — to feel like they are worthy and that they are good enough.” 

Years after graduating from Harvard, the 37-year-old, former Teach for America alum said she finally felt ready to take a risk and pursue a career in media. Alford, who got her master’s at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and who freelanced for The 74 early in her career, now serves as the vice president of digital content and an anchor at TheGrio, where she leads a national team reporting on critical issues facing Black communities. She is also a CNN political analyst and the recipient of numerous awards including “Emerging Journalist of the Year” in 2018 by the National Association of Black Journalists. 

American Negra, published by HarperCollins on Feb. 27, was named a “Best (and Most Anticipated) Nonfiction Book of 2024” by and the audio version list for Black and African-American books. The 74’s Amanda Geduld chatted with Alford about her book, education policy and solutions journalism. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

The 74: I want to start with a little bit of context. Can you explain to our readers how you selected the title for your book, American Negra?

“American Negra” is a phrase that describes what it’s like to live at the intersection of two worlds. I wanted to paint a portrait of an American experience that we don’t see often portrayed in the mainstream: being an African American and being a Latina — Puerto Rican specifically. The term “negra” just means a Black woman. If it’s “negro” it means a Black man. When you are in Latino cultures, it is not uncommon for somebody to refer to you as a “negra.” It is often a term of endearment, but it can also be used as an insult. But the point is, ultimately, that they are centering your race and your identity.

What makes it so interesting is that often in Latino cultures, we hear about color blindness and we hear about racial democracy. There’s an assumption that because many Latinos are people of color, there’s not really an issue with race — that race is something that is sort of a U.S. obsession. And so there’s a bit of a contradiction in that obviously: a culture that doesn’t really see itself focused on race to identify people by their race. I wanted to highlight that experience, while also making it clear that my experience was one that is based in America. I’m an upstate girl — grew up in Syracuse, New York — and so my experience of being Black and Latina is very much influenced by the United States and all of our recent politics and all of our histories.

And then finally, I think it’s also a declaration. It’s an embracing of the term because for some people to be called “negra,” or to be identified that way, is a bit of an insult. They don’t want to be called Black. But for me, I’m really centering my Black identity to say that no matter where I go, I’m a Black woman. It shapes my experience. I’m proud of it. 

So much of your book comes back to the themes of education and opportunity. What inspired you to tell the story in this way — with such a heavy focus on the education system — and can you talk about the ways in which your Black and Puerto Rican identities shaped this journey?

That is exactly why there’s an apple on the front cover of the book. That was very much intentional, because this is an education story as much as it is a story about identity. The reason why is because for so many communities of color — communities that are marginalized in the United States — education is our path out of that marginalization. At least that’s the message that we are told from the time that we are children. And that was the message that my parents imparted to me: that I came from two peoples who had been discriminated against in this country at various points in time throughout history, but education was something that no one could take from me.

What you see in this book is the pursuit of education, but also the pursuit of authentic self. I think too often when we talk about education and young people, it’s framed through this lens of conformity: you go to school, you have to assume a different identity, you have to speak a certain way, there are certain careers that are so-called successful. At each step of the way, young people are shedding parts of themselves or feel that they’re forced to. In the end, they may not recognize themselves. They may have succeeded on paper, but they’ve lost themselves in the process. 

I wanted to disrupt the education narrative that ends with someone getting into the Ivy League or getting into college and that being the end. And say no, actually, that’s when things just get started. The success is not just getting into this institution or conforming to this institution, but it is what you do with [it]. That’s the power of education … 

In terms of your own path to becoming an educator, your senior year at Harvard, when you were initially debating your career in education, you write in your book about this fear that people might say, “You went to Harvard to become a teacher? Shouldn’t you be doing better than that?” I’m wondering where you think this devaluation of educators comes from and what we can do to combat it.

There’s this really … about how high achievers learn to not become teachers. It explains essentially that we have created a culture in which young people pick up messages about what careers are valued and which ones are not. In terms of where this comes from, I can only assume that there’s a gendered dynamic to this. 

There is an element of sexism that has made its way into education and the fact that the majority of teachers are women, and women are not always paid what they deserve — we are often behind in terms of our male counterparts and many more are behind when you look at the different segments of women by race. So we are a society that gives teachers lip service, but doesn’t actually back it up with a financial investment in teachers and education more broadly. 

I actually don’t blame young people for seeing that. I don’t think that young people should have to be martyrs, frankly, especially young people who may be coming from working-class families themselves — may be coming out of broken educational systems. To go back and teach I don’t think they should have to struggle. From my short time in the education policy space and just in education, my takeaway was that we have a pipeline problem in terms of recruiting generally, but that in order to change education, you’re going to have to pay the talent — you’re going to have to pay them, you’re going to have to nurture them, and that it shouldn’t be an industry that you’re going into to make a sacrifice … This is something where we’re going to make the investment and see the results or not make the investment and the overall system will continue to struggle …

How can we get teachers to persist in the classroom when they’re up against challenges like the ones that you write about, like chronic absenteeism or eighth graders reading at a first-grade reading level? 

… I think what maybe would’ve kept me in the classroom was just having realistic expectations about what I could do in two years. Sometimes when teachers come in, they’re idealistic and they’re not necessarily ready for how long these problems have been brewing. If a student has not been supported academically from kindergarten, and you get them in fifth grade, there has to be some level-setting about what you can do. 

And so one critique I have of the short-term teaching programs is just with the optimism and the accountability and the expectation of making change. Sometimes there’s also unrealistic pressure put on a new teacher about what they can accomplish in one or two years, and that can be really deflating. If that teacher comes in hoping for the best, working really hard, going above and beyond, and they don’t see the “results” that are so valued by the people who are counting the numbers and counting the test scores, that makes them feel like a failure. When in fact, it takes much longer to build — whether it’s building school culture, establishing yourself within the school community, or just becoming the teacher that you truly can be … 

You recently tweeted about Nikki Haley’s “revisionist history” and the general idea within the Republican Party of color blindness. You were on CNN talking about why those narratives are so harmful, and I’m wondering if you can comment a little bit more on that in terms of how this plays out in the educational landscape.

She’s used the talking point many times: that if we tell children America was once a racist country, that somehow they will feel disempowered, and that they will feel like victims, and that they will have no incentive to try. That couldn’t be further from the truth. We have examples every day of people who were fully aware of America’s racist history, and who are strong in spite of that, who invested in this country in spite of that, who served this country in the military and in schools and universities, in spite of what they faced … 

We have to contend with this history because it’s ours. We have to own it. And that’s how we become a better county with each passing year, with each passing decade. But to ignore it is to handicap our children. It can leave them without context or understanding of what they’re looking at. What it does, then, [is lead to them] blaming themselves, believing that they’re inferior, thinking that something is wrong with them, and not necessarily wrong with the systems that produce many of the inequalities that we see today. 

So I completely differ from Nikki Haley in terms of my approach to history, and also just my general acceptance of America’s past. But I think it’s instructive and yet another reason why teachers are on the front lines of these culture wars around what is true and what is not. I give my deepest respect to all the history teachers and all the social studies teachers, because they’re doing some serious work right now that is important for raising a conscious generation who will go forth empowered to make change for the better.

You also recently wrote about race in higher education specifically around the former president of Harvard, Claudine Gay, stepping down. And this line really stuck out to me from your :  “With a new generation of Black students and young people looking to us adults for lessons from this moment, perhaps they are better served to know the truth: that even being ‘twice as good’ won’t always protect you from people who need your failure to justify their blind rage.” I’m wondering if you can expand a little bit more on how you experienced Gay’s stepping down and the vitriol that she received, especially as an alum of Harvard.

It became apparent right away that the attacks on Dr. Claudine Gay were about more than her testimony on the Hill. We’ve essentially forgotten about the third president who testified. It just went to show that this was always about more than the initial conversation of anti-semitism. What was really disheartening was that she became a punching bag for all of these critics’ anger and rage and a sense of frustration with what they feel is a loss. What they feel is that Black people’s advancement is somehow their loss, even though we’re all in this together. We’re all living and creating community and shaping this society together. Somehow they see it as a zero sum game … 

I wanted to unmask the image of the successful, inner-city poster child with this book. The point is that that pressure to be “twice as good,” if you bring up a child in that culture, and with that rhetoric, they may still struggle years from now — even after they’ve left school — to feel like they are worthy and that they are good enough. 

I read an article, I think it’s called “Contingencies of Self-Worth,” and the biggest lesson of that piece is that our own self worth can’t be contingent upon grades or upon getting into a certain school. We have to shift the way that we’re teaching young people about their value. And so “twice as good” is a survival strategy, but it’s not necessarily a strategy to thrive. I hope that my story — by being honest about many of the struggles that I’ve had despite having acquired certain credentials on paper — [encourages] others to talk about some of their struggles as well, and that we can cultivate a new generation that will be kinder to themselves and also accepting of the fullness of their humanity.

As a high schooler, you were followed by the local newspaper for all of your accomplishments. What kind of impact did that have to be so perceived at all times? It was because you were a role model and accomplishing so much, but I wonder what kind of narrative that instills in a young person about what they need to do to be successful.

Right. It was certainly a privilege, and I am grateful for the coverage that the local paper gave and appreciate that they wanted to show a young person of color from the city doing positive things. However, that also created a sense that failure was not an option. Making mistakes was not OK. And it inhibited me in ways. There were certain things that I wanted to try or do that I was afraid to do because I couldn’t guarantee my success. And that is not a way to go through life. You have to make mistakes, you have to experiment. You have to fully spread your wings in order to discover yourself and so really, I don’t spread my wings fully until I’m long gone from college. 

Five years after that I truly am honest with myself about what I’ve always wanted to do, and that was journalism and media. And I’ve made peace with, “OK, this might not work out, but I have to give it a try. I have to know if this is what I’m supposed to be doing.” It took much longer because of that perfectionist mindset that wouldn’t give me the freedom to try right out of school. 

My story is my story. I’m happy still. I think my life still worked out. I ended up where I wanted to be. I still feel blessed. But maybe someone else will be able to get to their destination a little bit sooner if they’re able to let go of some of that perfectionist weight that can keep you down.

As a former educator and now a journalist, what are education journalists getting right and wrong today? And how can we strengthen our coverage and make sure that we’re combating some of these problematic narratives that have become so ingrained over the years?

I know that journalists are working hard, and it’s not always easy. We have deadlines and fewer and fewer resources. I know many of us are doing the best that we can. But I would encourage us to move towards solutions journalism. We are dealing with a public that is weary. They’ve been hearing about problems nonstop. And it’s our job to also provide examples of what is working. Who’s getting it right. And not in a superficial way of “this overachiever managed to do X, Y and Z.” But what risks were taken? What experimentation is happening that’s really inspiring? 

I think it’s our job to highlight those things and also highlight diverse examples of this. Be open to information. Be open to inspiration coming from unexpected places and give people a reason to hope. That is our job as much as it is to point out what is not working. Because I think people who are living it know that a lot of this is not working. So I think that we can do that work to point them towards potential solutions and then hopefully people are inspired to go out and enact it at a grander scale.

Steve Dackin, appointed as the first director of the recast Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, told The 74 in an interview last month that building pathways to careers will be his second biggest priority — just after overseeing Ohio’s shift to the science of reading, which Gov. Mike DeWine and the legislature also mandated last year. 

For Dackin, career education even comes before the difficult task of tackling academic deficits students developed during the pandemic.

“I think a good job is the quickest way out of poverty,” said Dackin, a former local school superintendent and community college administrator. “I just see this as the mission of the agency.”

“First priority is making sure kids can read and write,” he said. “Second priority is making sure that they’re able to be employed and have a path to a good job.”

Dackin, 66, comes to the job with clear strengths, but also with controversy.

He has experience in both school districts and career pathways, having served as superintendent for more than six years of the 7,500-student Reynoldsburg school district near Columbus. Additionally, he has more than seven years connecting students, businesses and Columbus State Community College as that school’s superintendent of school and community partnerships.

Over the last few years, Dackin has also worked with the Governor’s Executive Workforce Board on a research project that looks at how well schools teach students about career opportunities. He said that the project, whose findings could be released in February, will be one guide in his new position.

A former member of Ohio’s State Board of Education, the current board selected him as state superintendent in 2022 to head the old version of the education department. But Dackin, who had a lead role in the search for that post before becoming a candidate, faced ethics complaints and had to step down just three weeks after taking the job.

Since the new director position is now appointed by the governor, the conflict of interest issues no longer apply.

Ohio’s shift to having an appointed director also drew controversy because it takes away control from the state school board, which has some elected members, and gives it to the governor. Some state board members sued to block the change, saying it would violate the rights of voters who elected them, but they failed and the powers of the state board and superintendent are now much more limited.

With those issues cleared, Dackin talked with The 74 about the department’s expanded mission.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: Do you see the mission of this department really changing now that workforce has been added to the name? How much?

Dackin: Yes. I mean, we have workforce in our title. We can’t separate education from workforce. It’s inseparable. And so to have a prepared workforce means that we have to do our due diligence on the preparation side. 

I’ve heard a lot in the last four or five years, from employers about their needs, and you hear everything from ‘I just need people who can pass a drug test.’…that’s a refrain from some… to ‘We can’t find people who have the skill set that I need,’ you know, and ‘We can’t find people who have the employability skills that I need,’ like showing up to work on time and being able to work with people, contribute to the team, some of those things that we know are needed. 

The American High School is amazing to me, how resilient it’s been for 50 years. Think about your own experience in high school. My guess is you experienced a seven or eight-period day where you had classes every 50 minutes and three minutes or four minutes between a class and then went to the next class and went to the next class and, and so on. And high schools look a lot like that still. I think it’s time to take a step back and ask ourselves, ‘Are we getting what we need to have for this new demand of an information-based economy?’ I think that’s a lofty question for a whole lot of people to try to answer.

The 74: Are you watching what Indiana’s doing right now? They’re having a big talk about rethinking and transforming High School and making work experiences a much more central part of high school.

Dackin: Well, I will be now. No, I wasn’t aware of that. And again, I’m 14 days in the job, but I’m always interested in looking at whatever places that are producing real outcomes. Because there are a lot of places doing things, but not many places are producing real outcomes. And again, to me, the ultimate outcome is a good job. 

I think a good job is the quickest way out of poverty… We have so many good jobs in Ohio right now. I just see this as the mission of the agency.

First priority is making sure kids can read or write. Second priority is making sure that they’re able to be employed and have a path to a good job. 

Third thing we’re trying to do is to deal with the accelerated learning issues that we have. You know the pandemic really set a lot…we had some students in the state who weren’t in school for two years. And so there’s still a lag there, around what they experience and where they’re at, and their gaps in learning, mathematics being a really good example of that. We have huge achievement gaps in math, more than even literacy. So we have to think about interventions we need to be doing and, frankly, make sure the department has a role in helping to analyze and research interventions that work and make those available to folks.

And then the fourth priority is none of this happens well if students aren’t safe, or they have challenges in their mental or emotional well-being. I’ve always applauded the governor since his first budget for putting money in and getting the legislature to agree to make dollars available for student wellness. It’s really hard to concentrate and read and write and do arithmetic if you’re dealing with all kinds of emotional or mental health issues.

So these are our four priorities. That’s all I want. Four. And they align with the Governor’s priorities. And I think when you can get really focused on doing a few things but doing better than anybody else, you’ve got a shot at doing something big.

The 74: You were state superintendent briefly under the old system? Do you prefer it this way? Is this really the best way going forward? 

Dackin: Yeah. I think the thing that I liked about this opportunity is that the governor’s focus is the same focus I’ve had my entire career. And it’s the same focus I had even as an appointee on the state board. First and foremost is literacy. We can’t accomplish our workforce goals if kids are not reading at or above grade level as they matriculate through the system. That’s foundational. I think that literacy is almost a right.

He’s put a stake in the ground around the science of reading. We know more now about how kids read and learn how to read than we ever have in the past. Our knowledge about the function of the cognitive processes in young brains, we know more now than ever. For him to say, ‘This is what we’re going to do in Ohio,’ took courage. And it was a visionary step on his part, to get us on the right path toward a more preferred future. 

The 74: Did you make the jump to science reading, when you were at Reynoldsburg?

Dackin: We did the science of reading in Reynoldsburg. We didn’t call it that, but we had the components of the science of reading. 

One of the things we did really well in Reynoldsburg is that we hired really, really, really, really quality teachers and principals. And then we gave them the authority to make decisions that they felt were in the best interests of their kids, relative to the outcomes we set. That was a difference-maker. 

The 74: So what if the professional in the classroom wants to use three-cueing with the kids? (Ohio’s law that requires teachers to use the science of reading approaches banned so-called “cueing” — having young students figure out what a word is through context or pictures — that has been a key part of other reading strategies.)

Dackin: Well, right now, the role of the Department of Education is to enforce the law. And so that’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna enforce the law. That’s kind of a nonnegotiable.

The 74: But do you agree with that, that it should be banned, like the state has?

Dackin: I agree with the fact that we have focused on five components of the science of reading that are research-based and have proven results. We felt that when I was a superintendent, and I know districts that do it very well. And so that’s where I plant my flag.

The 74: With this new department, how would you balance how much is straight workforce prep? And how much is just straight education?

Dackin: I don’t think you can separate the two. That’s been one of our challenges, not just Ohio, but across the country. We’ve seen Career Tech as a place that some kids go, and we have general education as a place for other kids to go, and it’s been this kind of separation point. But employers say the skill sets that are needed, and the knowledge base that is needed now in the workforce are a sophisticated set of skills. 

The last couple years, I’ve been working on a project on an issue that I think few people have a fundamental understanding of. The number of kids who enter high school in any given year in Ohio as freshmen…about 135…136,000… between 68 and 70% of those kids never get to a four-year degree In Ohio. It’s a big number.

But we have all these jobs that are posted right now that we can’t fill. And so we need every able-bodied Ohioan to be skilled, ready to take these jobs. We can’t have a stat like that, where three-quarters of the workforce after they get out of high school, are not sure what they’re doing. 

We then have to kind of reverse-engineer this a little bit. And that is, what are they doing while they are in K-12? And how do we ensure that kids are graduating and how do we expand opportunities while we have them in K-12 so that they’re leaving us in K-12 with requisite skills that become employable?

Dackin continued talking about the research project with the Governor’s Executive Workforce Board and how little students are taught about career opportunities.

One thing we do not do well in high schools in this state, and I suspect in many states, we never grab a kid’s heart while they’re in high school. I think it’s time to kind of use the phrase, reverse engineer, the middle school, high school experience so that we can start grabbing kids’ hearts.

