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In 2021, there was a sudden shift in how school board meetings around the country were conducted: Routine meetings turned heated, with angry community members often accusing educators of teaching their kids about critical race theory without their knowledge. That led to a firestorm of anti-CRT bans, intense focus on school board elections and partisan divides within local communities on education.

A new peer-reviewed study by researchers at Michigan State University and the University at Albany provides some insight into how the anti-CRT movement took hold — and the lasting consequences for how communities view their teachers and schools.

“We’ve seen debates about curriculum before but nothing that was so nationalized and spread like this,” said Ariell Bertrand, a doctoral student at MSU and one of the study’s authors.

The study examined the narratives that policymakers were using to justify CRT bans in the first 29 states that proposed them, she said. Based on the “narrative policy framework,” which scholars use to determine how policymakers and lobbyists use narrative storytelling to influence legislation, the researchers identified 11 key anti-CRT “narrative plots” being circulated.

According to the study, conservative think tanks such as the Manhattan Institute and Heritage Foundation and the group Moms for Liberty drafted specific narratives that brought CRT into the mainstream. The Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo, who is considered a key architect of the anti-CRT movement, tweeted his intention in 2021 to redefine CRT “to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”

The study found that the narratives created by these groups — the most common being that CRT indoctrinates children in school to feel guilty about their race — quickly took hold, Bertrand said. According to the study, since 2021, 44 states have introduced more than 140 anti-CRT laws or bans related to concepts allegedly being taught in K-12.

“We found that these narratives were having this downstream effect on people’s likelihood to even trust their local schools anymore.”

Ariell Bertrand, a doctoral student at MSU and one of the study’s authors

In addition, a survey the researchers conducted of Michigan adults in fall 2021 found that individuals who reported hearing any of the anti-CRT narratives were less likely to trust their local teachers to teach any subject fairly. People who had heard all 11 narrative plots were 59 percent more likely to support a CRT ban than individuals who had not been exposed to the ban-CRT narratives.

In surveys, Americans typically express strong support for their local teachers and schools even if they don’t hold favorable views about the nation’s public schools as a whole, Bertrand noted. But this survey challenges that pattern, showing that the anti-CRT narratives began to unravel support even for the schools and teachers people knew best, she said. The survey also found that adults who’d been exposed to the anti-CRT narratives didn’t trust teachers to discuss race or racism or choose materials to supplement curricula, and overall were less likely to support instruction on fairness and equity, she said.

“In the United States we have these really strong macro-level beliefs about public education, such as this belief that education is this cornerstone to our democracy,” Bertrand said. “We found that these narratives were having this downstream effect on people’s likelihood to even trust their local schools anymore.”

The findings also point to partisan and racial divides. Republicans and white adults were more likely to embrace CRT narratives. For example, while a Democrat who had heard all the CRT plots had a 44 percent probability of supporting a CRT ban, someone who identified as Republican had an 88 percent probability. White individuals who’d heard all the CRT plots had a 73 percent chance of supporting a CRT ban, compared to 46 percent for Black individuals.

Now, as attention shifts from anti-CRT legislation to LGBTQ student rights and banning books, Bertrand said she and colleagues believe these narratives and attacks on public education will have similar repercussions. “For generations to come these narratives could undermine people’s support for public education and funding and things like that,” she said.

The CRT study is part of a broader research project led by coauthor Rebecca Jacobsen, professor of education policy at MSU, that looks at how school board meetings have changed since 2019 as a result of anti-CRT, anti-LGBTQ+ and other national narratives.

The researchers are finding that even in places where school board candidates weren’t necessarily running on these issues, school boards made changes to how meetings are run — for example, by limiting open comment periods, adding timers counting down how long speakers may talk, and enhancing security. While these changes are a way to control heated meetings, Jacobsen said they have the long-term effect of altering how the public interacts with its schools.

“This was really an up-close-and-personal opportunity to shape politics, especially around an issue that’s so important to many people: education and the future of their children,” she said of school board meetings. “What was a well-intentioned response has potentially further distanced people and only maybe fueled some of these claims, like ‘Look, our schools are not about you or your children. Look, these people are not listening.’”

Today, the people showing up to meetings include not just parents and families who have legitimate concerns and complaints about how they want their children to be taught, she said, but community members and outsiders who are sharing misinformation about what is happening in schools. While public education is far from perfect, she said, most Americans have shared a universal commitment to supporting education.

But as partisan divides deepen around the issue, she said, “I really think that that’s beginning to wane.”