They don’t know what they don’t know, and they don’t know about careers, largely.

We found out a couple things. One is most kids were led to believe that their primary opportunities would be either in college or the military. There was little discussion about careers in technology, careers in medicine. So right now they’re at a deficit. If you ask a kid, what do you want to do when you get out of high school, they’re void of much information about what’s available. 

That’s a shame, shame on us as adults. We’ve got to figure that out.

I think our challenge is to make sure that every kid, as they’re going through our K-12 system, their parents have access to labor market data that talks about what the careers are, what the pay is, what it takes to get from point A to point B. So many people don’t know how to navigate the system, because it’s very complex.

The 74: How much do you think that report is going to guide some of your vision for this job going forward? 

Dackin: I think that is one of many blueprints that we can build on. You’ve got to have multiple strategies. And we’ve got to see some pilots out there where we can get real data on what’s happening, real outcome data. One of our challenges in our state is it’s tough to get employability data.

We’ve got (places where) it’s being done pretty well. Our challenge in Ohio is how do we scale that? How do we ensure that it just isn’t the luck of the draw, that a kid happens to be in a place where they have a really well-thought-out system from K-12 to a good job? College may be part of that, maybe not, but how do we scale it?

Recent surveys of young people show that parents’ concerns may be justified: More than half of U.S. teens spend at least four hours a day on these apps. Girls, who are , spend an average of nearly an hour more on them per day than boys. Many parents are searching for support. 

Perhaps more than anyone, Carla Engelbrecht and Devorah Heitner are qualified to offer it. They’ve spent years puzzling over how families can help understand media from the inside out, and how schools both help and hurt kids’ ability to cope.

Engelbrecht is a longtime children’s media developer. A veteran of Sesame Workshop and PBS Kids Interactive, she spent seven years at Netflix, most recently as its director of product innovation. Engelbrecht was behind the network’s Black Mirror “” episode in 2018, which allowed viewers to choose among five possible endings. 

Engelbrecht is now in public beta testing for , a new social media platform for kids under 13. She calls it a “course correction” for young people’s social media, aiming to teach them to be more mindful, thoughtful and responsible online.

Heitner is an who specializes in helping parents and educators understand how digital technology, especially social media and interactive gaming, shape kids’ realities. Her books include 2016’s and her new work . 

Speaking to either one would be enlightening, but we decided to facilitate a broader conversation by inviting them to come together (virtually) to share insights and offer a bit of advice for both parents and schools. 

Their conversation with The 74’s Greg Toppo was wide-ranging, covering the effects of the pandemic, the pressures kids feel online and the women’s experiences communicating with their own children.

The solutions they offer aren’t simple. In Heitner’s words, parents seeking to learn more about their kids’’ media usage should pull back their surveillance and “lead with curiosity.” 

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: Devorah, tell us a little bit about your new book.

Devorah Heitner: I wrote Growing Up in Public because I was speaking for years about Screenwise in schools and all these other environments, and people said, “O.K., I get that we want to think about quality over quantity with screen time. But we also want to understand what kids’ subjective experience is and not just focus on how many minutes are good or bad.”

People lie about that anyway. People are sort of oblivious to their own screen use sometimes and get over-focused on their kids’. A lot of adults are recognizing: If I could have had a Tumblr or a Twitter or Instagram as a kid, I could have really done a lot of damage to my prospects and opportunities by so openly sharing.

What are we doing to our reputations?

As I started digging into that question, I recognized that parents are really part of the surveillance culture with kids. So are schools, with grading apps like or [which keep track of kids’ location, among other functions]. I really started understanding in a fuller way how kids are scrutinized. Kids are growing up very searchable, very public, and some of that is awesome. They have a platform, they can be activists. Some of it is problematic. 

The title of your book, Growing Up in Public, says so much about kid’s lives these days. I saw this term the other day: not FOMO, “Fear of Missing Out,” but FOMU, “.” Are those competing interests for young people?

Heitner: Well, there’s definitely a fear of messing up and especially being called out. There’s a lot of “gotcha” culture going on, and kids documenting each others’ screw-ups. And as much as you patiently explain, as I have to my own 14-year-old, the concept of mutually assured destruction, if you’re on a group text with somebody for long enough, both of you have probably said a few things you don’t want repeated outside of that context.

I think it’s modeled by adults, but this kind of “gotcha” culture is very insidious and terrifying. And it should be terrifying. 

Carla, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Carla Engelbrecht: I’m a longtime product developer and researcher in the kids’ space. I’ve spent a lot of time making products for kids. I’ve seen for years kids wanting access to Twitter and Facebook and MySpace and , all through the generations of social media. And they always want what is not made for them. They’re aspirational.

Kids are just plopped into this. And just as you wouldn’t give a new driver the keys to the car and just say, “Go!” — you need to teach them how to drive — there’s the same concept for me with media use. We need to teach our kids. Parents don’t know what they’re doing, because none of us have really been through this before, and they abstain. They need support in learning how to do this. Where Devorah talks about things from that guidance perspective, I’m looking at: How can we build a product for kids that helps them learn? 

It seems to me like Betweened is a site for parents as much as anybody. 

Engelbrecht: There’s definitely two audiences here. There’s absolutely a path where I could build a product for kids and launch them onto it. But I wouldn’t be addressing all the pain points.

Kids want short-form content. They want to create. They want to connect with their peers. In order to successfully set kids up to do that, parents need tools, too. And so it is really a product for both kids and parents.

Carla mentioned all these different apps coming down the road. Devorah, I’m thinking about you saying to someone recently how you’ve been working on this book for five years. A lot has changed in five years. We didn’t have TikTok five years ago. 

Heitner: Screenwise came out in the fall of 2016, which was a memorable time for many reasons: a lot of social forces happening in our world with Trump’s election. 

And then you have the pandemic in 2020. That’s around the time I had sold the book and was trying to interview people. Suddenly, I’m not in schools anymore. I’m on Zoom with kids, which is a whole research problem: How do you get a wider range of kids, not just the super-compliant kids who show up to a Zoom? And the pandemic was an accelerant to a lot of things happening already with kids in tech.

It was certainly not the beginning of kids being too young and not [the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act gives parents control over what information websites can collect from their kids]. But it accelerated, and there was kind of a push toward things like Kids Messenger [on Facebook] and other things that I even experimented with at the time. 

The pandemic started when my son was 10. We were like, “Oh, what can we do to help him communicate with friends?” We experimented with Messenger. It was a fail for us, but I also talked to the people at and [two mobile phone companies marketed for children]. There are people, in different ways, trying to come up with solutions because they have understood that both the adult apps and the adult devices, like a smartphone that does all the things, might not be the ideal thing to give a 10-year-old. 

What’s changed since 2016 is there used to be more worry about one-to-one computing in schools. Now, every school pretty much is one-to-one. It’s really the outlier schools that don’t have tech or aren’t giving kids individual tech. Even as late as 2015, 2016, I was helping schools negotiate that with parents. And parents were like, “I don’t know. I’m not sure about screen time. I don’t know if I want my kid getting a Chromebook.”

Try to find a school now that doesn’t give kids iPads or Chromebooks or something. That’s probably one of the bigger differences. And then just the explosion in server-based gaming like Roblox and Minecraft and the ways kids interact in those digital communities. You see a lot of very complicated, weird ideas among adults who care about children. Like “I’ll wait until eighth grade to give a kid a phone. Meanwhile,my third-grader plays Roblox on a server with strangers.” 

Engelbrecht: Or has access to text messaging through their iPad.

Heitner: Exactly. And they’re very smugly waiting till eighth grade and I’m like, “For what? For your kid to make voice calls?” That’s the one thing they don’t want to do.

Carla, you come from a game design background. People have lots of terrible takes about video games, which I’m sure you’re used to. How has that background informed what you’re doing and what Betweened looks like?

Engelbrecht: A lot of people come to video games and they’re just like, “They’re evil,” or “They’re awful,” or “They’re violent.” And you can say the same thing about television. You can also say the same thing if you only eat broccoli. Anything in excess is not good for you — like running a marathon every day. I take a very pragmatic approach to most things we can actually find good in.

When I look at video games, I can’t classify them as evil. I instead look for the good things. And it’s the same with social media. Social media as part of a balanced media diet gives parents a lot of opportunities to connect, gives kids a lot of opportunity to express creativity and develop skills. 

I’ll give you an example on the games side of things: Years ago, I did a South by Southwest talk called “What Can Teach Us About Parenting.” Left 4 Dead is not a game that kids should ever play. It’s a violent, first-person zombie apocalyptic shooter. It’s also one of the most beautifully designed cooperative games ever. I’m terrible with thumb sticks on video game controllers. I can’t walk in a straight line in a video game. I’m not great at the actual zombie-killing side of things. But I’m really good at running around and picking up health packs and checking in on people who have been damaged by zombies.

So there are different roles that people can play. I can still participate in the game, even though the primary way of playing Left 4 Dead is not what works for me. 

Also, if I’m playing with people, it fosters communication. I have to talk to people and someone needs to say. “Hey, I need help,” and I can come over. That’s what I’m looking for in games and social media: What are those underlying skills that, with a thoughtful perspective, you can leverage for good?

I wanted to switch gears a little bit and talk about something you mentioned earlier, Devorah: casual surveillance. I think about the stories we hear about parents not even just surveilling their kids — tracking their phones or their cars — but just keeping up in a way that we never even dreamed of. I wonder: Where did this come from? And how do you think a site like Betweened is going to help? 

Engelbrecht: I wish I knew exactly where it came from, but it certainly seems it’s symptomatic of the same thing: Everything has just kind of crept up on us. It’s like, as phones started to be introduced, we just thought, “Oh, well, I need to charge my phone, so I’ll charge it next to my bed.” And then the next thing you know, you’re checking it first thing when you wake up. It’s this slippery slope without the mindfulness of what it’s doing. Something has to happen to stop you, to make you take a step back and think, “How far have I gone? What boundaries have I crossed or what new boundary do I need to establish?” And to Devorah’s earlier point, the pandemic accelerated a lot of this.

Heitner: Part of it is we do it because we can. Even in relationships. I’ve known my husband since before we each had cell phones, but we didn’t used to check in as often because we didn’t have cell phones. It had to really rise to the level of an emergency before I would call him at work.

Remember the days of 9-to-5 office jobs? He left in the morning and was at his job. I was a grad student then and I would go up to Northwestern and not even really have any reachability by phone. Now we have phones, and the expectation is pretty much down-to-the-minute: If I’m 11 minutes late, I’ll probably text and say, “I’m 11 minutes late.” There’s just so much expectation for contact and communication and knowing where other people are. We don’t use location surveillance for that, but a lot of families do, and a lot of people have watches and will check into each other’s location on watches.

Because it’s there, people do it. And then there’s also just tremendous worry right now about kids. Given that we as a society think it’s a good idea for everyone to have assault weapons, parents are a little nervous. That anxiety creeps into everything.

My older daughter is 31, and I remember getting her first cell phone when she was 12 or 13. I remember the intense peer pressure she felt to have a phone. And I really didn’t like it at all. But I kind of justified it by saying to myself, “This is going to keep her safe.” And I remember thinking to myself, “You’re so full of shit. You’re just really trying to smooth things over.” And I guess I wonder: As parents, do we have an overextended sense of peril about our kids these days?

Heitner: There’s a sense of peril. Also, the Internet and online news and targeted algorithms just fuel that worry and outrage. It’s a bit of a vicious cycle.

Engelbrecht: In some ways, it’s almost like there are more risks that could stick with you. There wasn’t social media when I was in college. A bad decision in college couldn’t chase me through my entire life. In that sense, there are risks that feel much larger.

I think about my daughter and I don’t want something to chase her for her entire life. That part of it feels very real. And then it feels out of control. I don’t have the tools or know exactly how I can best help her except for having hard conversations and trying to put some bumpers around her. But there’s not a lot of tools to put the bumpers around her.

Devorah, one of the things you have said is that the kind of surveillance a lot of parents are undertaking is really undermining the trust their kids feel, and backfiring because kids won’t open up to them when they really need to. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Heitner: You just see kids really getting focused on going deeper underground. If their parents are like, “I’m going to get Bark and read every single thing they text,” then you see some kids who are like, “O.K., I need to go deeper underground, I need a VPN or to only text on Snapchat, or I need to do something where I can be more evasive.” And that concerns me, because then there’s no way to make use of the parent when the parent might be useful.

Engelbrecht: I think about how to create space to allow the kid to have a second chance at telling me the truth. For example, if there’s an empty bag of gummies and the kid is the only one who could have eaten it but says they didn’t, how can I create space to talk about making mistakes versus lying or intentionally hiding the truth? Saying, “I’m going to ask what happened to the gummis again, but first I want you to take a moment to think about your answer — it’s OK to change your answer, because I want to understand the truth. We all make mistakes and we can talk about it. But intentionally hiding the truth has consequences.”

If I later find out that the child lied, then there’s consequences. The hope is that eventually, a parent can say, “If you end up at a party where there’s alcohol, don’t drive home. Call me for a ride home. If you try to hide that there was alcohol and make poor decisions, then there’s additional consequences.”

It’s important to be able to say, “I made a mistake” and talk about what to do from there. Hopefully, that provides an alternative to the arms race of increasingly sneaky strategies that Devorah described.

Heitner: That makes a lot of sense. I was just going to say: The surveillance — schools just push it really hard. Every time I go to a school, they’re like, “Are you logged into ?” or “Are you logged into ?” They’re just really pushing it so hard.

Are schools culpable in this? Sounds like you’d say, “Yes.” I don’t know if you’d call it surveillance, though. One of the functions of schools is to keep track of things, right?

Heitner: But what about the location tracking? My kid has to scan a QR code to get into the cafeteria. I skipped lunch every day of high school and ate with my drama club friends in the theater. Was that so bad? They have 3,500 kids QR-coding themselves into study hall. It’s pretty locked down. It’s pretty Big Brother, or if you read Cory Doctorow. 

Engelbrecht: Homework tracking means having full visibility of my daughter when part of what she needs to learn is the executive function skills to actually be able to plan and follow through and do her homework. I don’t want to be in the place where I’m policing her homework. Now that she’s in seventh grade, it’s time for her to be learning those skills before there’s the consequences of missing your homework in high school or college.

So to me, it’s kind of that same thing: The information is there. Should it be provided? How do you use it? And, for me it’s: How do we better equip administrators, teachers or parents to stop and think about how to leverage this information? So maybe a kid who’s consistently missing their homework, yes, the parents should have more visibility as part of a support program to get the kid back on track and help them learn the skills. But to Devorah’s point, it doesn’t mean everyone needs to be badging into lunch.

Devorah, your message to parents is: There are all these things happening. There are all these things you have to keep track of. There are lots and lots of risks to kids being on social media, especially teenagers. But you shouldn’t panic. And I wanted to just throw this out to both of you: Instead of panicking, what should parents do? 

Heitner: Carla, you’re talking about creating a new community space for kids that’s more of a learning space, and that’s one alternative. Another alternative, in addition to, or potentially instead of, for parents who don’t have access to that, is just leaning into one or two spaces they really want to mentor their kids in.

Maybe their kid’s really involved in Minecraft. And if they want to join [a free voice, chat, gaming and communications app], the parents are waiting and saying, “O.K. You can join your library Discord with or your school Minecraft club on Discord, but not general Discord.”

Parents will tell me their kids are playing or they’re on YouTube. But I’m like, “What channels? It’s just like if somebody says, “I’m watching TV.” Well, what are you watching? Because that really is a big differentiator in terms of the experience.

Engelbrecht: It goes back to your “Fear of Messing Up.” I think so much about how it’s important for parents to wade in and get involved with their kids. This has been the advice for decades, whatever the newfangled thing was. I was just doing some writing about encouraging parents to actually do with their kids. It’s an opportunity to bond. It actually requires some planning and practice. It’s physical activity. I assume most parents are like me, that they’re not a great dancer and it’s uncomfortable and you don’t want to mess up.

But modeling that I’ll do something that’s out of my comfort zone and connect with you over something that I know you enjoy, can be very simple. It doesn’t mean a parent has to suddenly learn all aspects of Roblox or Discord, because they can be intimidating. But just find an entry point and connect with the child and participate with them. It just has so many benefits. It’s true whether they’re into Tonka trucks or Roblox. Parenting means, “Get in there with your kid.”

Devorah, you use the phrase, “Lead with curiosity.”

Engelbrecht: Oh, I love that.

Heitner: You want to be curious and have your kid share it with you. Their expertise and experience as well and their discernment — what do they like or not like about this app? How would they change it if they could? Staying curious is an alternative to spying — being curious and asking kids to be curious even about their own experience. Do I actually feel less stressed when I scroll this app? That’s maybe a lot of mindfulness to expect of kids, who have a lot going on and a lot coming at them. But it’s important for all of us to be curious about how our experience is going.

Engelbrecht: That’s one of the ways I’ve been thinking about it from a product perspective: just how to help build in some scaffolds for mindfulness — things like when you start an app, actually having a timer that’s like, “How long do you want to spend on it right now?”

I set a timer for myself when I use TikTok because I spend a very long time on it. So being able to put that in there as a scaffold, to start being mindful and thoughtful about it. We’re posting content, but we’re actually not posting endless scrolls where you could spend all day.

I don’t want to prioritize the traditional tech metric of “time on task.” To me, success is like, “You can come and use Betweened for 20 minutes and then know you can come back another day and there’s lots of interesting stuff for you.” But it’s not all-consuming, must-do-this-all-the-time. And that’s a different perspective on tech products. It’s not how most products are developed.

If you’re raising your child, hypothetically speaking, to be trilingual in Spanish, English, and ; play a musical instrument; make varsity track by their freshman year in high school; secure admission to a top-flight college; and publish a peer-reviewed article by graduation … you’ve got a lot to worry about. And you’re all but guaranteeing that you’re going to feel terrible about yourself — and maybe about your kid. 

But that’s the sort of insight that’s appropriate to a time of relative normalcy, a time when families can count on some basic social stability and standard functioning of things. It’s not as helpful in a moment when families are coming off a punishing global health catastrophe in a country with worsening political dysfunction. 

Families in 2023 are juggling post-pandemic about their kids’ academic progress and their social and emotional well-being, health and safety. That’s more than most of us can carry with easy equanimity. 

Now, instead of worrying about the various projects we’ve chosen for our parenting, we’re grinding ourselves just to get our kids back on some kind of recognizable track. As author Stephanie Malia Krauss puts it in her new book, , families are asking, “Will the kids be ok? What do they need? What can I do?”

I sat down with Krauss because I need answers to all three of those questions. 