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

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I cried the day I gained acceptance to Wesleyan University in 2018. My tears signified relief, joy and excitement. I viewed my acceptance into this elite private institution as a dooropening, a new opportunity for young Black students like me.

As a Sierra Leonean American, I had felt constrained by my public education in the United States. I had to fight against low expectations and conditions that devalued my potential, including “accidentally” being placed into English as a Second Language in elementary school, even though English is my first language. I then had to fight for a spot in upper-level classes when I got into high school.

I was fortunate to become a part of TeenSHARP, a college access program for marginalized students that exposed me to schools like Wesleyan and taught me how to advocate for myself while paving the way for others.

Little did I know that my acceptance to Wesleyan was opening a portal to an academic and corporate world in which I would see even fewer people who looked like me. While many college students experience their first semester as an exhilarating time filled with joining student groups, I spent a lot of my time grappling with what it meant to be the only Black woman in predominantly white classes. With the end of affirmative action, more students will experience what I felt: being the only or one of a few Black students.

I remember exploring Wesleyan for the first time. The halls were filled with pictures of alumni, mostly white men, that sent me on a trip down the institution’s memory lane where, as a Black woman, I didn’t exist.

No matter how much I told myself that I belonged, the insidious history of Wesleyan, from its pictures to its architecture to its racial makeup, was a haunting reminder that while I may have gained entry into this world, Black people generally do not.

I would have loved to go to a historically Black college or university, but the lack of funding for HBCUs means they can’t be as generous with financial aid,leaving me, and many other Black students, with the options of taking on unsustainable debt or trying to get in somewhere else.

My acceptance to Wesleyan came at a time when race could still be considered in college admissions, before the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action, effectively ending an avenue of hope for Black and Latino groups.

Related: Will the Rodriguez family’s college dreams survive the end of affirmative action?

However, the gap between the numbers of Black and white college graduates was growing even before the court ruled on affirmative action.

Affirmative action was a meager attempt at leveling the playing field. The Supreme Court’s decision to get rid of it will only continue the caste system in which people with marginalized identities are barred from reaching self-determination because we simply can’t get into spaces that will allow us to thrive.

Ending affirmative action is not only an attack on the benefits of diversity in education, but a direct way to end the mobility of students like me by closing the door to opportunities that were already hard to access.

Historically, race has been a social determinant. Race determined which jobs you could get and which schools you could attend. To ignore race in college admissions will not erase the race problem that plagues our nation. It will only exasperate it.

As long as America refuses to look in the mirror and face the social barriers that necessitated the creation of affirmative action in the first place, brilliant students of color will be overlooked in the admissions process.

Related: OPINION: Legacy admissions are unnecessary, raise moral concerns and exclude deserving students

As I build my career, I often find myself in situations similar to those I experienced as an undergraduate: One of just a handful ofBlack people, or even the only one, in professional settings.

The Supreme Court’s decision has now set a precedent such that initiatives like the Fearless Fund, a nonprofit that provides funding for Black women entrepreneurs, are under attack. And many companies have halted diversity, equity and inclusion programs due to fear of being sued.

Now is the time not to be complacent but to educate ourselves, stay informed and mobilize. The court’s decision is a reminder that the rights and opportunities we have fought for are not a given, and only stay firm when we are.

Alphina Kamara is a development associate at The World Justice Project and a previous Fulbright fellow.

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

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Silence may be golden, but when it comes to learning with a tutor, talking is pure gold. It’s audible proof that a student is paying attention and not drifting off, research suggests. More importantly, the more a student articulates his or her reasoning, the easier it is for a tutor to correct misunderstandings or praise a breakthrough. Those are the moments when learning happens.

One India-based tutoring company, Cuemath, trains its tutors to encourage students to talk more. Its tutors are in India, but many of its clients are American families with elementary school children. The tutoring takes place at home via online video, like a Zoom meeting with a whiteboard, where both tutor and student can work on math problems together. 

The company wanted to see if it could boost student participation so it collaborated with researchers at Stanford University to develop a “talk meter,” sort of a Fitbit for the voice, for its tutoring site. Thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, the researchers could separate the audio of the tutors from that of the students and calculate the ratio of tutor-to-student speech.

In initial pilot tests, the talk meter was posted on the tutor’s video screen for the entire one-hour tutoring session, but tutors found that too distracting. The study was revised so that the meter pops up every 20 minutes or three times during the session. When the student is talking less than 25 percent of the time, the meter goes red, indicating that improvement is needed. When the student is talking more than half the time, the meter turns green. In between, it’s yellow. 

More than 700 tutors and 1,200 of their students were randomly assigned to one of three groups: one where the tutors were shown the talk meter, another where both tutors and students were shown the talk meter, and a third “control” group which wasn’t shown the talk meter at all for comparison.

When just the tutors saw the talk meter, they tended to curtail their explanations and talk much less. But despite their efforts to prod their tutees to talk more, students increased their talking only by 7 percent. 

When students were also shown the talk meter, the dynamic changed. Students increased their talking by 18 percent. Introverts especially started speaking up, according to interviews with the tutors. 

The results show how teaching and learning is a two-way street. It’s not just about coaching teachers to be better at their craft. We also need to coach students to be better learners. 

“It’s not all the teacher’s responsibility to change student behavior,” said Dorottya Demszky, an assistant professor in education data science at Stanford University and lead author of the study. “I think it’s genuinely, super transformative to think of the student as part of it as well.”

The study hasn’t yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal and is currently a draft paper, “Does Feedback on Talk Time Increase Student Engagement? Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial on a Math Tutoring Platform,” so it may still be revised. It is slated to be presented at the March 2024 annual conference of the Society of Learning Analytics in Kyoto, Japan. 

In analyzing the sound files, Demszky noticed that students tended to work on their practice problems with the tutor more silently in both the control and tutor-only talk meter groups. But students started to verbalize their steps aloud once they saw the talk meter. Students were filling more of the silences.

In interviews with the researchers, students said the meter made the tutoring session feel like a game.  One student said, “It’s like a competition. So if you talk more, it’s like, I think you’re better at it.” Another noted:  “When I see that it’s red, I get a little bit sad and then I keep on talking, then I see it yellow, and then I keep on talking more. Then I see it green and then I’m super happy.” 

Some students found the meter distracting.  “It can get annoying because sometimes when I’m trying to look at a question, it just appears, and then sometimes I can’t get rid of it,” one said.

Tutors had mixed reactions, too. For many, the talk meter was a helpful reminder not to be long-winded in their explanations and to ask more probing, open-ended questions. Some tutors said they felt pressured to reach a 50-50 ratio and that they were unnaturally holding back from speaking. One tutor pointed out that it’s not always desirable for a student to talk so much. When you’re introducing a new concept or the student is really lost and struggling, it may be better for the teacher to speak more. 

Surprisingly, kids didn’t just fill the air with silly talk to move the gauge. Demszky’s team analyzed the transcripts in a subset of the tutoring sessions and found that students were genuinely talking about their math work and expressing their reasoning. The use of math terms increased by 42 percent.

Unfortunately, there are several drawbacks to the study design. We don’t know if students’ math achievement improved from the talk meter. The problem was that students of different ages were learning different things in different grades and different countries and there was no single, standardized test to give them all. 

Another confounding factor is that students who saw the talk meter were also given extra information sessions and worksheets about the benefits of talking more. So we can’t tell from this experiment if the talk meter made the difference or if the information on the value of talking aloud would have been enough to get them to talk more.

Demszky is working on developing a talk meter app that can be used in traditional classrooms to encourage more student participation. She hopes teachers will share talk meter results with their students. “I think you could involve the students a little more: ‘It seems like some of you weren’t participating. Or it seems like my questions were very closed ended? How can we work on this together?’”

But she said she’s treading carefully because she is aware that there can be unintended consequences with measurement apps. She wants to give feedback not only on how much students are talking but also on the quality of what they are talking about. And natural language processing still has trouble with English in foreign accents and background noise. Beyond the technological hurdles, there are psychological ones too.

 “Not everyone wants a Fitbit or a tool that gives them metrics and feedback,” Demszky acknowledges.

This story about student participation was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Proof Points newsletter.

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Millions of families may now face a lack of child care following the recent expiration of pandemic-era federal funding.

The child care “stabilization” funds included in the American Rescue Plan Act were just that — emergency funding to stabilize the sector amid a pandemic.

As vital as that funding was, it was insufficient to address the many systemic problems impacting early childhood education and its workforce, including inequitable wages.

Wages for early childhood workers already lag far behind those of their K-8 colleagues who have similar credentials. These workers, disproportionately Black, Latina and indigenous, face poverty rates an average of 7.7 times higher than other teachers.