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length. 

First of all, I have three kids, which makes five kids between us, right? 

Yes!

OK. So we know what we’re talking about. I’ll put it plain: It’s a really, really hard time to be raising kids. I think we — individually and collectively — need to say that out loud until more people realize it. How are you doing now, as a human in this moment, as we dig out from the worst of the pandemic?

​�ċParenting is extremely tricky right now, I think in large part because our kids are facing an onslaught of challenges and stresses and pressures that are either historic, but now feel intensified, or are legitimately new. 

Right now, the livability and lovability of young people’s lives are more on the line than we have seen in recent history. There is a level of volatility and uncertainty that has been building over the past 20 years in the U.S. that we really saw come to a head during the pandemic — from global health issues, but also racial violence and economic recession. I would bring in increasingly extreme weather as another thing to think about. 

Young people are living in the midst of so much unpredictability and it just feels deeply insecure, and it feels like their lives are on the line. 

So how is this parenting experiment going? I’m trying to figure out ways to protect childhood while empowering my kids to be resourceful and skilled and capable in the world as it is and also giving them the kinds of resources and opportunities where it’s possible to thrive, including being able to thrive when times are really challenging. 

I think you’re right. It’s a combination of old pressures that we’re maybe only sort of now attending to more thoroughly or noticing even … and this feeling of new challenges with heightened stakes. It drives more attention to how systems do or don’t meet kids’ usual — and new, in these stressful times — needs, right?

That’s also a conflict in the parenting experiment: I’m constantly aware of when I am complicit in signing my kid up for something that was designed for him to be a part of, but not designed with his learning and well-being in mind. 

Some of this is simple. For example, as kids get older, they go to sleep later, and they need to sleep longer. When the school year comes around, I’m going to be waking my middle-schooler up every day at 5:30 a.m., when I know it’s bad for his brain and it’s bad for his body. He needs more sleep.

And he’s gonna struggle to go to bed at night when I know he really needs to sleep for his mental and physical health. And I’m going to do that every single morning, knowing that’s actually not good for him, but because it’s just a part of how he needs to go to school. So I think that there are so many moments like that, and you think, ‘Oh, in an ideal world, this is what you could do to support the development and the well-being of my kid.’

So it’s about figuring out how to negotiate and live in that mess.

Is that where Whole Child, Whole Life came from? 

About 10 years ago, when my younger son was born, I left school leadership, where I had a number of questions about what young people actually need to be ready for the real world versus completing high school. So I go into national work, and soon realized that there are really smart people who are talking about these questions, they’re just not including a lot of people in the field.

So I decided to write a book as my love letter back to people raising and working with kids: Here’s what readiness really requires.

at the height of the pandemic, just right in the middle. I’m doing a pandemic book tour from my basement, talking to educators, counselors, parents, social workers, anyone. I’m talking all about how the future is changing, what young people need to be ready for the world as it is, what they need to be ready for the future.

But every single time, somebody would ask the same version of this question at the end: ‘We really need to know what our kids need to be ready, but they are not well, and we are afraid that they could give up or burn out before they get to this future you’re talking about. What do our kids need to be well right now?’

 I felt that question in the deepest parts of my bones. It was the question I was asking myself as a mom. So I put together this concept for what became Whole Child, Whole Life: 10 Ways to Help Kids Live, Learn, and Thrive. 

Any concrete tips for staying sane? 

Whole Child, Whole Life aims to explain what we need to know about young people’s physical, mental, cognitive, social, emotional, and even spiritual development. It tries to explain the practices that promote thriving, and why they matter, and puts it together in a way that is accessible and actionable. 

There’s a set of practices that make up the bulk of the book. These 10 practices we need to practice as adults for kids. And eventually, as they get older, we need to practice it with them.

Eventually, kids internalize these 10 practices as self-care strategies, which means we, the adults, need to practice these things, too. We need to build community and belonging. We need to nurture healthy relationships. We need to attend to our past and present circumstances — all the same practices apply to us that apply to them. 

When kids are with us, regardless of our title, we have a responsibility for them. They are in our care. And I tend to think about it as like: What is lifesaving? What is life extending and what is life giving for kids? What are my responsibilities at this particular moment? 

Our kids are growing up in so many situations where danger is implicit. Imagine being a child, showing up to school every single day knowing that you might get shot, or you might get Covid and pass it to somebody vulnerable, like your grandmother, who lives in your house. And yet you just keep doing that every day and it’s normalized. It’s a part of what today’s kids are incorporating into their childhoods. So we have to think of the lifesaving techniques that kids need now.

And then there are the big questions that I think young people grapple with from a practical level all the way to an existential level. Am I going to live a long life? Is there a future for me? Can I even imagine what this world is going to look like? Are we all going to make it? Am I going to make it? Is my family going to make it?

How do we support them with life-extending techniques that help them imagine a long life and a good life. What do they need to imagine and secure that?

And then the life-giving pieces: How do we make sure that kids can actually enjoy their childhoods without constantly feeling like they’re at risk of something bad happening? A lot of them go through life with just a real and pending sense of doom that has been brought on by their lived experience and is totally reasonable to me. 

What does it look like for us structurally and systemically to help kids get back to well? 

First, we should do a very honest appraisal of what the risks and realities truly are for our kids so that we understand. We can then get about the business of figuring out: OK, so then what? Then what will it take for them to learn, to grow, to thrive? And what does that require then, of me, perhaps that I may not have been prepared to do before? 

But we also have to look bigger. Our kids have the potential to live longer than anybody else with the right resources and opportunities. Science has advanced enough that we can keep people alive for a much longer time. Some people are projecting that our kids, as an expectation rather than an exception, could live a 100-year life. 

Put that in the context of work. You and I were raised in a generation where hustle culture and putting in the hours and putting in the work was a matter of pride. It was what you did. But the idea of my children having to do that level of work over a 60- or 70- or even 80-year working life — that is not the life that I want for them, and I don’t think they could sustain it. 

When I think about the prospect, the possibility of my kids having a 100-plus year life and then I think about the likelihood that in that 100 years there will continue to be volatility and uncertainty, acceleration, innovation, change, AI, and other advances and disruptions, it changes my view about what is important and why. 

A first credential might matter less in the context of a longer life. We know that a degree is going to get you a better-paying job, that there are real economic benefits. But in the potential of a 100-year life, that is one step of many in a working journey.

What are some tangible ways we could refocus schools on children’s needs and development? 

One of the things that I was so hopeful about as I wrote the book was that there are these 10 timeless practices that will always, no matter what is happening, support the health and well-being of young people. We know that learning is highly social and emotional. and that when young people are well, not only are they healthy, happy and whole, but they’re better learners and one day, workers. 

In schools, we have all of these frameworks and prescriptive programs. We have tiered interventions. We have positive behavioral interventions and supports. We have discipline strategies, we have academic remediation. We have skills to prepare for the future. We have all of these pieces and requirements. 

But we don’t actually have explicit, named frameworks for the art and science of taking care of children and human development. Schools need policies and practices that explicitly name and prioritize child well-being and development. I would love to see our schools commit to the whole child with a whole life orientation. Imagine schools answering the question: How do we help young people build lives and futures that they love? 

We can focus on the everyday interactions that teachers and principals have full agency and decision-making power over. How are we building consideration of children’s development into the decisions that we’re making in the school culture, the commitments and the discipline decisions that we make? Our content and curricular choices? How are we setting up classroom learning? There are things like project-based learning and experiential learning that can light up all of the aspects of a kid’s well-being.

I would love for readers to look at Whole Child, Whole Life as kind of a sifter they can take their practices and policies through, and ask each time: What lights of well-being and thriving come on when we do this practice, when we implement this policy at home or at school? Is this helpful, or is this actually harmful to a young person’s well-being?’

 She’s a product of that community’s public schools, which host one of the country’s longest-running, and evolving, school integration experiments. We sat down to discuss her new book, which came out Aug. 22 to and as well as the past, present, and future of racial equity in the Cleveland suburb. 

“You have to do a lot of different things and you have to keep at it,” Meckler told me. “That’s why I came away from writing Dream Town with optimism. This is a community that is still trying and still looking at all sorts of different things — a community that hasn’t given up — whereas in a lot of America, people don’t even care or don’t even try.”

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length. 

Let’s start with some context: what makes Shaker Heights unique? What’s its history? 

Well, I think of Shaker Heights as a story in three acts. The first act is its founding at the turn of the 20th century as an elite refuge for wealthy Clevelanders escaping the city at a time when the number of black residents in the city was rising with the Great Migration. Shaker was developed as a sort of “best of the best” community, with very high standards for architecture and for the people who they let in. And that’s how it was for a few decades. 

Then we move into what I think of as the second act. Of course, Black families could not get in for a long time, but in the mid-1950s, a few Black families did manage to get into Shaker’s Ludlow neighborhood, and once a few got in, more got in, and soon that neighborhood was rapidly moving towards resegregation.

But something different happened in Shaker, something that really sets it apart from most of the country, which is that the white people living there and the Black people living there decided to get together and fight against all the pressures that were leading towards segregation and white flight. With the and fear mongering that was being driven by the real estate and banking industries, they chose something different. 

So they got together and formed a community association. It started out with just getting to know each other, but then it moved into actual real estate, showing houses to white families and even offering second mortgages again to white families. They viewed it as a way to counter the forces that were pressing down against them. 

This spread to other Shaker Heights neighborhoods, and eventually to the city itself, which chose to be a place that was embracing diversity and promoting integration. So Shaker developed a national reputation as an integration leader—first in housing and then in schools. In 1970, a very forward-looking superintendent led the district to a voluntary school busing plan to desegregate the elementary schools. This, of course, was at a time when lots of communities across the country were to do the same. Shaker was embracing it, white families voluntarily sending their kids into the predominantly Black school, and vice versa. 

The third act comes in more recent years: a struggle over what racial equity means, over whether the schools are delivering it.

Shaker Heights is your hometown, you’re a product of its school district. But what brought you to this particular project for this particular moment? Why Shaker Heights? Why now? 

I first started thinking about reporting on my hometown back in 2013, when I was coming off of the White House beat and onto a beat covering demographics. I heard about a new Shaker superintendent who was taking on the achievement gap and taking on the question of racial equity. I was interested and intrigued. 

It took a while, but it . Usually, when I’m done with a big story, I sort of take a deep breath and move on to the next one. This time it felt like I had just scratched the surface.

There had never been a book about Shaker Heights. There had been a lot of media coverage, a lot of academic work, but never a book for the general public and I felt like I was really in a great position to tell this story. And then the pandemic hit, and I thought, “Well, if not now — when I have some time — then when?” So I started working on it in earnest.

The book is a story about, as you put it, “the promise and problems of Shaker Heights,” about its efforts to advance racial equity in the past and present. In recent years, various tracking systems — honors and AP classes and so forth — threatened the district’s equity efforts. How?

For a long time, Shaker Heights had this glow, like it felt really good about itself. “Hey, we’re doing this. We’ve got this. Maybe you guys out there have trouble with race, but we’re enlightened, and we are a model.” 

But in more recent years, there was growing discomfort with the academic achievement gap and the racially disproportionate placement of students by academic levels. The top levels — the Advanced Placement (AP) classes, the International Baccalaureate (IB) program, the honors classes — were all disproportionately white, and the regular and remedial classes were disproportionately Black. When you walked into Shaker Heights High School you’d look at the hallways, and it would be incredibly diverse. And then you’d walk into a particular classroom, and you’d say, “Is this an all-white school or is this an all-Black school?” depending on which level it was on.

There were a variety of things tried over the years to try to address this, none of them successful. When arrived a few years ago, he started combining some of the honors classes with what were called “core” classes, regular-level classes. So there’d be kids in honors and kids in core learning together in the same classrooms, with maybe different assignments or workloads. 

Then, in the , the superintendent made a huge change — to dismantle the tracking system. In one fell swoop, he moved all children into the honors level, basically starting in fifth grade all the way through ninth grade. Essentially everything up until you got to AP and IB classes. 

How did the community react? I mean, that’s the central theme of the book, right, Shaker Heights wrestling with its sense of itself, with its priorities and what those actually require it to do. 

There was a lot of confusion, because a lot of other pandemic stressors were in the air and this change was not well explained. Some people didn’t know about it at all. Other people thought that they were getting rid of AP classes. Both sides of that were wrong. 

Some people were thrilled. A lot of very equity-minded people, Black and white in the community, were very pleased. They thought, “It’s about time. We’re finally taking this on.” Others, who felt like these classes weren’t truly being taught at the honors level because they had such a wide range of academic ability in the class, were very unsettled. 

At the same time, the district was reducing homework and was giving people more time to do work, just sort of lightening the load. That happened in other communities also during the pandemic. But here, it happened at the same time as the detracking. So some people felt like the standards were dropping. Shaker, in addition to having a national reputation for integration also had a national reputation for excellence. 

So there were parents and students who felt like, “Are we no longer valuing, you know, real academic achievement? Are the very top kids gonna be lost in this?” 

Finally, this was sort of sprung on teachers at the last minute. They did not have any training before it happened. It was particularly hard for math teachers. Think about it: all eighth graders were put into Algebra I, which is typically a ninth-grade class. On the honors track it’s an eighth-grade class. But there were eighth graders in there who had never had pre-algebra, and maybe they didn’t do all that well in whichever seventh-grade math class they took. Now, all of a sudden, they’re not doing seventh- or eighth-grade math. They’re taking ninth-grade math.

Teachers told me that the training they got was mostly about the moral urgency of the matter, not the nuts and bolts of implementation. 

This is exactly what I was thinking as I was reading. I’m a former teacher and I feel like differentiation gets treated like a magic wand. It pops up when folks have theoretical priorities that run into practical headaches. Somebody says, “OK, well, what are you gonna do about the fact that a bunch of these kids haven’t had pre-algebra?” And then people go, “We’ll differentiate!” as though that’s just an easy, obvious answer. But differentiation is wildly difficult to do, even if it’s easy to say! How is Shaker Heights wrestling with the possibilities and limits of differentiation?

I did observe some classrooms where I saw teachers trying, and I saw some good things happening. 

The thinking is that you know, if everybody’s talking about the same thing, they can all be in the class together learning together, even if they show that learning in different ways. For example, they can all read the same novel—maybe some kids are writing long papers in response and other kids are doing a graphic panel. Someone else is maybe doing a podcast. 

I saw an eighth-grade math class working on probability. There were two girls working together, one Black and one white, and the Black girl was lost. I mean she was really lost. I could see she didn’t really understand it. The white girl definitely had it mastered, but she was very patiently explaining it to the Black girl. It was helping both of them, because the girl who was struggling was getting this one-on-one help, and she seemed to be getting it. And the girl who already understood, told me later that explaining it to somebody else solidified it in her own mind. We’ve all had that experience. 

At one point in the book, Shaker Heights High School principal Eric Juli asks: what if high schools focused on teaching kids to live and work together as opposed to looking up the Battle of Gettysburg? We don’t need you to memorize that, really. But we do need you to be able to live with one another and work together.

We often talk about school integration as this strategy in and of itself — integrating schools means changing the demographics of a school and its classrooms. That’s the work. Shift the demographics and you’ve done the reform. We don’t always talk about the necessary, discomforting system changes that come next. 

Juli’s view is that there are all sorts of ways to learn. And he’s very interested in project-based learning. His view is that let’s aim for a class that’s fun and cool, where you build and set off rockets, instead of just aiming for AP Physics. 

When I asked him, “Is there any value to, you know, reading a novel and being able to write a paper where you explore the characters and themes and show that you’ve understood it?” 

And he said, “Yes, but not every semester for all four years.”

Racial equity work isn’t just about in-class differentiation. It’s about shifting things like dress codes, disciplinary systems, the PTO, and such to help all kids and families feel like they belong, right?

Absolutely. That might even be the most important thing. What does it mean to feel like you belong? Why does that matter? You think, “Oh, you don’t go to a PTO meeting, someone else will plan the carnival. You don’t need to go.” 

But it does matter, because that’s the place where informal information is exchanged. That’s where people find out about the cool new classes or the teachers you really do or don’t want. That’s the information that affects kids’ lives. 

If you don’t feel comfortable walking into the school, are you gonna show up at the parent-teacher conferences? It’s easy not to. Maybe it’s hard because you’ve been working all day, you’re exhausted, your kids haven’t had dinner, and you don’t have any energy left. Maybe you also think, by the way, I don’t really like it there. Maybe that’s because you didn’t do well in school, maybe school doesn’t feel warm and fuzzy to you.

But if you have a sense of belonging and you’re part of this community, then yeah, you’re gonna go to Back to School Night. You’re going to the parent-teacher conferences. You’re going to the PTO meeting. 

Obviously, it also matters for students. Do you see yourself in the curriculum? Are your strengths and accomplishments reflected in the school’s trophy cases? How do you experience the school’s discipline system? If the Black kids are always, just always getting in trouble, you know, how are you feeling about this? Is school your place, or are you feeling like this is a place I have to go and just make it through the day? 

One day, Eric Juli was talking to a science teacher who’d asked a kid in his class to remove his durag, a tight skull cap that some Black boys and men wear, and the mother complained. The teacher says to Juli, “It’s against our dress code. You’re not allowed to wear any sort of hood.”

And Juli said, “Yeah, technically, this is against the dress code, but we’re not enforcing it.” He even said, there are skinny white girls walking around here half naked, and no one’s stopping them. We can’t be seen as just selectively enforcing it for this one kid. We don’t have bandwidth as a staff to start enforcing it evenly, so we’re gonna let this go. The teacher goes, “You know what? I hear you and I understand.” 

It’s one small thing, but I think it was reflective of something larger. Because how do you feel like you belong in this school when you don’t get to wear the thing you want to wear when it really isn’t bothering anybody.

Exactly. School integration isn’t an alternative to structural education reforms. It’s not like we get to choose between integrating schools and changing the internal systems and dynamics of how schools operate. We have to do both — a serious push towards racial equity that begins with student demographics and race at the center ends up requiring all kinds of uncomfortable things from adults, right?

It’s definitely both, and there’s no magic bullet. There’s no five-point plan for fixing your schools. It’s not that simple. You have to do a lot of different things and you have to keep at it. That’s why I came away from writing Dream Town with optimism. This is a community that is still trying and still looking at all sorts of different things — a community that hasn’t given up — whereas in a lot of America, people don’t even care or don’t even try. 

So no simple plug-and-play plan for the world beyond Shaker, fair enough. But is there a message for the rest of the country? For other schools? 