This financial condition perpetuates economic inequality and reflects systemic racism, with early childhood education programs continuing to be subsidized through the long hours that Black, Latina and indigenous women work for unjust wages and limited benefits.

Related: Early education coalition searches for answers to raise teacher pay, even as budgets are cratering

This inequity and the end of the crucial pandemic-era federal lifeline for early childhood educators will negatively impact families and workers, The Century Foundation estimates. Some 70,000 child care programs are likely to close; millions of families will struggle to get access to child care; 232,000 jobs could soon be lost; and states will lose $10.6 billion in tax and business revenue every year.

There is one bright note: State and local governments are offering models of innovation and glimmers of hope in the face of such a dire challenge.

In late 2022, New Mexico became the first state in the nation to create a permanent child care fund, making child care free or affordable for many families and increasing early educator wages.

State and local governments are offering models of innovation and glimmers of hope.

Washington, D.C., recently established the Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund, which aims to achieve pay parity between early childhood educators and their K-12 counterparts. Since 2022, almost $70 million has been distributed to nearly 3,000 early childhood educators. The district is also expanding health insurance for early childhood educators.

In Louisiana, a coalition of state and local government partners is working with a nonprofit to test the impact of projects that increase child care workers’ wages in key communities; if positive, they intend to scale the programs across the state.

Minnesota last year signed into law the Great Start Compensation Support Payment Program to fill the gap following the ending of the federal child care stabilization grants. The program will provide $316 million this fiscal year, and $260 million every two years ongoing, to directly increase child care workers’ pay.

These solutions are critical, because it is our nation’s youngest students who will ultimately suffer the consequences of high teacher turnover and an unstable learning environment at a key time in their development.

Early childhood education directly impacts their future learning outcomes and lifelong success; it deserves our attention and investment.

Building on these efforts, the Early Educator Investment Collaborative — a group of funders that has come together to accelerate progress in the early childhood education profession — recently announced grants for state and local partnerships in Colorado, Louisiana and Washington, D.C.

These grants will bolster innovative approaches to increasing early childhood education workforce pay, including the creation of dedicated revenue streams and pilot demonstration projects to evaluate the impacts of salary increases.

They will also promote greater collaboration between agencies to improve workforce compensation — aimed at increasing the capacity of financial and data systems to support long-term wage and benefits increases.

Related: OPINION: School district leaders must make early education a priority, so children enter school prepared

I’m excited for the solutions these grants will amplify and hope they can provide useful models and encouragement for other states to explore ways to better compensate early childhood educators.

But we also need state and federal legislators to step up for their constituents on this issue. It’s critical for legislators to reflect the majority of voters’ interest in early childhood education reform by increasing investment, enacting legislation to boost compensation and advocating for broader support of early childhood educators.

Philanthropy also has a big role to play. By supporting governments with the funding needed to explore unique solutions, philanthropic organizations can help find what works, scale successful models and support sustainable change.

Along with boosting the rallying cry for increased federal investment in early childhood education and its workers, this moment is an opportunity for states, communities and philanthropists to find truly long-term solutions to fully support early childhood education workers and the families they serve.

Ola J. Friday is the director of the Early Educator Investment Collaborative.

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

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Across the country, state legislatures have passed bills to ban “age-inappropriate” books from schools, in many cases subjecting teachers and school librarians to criminal charges for possession of such books. In January, EveryLibrary, a group that tracks legislation that puts school and college librarians, higher ed faculty and museum professionals at risk of criminal prosecution, identified 44 bills in 14 states as “legislation of concern,” for the 2024 session.

This climate has teachers and librarians feeling fearful, confused and stressed. Lindsey Kimery, the coordinator of library services for Metro-Nashville Public Schools, said she has “no hidden agenda other than that reading was my favorite thing.” Having books by, about and for LGBTQ+ students, she said, “does not mean we are out there promoting it. It just means we have books for those readers, too. What I try to convey is that a library is a place for voluntary inquiry.” 

Krause’s List

It is unclear how the recent book ban fervor started. Certainly, a former Texas state representative, Matt Krause, deserves some credit. On October 25, 2021, using his power as chair of the Texas House Committee on General Investigating, Krause sent a letter to the Texas Education Agency and to school districts listing some 850 books. He demanded that districts (1) identify how many copies of each title they possessed and where they were located, including which campuses and classrooms; (2) say how much the district spent to acquire the books; and (3) identify books not on his list that dealt with topics such as AIDS, sexually transmitted diseases, or other subjects that “might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex or convey that a student, by virtue of their race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”

Districts had until November 12, less than a month, to respond. This alarmed librarians. At the time, Mary Woodard, president of the Texas Library Association, was also in charge of school libraries in the Mesquite Independent School District (ISD). She recalled receiving the letter. “I was actually at home. My superintendent forwarded it to me. It was in the evening,” she said. “I just felt a cold chill. I was beyond shocked that somebody from our state government was asking what books were available in our school libraries. I never thought I would see anything like that.”  Like librarians around the state, Woodard was quickly called into a meeting with her superintendent. Ultimately, they gathered the information Krause asked for, but decided not to send it unless it was specifically requested. It wasn’t.

The lack of follow-up by Krause was interesting. He has repeatedly refused to say how he compiled the list or what he was trying to accomplish. But around the time the letter gained attention, Krause was running for state attorney general. He failed to make it onto the Republican ballot in March 2022, then decided to run for district attorney in Tarrant County as a “Faithful, Conservative Fighter,” but lost. His legislative term ended on January 10, 2023. He is now running for Tarrant County Commissioner.

Related: The (mostly) Republican moms fighting to reclaim their Idaho school district from conservatives 

The list was probably the most newsworthy thing he did as state legislator — it caught fire. Suddenly, Krause’s list was a state resource and discussed in the national media. Governor Greg Abbott called on the Texas Education Agency to launch criminal investigations into the availability of “pornographic books” in school libraries. Some of writer Andrew Solomon’s books were on the list, prompting him to write an essay titled “My Book Was Censored in China. Now It’s Blacklisted — in Texas.”

Actually, Krause’s list was quite sloppy. Media outlets dove into specifics and unearthed a ridiculous assemblage. Of course, books that mention LGBTQ+ students or are about sexuality (even from the 1970s) or race were well represented. But there was a lot that was puzzling. “Almost one in five of the books listed, I have no idea why they’re included,” wrote Danika Ellis of Book Riot, a podcast and website about books and reading, who sifted through the entire list. “Probably the one that has me the most stumped is ‘Inventions and Inventors’ by Roger Smith from 2002. What’s controversial about a book on inventions??” Other outlets shared similar head-scratching reactions. The Dallas Observer named their “10 most absurd” books on the list.

Actually, Krause’s list was quite sloppy. Media outlets dove into specifics and unearthed a ridiculous assemblage.

Yet many educators treated the list like an instructional manual. Chris Tackett, a political campaign finance expert, tweeted a photo of a man in a hoodie leaving the high school library in Granbury ISD pulling a dolly of cardboard boxes labeled “Krause’s List.” Granbury ISD’s superintendent, Jeremy Glenn, was eager to comply, as a leaked audio recording showed. He gathered librarians in January 2022 and told them that students didn’t need access to books about sexuality or transgender people. A secret recording shared by the Texas Tribune–ProPublica Investigative Unit and NBC News revealed a stunning disregard for students’ First Amendment rights.

Yet when Glenn addressed the librarians, there was clearly no room for disagreement. He stated that school board trustees had been in touch. “I want to talk about our community,” he said in a firm but syrupy drawl. “If you do not know this, you have been probably under a rock, but Granbury is a very, very conservative community and our board is very, very conservative.” He warned, “If that’s not what you believe, you’d better hide it because it ain’t changing in Granbury. Here, in this community, we will be conservative.”

He then detailed that meant not having books about sexuality or LGBTQ+ or “information on how to become transgender.” Then, Glenn revealed his discomfort with gender-fluid individuals, saying, “I will take it one step further with you and you can disagree if you want. There are two genders. There’s male and there’s female. And I acknowledge that there are men that think they are women and women that think they are men. And I don’t have any issues with what people want to believe, but there is no place for it in our libraries.” He told librarians that he was forming a review committee of parents and educators and that they would “pull books off the shelves, especially the 850” on Krause’s list. He finished with a directive that camouflaged the seriousness of what he asked them to do: “When in doubt, pull it. Let the community sign off on it, put it back on the shelf. You’re good to go.”

Objections Reflect Times, Personal Views

Not surprisingly, the matter of what should and may be included in school libraries has long been a source of contention, often influenced by the political climate of the time. In 1950, amid the fervor of McCarthyism, the Yale Law Journal delved into a controversy between The Nation and The New York City Board of Education after the left-leaning magazine published articles critical of Roman Catholic church doctrine and dogma. The school board voted to remove The Nation from school libraries. A multi-year battle followed with The Nation offering free subscriptions, but appeals to the state department of education failed. Was it censorship, as the Yale Law Journal and The Nation defense suggested? Libraries cannot subscribe to every periodical. The schools did not remove existing materials but did not include new issues.