Different places have different demographics. Different places have different challenges. Different places have different potential for integration. Different places have different levels of achievement gaps. Everybody’s got their own, their own puzzle to solve. But I think if they look at the different kinds of strategies that Shaker has tried, communities can pull out different things and give people in their communities things to think about. 

So much of the conversation about education today is rooted in culture wars. Should you even be talking about racial equity? Is that critical race theory? Is that offensive? Is that racist in and of itself? Some people feel that way— so this may not be for them. But there’s also another part of the country that is interested in a different conversation, in exploring these issues and looking under that hood. 

I wouldn’t say that they’ve cracked the code, but I would say that they’re still at the decoder.

Few could have foreseen a shift of this magnitude. But the theory and framework for a truly choice-based school system, in which families receive subsidies from the government to attend the private institutions they prefer rather than being assigned to the school nearest their homes, were laid long ago. Cara Fitzpatrick’s , which will be published September 12 by Hachette Book Group, offers a comprehensive and unblinkered history of the half-century campaign for school choice — and a kind of origin story of the moment we’re living through.

Beginning in the early 1950s, the book explores the hodgepodge of intellectual influences on the fight for school choice, ranging from conservatives like Milton Friedman to liberals like the psychologist Kenneth B. Clark, whose research was cited by the Supreme Court in the Brown V. Board of Education case. An editor at the education site Chalkbeat who won at the Tampa Bay Times, Fitzpatrick gives careful consideration to familiar vignettes from the history of the movement, including Southern efforts to undermine the Court’s blow against segregation in schools. 

She also reintroduces obscure, but critical, players from the years-long push for school vouchers. One of them is Virgil Blum, a Jesuit priest and civil rights activist who insisted that taxpayer support for religious education was not only desirable, but entirely necessary under the U.S. Constitution. Though he died just before Milwaukee established its pioneering voucher system, Blum’s arguments can sound strikingly similar to those advanced in Carson v. Makin, the landmark 2022 litigation that disallowed prohibitions on state assistance for parochial institutions.

Though it took years to move from theory to action, the diverse and resilient coalition eventually proved stunningly successful. Closing in on the present, Fitzpatrick gives close consideration to how some of the movement’s biggest victories grew larger and faster than their advocates ever anticipated. One of the most compelling policymakers she follows, Polly Williams — a Wisconsin Democrat who entered what she deemed an “unholy alliance” with Republicans to pass a municipal voucher law — later broke forcefully with her signature accomplishment and its supporters.

“What’s so intriguing about this topic is watching what happens to someone’s ideas 30 or 40 years on, after other people have picked them up with different intentions,” Fitzpatrick said.

In a discussion with The 74’s Kevin Mahnken, Fitzpatrick talked about the widening political divide on education policy, the endless debate over whose values are reflected in education, and the pandemic’s continuing impact on families’ school decisions.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: The book is called The Death of Public School. But something like 50 million American kids attend public schools. What did you intend by choosing this title?

Cara Fitzpatrick: Everyone loves to ask me about the title! It’s provocative, that’s for sure. 

Originally, the book was called Unholy Alliance: The History of School Choice, which is a partial quote that I loved from Polly Williams. But unless you know about that quote, it was possible for people to think it was specifically about the Catholic Church or something. It didn’t say enough about education. And since people define school choice in very different ways, we couldn’t really go with that either. 

As a reporter, this book was my way of asking whether you can have the traditional public school system alongside everything that comes with school choice. Charter schools have probably been the most successful school choice reform; around the country, and in some cities, they’ve had a huge, huge impact.

For me, it all raises some questions: Are these things compatible? Does this expansion of choice inevitably mean the end of the traditional public school system? 

An even wonkier question that I was also thinking about was how we define a public school. Our country has defined it a certain way for a long time. But if you start having private schools where every student receives a voucher, and most of the money essentially comes from the state, at what point does that become a public school? 

The narrative part of the book really kicks off in the 1950s, with desegregation and the first voucher programs on the horizon. But you also periodically allude to the debates over parochial education in the 19th century, when a huge, alternative system emerged to serve Catholic families. Would it be fair to say that the seeds of the present moment were sown from the beginning of public schooling?

Going back 150 years, there were “” in a couple of New England states that were essentially a model for school vouchers, and the Catholic school system was forming at the same time. You could say that was the earliest movement for school choice because it represented a group of people who were not well served by “common schools,” which had a distinctive Protestant bent to them. There were huge fights over which Bible to use in class, for example. 

So figuring out where to start the book was tricky. The Founding Fathers had debates about how to educate kids and which kids should even be educated. One of the ways I addressed it was to mention that history in my introduction and then introduce , this mostly forgotten priest who was interested in vouchers for religious liberty. I thought his background could open the door to the big themes without the book being 500 pages long and extending back to the American Revolution. You don’t want your book to be an encyclopedia of school choice that no one will read.

From one point of view, the seeds were there all along, as you say. But there’s an essential difference between what developed in the late 1800s and what we had a century later: a public school system that’s secular, that’s compulsory, that’s for everyone. You could say there was such a thing as a choice system earlier than that, but this also wasn’t a country that was interested in educating women or Native Americans or African Americans during that period. That makes it hard to compare.

I ended up starting in 1950 for a few reasons. You had what was going on in the South during the lead-up to Brown v. Board of Education, and you had segregationists to avoid Brown. But at the same time, there were other threads that I thought were really compelling, like Milton Friedman making an economic argument for vouchers. The way a lot of people tell the story, school choice begins with Milton Friedman, and then nothing happens for 40 years, and then you get vouchers in Milwaukee. That’s kind of the stylized version I’d often heard as a reporter.

Friedman did make his economic argument for choice in the ’50s, and there were also segregationists essentially using choice for exclusion. But you also have Virgil Blum advancing an argument based on religious liberty. I thought it was fascinating to have these voices emerging and previewing where this movement could go, for good or bad uses. They set up so much of what we’re still seeing now. 

As a longtime education journalist, do you think the complexities of the debate around school choice have been flattened somewhat in the public conversation?

As a reporter, we so often cover the school choice issue as this yes-or-no, pro-or-anti phenomenon. There are traditional public school advocates who are very opposed to anything involved with private school choice, and they are increasingly opposed to charters as well. Of course, there’s an energetic lobby in favor of choice on the other side.

When I started digging into the research, I found the history much more nuanced than that. For instance, it’s pretty hard to say, “Here’s the date and time when we had a public school system that was available to everyone as we know it today.” The regions of the U.S. developed public schooling at different paces, such that the South was a bit further behind, and New England was a bit further ahead. There have always been voices and debates about how we educate kids, and whose values are reflected in education, but they’ve been sort of lost in some of the yes-or-no, for-or-against debate. My fascination with those debates kept me going through five years of research.

I also found it interesting that even among school choice advocates, there wasn’t universal agreement about how it should work. Should it be a means-tested program for low-income kids? Is it a tool of empowerment for African American and Latino kids? Should all schools exist within a choice system, as Milton Friedman said? In some of his letters, Virgil Blum argued that Catholic schools would need to adopt some of the same accountability measures as public schools under a voucher system, whether those included elected boards or public audits.

You can see those fault lines now in the way some choice programs have evolved. Milwaukee’s system started out with less accountability and had more and more added to it over time. Kids who receive vouchers in Florida take a norm-referenced test — it’s not the same as the state test, but it’s a measure of accountability. 

Of the three school choice strands that you listed, a lot of people have heard of Milton Friedman, and many are familiar with the story of segregation academies by now. But Virgil Blum is going to be a new name to most readers. 

You’re right that people are probably familiar with the segregation element. But the treatment of that is sometimes used by opponents of choice to just invalidate the whole thing. 

I don’t think that’s entirely right or fair because even as the courts were striking down school voucher programs, there were already overlapping figures who were interested in school choice as a mechanism to help low-income kids. You had [journalist and academic] and active in that time period as well. It wasn’t just that segregationists were trying to thwart desegregation. Other people were looking at the same mechanism and thinking of uses for it that were quite different. That aspect of the segregation story can get lost at times.

But you asked about Blum. He and his organization, the Catholic League, were hugely influential during this period. He was making arguments about religious liberty — legal arguments — 50 years too soon. The Milwaukee voucher program hadn’t happened yet, and obviously neither had the Supreme Court cases that have since shaped the way vouchers can be used. But he was already advancing the case that they would someday be allowed under the First Amendment because this was an issue of religious liberty and discrimination against people who wanted to choose a religious education. 

It is incredible to read Blum’s early writing, which you can find at the Marquette University archives, and think about how ahead of his time he was. Some of these federal cases were happening while I was doing my research. I’d watched the arguments for Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue at the Supreme Court, and this guy made some of the same arguments in a book published in 1958. 

It sounds so dorky, but one of the coolest things for me was to read the correspondence between Blum and Friedman. They exchanged a few letters, and you could see that they were coming at school choice from different angles — both in support, but from different motivations. Friedman was very candid with Blum in arguing that school choice could actually be bad for Catholic schools; he was anticipating that if vouchers came about, there would be many more private schools entering the market, and Catholic schools would face more competition. 

You can see how that dynamic is playing out now. Catholic schools may, in fact, benefit from the recent explosion in voucher legislation, but other schools will as well. But it was all forecasting at the time, and Blum didn’t even live to see the Milwaukee system enacted.

Do you think Friedman’s predictions proved accurate? It seems like urban charters, more so than private competitors, have played the biggest role in shrinking the Catholic sector. Vis a vis the South, he also noted that vouchers might not succeed in maintaining segregation. While there is some research on vouchers and segregation, I think the jury is still out on that question. 

Friedman laying out his view of how vouchers would work, and it’s not exactly a barn burner. I hear people refer to it as a manifesto or something, and I’m like, “Have you read it closely?” He was making an economic argument, with no fiery language, about what he saw as a better way to run education. 

He lived a long time, unlike Blum, and he actually got to see his theory become policy in Milwaukee and Cleveland. That included litigation, and the Supreme Court . And I think some of the things he thought would happen were pretty close to right. He never really changed his mind that a voucher system was more likely to end segregation than create it. When he was interviewed even 50 years later, he kept arguing that school choice would help deal with segregation.

We don’t know yet how the spread of vouchers will affect Catholic schools, which have been on the decline for a long time. A Catholic school recently closed in my neighborhood in New York, just a couple of years after another one closed. But Catholic schools in Florida might end up benefiting from private school choice. I’m not sure if Friedman was really making the point that vouchers would hurt Catholic education, or if he was just trying to be honest with Blum that things might not go in the direction he hoped. Even at that time, Catholic education wasn’t necessarily doing that well, which is partially why Blum was leading this movement to get aid from the state.

I think Friedman was right about the idea’s potential, and right now, we’re obviously seeing kind of a wildfire spread. It’s still small numbers compared with traditional public schools, but this proliferation of choice laws over the last few years would have probably pleased Friedman — especially the universal legislation. He didn’t think voucher programs that were solely targeted at low-income children were a good idea.

One thing the book shows is how diverse the school choice movement has been, including not just religious figures like Blum and conservatives like Friedman, but also Cold War-era liberals like and the sociologist Christopher Jencks. Do you think any of that heterogeneity remains? Vouchers today are as polarizing as any other political issue.

It seemed like it was headed in that direction even when I started doing this research. There was always a tension between African American Democrats like [Wisconsin legislator] Polly Williams, who were in favor of school choice to help low-income children, and their white conservative allies. I think that when President Trump was elected and Betsy DeVos was at the helm of the Education Department, it definitely increased that polarization. 

One of the ways we really saw that unfold was with respect to charter schools. Until that point, there had been a longtime, bipartisan consensus around charters as an education reform that people were comfortable with and that seemed somewhat successful. But a lot of Democrats started backing away from them when DeVos became education secretary, that fissure is widening now with the push toward religious charters, which goes against the original intent of the policy. All the school voucher legislation, especially the push for universal programs, comes much more from a Friedman place than a progressive or bipartisan place.

I’m terrible at making predictions, but it does feel extremely polarized at this point. It’s why I come back to the question of whether these two ideas can coexist, universal school choice and traditional public schools. At the same time we’re seeing the wave of choice legislation, we’re also seeing fairly aggressive attacks on public education from Republican lawmakers. That makes it very hard to look for consensus.

I’ve now spent a long time researching and writing a book that would give a fair look at the complexity of these debates and not take an ideological position. It’s been hard to know how it would be received on either side because we’re not super interested in nuance right now. 

My sense is that this debate has split the Left more than the Right. As you mentioned, Democrats are somewhat torn on charters, where most of the gains for school choice have actually been made over the last 30 years. Maybe I’m wrong, but it feels as though there’s no opposition in the GOP to universal vouchers, by contrast.

There are definitely people [on the Right] who got into school choice and school vouchers with a Polly Williams mindset, just aiming to help kids who had access to fewer choices. I’ve spoken with people who are uneasy with how things have gone the last few years. Some of them have voted Democrat before, and maybe they’re feeling some discomfort seeing where universal vouchers are going. But I don’t know if that means there’s no place in the movement for those people anymore.

There’s always been a sense within the school choice community that it should be a big tent. That’s supposed to be the nature of choice. On the flip side, I’ve recently heard this argument play out on Twitter and elsewhere: Can we use the culture war to rack up wins for school choice legislation? We’ve got people like Chris Rufo talking about how could lead to more demands for school choice. 

There’s been pushback to that line from other advocates within the movement. That said, I think the Friedman side has won. What the book broadly describes are the competing arguments within the movement, and the Friedman side is ascendant right now. The question is whether the other folks are disgusted and walking away, or whether they’ll find a way to navigate the new landscape.

And the Democrats? Few of them will talk much about school choice anymore.

There’s not a lot of space right now for a Democratic lawmaker who’s interested in school choice of any kind. 

That was on display in Pennsylvania, where [Democratic Gov. Josh] Shapiro on school vouchers. I was astonished by that because it definitely didn’t feel like the moment for a Democratic governor to support a voucher program. I had to double-check his party affiliation because I was like, “This can’t be!” And as we saw, there was a backlash to that, and , and he’s backed away from that commitment for now. 

There was a backlash to charter schools from Democratic lawmakers during the Trump administration, and since that time, the interesting turn of events has been the push in some quarters for religious charters. For the traditional public education defenders who were always opposed to charter schools, they feel like this is what they’ve always warned against: Charters aren’t truly public schools, they’re just masquerading as such. But for the early charter advocates, it’s so far from what most of them intended, almost like a bomb going off in the charter movement.

What’s so intriguing about this topic is watching what happens to someone’s ideas 30 or 40 years on, after other people have picked them up with different intentions. You see that throughout the history of vouchers, and the same thing is happening now with charters. 

What’s your assessment of the educational effects of this blossoming of school choice? Stanford’s CREDO institute showing that charters now slightly outperform district public schools, and lots of other research point to beneficial competitive effects from the charter sector. I’d say that studies on voucher programs have been mixed-to-negative, however.

Research was one of the more difficult things to handle while I was writing this book. When school choice policies got off the ground, there really was no research other than this sense that Catholic schools were pretty good. I also didn’t want to write a book about research studies, any more than I wanted to write an encyclopedia of school choice. 

But you can’t ignore the research, especially now that we have pretty good findings on the existing school choice programs. We don’t know much at all about how universal programs work because they’re still too new, but there are studies on charter schools and on some of the voucher programs that have been around a while. 

Early on in the writing process, I had a brief fellowship at the Russell Sage Foundation as a visiting journalist. As part of that, I presented to some researchers about my book, and by an incredible coincidence, Christopher Jencks — who makes several appearances in the book — happened to sit in on my presentation. And after listening to me go back and forth with an economist who was really pushing me to focus more on research, he suggested that I look at how the research has influenced the narrative around school choice. 

As an example, one of the arguments for the earliest voucher program in Milwaukee was that it was actually going to be better than the existing public schools; after all, why else would we be spending money to send kids to school that aren’t better? But the very early research on Milwaukee didn’t show that. Parents were very happy and satisfied about being able to choose, but test scores were about the same as they had been. 

Eventually, though, that changed. [Harvard Professor] Paul Peterson and a couple other folks that showed increases in test scores. This argument over the program’s effectiveness was happening while it was being litigated in the Wisconsin Supreme Court. You could see that the research mattered a lot in that moment, as part of the argument about whether private school choice was worth replicating. 

Beyond that, I had the feeling that after three decades, I had to be able to say something about whether school choice works. If someone picks up the book who knows nothing about school choice, that is the obvious question: Does it work? And, if so, how does it work? 

In the end, I don’t think any of the results have turned out as well as early advocates believed. Vouchers show some good life effects for their students, including an increase in high school graduation for some of these programs. Those are good. But there have also been multiple studies showing declines in test scores for some of these programs. Certainly, advocates did not anticipate the private schools actually performing worse than public schools. 

As you mentioned, CREDO’s most recent report shows that, on average, charters now have an edge over traditional public schools with respect to test scores. But with most charter studies, the effects tend to vary depending on the different charter markets. Some cities have much better charter schools than others, and they’ve varied over time. For a while, there were certain states that were seen as problems in the charter school movement because they kind of let anybody into the market. The reverse was Boston, which was much more selective about letting people open schools, and they saw really good outcomes. Urban charters in general have done really well raising test scores for disadvantaged kids.

No one study is the end-all, be-all, and with this research, people cherry pick the findings they like best. But it’s worth trying to look at the cumulative picture over time.

Given how harsh the debate around charters and vouchers, do you think a truly public system of choice — like open-enrollment, which allows families to cross district lines — could be a reasonable area for compromise? It’s been widely embraced in Michigan, though with the unintended side effect that districts are now racing to poach one another’s kids.

For various reasons, there’s even opposition to the idea of inter-district choice. There are clear limitations, like how you move kids from a really rural district to go to school somewhere else. A lot of bigger districts, where that issue is easier to manage, already offer a bit of choice in their student assignments, and things like magnet schools. It’s an area that was pretty instrumental in establishing the idea that your kids didn’t necessarily have to go to their neighborhood school, but I don’t know that it offers a compromise in the current argument.

That’s even more true now that so much of the argument revolves around values and the Virgil Blum side of the debate. Being able to switch from the New York City school district to somewhere in Westchester might be useful for a family that’s trying to escape a particular zoned school, but what if you really want a religious education for your children?

You write about that question in an early passage about parochial schools that might not admit gay students or hire a gay teacher: “These reflect religious beliefs but perhaps not the views that all Americans want supported by tax dollars.” But of course, all Americans have never agreed about what they want schools to teach. The pivot is that courts are now taking a much more open view of what the state can support.

That’s right, all Americans don’t have much of a consensus on anything. To go back to the beginning of our conversation, this idea of which values to express in American education has been there going back to the 1700s. If you’re using a Protestant Bible, then the values of Catholics aren’t reflected.