The example hits on a current matter. Aside from pressure to remove materials, what should be included in the first place? Nowadays, rather than face controversy, some librarians are simply choosing not to purchase some books. A survey conducted by School Library Journal in Spring 2022 received input from 720 school librarians, 90 percent from public schools (all anonymous). It found that 97 percent weighed the impact of controversial subjects when making purchases. “The presence of an LGBTQIA+ character or theme in a book led 29 percent of respondents to decline a purchase,” the survey report said. Forty-two percent admitted removing a “potentially problematic” book that had not faced challenge or review. An updated 2023 survey revealed that this has only become more common. Thirty-seven percent said they declined to select books with LGBTQIA+ subject matter; 47 percent admitted to removing a book on their own. Interestingly, one-third said they had considered leaving the profession “in reaction to the intensity over book bans” — but two-thirds said that intensity has moved them to be more active in fighting censorship.

Book banning is a chaotic and illogical business. How a book is received or understood is often subject to the historical moment — and the tastes of individuals.

Book banning is a chaotic and illogical business. How a book is received or understood is often subject to the historical moment — and the tastes of individuals. The notion of an objective measure or checklist to decide what is “appropriate” — something far-right school boards have worked to police and enforce — is slippery to define. In the late 1930s, the children’s book “The Story of Ferdinand,” about a bull who would rather smell flowers than fight a matador, was interpreted as carrying a pacifist political message. But in a whirl of confusion, it was marked as both pro-Franco and anti-Franco — and also as “communist, anarchist, manic-depressive, and schizoid,” according to an analysis of children’s book censorship in the Elementary School Journal in 1970.  

Related: Florida just expanded school vouchers — again. What does that really mean?

In other words, people saw what they wanted to see. That also happened to “Sylvester and the Magic Pebble,” a children’s book by William Steig about a donkey who finds a magic pebble and, frightened by a lion, wishes himself into becoming a rock. The book contained images of police officers dressed as pigs. In 1971, the International Conference of Police Associations took offense at that portrayal of police as pigs — “pig” being a derogatory term for law enforcement officers. According to the author of the journal article, school librarians who agreed with the police association view of the drawings and “considered [the portrayal] a political statement,” pulled the books from shelves in many locales, including Lincoln, Nebraska; Palo Alto, California; Toledo, Ohio; Prince George’s County, Maryland; and several cities in Illinois.

Books often get singled out because they make someone uncomfortable. Lately, far-right activists have particularly objected to graphic images, including of intimate body parts. Which is what happened in the 1970s with Maurice Sendak’s “In the Night Kitchen.” The book includes drawings that reveal the toddler hero’s penis on several pages. School and public libraries quietly devised a solution: They used white tempera to paint diapers on Mickey, the main character. At a meeting of the American Library Association in Chicago in June 1972, some 475 librarians, illustrators, authors and publishers were outraged at the practice of the painting over the penis and signed a petition denouncing it as a form of censorship.

“School libraries are for all students but not all students are the same — they have diverse interests, abilities, and maturity levels, and varied cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds.”

Texas Library Association

Books that involve drugs, violence, sex and sexual orientation can attract fierce opposition, regardless of the intended message, literary merit or value. Sometimes these books offer windows into other worlds and experiences, which in 1971 bothered school board members and a few parents in a white middle-class section of Queens, New York City. Community School District 25 board voted to ban “Down These Mean Streets,” by Piri Thomas, in which the author shares his tough story of survival in Harlem as the dark-skinned son of Puerto Rican immigrants. The five members of the school board who voted to ban the book did not have children in any public schools governed by the district. At a meeting that drew some 500 people and lasted for six hours, 63 attendees spoke with most objecting to the ban. According to a New York Times account, “Book Ban Splits a Queens School District,” the five school board members who favored the ban were nicknamed “The Holy Five” or “The Faithful Five.” Four had run on a slate sponsored by the Home Schools Association, a support group for Catholic parents home-schooling their children. In a parallel to the present, some questioned their motives, concerned that they were reflecting personal interests and not the district’s. A few years later, in December 1975, the board, composed of different and recently elected members, voted to repeal the ban. The board president called the book banning “abhorrent” and “undemocratic.”

Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico

Thomas’s book also played a role in a case on which the Supreme Court ruled in 1982. It began in September 1975, when several board members of the Island Trees Union Free School District on Long Island, New York, attended a weekend education conference in Watkins Glen, New York, organized by a far-right group, Parents of New York United, Inc. (PONY-U. Inc. for short). Island Trees Union Free School District board members mixed with representatives from the Heritage Foundation and parents opposed to school desegregation in Boston. The keynote speaker, Genevieve Klein, a member of the New York State Board of Regents, advocated for adoption of a voucher system for education. “If you are a parent who believes that reading, writing, spelling and arithmetic are basic tools necessary for developing into a contributing member of society, then you know that parental control is an immediate necessity,” she told the group. “If there is to be any hope for saving another generation from becoming functional idiots the time to act is now.”

PONY-U. Inc. was not just a local group eager to talk about schooling. Headed by Janet Mellon, a far-right activist, the group had spent several years orchestrating opposition to sex education and human relations education in schools and to student busing across Upstate New York. Yet books were top of mind leading up to Watkins Glen. A few weeks prior, the group hosted a talk titled “Book Censorship in Our Schools” at the Central Fire Station in Ithaca, New York. The Watkins Glen conference also came on the heels of one of the most violent and divisive school textbook battles in history. For six months in 1974 and 1975, bitter conflict roiled West Virginia’s Kanawha County after a new school board member, Alice Moore, sought the removal of textbooks that she found objectionable. She had won her seat by convincing voters that schools were “destroying our children’s patriotism, trust in God, respect for authority and confidence in their parents.”

Moore mobilized other conservatives locally and nationally, including prominent education activists Mel and Norma Gabler, who sought to “excise the rot from the nation’s schoolbooks,” as Adam Laats writes in “The Other School Reformers: Conservative Activism in American Education.” That “rot” included teaching evolution; communicating a “liberated” sexuality; “graphic accounts of gang fights; raids by wild motorcyclists; violent demonstrations against authority; murders of family members; of rape” and “books that denigrated traditional patriotic stories” in favor of popular subjects at the time, including Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Gertrude Ederle, Bobby Jones, Joan Baez, W. E. B. Du Bois “and many others dear to liberal hearts.”

Related: Who picks school curriculum? Idaho law hands more power to parents

As protests in Kanawha County grew, violence spread. Reverend Marvin Horand, a fundamentalist minister and former truck driver, called for school boycotts, arguing that “no education at all is 100 percent better than what’s going on in the schools now. If we don’t protect our children from evil, we’ll have to go to hell for it.” The controversy resulted in two shooting deaths and multiple bombings. Horand was charged and ultimately found guilty in connection with the dynamiting of two elementary schools. The Heritage Foundation was also on the ground, providing legal support and helping a local group hold a “series of ‘Concerned Citizen’ hearings on discontent with the public schools.” Mellon of PONY-U. was one of their “expert” speakers.

At the Watkins Glen conference — with the memory of Kanawha County still fresh — board members of the Island Trees Union Free School District received a list of 32 books described as “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic and just plain filthy.” Then, in February 1976, the board ordered the Island Trees Union Free School superintendent to remove 11 books from the district’s junior and senior high schools, including nine from school libraries. The move stirred outrage, but the board defended the ban, claiming that the books contained “material which is offensive to Christians, Jews, blacks and Americans in general.” Two of the books — “The Fixer,” by Bernard Malamud, and “Laughing Boy,” by Oliver La Farge — had won the Pulitzer Prize. At a press conference, school board member Frank Martin read aloud from “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut, citing sentences in which Jesus is called a “bum” and a “nobody.” Martin said that “even if the rest of the book was the best story in the world, I still wouldn’t want it in our library with this stuff in it.” The other books: “Down These Mean Streets,” by Piri Thomas; “The Naked Ape,” by Desmond Morris; “Soul on Ice,” by Eldridge Cleaver; “Black Boy by Richard Wright;” “Best Short Stories of Negro Writers,” edited by Langston Hughes; “Go Ask Alice,” by an anonymous author; “A Hero Ain’t Nothing but a Sandwich,” by Alice Childress; and “A Reader for Writers,” by Jerome Archer.

“We are not even allowed to order the newest ‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid’ or the latest ‘Guinness World Records’ unless the board gives express permission for those specific titles. We can’t get any new nonfiction books about camels or squirrels or football without specific approval of the school board.”