The idea of a public school system has been to avoid those really personal considerations and try to find a landing place that works for most people. And there’s a whole legal history in this country to do something else if they want that. The Supreme Court famously ruled in Pierce v. Society of Sisters that “the child is not the mere creature of the state.” The practice was to have a system and then let people go outside the system to reflect their values.

What’s also important in our country is that we don’t have one, standardized system of K–12 schools. Local control has been the hallmark of American education from the start, and local values tend to differ a lot by region. We’re seeing really tense political battles in Texas and Oklahoma, where some conservatives actually oppose school voucher proposals. I think that’s because they believe they already see their values reflected in public schools, and public schools are a huge part of their rural communities.

My public education, which I experienced in a conservative corner of Washington State, was probably rather different than one experienced by a coworker of mine who was raised in New York City. You could argue that degree of localism is good or bad. I spent a good bit of high school learning the history of the Pacific Northwest. [Laughs.] We got a lot of Lewis and Clark because at some point, someone decided that was really important for kids in my part of the country. If you live in Gettysburg, you probably take a field trip to Gettysburg every year.

That kind of variation is already possible in American schooling, and your local district probably does incorporate the identity of the community in some way. What’s interesting now is watching Republicans, who tend to be in favor of local control and small government, taking a statewide approach to the issue of how we teach history and gender and race. 

K–12 enrollment has fallen quite a bit since the pandemic, and early signs don’t indicate that the rebound will make up for what was lost. Do you think that movement, along with steadily declining birth rates, could further fuel school choice and perhaps provoke some kind of death spiral for a number of public school districts?

COVID was happening as I was writing. I signed a book contract right before having my third child, and the pandemic started when he was nine months old. So he never went into childcare, and I lost in-person school for my older kids at the same time.

I could see, both as a journalist covering the pandemic and a parent living through it, that this was going to have a lasting effect on schools. I’ve heard historians say that you can’t write about something until 10 years after it happens, and I didn’t choose that. But I ended the book in 2019 because there was a moment there that I thought tied everything together nicely.

Despite the book’s title, I think the idea of a death spiral is a little much. You could say that the pandemic has opened up a moment when it’s been easier for Republicans to justify and pass school choice legislation. Given the nature of how parents had to get through the school closures, people’s lives were changed so significantly that they were willing to try forms of education that they hadn’t before. We saw a big lift in homeschooling among African American families, for example. 

A lot of parents got a closer look inside classrooms through Zoom — not that that was necessarily a fair representation of what normally happens inside schools — and it set some families on a fundamentally different path. Other families made short-term choices that got them through the crisis, and then they returned to what they were doing before. We homeschooled my older kids for a year, and it was a really interesting experience, but they’re now back in a public school full-time. 

Some of the enrollment decline obviously comes from people leaving big, expensive cities like New York. Some of it comes from people making different school choices. Catholic schools had an increase for a year, but they’re still in decline. In the end, the biggest questions leftover from COVID have less to do with choice and more to do with academic recovery and mental health. For a lot of kids, there’s been a disconnect from the idea that you have to go to school; the pandemic showed that they really didn’t have to go to school.

That said, I’m very curious to see how many people actually take up the states on some of these voucher programs. How many Floridians will use these vouchers? And how many were ever enrolled in the public school system? We’re going to see it happen in real time.

But at night, there is a lot keeping her up. 

“It feels like perilous times,” she told The 74.

The philanthropic backing for the work to build up pipelines for more educators of color — which saw unprecedented support in the wake of George Floyd’s killing — is dwindling. And a generation of young people are being challenged to see education as a viable career, amid poor wages and political restrictions, said Semaan. 

“A number of funds that were set aside specifically for diverse leaders and educators, those things are being sunset now,” said Semaan, who founded the Surge Institute in 2014 to provide leadership development opportunities for educators of color in several American cities. 

“The wild enthusiasm that we saw for elevating and amplifying leaders of color and having them be thought leaders, those tones are becoming more muted.”

After nearly a decade supporting Latino, Asian, Native and Black leaders like herself thrive in higher level positions in districts nationwide, Semaan has witnessed ebbs and flows in public opinion, success and philanthropic priorities when it comes to diversifying the workforce. 

In conversation with The 74, she reflected on the biggest challenges to bringing in more leaders of color, her personal experiences being discouraged from the field, and what’s at stake for the next generation without systemic change in recruitment and retention. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about what you’ve been seeing, hearing, thinking. What is the state of diversifying teacher and leader pipelines right now?

It feels like perilous times. 

In 2020, because of the combination of the pandemic and the racial reckoning post George Floyd, there was a lot of attention being paid, or at least lip service being given, to education equity. Regarding the need for not only creating pathways, but for retaining teachers and leaders of color. At the time, when people asked me a very similar question to the way you’re asking now, I would say I was cautiously optimistic. 

The reason I was cautious is because I think that this work has to be movement work. And it felt like people were responding to a moment with all the right words. But if there’s not true belief that is grounding those words and activities, then when the next thing comes, it is very easy to pivot away from that. 

I’m thinking about … the role that pay disparity and politics play, and how that weaves into the ability of teachers to do their job. Burnout from the past two and a half years is particularly impacting teachers of color. I think that those things should give us all pause, and cause us all to question whether that bump of interest and commitment and urgency post George Floyd, if that somehow lost its luster. 

People have felt that they’ve checked some boxes and are now moving on, whether it be book banning or school boards and fighting for seats. 

Could we spend a moment thinking through the barriers to your work right now. What do you see as the largest challenges to diversifying the workforce? How have they changed since you founded Surge in 2014? 

A lot of the challenges that are facing us in education, from teacher pay to student loan debt to politics that are making it really divisive and unsustainable, are all things that aren’t helping us in getting a new generation of leaders interested in seeing education as a viable professional opportunity. That is something that does make me lose sleep … I think about the number of people, especially first generation college goers, that are being told in their communities, by their families, and sometimes even in their schools, that if they want to be successful, have a living wage and a sense of freedom, that education isn’t the pathway for them. 

Education is also policy, education is philanthropy. Education is curriculum writing. Education is graphic design, and using creative measures to contribute to student learning. We haven’t always done a great job of helping young people see how they can use all of their brilliance and abilities, because we’ve created such a narrow definition of what it means to be an educator. And I think that is something that becomes increasingly perilous with Gen Z, who are not the folks that are trying to be in one job for 30 years.

I also have a micro level concern. I’m just going to be honest with you as a CEO of an organization that does invest unapologetically in Black, brown, and AAPI leaders. We experienced some of the largest investments in our work that we’ve ever had post George Floyd, as people were really doubling down on this effort to invest in education, equity. But those things are waning, not just for Surge, but as I talk to peers within this work.

A number of funds that were set aside specifically for diverse leaders and educators, those things are being sunset now. The wild enthusiasm that we saw for elevating and amplifying leaders of color and having them be thought leaders, those tones are becoming more muted. 

Why do you think that enthusiasm has gone away? Why do you think you’re seeing the availability of funders dwindle?

I think some [factors] are just externalities. Think about all the tech funding that supports education, philanthropy — tech has taken a big hit over the past 18 months. People have seen their actual balance sheets impacted. The reality is, a lot of folks have had to make tough calls about where we make cuts. 

In some cases, while there may be this commitment to educational equity, it was often tacked on as a nice thing to do versus being integrated in the fabric of strategic priorities. It’s not surprising to me that issues of equity and diversity have been some of the first things cut when there’s a need to tighten purse strings. It never was really integrated in the thinking about the things that are really good at driving systemic change. 

I also think that as human beings, we follow the shiny objects. As national discourse has changed, there’s been some natural shifting of attention. ‘Oh, yes, we now see many more organizations that are centered around leaders of color. We see a lot more people who are visible in leadership positions, so we can check that box and move on to the next.’ I don’t think that comes from a necessarily malicious place. 

We’re nearing the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board, which as you know resulted in a generation of Black leaders being purged from schools. Could you reflect on that impact? How might students be impacted by these kinds of disparities, if they continue as they have for the next seven decades?

I’m going to make this really personal. I’m 46, so I’m kind of squarely in the middle of that. The adults in my life when I was younger were those who lived through Jim Crow. I was very explicitly discouraged from taking on a role in education. 

I was studying chemical engineering, and I had this epiphany. I had a scholarship, I’m doing really well. And I called my mom my junior year of college and said, I’m going to get this chemical engineering degree, but I know that I’m called to do something different with my life. I was talking in my 21-year-old wisdom about eradicating poverty, revitalizing urban neighborhoods and all this stuff. I grew up well below the poverty line, lived in projects and was homeless at some point in my childhood. My mom said, no, you’ve got to continue what you’re doing, you’ve got to get a good job as an engineer. ‘The best thing you can do for poor people is never be one of them again,’ was her wisdom to me at that time, which you can imagine, I thought was the worst thing in the world to say. 

She was doing her best to prepare her child to live and thrive and live a life that offered opportunities that she couldn’t have imagined. That was 25 years ago, and those conversations are happening with young people now and are even intensified because of things that we’ve talked about earlier. You’re going to not be treated well, and you’re going to burn out, because you’re going to be expected to do all these other things. You’re not going to be treated as a professional. There’s going to be all of these politics that limit your ability to actually do what you think is really necessary for those that you serve.

When I think about what we are living in, it is disheartening. But what gives me hope is there are so many amazing organizations that are out there investing in our young people, our families, who have been underserved or overlooked. their organization like ours, and others that are investing in the current generation of leaders and senior leaders, to actually keep people in these positions, and keep the profession, you know, vibrant and thriving, and a place for innovation and ingenuity that doesn’t become stale, that actually welcomes people to bring the fullness of who they are their experiences, in ways that are going to improve and drive systemic change — those things are happening.

I just think there’s got to be even greater support of the types of work that we are doing to combat all of these other negative externalities that are really haunting me when I think about this next generation of young people entering the workforce. 

And in this new phase, if you were to imagine a school system that was working toward a movement, as opposed to just responding to a moment, how would it look? Can you point to places that you know are more systematically changing the way they bring folks into the classroom and leadership?

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out Sharif El-Mekki in Philadelphia, who leads the Center for Black Educator Development. His work … aligns with this idea of a movement. Key is starting with young people and saying, Okay, if we want to recruit and retain folks, there has to be a multi-prong approach. Getting more young people and people from communities seeing roles in education as viable professional pathways is one part of that work. 

How do you actually retain people in these roles, and create the conditions necessary for them to really thrive in these positions? A couple of things that immediately come to mind are first recognizing the different responsibilities that are often held by teachers, administrators and other leaders of color in education, that are frankly just different from their peers. 

A number of folks we have in the Surge Network are Black male educators, who talk about no matter what their role is, they are often pulled into disciplinary experiences. People say, oh, you have good interactions with the students, so we want you to now take on this responsibility for the social and emotional welfare for young people, potentially young Black men. Which is fine. But if there’s not an acknowledgement that you are actually asking people to do a lot more than the one job that they are hired for, that leads to burnout and turnover. You’re asking people to shoulder, in addition to the intellectual aspects of their roles as educators, the emotional and mental burden of students and families because of their proximity to them.

When you have folks wearing all of these different hats, like the multilingual teacher who also has to translate for lots of other people in the school. These are often those unspoken responsibilities that our educators carry, without additional compensation … But what we heard and continue to hear is they also need the space for rejuvenation, real healing, rest and storytelling, to feel like ‘I’m not alone,’ which is something I think is invaluable and too often overlooked as a necessary component in creating greater sustainability in these roles.

If I were in a position at a system level, I would really be thinking about what are the things that are contributing to these roles feeling unsustainable for educators and leaders of color, and then getting to the heart of those matters. 

At Surge, you’re mentoring, coaching, creating community. Why is that kind of nurturing so important for leaders of color? And what are some approaches system leaders could consider in trying to get at those parts that aren’t necessarily a training workshop, for example?

We talk about our work at Surge as head, heart and spirit work. It’s why I sort of cringe when people say, ‘Oh, yes, you do leadership development, for educators of color.’ Yes, there is absolutely a part of that — we can’t say that we aspire for people to achieve and sustain themselves in senior and executive level roles without providing access to skills and knowledge that we know is required in order to thrive. But what’s been transformational in the experience of our fellows and alums that we hear time and time again, is this heart and spirit component.

There’s this myth that our people don’t want to lead a certain level, or that there is this hesitation. Those things are simply untrue … We start from a place of knowing who our people are, having a real asset- and strengths-based approach. We don’t minimize that heart and spirit work, we don’t see it as an add on, we see it as a necessary precursor to thriving in these roles. 

We are often fighting a lot of other things, including systems that have told us that we have to be less of ourselves. Leave those things that actually make you richly and deeply connected and proximate to your students and their families. When I say it that plainly, it makes it pretty obvious how we could, you know, be creating situations that make people feel that they’re unsustainable, because they are having to operate in a place that doesn’t see them for who they are, and therefore can’t bring the best of themselves into spaces.

We believe that that community is necessary in order for people to sustain in this work in the long run. I’m a comic nerd. We dispel this individual superhero myth, and we recognize that it’s Justice League work. And in order to build real connection with other leaders, that can’t be about the transactional stuff, that’s got to be about who we are, what are the challenges that are unique to us. 

Disclosure: The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative provides financial support to the and The 74.

That’s the question confronting university administrators, faculty, applicants and their families in the wake of in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. The 6-3 ruling by the Court’s conservative majority at both Harvard and the University of North Carolina, overturning the decades-old model of affirmative action in higher education.

That system — in the 1978 Regents of the University of California v. Bakke case — allowed schools to include race as a consideration in offering university acceptance, but only as a means of cultivating the benefits of a diverse student body. But after a series of failed legal challenges over the past 20 years appealing to the bench’s increasingly rightward tilt, a group of Asian plaintiffs prevailed in arguing that they were unconstitutionally disadvantaged by affirmative action as currently practiced. 

“Many universities have for too long wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned, but the color of their skin. This Nation’s constitutional history does not tolerate that choice,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in the majority opinion. 

But if the status quo of college admissions has been cast aside, a replacement hasn’t yet been offered. According to Georgetown University’s Anthony Carnevale, the future remains murky.

Carnevale is the longtime director of Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce (CEW) and one of America’s most-cited economists on the intersection of schools and the labor market. A former member of multiple federal panels on employment and technology, and a passionate advocate for additional K–12 funding and policy experimentation, he has long pondered the question of what might follow an abrupt end to affirmative action.

His observations and proposals fill published in June, which may help shape colleges’ and policymakers’ response to a new landscape of socioeconomic mobility. If elite schools can no longer act as an access point for historically disadvantaged groups to enter the middle and upper classes, he and his co-authors argue, the logic of broad-based education reform — including both dramatically boosted resources and an overhauled approach to college and career counseling — becomes inescapable.

In an interview with The 74’s Kevin Mahnken, Carnevale discussed the legacy of the Bakke case and multiple generations of racial preferences; the plausibility of class-based selection metrics replacing the vanished system; and the future of a higher education sector that could increasingly come to be seen as elitist. While lamenting the end of affirmative action as we knew it, he argues that colleges should step up efforts to become truly egalitarian.

“One of the problems for elite colleges is that they’re going to become unpopular because everyone is going to see them as what they are: institutions that preserve elites,” he said. “If you’re an elite college president, that’s a problem you have to deal with.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: What’s your perspective on this ruling and the legacy of race-conscious admissions?

Basically, affirmative action has been a Band-Aid that’s been used by politicians and the rest of us, so that we have a little racial access to elite colleges. And it’s stopped us from truly reforming education. Now the Band-Aid has been ripped off, and race is a gushing wound in America.

In the end, what disgusts me most about this outcome is that they’re demanding that minority applicants humiliate themselves. The best way for a minority to get into Harvard now — it’s allowed in this opinion — is to write an essay about the hardship you’ve suffered; that your parents abused you, that your neighborhood abused you, that you got beaten up going to school every day, and that was good for your character. I find that humiliating, to turn on everyone you know and care about so that you can get into Harvard. Telling your story in this way is kind of like racial porn: “Let’s see who’s got the sorriest story to tell, and we’ll let them in!” 

There are definitely going to be fewer African American, Latino, and Native American people on campus, no doubt about it. That’s what’s going to happen here. The question is, how does everybody respond?

How do you think they’ll respond? Are college admissions officers freaking out right now?

I’m not sure about “freaking out.” I go to meetings of college officials where this topic is the center of the discussion, and people basically don’t know what they’re going to do. In one of those meetings, a lawyer opened the conversation by saying, “The first question you have to answer is, do you want to get sued?” I thought, “Boy, that’s a good question.”

If you want to make your name in higher education, you can disobey this ruling and let them sue you. If you’re Harvard or Georgetown, and slaves helped build the buildings, maybe you should do that and make a point. But I don’t see any way out of this because the anti-preferences side is committed, and not all of them are racists — a lot of them are just idealists. They’re well-funded, they’re well-organized and they’re always three steps ahead. They’re already changes to Gifted and Talented programs, and if anyone’s wondering whether they’ll persist [in those challenges], I think the answer is yes.

If I were as rich as Harvard, I might simply disobey the ruling. What are they going to do? They’re like the pope — they have no army. Maybe they’ll sue you.

Deliberately contravening a Supreme Court order seems incredibly risky, though. I wonder if universities are entering a particularly dangerous period with respect to the law and public opinion.

It is risky because people’s feelings are easily aroused on this issue. One of the things that will happen is that the ACE [the American Council on Education, a nonprofit advocacy group representing 1,700 institutions of higher education] will take a beating. 

I think the [legislation re-introduced this spring, which aims to modernize data collection from universities and give families a fuller picture of schools’ enrollment, completion, and post-completion earnings statistics] will pass when there’s an opening for it. It has strong, bipartisan support, and one of the things you can do to whack higher education is to make them more transparent in terms of their employment and earnings effects. There’s also a push for expanding funding for workforce training, so we’re going to get transparency on degrees and accountability on training. All of that stuff will move now.

I worked on the Hill a long time, and higher education annoys politicians because they think it’s arrogant and ungrateful. Higher education leadership tried to stop the GI Bill, and they lost. They tried to stop student aid because they wanted that money to go to institutions, and they lost again. They lose at every turn when it comes to issues going beyond higher education. Whacking the elites is a common American sport that appeals to both parties for different reasons. 

So if I’m a lobbyist for higher education, I’m looking for another job.

What has been the final legacy of race-conscious standards of college admission since the Bakke case?

The importance of Bakke was that it saved race-conscious affirmative action just in time. There were questions even then about whether it could survive, and it’s . 

If you ask the American public straight-up, “Do you agree that we should give racial preferences in admissions to selective colleges,” a majority will say no — and that includes a majority of African Americans, Latinos, etc. If you ask them, “Do you think there are fundamental problems in the American system that are racist and need attention,” they’ll say yes. But if you give them anything specific, they’ll reject it.

So Bakke saved the day by deferring to the expertise of educators, the notion being that educators understood higher education better than judges do. What has now happened is that the deference is over, and they’re no longer going to defer to American education institutions on race. The argument is that race is too much; even if diversity is a good thing, we can’t base admissions decisions on it because that would be racist. 

Could there be any replacement measures for racial preferences? 

The courts have been chipping away at preferences in admissions for a long time, and we’re now at the point where they’re saying it’s the end. But it’s not clear that it is. In many people’s judgment — lawyers and others — courts will begin to defer to class instead. Many decent people argue that the real issue of concern here, across all our diverse peoples, is class. We believe strongly in striving and Horatio Alger, and we want to reward that. The polls make clear that the public still believes that, and it’s part of our culture. 

The classic story is Poor Kid Makes Good. Everybody likes that, you want to give that kid a break. But for some reason, we don’t recognize the connection of race to American history and the disadvantages that are still there. It’s a failure to deal with American racism, and it has been since Bakke. The hope among some people is that we’ll use class as a proxy for race, but class and race are not the same thing. They are two very different forces in disadvantaging people’s lives, though a lot of people notice that they often go together. 

We’ve done a over the years and discovered that, no, you don’t also get race when you screen for class. You can claw back a bit of the racial diversity you had before affirmative action was banned, but not much of it.

Nevertheless, a lot of people are celebrating a potential switch to class-based affirmative action, saying, “Finally, going to Harvard isn’t just going to be for rich minority kids anymore.” The truth is, it never was. Most of the African Americans and Latinos who go to the top 193 schools are from the bottom half of the income distribution. A lot of them aren’t poor in the classic sense, but they’re not a bunch of rich kids. 

The thing people don’t talk about when it comes to class-based admissions is this: A basic problem for people who are poor is, obviously, that they don’t have money. And with the exception of places that are filthy rich, like Harvard and Yale — they can do whatever they want, and their concern is prestige rather than money — colleges just can’t afford class-conscious affirmative action. There have been efforts, but what people forget about colleges, whether they’re selective or not, is that they’re businesses. What they’re always trying to do is find as many kids who can pay full tuition as possible, and if they’re lucky, more than 50 percent of your families will do that.

There’s a bargaining process that every middle-class family is familiar with, where families visit eight colleges and strike the best bargain they can within their kids’ preferences. The colleges will give them “merit aid,” but what it is is a bargain. You get all the full-pay parents you can get, and you haggle with the parents you have to haggle with. Then, whatever you’ve got left over, you can use it for athletes, legacies, the trombone player you need in the band. But you really don’t have room for many poor kids. 

You might say to these schools, “You’ve got an endowment of something like $2 billion. How the hell can you not afford it?” Well, if a college president takes money out of the endowment, the alumni are going to get him fired. 

How did this whole focus on diversity get started?

As a practical matter, this has always been about white kids. James Conant, who was the president of Harvard after World War II, determined that we needed 5 percent of kids to go to college. He that we should build a certain kind of high school nationwide, the “comprehensive” high school. It was comprehensive because it offered a college pathway to a small share of the kids; it offered vocational education, mostly for boys; and it offered home economics and typing for women. 

But one of the big moments in the history of education came in 1983. After A Nation at Risk, we decided to do away with the comprehensive high school and provide every American child a full academic education through high school. And the real political reason behind that reform was the civil rights movement, the women’s liberation movement, the disability movement. Basically, anti-tracking sentiment killed the comprehensive high school and, in the end, created an academic curriculum that assumed everyone would go to college. Since Obama, the battle cry has been to make every kid college- and career-ready, but of course, high schools don’t. A lot more kids are graduating high school and going to college, a lot of them are dropping out, and a lot of the kids who don’t make it are the ones you’d figure wouldn’t make it. 

Underneath all this, there’s a fundamental shift in the relationship between education and the economy. We needed an elite to run our military, our businesses, every institution in American life, and most of these people were going to be white males. We realized that if you’re going to run a diverse economy and be the global leader in a diverse world, you need to have some understanding of demographic diversity. The reason we did affirmative action was for them — they needed it! If you’re going to run a company in America, you need to have a diverse workforce, or Reverend Al’s going to show up. 

The way this will work out is that employers will need to have diversity in their leadership. They’ve got to “look like America,” as Bill Clinton used to say. So irrespective of what the court’s done, they’ll go to UMass instead of Harvard to recruit, and they’ll find plenty of talented minorities there. They’re serious about this, and they have no choice — you can’t run a company with an all-white leadership team. 

What about the political consequences?

It will be hell for the Democratic Party. The Supreme Court has effectively put a Band-Aid on racism for years, and now we’re ripping it off. If minorities are a core part of your coalition, you’ve got to come up with something for them. 

Joe Biden’s answer is: We’re going to go back and do what we should have done in the first place. We’re going to have preschool for everyone, we’re going to increase spending for Title I, we’re going to increase funding for low-income schools, and we’re going to make community college free. In other words, now that you can’t just mess around with the elite schools, you’ve got to focus on the whole damn system. That’s not very satisfying because you’re talking about 40 years of work. There’s going to be much more focus on making the education system produce minority elites who aren’t from rich families. 

This changes the conversation on education reform, which has run out of gas at the K–12 level. That discussion is about to get revived because there’s nothing else to do except go back to the beginning and get it right.

That sounds refreshing, but also potentially impossible.

In the end, K–12 has caused this problem, so we’ve got to go back to court cases in the states. There have been a lot of those, and they’ve been reasonably successful over the last few decades. But it’s a big, big deal. Politically, it’s going to be awful because what you’re talking about, in part, is screwing around with the local control of schools. 

The education system is now the primary pathway to a good job in America. That wasn’t true back when I was young. If you had an uncle working at Chrysler, he could get you in. 

You didn’t need to go to college; truthfully, you should drop out of high school instead of waiting. But in all the research — OECD [the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] was the first organization to start saying this, in the ’90s — the education system is now the primary institution that ensures the reproduction of advantage from one generation to the next. It’s a machine where you go to a good grade school, a good high school, a good college, and you get work-based learning and internships. Then you marry a college graduate, move to a neighborhood with good schools and the whole thing starts right over again. 

The thing is, it’s hard to argue with. And if we weren’t a diverse nation, it would be an ideal system. But we are a diverse nation, and diversity clearly matters in terms of who wins. Both Republicans and Democrats have tried to reform the K–12 system, and they did good things, but it wasn’t nearly enough. 

What I’m hearing is that this change to college admissions is occurring in an economy with an increasingly ossified relationship between higher education and success in life.

The endgame now is much clearer than it used to be. According to , which run out to 2031, we’re going to have 171 million jobs. Forty percent will require a B.A. or more, and about three-quarters of those jobs will be good jobs. Meanwhile, 30 percent of all jobs will be middle-skilled, and maybe 40 percent of those jobs will be high-paying and secure. And then there’ll be jobs for high schoolers, only about 20 percent of which will be good jobs — largely . 

That said, there’s still quite a bit of variability. That’s why, in the United States, 40 percent of people with B.A.s make more than people with graduate degrees, and 30 percent of people with A.A.s make more than people with B.A.s. It’s a system, more and more, where what you study really matters. If you go to a community college and learn about HVAC, you’re going to get a good job. There’s movement here.

Why wasn’t affirmative action ever popular? You mentioned the fact that polling around it is terrible, but it was also striking that a ballot measure to bring back race-conscious admissions failed — in , of all places — a few years back.

Think about it: Every family has that guy — in my family, it’s a couple of immigrants — who came over and worked hard with a pick and shovel, and by the third generation, we all went to college. Everybody’s got that story about themselves and their families, and we’re almost neurotically tied to hard work and individual success. The idea that somebody who worked less hard or was less qualified could get the job over my grandfather, which they did, was anathema. The striving, the upward mobility, is what we reward.

Now, if you recognize racism in America, you ought to question that perspective somewhat. That is, in America, there were people who weren’t allowed to strive. But it’s a tough American problem because it creates the cultural contradiction of rewarding people based on the color of their skin. You put that to the average guy in a bar, he’ll say, “Hell no! Whoever works the hardest and does his homework should get the job.” To my mind, it’s a very superficial understanding of the United States and its history, but we are who we are. 

If I’m a Republican, I’m standing up to make a righteous speech about how the people who deserve advantages are now going to get them. Even if you look at Democrats, they tend to agree with that, so you’ve got to find a Plan B. I’ve worked for a lot of politicians, and boy were they happy that the Supreme Court handled abortion and affirmative action. Now it’s falling into their laps.

If you’re a Democrat, the abortion ruling last year was very advantageous. On affirmative action, not so great.

Is it possible that colleges will effectively ignore this ruling? They can just jettison the use of admissions exams, which were a big part of the evidence in this case, and admit whomever they like, right?

If you look at the data, test-optional [admissions] has increased the recruitment of high-income kids. White kids. If you take the test away, colleges and universities can admit more legacies, the quantity of whom is growing all the time. After this decision, they can admit anyone — except African Americans and Latinos. 

In an ideal world, if you’re talking to a student who wants to go to your college, you should be talking about the whole kid, not just their grades. There’s something to holistic admissions. But it also frees up colleges to do whatever they want, and what they want is not to admit poor kids. The flip side is that in American politics, elitism is not a good look. Americans don’t like elites, even if they themselves are elites. There are in Congress that would prevent colleges from admitting legacies. That won’t go anywhere, but we’ll get transparency on legacies; they’re going to have to report to the Department of Education how many legacies and donor kids are in their freshman classes. You can call it grievance, or revenge politics, but it’s going to happen. 

One of the problems for elite colleges is that they’re going to become unpopular because everyone is going to see them as what they are: institutions that preserve elites. If you’re an elite college president, that’s a problem you have to deal with. If you don’t have any African American or Latino students on campus, people aren’t going to like it. Resentment politics might become stronger in higher education because the class differences and race differences will get even more real.

Class has always been real — elite colleges have always done better with race than with class. If you walk around on a college campus, you can’t tell what a poor kid looks like. But you’ve got a much better chance of bumping into an African American or Latino kid than a poor kid on an elite college campus. They just don’t go there.

Combined with the decision to overturn the Biden administration’s student debt forgiveness program, we’ve now seen big reversals for universities as engines of social and racial equality. It seems like higher education will increasingly come under some skepticism from the political realm.

Yeah. We’re going to get a big emphasis on training and career education because it’s a program that can reach the working class in a way that Harvard and a lot of four-year schools never could. The Democrats need it to shore up their working-class voters, and the Republicans need it to retain white working-class voters as well.

So higher education is going to get some competition from training. That’s good for two-year institutions, but not four-year institutions. now allow you to get bachelor’s degrees at community colleges. Higher education is being rebuilt, in other words. Pretty soon we’ll have a mandate to force higher education institutions to tell their applicants what happened to all the other students who took the program they’re in, whether they got a job, and how much money they made. The data is there for that.

Transparency and accountability is about to come to higher education. You can’t stop it now.

Is it possible this judgment will affect a school like Harvard much more than one like UNC? My guess would be that the types of students who are currently benefiting from racial preferences at the most selective institutions will just apply, and gain acceptance to, slightly less selective institutions. But the more elite the institution, the more challenging it could be to find top nonwhite students.

Yeah, it’s not a choice for these kids between Yale and jail. It’s a choice between Yale and Dartmouth, or Colby, or Bates. But it should change the demographics at the top, say, 40 institutions, and people will be pissed off about it. The newspapers will write headlines about the shrinking number of minorities enrolled at their local colleges, and that will get noticed politically. The decline in the number and shares of minorities at elite colleges will be a constant topic. The people who fund me already want me to get in and start tracking this.

Did affirmative action save America from racism? No, that’s pretty clear. But it allowed elites to operate in a way that made them seem like they were progressive and honoring America’s racial history. So the reputational effects are real. Parents are going to want their kids to go to diverse schools, and there might not be many.

In the five years since a gunman walked into a Parkland, Florida, high school, killing 17 people and injuring 17 others, national attention has pivoted to more recent mass school shootings in Michigan, Tennessee and Texas.

Yet in Florida, the community is still grappling with fallout from its own deadly attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Just last week, a first-of-its-kind got underway for a former campus police officer who failed to confront the shooter. It wasn’t until November 2022 that the now 24-year-old gunman was and in April, a judge related to the shooting against the former Broward County schools superintendent. 

All these events force Parkland residents to revisit the fatal day. For Ty Thompson, who was the principal of Stoneman Douglas on Feb. 14, 2018, the most pressing issue now is the need for robust campus mental health services, particularly as mass shootings . 

“You shouldn’t have to wait for a tragedy to have a wellness center,” he told The 74. “Every school should have a wellness center on their campus. That’s just the state that we’re in and we need to keep tabs on what’s happening with our youth to make sure that if there are problems, we can catch them early.” 

As a member of , Thompson and other school leaders who confronted mass shootings and their devastating aftermath visited lawmakers last week on Capitol Hill to advocate for additional help in long-term recovery efforts. Their appearance coincides with June being Gun Violence Prevention Month. 

Even after the national attention fizzles away and disaster relief funding dries up, Thompson told The 74, trauma remains omnipresent. Founded in 2019 and supported by the National Association of Secondary School Principals, the Principal Recovery Network works to help guide education leaders immediately after campus shootings and to promote policies that help school communities regain stability. 

Thompson, who retains his principal title, worked for a time as the district’s assistant director of athletics and student activities and is now assigned to the IT department. He talked to The 74 about a range of issues, from the practical advice he offers school leaders reeling from a shooting to his support for school-based police officers, so long as they aren’t monitoring hallways with AR-15s. The conversation was edited for length and clarity.

It’s been five years since the Parkland shooting. In what ways is that tragedy present in your community today? 

One of the things we talked about in Washington, D.C., is that while we got a large influx of resources right away, after a year or so people started to disappear as far as the resources. And so that’s one of the things that we’ve been advocating for is the fact that it doesn’t go away. It just continues. 

Even though we’re five years out, there are still things that the school needs. Trauma after an event like this comes in different forms, it hits people at different times over the course of their trauma. For some, it’s right away;  for some, it’s a few years later. For some, it’s many years later. We continue to battle that with the recovery pieces in making sure we’re providing the resources needed, not only to former students and to the staff who are still there, but also our community members as well. 

Can you provide any specific examples of how that trauma from an event five years ago manifests in your community today?

Unfortunately, we see it almost daily on the news. With new shootings, whether it’s at schools or in communities, that brings everything back. So as those things continue to happen in our country and we are constantly reminded of some of the violence happening in our country, that just brings back that day and they think about what took place with their families, friends or community members around our incident. 

It just continues to regurgitate that back up as they go through trying to heal and they are moving toward healing, but as you continue to see this stuff in the news and the daily shootings, it slows down the process.

It’s almost like you take one step forward and two steps back just because of the current environment of things that are going on within our country. 

What tangible policy changes did you present to lawmakers in Washington? What do you think are the most critical steps that we need to take right now to combat this issue?

A lot of our stance with the Principal Recovery Network is exactly that: The recovery. While gun control and all of these things are very pressing factors that are going on right now, that is obviously not our expertise. 

When you’re a leader of a school and you face a tragedy —  it doesn’t have to be a shooting, it could be a tornado taking down a building or suicides and things like that — it’s up to the school leader to be able to help move that school forward. 

Our biggest part is the recovery effort, and a big part of that is wellness and mental health. We are really pushing that part because Congress is moving in that direction, with the importance of mental health. We wanted to advocate for some additional funds in that area because we also feel that’s important not only after a tragedy, but at any time for a school. 

At Stoneman Douglas, after our event, we instituted a wellness center at our school. We had two portables brought in and we had mental health experts who were staffed in those portables and they were able to serve students, staff and community members. Even to this day, five years later, that wellness center is still on campus and it’s still servicing our community. 

One of the things that I brought to Congress was the fact you shouldn’t have to wait for a tragedy to have a wellness center. Every school should have a wellness center on their campus. That’s just the state that we’re in and we need to keep tabs on what’s happening with our youth to make sure that if there are problems, we can catch them early. 

When we look at some of the past shooters, not necessarily mine in some cases but in others, there were red flags along the way. There’s got to be a way for us to get the proper help to students that we see early on that may need some help. I think that having wellness centers on campuses would help that scenario. I’m not saying that it’s going to be a cure-all, but it certainly couldn’t hurt to have that. 

The Parkland shooter did present prior to the attack. What lessons did you and your colleagues learn about threat assessments and early intervention efforts?

Hindsight is always 20/20. In the case of my school, he was only with me for less than a year, and so a lot of these things that we found out after the fact were prior to him being a student at Stoneman Douglas. I’m not passing the blame on anybody, I’m just saying that there are certain things that take place in a student’s educational record that we need to be sure is moving forward through their careers so that people are aware of what’s happening. 

And we’ve made strides in that since our tragedy. With behavioral threat assessments now becoming more digitized and there’s less chance of things falling through the cracks, we definitely have our lessons learned not only from our tragedy, but all of the different tragedies. 

The shooting divided the community. How did you navigate that?

That was probably the toughest part of my job for those 18 months after the tragedy was trying to make sure I put student and staff interests first. Right away, the community rallied behind everyone, they wanted to provide support. Then, after time went by, that’s when the fingers started to point. And that’s not uncommon in any situation like this, where they’re going to start to put blame and figure out who did what wrong. 

The politics are difficult, don’t get me wrong, but I also understand that’s just what happens. It can’t necessarily be avoided though I would like it to be avoided. With a tragedy like this, everyone has their emotions. Emotions get exponentially kind of out there. Someone that may have already been feeling negative about a situation, now they’re feeling that much more negative.

Following the Uvalde shooting, Texas politicians approved legislation to place armed guards at every K-12 school. Florida took a similar approach after Parkland. How do you think this move played out in your state, and how did it affect the overall safety of kids in your schools?

Look, any time you can have extra security on campus is always a good thing. In our case, in Florida, they want every school to have an armed guard or a school resource officer. 

I definitely think that it helps. It’s definitely a good thing, anytime we can increase security and having people feel safe about coming to school is definitely a positive. For the little ones in elementary, when they see people walking around with guns, I’m not quite sure how that could affect their psyche. I just know that when it came to the high school kids, when we got back to school after the tragedy, we had a mini-army on our campus walking around with the same weapon that took out some of our kids. That did not go over well. 

It’s a delicate balance between making sure you’re feeling safe versus feeling scared quite frankly. That’s something that we were able to circumvent after our tragedy, to still have this presence but not have to have people walking around with AR-15s because that really was not the best course of action. 

As far as legislation, SROs are important. It’s good to have someone on campus, at a minimum, to be able to call in resources in the event of a tragedy. There’s so much tension in the country right now when it comes to violence and how to protect kids without making them feel like they’re in jail. I mean, the school is supposed to be a school and not a prison and it’s definitely a delicate balance, but the more people you can have with eyes and ears out there, it definitely makes it a better situation for all of us.

The former school resource officer at your school was criminally charged and put on trial for failing to confront the gunman and stop the shooting. What lessons from Scot Peterson’s response can we learn about the roles and limitations of police in schools? 

Any time there’s an investigation into these kinds of things, they review all those types of policies. I remember after Columbine, they redid how they handle active shooters. Then something else took place and they readjusted policies. That’s the same scenario here. I’m not going to speculate on what he did or didn’t do wrong. I am by no means a law enforcement person, that’s not my expertise and I’m not going to pretend to know what they are supposed to do or not do. But they do review policies after things take place, whether it’s a shooting or it’s some other incident in the community, to determine what could have been done better. 

As a member of the Principal Recovery Network, have you had to make any calls with school leaders after they experienced shootings? What kind of advice do you offer? 

Unfortunately, I’ve had to make a few phone calls. First, I usually send them an email because trying to get ahold of someone on the phone is nearly impossible. So I usually send an email pretty quickly, within 24 hours of when we hear about it. I just let them know who I am and that I kind of know what you may be feeling right now and, ‘Please, give me a call when you can.’ 

Sometimes that call comes quickly. Sometimes the call never comes because I’ve reached out to a couple of principals and never heard back from them. 

And really, it’s just for me to be a listening ear to them to understand. ‘Look, these are some of the things that may start to come up that you may not be aware of.’ Something very logical like your mail is going to start to increase, so you might want to think about getting some extra staff in there just to handle mail. The phones are going to start ringing off the hook, you need to make sure you have some staff for that. You need to think about getting some additional substitutes because some teachers may not be able to come back right away, depending on the size of their school and the tragedy itself. Make sure you don’t try to get back to school before funerals have taken place.

We have a guide to recovery. It’s not like a playbook because not every tragedy is going to be the same exact scenario. But there are some commonalities across all of these things to just keep in mind. You know, you should be meeting with your staff before you bring students back so that you make sure that they’re ready to come back. You want to make sure you have mental health practitioners on campus and ready to go because there’s no way for you to predict how people are going to react.

The main goal is to let them know that I’m here to listen to them. They can call me at any time, no matter what time of day it is. We want them to feel like they’re not alone. 

In his reelection bid, President Joe Biden has made gun violence prevention efforts part of his appeal to young voters. Youth activists from Parkland became leading voices in the gun control movement. Beyond the most outspoken advocates, how do young people in your community view gun violence today and how has the shooting affected their worldviews? 

Our kids rallied very quickly and had the March for Our Lives happen in D.C. within six weeks after our tragedy. I really thought that was going to be a momentum changer, and there were a lot of people involved with that. I was hoping that was really going to make some change. 

I’m not saying that maybe there weren’t some thought processes changed in Washington, but obviously it remains a hot topic. I do know that many of my kids that were involved from Stoneman Douglas still have those thoughts in mind of changing the world, which is what we teach in high school is getting out there to debate the right way and present yourself in a positive light and try to move the country forward. 

A lot of these kids now, five years later, are out of college and some of them are just wrapping up their college careers. It’s going to be interesting to see if they are going to be able to keep the momentum and move it forward with gun control. I’m hoping that continues. 

Any time these things do come up in the news, hopefully it re-sparks them to want to try to do something, to move that legislation and those policies forward. 

What didn’t I ask that you’d like to discuss? 

It’s important that these conversations continue to stay at the forefront. That was the big thing we talked to legislators about because we know that after tragedies take place there’s a lot of attention and then it dies off. It’s like, why do we only talk about this when stuff happens? Why can’t we be a little more proactive on some of these things to make sure we’re moving forward and looking to the future versus being reactionary all the time?

That’s what I was most encouraged by in D.C. is the fact that they’re trying to move not only with the gun stuff, but also with mental health support.

Clarification: The Broward County Public Schools’s online directory identified Ty Thompson as its assistant director of athletics and student activities last month while the former Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School principal told The 74 he was also involved in some IT activities for the district. A district spokeswoman in a July 12 email said Thompson retains his principal title and is now assigned to the IT division. The clarification came after with the district. 

But after spending most of a school year in a role at the center of America’s education culture wars, the high school senior said he’s used his first-hand experiences to be a voice of “moderation” on the seven-member board.

In the face of extremist views, he counters with a dose of reality: “Regardless of what Tucker Carlson says is going on in Idaho schools, here’s what’s actually going on,” he’ll offer. “Only students can provide that on-the-ground perspective.”

In Boise, Rajbhandari’s election win has put in motion a chain reaction of efforts to elevate student voices. The school board now includes a brand new youth advisory council and the district this year administered a first-ever mental health survey to take account of the struggles its students are experiencing.

Meanwhile, the teen has also helped usher along a Climate Action Plan the board is implementing — a measure he had long pushed for as a climate activist with the in his days before holding elected office.

The 74 caught up with the young politician, who’s juggling the responsibilities of senior year alongside oversight of his roughly 23,200-student district, for a Zoom conversation that ranged from his efforts with the nonprofit to facing off against counterprotesters wielding AR-15s.

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

The 74: It’s been the better part of the school year that you’ve been on the Boise school board. What has stood out to you most so far?

Shiva Rajbhandari: Coming into the school board, I thought this was really the end-all be-all of problem solving. But there’s such a big team that works across our district to write good policy and to propose a strong budget and to make sure that we’re hiring the top staff to keep our schools running. Learning about the incredible people across our district has been really rewarding. 

Also learning how slow change is sometimes. Coming into this role was this transition from being an activist and really calling the shots. Like, we would meet on a Thursday and have a protest organized by Saturday. Those things were very quick. 

Now, there’s a lot more accountability — to our patrons [constituents], to our students — so things happen slower. But it’s neat to consider all aspects of the solution and think critically about how we can best prepare students for college, career and citizenship while maintaining the integrity of our district and the faith of our patrons.

That must be an interesting transition, from activist to school board member. So what are some of the issues you’re working on now where the pace of change has felt slower?

One thing I’m really excited about is establishing a permanent student position on the school board. We’ve been talking about it since January and before that, I was talking with trustees, talking with staff, about how we could shape this policy. [It’s gone to several committees including our student advisory committee and] now we’re waiting until September to take it back to the Governance Committee for review and then hopefully passing. So that’s one example.

Another example would be our district sustainability commitments. This [issue] is why I ran for the school board initially. I led this campaign with my fellow students across our district to establish a clean energy commitment and a long-term sustainability plan for our schools. We’d seen districts across the country move quickly and then our district was slow and deliberate about it. But ultimately, our efforts did lead to the passage of this commitment on clean energy by our school board. 

Some things just take a lot of time, like reviewing all the carbon emissions of our district. And then [the question of] what does the long-term plan look like that saves our taxpayers money. That’s going to take probably another year or two to craft that plan and get that through. 

Going back to the effort to get a permanent youth board member, in your view why is youth voice so important in school decisions?

Students are the primary stakeholders in our education. And yet, our school boards are elected by people who are over 18, the majority of whom are no longer in K-12. They tend to be parents or grandparents or community members, but really only students can provide that on-the-ground perspective of what’s going on in our schools. I think having students on school boards is about bringing in a perspective that is vital to policymaking.

In addition, elevating students to positions of leadership empowers an entire generation of students within your district. Because when students understand that their voices are being taken seriously, that more than anything allows students to achieve their education goals. 

How have your friends and peers reacted to your role on the board? Are they telling you things to bring up in meetings?

Absolutely. Our whole district is getting so much more engagement with students and it’s helped us think outside the box about how to engage students in policymaking. 

For example, we did a districtwide mental health survey. That’s something we’ve never done before and we found out 30% of our students have had depression or suicidal ideation. We identified stress and social isolation as key contributing factors we really want to tackle. But that’s something our district has never done before, not because our district didn’t value student voices, but I don’t think we understood how incorporating student input could help our district. 

We also put together a student advisory committee [to the school board] and we have peer feedback groups. We’ve seen so many more students attending our board meetings, asking questions of our board, bringing ideas forward. 

It’s a simple thing to have [a student] up there on the dais, but it really opens the floodgates for transformative change within a system that is often really rigid.

I saw that you made YouTube previews of the last few meetings. Was that an effort to make the board more accessible to your peers?

Yeah. I think there’s really this misunderstanding of what the board does, and how folks can give input. And so the goal of the video is to communicate to students, ‘Hey, this is what’s going on at our board meeting.’ Everybody should be able to participate.

Going back to when you won your seat, that was a victory over an incumbent who had an endorsement from a far-right group. How have you navigated extremism in the campaign and in your term on the board?

Our state is split ideologically between the far right and the really far right. And there’s this hate group called the Idaho Freedom Foundation, a policy think tank, whose stated goal is to in our state. And so we’ve seen that come up time and time again with allegations of indoctrination or grooming in our schools. Now we’re seeing the third iteration of that, which is vouchers in the name of school choice, giving public dollars to private and potentially religious institutions with limited accountability.

I think the perspective that I’ve brought is one of moderation. Regardless of what Tucker Carlson says is going on in Idaho schools, here’s what’s actually going on. And here’s what students actually need. No one is scared about a [female-identifying person with male genitalia] going to the girl’s bathroom. What folks are scared about is their friends committing suicide, because we don’t have the mental health resources or the resiliency factors that we need. 

It’s bringing an ounce of reality back to these ideological conversations. I’m super lucky that, in our district, the problems we have with extremists aren’t nearly as bad as in the rest of the state. 

Your time on the board isn’t the first time you’ve interfaced with right-wing activists. Can you tell me the backstory there?

Yeah, gosh. It’s funny, I think nationally, when people hear about Idaho, it’s like, ‘Oh, my gosh, people are running around with guns.’ And living in Idaho, it’s almost like a fact of life, you organize a protest and folks show up with AR-15s.

The first time I interacted with the group I think you’re referring to, the , I was in ninth grade. We were organizing a protest on Capitol Boulevard and it was 70 kids who got together with signs and we blocked the street, we were playing music and it was honestly a fun day. These folks showed up with AR-15s to our rally. Not only that, but then a ton of cops showed up and they all were friends with the [counterprotesters] who weren’t even from Boise.

Then last year, a student brought a gun to Boise High, the school I’m at now, and he was suspended and not allowed to walk at graduation. This same group . 

The threat of extremism and militarism is very real in Boise. But we’re not afraid of them. We’ve been through so much. I think that takes away the power when people aren’t afraid of you. 

I know we’re jumping from one hot-button issue to the next, but I also wanted to ask about book bans. I saw there’s some state legislation proposed schools for ‘harmful’ books. And there have been several Idaho districts, not Boise, that have enacted bans. So I’m curious how that’s come up in your time on the board?

What’s a little humorous to me about the whole book ban thing is, it’s not parents and it’s not students asking for books to be banned. It’s generally random people who have heard something. And so, for example, in the nearby city of Meridian, there was this group that tried to get 200 books banned from the school library and I think they just pulled the list off the internet because half of the books weren’t even in the Meridian library. 

To me, I will never support any kind of book bans ever because I think free access to information is the cornerstone of democracy.

The narrative that’s being missed is that book bans, frankly, are disempowering to students. It’s alleging that students don’t have the agency to know what they should read. Schools are a resource, they’re a tool for students to learn and engage and ensuring that there’s open access to information is critical to that.

You wrote a recent about efforts to reduce youth voting, which seems like a big issue for you also because I saw you co-lead the organization BABE VOTE. Can you tell me about that?

BABE VOTE is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, voter advocacy organization promoting voter registration among young people. We just got the data back and Idaho is the between 2018 and 2022. So the efforts that we’re doing are working and it’s really exciting. 

The [Idaho] House and Senate both just passed a bill banning the use of student IDs at the polls, which for many students, that’s their only form of ID, especially college students. 

As soon as the governor signs this bill, we’re actually going to be and protecting the right to vote. So it’s that kind of stuff, knocking on doors, registering people and reminding people, ‘Hey, there’s an election,’ and then protecting the right to vote in the legislature and across the state.

What’s it been like to juggle all this work alongside senior year?

It’s been a little bit crazy. Honestly, being on a school board is [manageable]. Any student can do it. People try to make it something that it’s not.

Senior year, you have so many opportunities and it’s such a wide world. Sometimes it’s hard to get up for first period everyday. But just keeping a Google Calendar and checking in with my friends and making sure that I’m taking time for myself. Also remembering that I don’t have to do everything right; I have this whole team of folks who have supported me in my election on board and support this climate activism work.

One of the things that’s kind of taking a beating has been my track practice. Sometimes it’s hard to get to my practices.

What events do you compete in?

I run the mile and the 800 [meters].

And do you know what your plans are for next year, both in terms of school and whether you’ll maintain the position on the board?

Yeah, I’ll stay on the board. I made a commitment. All meetings we can mostly do virtually, but I will be leaving the state for college. And I want to study public policy and maybe go become a lawyer or something. [Rajbhandari has been accepted to UNC-Chapel Hill, Whitman College and Stanford University and is still deciding where to attend. He was elected to a two-year term.]

And last, who’s one teacher who made the biggest impression on you and why?

Well, there are so many. My teachers were the best teachers ever. One teacher, Monica Church, she was my Student Council teacher and capstone teacher sophomore year. She’s just been such a mentor and a guiding force in my life. Whenever I have a problem or something I want to talk about, she’s the first person I call.

I remember one time in my capstone class, I was running for [student body] vice president and I was a sophomore, so no one had ever done that before, and I was talking about ‘Hey, the election’s tomorrow. Everyone, make sure you go vote.’ And one of my friends, who is kind of a contrarian, goes, ‘Why would you ever vote for Shiva?’ Then Ms. Church was like, ‘Well, I would vote for Shiva. And one thing I’ve learned in the last eight months has been never bet against him.’

Now that’s a source of [motivation]. Whenever I’m like, ‘This is hard,’ I remember Monica Church, someone I respect more than anyone, said, ‘Never bet against Shiva.’ 

Either one-on-one or in small groups, researchers say tutoring may be among the best approaches for helping youth quickly recoup lost ground. And armed with $190 billion in federal stimulus spending, the nation’s schools now have the resources to invest in new programs.

But launching an effective tutoring initiative requires more than just financial investment. Schools must answer key questions about how to structure the program: Which students will participate? What curricula will they follow? How long will sessions be? Will they take place during school or outside of it? Who will work as the tutors?

Matthew Kraft is an associate professor of education at Brown University and a leading voice on tutoring as an intervention to accelerate students’ learning. In 2021, he published a laying out a blueprint for how schools might effectively scale tutoring programs to help youth catch up after COVID. Finding the right curriculum and structure can lay the foundation for strong results — and can even ease staffing woes, he explained.

“The stronger the tutoring infrastructure,” said Kraft, “the less the program will rely on the individual skills that a tutor brings with them. And so it really opens up the potential labor supply pool to a much greater degree.”

The 74 spoke with Kraft over Zoom to find out what school leaders interested in tutoring should consider as they design their interventions and what pitfalls they should avoid.

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

The 74: Can you tell me, in brief, why you’ve chosen to focus so much of your research on tutoring? What’s the potential to help students catch up on missed learning from the pandemic?

Kraft: I started studying tutoring as a doctoral student almost 15 years ago. Part of that was motivated because I have worked as both a volunteer and as a paid private tutor. It was a formative experience to be able to work one-on-one with students and see them make rapid gains in their understanding, whether it be algebra or reading. As a classroom teacher, you just don’t have nearly as many opportunities for sustained one-on-one interaction to develop those relationships. So from my own experience, I knew tutoring really had a lot of potential. 

As I began to learn more, it became clear that there’s a huge potential to move the spectrum of how we deliver instruction in public schools so that it’s not only group instruction but also individualized personalized instruction. So I started to study (where leaders had implemented a tutoring model), which led to the thought experiment of saying, ‘Why isn’t this something that we do more broadly? Why is it a service that those who can afford it pay for in the private market, but not something that we offer more widely in our public education system?’

Then the pandemic opened a larger public conversation. It created the opportunity to say, not only has there been huge potential for tutoring, but now we’re facing a moment where there’s an incredible need to support students at a more individualized level and accelerate their learning. So all of that came together to really motivate the work that I am doing right now.

You mentioned tutoring is what wealthy families turn to when their kids fall behind in school, and that resonated because it shows we intuitively know tutoring works. It’s just that not everyone has the resources.

Yes, there’s a lot of intuitive appeal to tutoring. In the antiquities, in Roman and Greek times, that’s how a lot of the privileged class were educated. And that remained the form of private schooling with one-on-one tutors in much of the Elizabethan era and even into the Colonial era. As we expanded access to education, the model moved away from that, to some degree by necessity, but there’s just the sense that one-on-one feedback is the natural way we learn.

Now, to add to that, we have a deep and growing body of evidence examining its efficacy through rigorous experimental research. And when you look at that body of evidence, it is very compelling. That said, it largely is built on evidence of small- to medium-scale programs implemented in person prior to the pandemic under favorable circumstances. And that’s not what we’re doing today, trying to scale tutoring to an entirely new level.

For school leaders trying to roll out new tutoring programs, what factors do you think they should consider when they’re picking out curricula?

The first question districts and schools need to answer is, ‘What is the intended outcome of a tutoring program? What are the goals?’ Because it may be that the goal is to support students belonging in school, their social-emotional development, as much as it is to accelerate their learning. It could be both. By first answering that question, I think that helps the program to backward map onto the type of curriculum that would be best suited to meet those goals. 

Often there’s a bit of a slippage that happens. There’s this notion that tutoring is a good thing writ large and so if we do something individually with tutors and students, that will produce positive outcomes. I think that’s wishful thinking. It requires a lot more purposeful alignment between choosing a curriculum that is both built on strong instructional materials, but that also complements the type of instruction students are receiving in their larger traditional classes. It doesn’t need to be the same curriculum, but it’s less productive to have tutoring use a curriculum that’s completely divorced from what students are doing in the classroom. They should be compliments.

Do you have practical tips for how school leaders can go about doing that? Who’s best suited to make the call on curricula? Maybe department heads?

The reality is there are a wealth of curricular materials designed for trained teachers [in a full classroom]. And then there is a potpourri of one-off materials for tutoring. And so there’s not as rich of a supply of curricular materials available that are designed to be able to be implemented by a tutor who has limited experience working with students. 

A key is to ask whether the tutoring materials could be used effectively by someone with some training and support, but not necessarily a formally trained teacher. When I’m searching for materials, do these materials feel accessible to a wide range of potential tutors?

That means they should be able to be broken down into very explicit instructional steps and should come with a scope and sequence that allow you to do very short formative assessments of students to figure out where to reinforce their knowledge and shore up their foundation. 

Materials also need a clear instructional sequence over the duration of a tutoring period. Some curriculum materials may be designed for a 60-minute class, but tutoring sessions may be for 30 minutes. And so, [leaders] need to map that on to the design of the tutoring program itself. And in every context, I think there is going to be some individualization required. 

So it sounds like I’m hearing that if schools get those structural components right — like finding curricula that align with classroom standards, for example, or designing lessons to match the amount of time for tutoring sessions — they can actually unlock a new pool of possible tutors. Which strikes me as important because teacher burnout is so high right now and staffing has been an issue for some programs.

I think that’s a key observation. The stronger the tutoring infrastructure — to support tutors with strong instructional materials, ongoing coaching and feedback, peer learning networks and a leadership team that will troubleshoot issues that come up like technical problems or attendance challenges — the more success tutors will have and the less the program will rely on the individual skills that a tutor brings with them. And so it really opens up the potential labor supply pool to a much greater degree.

So now in this current moment, we see a lot of districts actually moving to implement tutoring programs to help students catch up on missed learning from COVID. In these last couple years, what have we learned?

A huge advantage of the decentralized nature of public education in the United States is that there’s an amazing amount of innovation and experimentation that happens. A lot of districts are developing tutoring programs on their own and it looks different across a whole bunch of places. Those districts are individually learning a huge amount about what worked, what didn’t work. And if they continue to invest in those programs over time, there will hopefully be continuous improvement.

Where we fall short is in helping districts to share those best practices and [also what they learn about what] practices we should leave on the scrap pile of design improvement. There are efforts at the state and federal levels to build these networks and I think those have a huge role to play. 

At the same time, researchers like myself and a whole host of others are working in partnership with districts to study tutoring programs in dozens of different contexts. But it’s hard to do that while delivering rigorous research designs, which may not always be feasible in these Wild West contexts, at the same time as trying to roll it out as fast as we can. Research can be a slow process and is not always able to inform program design in real time.

We’re starting to see some new evidence coming out that districts are struggling to implement tutoring at scale and deliver the high-dosage model that we think is necessary. Some efforts to contract with 24/7 on-demand tutoring providers has led to . And the uptake has skewed more toward students who may already be having some degree of success in school rather than [serving] students who are struggling most.

When you say the high-dosage model isn’t quite being hit, what exactly does that mean?

Districts are aiming to deliver tutoring on a regular basis to students multiple times per week. And maybe they’re shooting to do that for 1,000 students, but instead they’re only getting 100 students to come with regularity. Maybe that’s because there are transportation problems, communication problems, technology problems, tutor-supply challenges. All of those things are, at least in this initial rollout, expected implementation challenges. Taking an effective program and scaling it is, historically, something that our decentralized education system has always struggled to do well.

To school leaders who are thinking of iterating on these programs or rolling them out if they haven’t launched them yet, anything that, based on your research, they should really try to avoid?

There’s compelling evidence that efforts to scale tutoring by simply adding more kids to a tutoring session — while tempting because it means you can serve more students — is going to quickly lose its efficacy. It just ceases to be personalized and starts to look like group instruction. That’s one common pitfall. 

A second common pitfall is failing to eliminate the barriers to accessing tutoring on a regular basis. If tutoring is moved to after the school day, some kids have other commitments. [If it’s online], some kids may not have the support to troubleshoot technology or may not have the technology itself. The more that we can reduce those access barriers, the more successful schools will be at delivering tutoring at scale and delivering tutoring with the high-dosage frequency that we think is necessary for it to be effective.

I think schools have to be clear-eyed about the trade-offs of different design changes. [They should aim to] scaffold these programs so the program is driving success and tutors can parachute into it and be bolstered by the great infrastructure, with students showing up ready to roll, knowing the routine.

It’s not easy to be a first on the Minneapolis School Board. The board has had Black and Latino members for decades. It has had Asian, Muslim and LGBTQ members, and the country’s first elected Somali official. Its first Native American director, Peggy Flanagan, is now Minnesota’s lieutenant governor. 

All this diversity notwithstanding, Sonya Emerick is a first, elected as the board’s first autistic director in November. When Emerick, who is transgender, took the oath of office Jan. 3, they became, it’s believed, the second autistic school board member in the United States and one of four transgender people elected to a school board in 2022.  

Emerick, 41, decided to run after spending most of the pandemic trying — and failing — to secure basic instruction for their son Foxy, who is homebound and communicates with assistive and augmentative technology. The boy got in-home therapies but never received the hundreds of hours of interaction with a teacher for kindergarten, and now first grade, mandated in his Individualized Education Program — the legal document that determines a child’s special education services. The resistance Emerick, a community organizer and activist, encountered sparked the unique campaign that propelled them to office. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

By law, children whose disabilities prevent them from leaving home are entitled to the same free and appropriate public education as other kids. Your experience trying to get support for Foxy tells a different story. 

My younger child, who is 7, has been a Minneapolis Public Schools student since he was 2, when he first started receiving special education services. My early experiences of advocating for him were challenging, but overall positive. As he got older, the advocacy got more challenging. Then there were the additional challenges of the pandemic and the state of the city of Minneapolis in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. Everyone started to have to advocate a lot more on behalf of themselves and their families.

How that played out for my particular kid, because of the nature and complexity of his disabilities, is that he basically stopped receiving the educational services that were in his IEP — services he is legally entitled to. I did what, as a parent, I am empowered by the law to do, which is to use the alternative dispute resolution process to try to work collaboratively with the school and district to figure out how to get my kid’s education delivered.

I worked really hard for a whole year and went to 40 hours of IEP meetings to try to get it done. We were not able to do it. Though my direct dealings with the IEP team weren’t 100% free of conflicts, the real difficulties didn’t lie with a teacher or a building administrator or anyone who I had direct access to. The barriers to getting my child’s most fundamental, basic educational needs met were much more at the systems level, above the pay grade of every person at the IEP table. 

I had two choices: to move into litigation with the district or to try to move where I had access to influence systems-level problems and barriers. I chose the latter. When you litigate in special education, it’s a significant amount of time and financial resources. It’s very, very draining on a family emotionally. Even if you get the best possible outcome, it still begins and ends with one kid, typically. I decided I can do something with a bigger impact. That’s why I decided to run.

There’s a second layer. The systemic form of oppression called ableism has a very dehumanizing impact. As a disabled parent of two disabled children, advocating in the school system for one of my kids, these really traumatic — I don’t think I’m being too extreme when I use the word “traumatic” — experiences occur. I experience that trauma as a disabled person trying to navigate these systems, and as a parent, watching my child have to experience this oppression. 

The deficits-based narratives we impose on kids who receive special education services — we have to use those narratives in our conversations about our children, with parents, families, caregivers. It can really start to impact your relationship with your child. You sit down to play with your kid or hug your kid or read to your kid or put dinner in front of your kid and it’s there all the time as something that you’re either choosing to mitigate or to ignore or choosing to believe or work not to believe. It builds something that exists between you and your kid. Think of the violence of putting something between someone and their baby that interferes with their relationship and the developmental support that exists for that child. That will exist for that family forever. It’s generational. 

I was in an IEP meeting and a special education director said, “For kids like your child, who are difficult to engage…” I had to interrupt and say, “If we’re having difficulty engaging my child, educationally, that’s a problem with our instruction. That’s not a problem with my child. My child is extremely engaged.”

The way we talk about disabled kids, no one even thinks about it. What if I didn’t interrupt? I think about all the times that I haven’t interrupted, and then I think about as a white person, as an English-speaking person and as a person who has expertise, the safety that I believe I will still experience after interrupting — those are privileges a lot of people trying to navigate these systems don’t have. 

I have seen some pretty amazing videos of Foxy you made for his teachers. Why did you start doing that?

I actually created a website of video and images of him and got the district to agree as part of his IEP that it would be an official tool for evaluation. That the evidence that I upload onto this website is used to determine his services, because I just don’t trust that traditional tools always capture everything. 

Foxy has been literate since the age of 3. But he is also non-speaking and has significant communication difficulties. He can type the entire book “The Very Hungry Caterpillar.” He can type many books. He can use capital letters and punctuation and spaces. But I was told when he was 5 that we didn’t need to put academic goals into his IEP because a functional IEP [one that addresses basic self-care skills] would be fine. The idea was that we wouldn’t even make an investment in his academic instruction because it wasn’t worth it, we would just teach him life skills like hand washing or picking up toys. 

So you changed people’s beliefs about him. 

I don’t know that I did. Where that type of advocacy has been effective is with educators. When I show his teachers what he can do, it definitely informs what kind of instruction they provide. They can observe where he has skill and plan for that. But I don’t know that it has necessarily had a significant impact when you go above the educators who are directly teaching my child. Sometimes I almost feel like it’s a cute party trick: “Look at what my kid can do. He’s so skilled and amazing.” “Wow, that’s so great. He’s so cute.” Yet it doesn’t alter programming or prioritization or get them to hire a teacher or anything like that. It’s frustrating to get really creative and spend a lot of energy designing advocacy mechanisms and then have a system that’s so broken it’s impenetrable. As an individual parent, there is no amount of advocacy I could do that would have the impact that my child needs just at, like, baseline level.

When the idea of running first came up, was there an “aha” moment? 

No. Honestly, my initial response was a feeling of shame. That I would think that something like that was for me — an autistic person with other disabilities, who was not successful in school, didn’t go to college, tried to pursue a few different career paths and was not successful, and ended up living in survival mode, parenting in acute poverty for a couple of decades. I have never in my life gotten messaging that this kind of opportunity was for me. 

So my initial experience wasn’t “aha.” My initial experience was, “How foolish am I that for one second I would think this is something that I get to do.” That’s painful to think about. 

You did not run a traditional campaign, yet you credit its novel aspects with helping you win.

Filing to run is easy. You fill out a one-page form, you pay $20. But actually running? I’d never been involved in electoral politics before. I’d been a community organizer and an activist, but I’d never worked on a campaign. My participation in electoral politics began and ended with voting. 

I talked to somebody who said, “You need a kitchen cabinet, a group of people you meet with maybe every week to help figure out your campaign.” I found a very small group. We tried designing a big field strategy where we mapped out every week, phone-banking, door-knocking, fund-raising — really specific goals. It wasn’t something that we held onto because we found we couldn’t plan that far out. Part of that was resources. And part of it was the way that my body and brain function because of my disabilities. 

Autistic people do not yet have a disability support services system anywhere in the country, as far as I know, that really takes a look at adaptive support needs [daily living skills that may need to be taught or approached differently], which is where many autistic people have significant need. And it’s also an area of need that’s quite easy to mask [by working to appear as typical as possible]. 

Autistic people can do many things, but we can’t do many things. I can do 10 things, but only two of them today. The other eight I have to outsource, because I run out of processing power, because I get tired, because I need a lot of recovery. That’s hard to assess.

For us, what worked was to do something, evaluate it and then decide the next thing. We planned out a week. Let’s try phone-banking. Let’s try an event. How many events can Sonya do in a week? How many hours can Sonya do in a day? I don’t know. 

I found out I can’t door-knock, which is hard if you’re a candidate. Things like steps and walking on inclines and those types of things I can do for a few blocks, but then I’m at risk of falling, of going to grab a handrail and missing. Then the other challenge of knocking on a door as an autistic person is not knowing if I would be talking to somebody, if I talk to somebody, who are they going to be, how they are going to receive the fact that someone’s knocked on their door to have a conversation. Then having to try to be effective — that elevator stump speech at the door was just so far beyond what my social communication skills are capable of. As an autistic person, there was too much uncertainty. 

What I could really do well was go to community events and talk to people there. I had no problem going up to folks, giving them my literature. I didn’t have to do as much coordination because I’m just walking around a parking lot or a blocked-off street. If I go out door-knocking for an hour, I might talk to 10 people on a good day. But I can go to an event for an hour and talk to 100. I started doing as many events as I could. There were weekends where I hit eight events. 

There was a time where I was told we would need to hire a social media person because the job was too big to ask anyone to do it without compensating them. I didn’t think that’s a priority in terms of our limited spending. I was like, Okay, let’s game it out. We need someone to create a calendar, someone to create the graphics and to create the text. And then we need somebody to post the posts. That’s four jobs. Can we get four volunteers? Are those jobs little enough that it’s reasonable to ask someone to do just one part? 

I did the graphics, and we found three volunteers to do the other pieces. Not only was nobody feeling like it was too big of an ask, we got feedback that it provided more ways for folks to plug into the campaign. There was one person who took care of her kids during the day but was happy to schedule our social media posts late at night. She was like, “I’ve really wanted to volunteer for the campaign. I can’t do events or door-knocking, but this is something I can do.” 

We made a variety of little volunteer opportunities. It was a great way to get folks to help us out, because we didn’t ask them to be in a certain place at a certain time. By the end of the campaign, we had almost 100 volunteers, not counting people who came to a meet-and-greet or got a yard sign. 

When I think about special education, I want opportunities to be differentiated [presented in different formats for people of differing abilities] like this so everybody can be involved. There should be a way for everybody who wants to plug in to plug in. A lot of this came from the principles of the Disability Justice Movement and around dismantling white supremacy culture. 

We had a saying: The means is the work. It’s where the real work is. 

But you didn’t start out centering those principles or your needs. 

I grew into myself over the course of campaigning. Early on in a kitchen cabinet meeting, I was apologizing for something that didn’t require an apology. Someone said, “This is the second time during this meeting that you’ve apologized. I get the feeling that you think that we are all going to abandon you. I need you to know that we’re not waiting for you to do something wrong so that we can decide that we don’t support you after all.” She wasn’t just being nice, she was being really clear. 

I had impostor syndrome. I was so afraid that these people who are investing significant money, time and energy in me being in this role were going to find out that I’m not who they think I am. But what actually happened is that I found out that I wasn’t who I thought I was. I saw myself as unworthy. Maybe able to mask well enough to convince people that I had some value or skill. But they saw me as someone who could bring something needed to this role. And they were right. 

Their belief held me while I was figuring out how to believe in myself. I’m changed because a group of people decided unequivocally that they believed in me and decided to act from that belief, consistently, 100% of the time, regardless of how I acted. If there was a day where I had a symptom flare up and couldn’t get out of bed, they still believed in me. If I made a mistake, did something I shouldn’t have done or forgot something, they still believed in me. 

Once I got a taste of what it felt like, for the first time in my life to feel believed in, I was like, this is what every student in our district — and everywhere — needs to experience. What would it be like if our students experienced this unshakable belief in their goodness, their worth, their abilities? That wasn’t conditionally based on how they act today in school, or this test score, or this assignment, but because they’re worthy of belief because they are here. 

There is a particular experience a lot of disabled people have where we’re thought to not be capable. It becomes part of the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. There’s so many kids, some because of disability and some for different reasons, who we’re teaching that they are not worthy of belief. We talk about the belief gap as racism, and it certainly is. We have kids of color, Black kids, Indigenous kids, who are not believed in because of who they are. 

Think about how inextricably tied ableism and racism are. You don’t have to be disabled to experience ableism. It’s a set of beliefs that some bodies and minds are more worthy than others. We decide that some children are capable of learning to read and some are not, some children are worth academic investment, some are not. Some children are worth the support needed to stay in a classroom even when they’re having a tough day and some are not. That is ableism. 

I could talk to you all day about this, and the trauma of the thing that gets inserted into the parent-child relationship, but I should ask you about your yoga ball. 

I’m glad you asked. The majority of the campaign, I didn’t expect that I would win. I really had to think about what our goals were other than winning to keep us going. I had prepared myself for if I didn’t win, how I would deal with the fallout. But I didn’t prepare myself for if I did win. 

I called the person who had probably been my closest support in terms of disability and access and said I’m in this dark place because I’m alone now. I’ve had this whole team directly supporting me every single day. Now, that part is over, and I’m going to go be a school board director and I have to do it on my own. I am a disabled person who will always need significant support to execute my considerable strength. I don’t think I’m going to be able to do it.

She said, “Who told you that you have to do this on your own? You needed a high level of support to campaign and nobody thought something magical was going to happen if you got elected and you wouldn’t need it anymore.” 

There’s this adage I like — I don’t know who it’s attributed to — if you feel like you’re walking in circles, look down, because you’re probably moving on a helix. It may look like you’re back in the same place, but you’ve come to a new plane. I experience my life like that a lot. 

I have to build out what that support looks like now. I was successful campaigning because I let it have breathing room. And I can feel now, because of the state of crisis that our school district is in, that it can feel like there’s no space, there’s no time to do anything like that. So I have to ground myself. I go back to my campaign experience and say, we were able to be successful, giving ourselves room to figure out how to be authentic and not leave anyone out. The means is the work. 

So, the yoga ball. If I have to sit for a meeting or any sort of situation where there’s a lot of information, a lot of executive functioning, I can modulate my processing experience through continuous rhythmic movement. Sitting on a yoga ball behind the dais will give me a way to support my processing so that I can integrate all the information and the discussion and the presentations, and be super present and effective. 

I already have the ball at district headquarters because I know I’m going to need it. But what happens if I need a sensory break during a meeting? What happens if I need somebody to repeat something? I don’t know if I will. If I do, we’re going to have to have a conversation about what does that look like. I can’t identify all the needs beforehand, because it’s experiential. It’ll be an adventure to figure it out. 

I’m not saying everyone should be expected to do this by any means, but there is value when people choose to do this in public. Disabled people are supposed to be invisible. Institutionalization is a primary mechanism through which disabled people have been kidnapped out of society and put away so that no one sees us. If I can’t be a visibly disabled person and be a school board director, then I’m not included. It doesn’t do me any good to try to hide my process as a disabled person.

I hope that having an identifiable disabled person behind the dais will let kids who receive special education services see an example of what kind of life they might prepare for. And I hope that having a visibly disabled person behind the dais will show caregivers and educators of students who receive special education services what kind of future they might need to prepare their kids for.