A librarian from the Bear Creek Intermediate School, Keller Independent School District, Texas

Opposition to the ban grew. In April 1976, 500 people jammed a local school board meeting. Many juniors and seniors in high school also attended. One told a reporter, “These books are very tame. It’s nothing you can’t hear in the sixth-grade school bus.” Yet the board upheld the ban. Then, several months later, it reaffirmed the ban, saying that board members had read the books and pronounced them “educationally unsound.” By September 1976, the matter had attracted broad notice and Thomas, the author of “Down These Mean Streets,” wrote in The New York Times arguing for “the right to write and to read.”  He explained that the book “was not written to titillate but to bring forth a clarity about my growing up in El Barrio in the 1930’s and 1940’s.” He added, “Since the horrors of poverty, racism, drugs, the brutality of our prison system, the inhumanity toward children of all colors are still running rampant, let the truth written by those who lived it be read by those who didn’t.”

When the books were first removed, Steven Pico, at 16, was vice president of the junior class and a member of the school newspaper’s editorial board. The following year, as student council president and a liaison to Island Tree Union Free District Board of Education, he attended school board meetings. He decided to mount a challenge to the ban. Pico connected with lawyers from the New York Civil Liberties Union, and four other students joined the suit. It took years for the case to make it to the high court. Pico went off to college, earning his BA from Haverford College in 1981. Just over a year later, on June 25, 1982, the Supreme Court handed down its decision. The Court ruled that the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech limited the discretion of public school officials to remove books they considered offensive from school libraries. The New York Times ran its story on the ruling on page one. Linda Greenhouse, who covered the Supreme Court, noted that Bruce Rich, general counsel to the Freedom to Read Committee of the Association of American Publishers, “called the ruling ‘marvelous’ and said it ‘sends a very important message to school boards: Act carefully.’”

The decision in Pico was taken as a victory by those opposed to book bans, but as Greenhouse’s story also stated, it was a complicated win. It was a plurality ruling, which included a four-justice majority and two concurring opinions, that recognized school officials had violated students’ rights when they removed library books they didn’t like. “Our Constitution does not permit the official suppression of ideas,” wrote Associate Justice William J. Brennan Jr. But, as Greenhouse noted, “The Court did not define the precise limits of the Constitutional right it recognized.”

In the late 1930s, the children’s book “The Story of Ferdinand,” about a bull who would rather smell flowers than fight a matador, was interpreted as carrying a pacifist political message. But in a whirl of confusion, it was marked as both pro-Franco and anti-Franco — and also as “communist, anarchist, manic-depressive, and schizoid.”

School board members in Pico wanted to remove books whose content they disapproved of. But what if books were removed as a result of a restrictive policy? Or if state legislatures or school boards passed rules that restricted library materials? Would that run afoul of the law? Or would it provide cover for de facto book bans? What if a district made a process for approving books so onerous that librarians simply stopped ordering books with certain content?

These and related questions are playing out in real time now over what should be allowed in school libraries. Keller ISD, near Fort Worth, Texas, has faced controversy. When Governor Abbott announced plans to investigate school libraries amid reports of “pornographic” books, he specifically targeted Keller ISD, putting librarians in the district on the defensive. And when the Texas Education Agency released new guidelines for how districts should prevent “obscene content” from entering school libraries — a bid for wholesale changes in how books were acquired for libraries, bypassing the graduate training that is part of being a librarian — a far-right majority Keller ISD school board, newly-election in Spring 2022 with backing from the Patriot Mobile Action PAC, was only too happy to get involved.

Related: Moms For Liberty flexes its muscles — and faces pushback

At the time, the Texas Library Association and the Texas Association of School Librarians (a division of the Texas Library Association) objected to the new state guidelines. Those guidelines included the language of the Texas Penal Code Åò43.24(a)(2), a clear political statement, and a not-so-veiled threat. In most states, after all, K–12 schools and public libraries are typically exempt from obscenity laws; it is recognized that items that may clash with the language of those standards — art, biology, literature — involve creative and educational works that seek to deepen understanding of the human experience. Removing that exemption was the goal of the failed Tennessee House Bill 1944; it is a focus of several proposed bills around the country. 

The Texas Library Association objected to the increased burden on librarians, superintendents and school boards to read and review thousands of titles, acknowledging the difficult task for people who lack training as librarians. Such a process means relying on personal views of elected officials and other untrained people, which got the Island Trees Free Union School Board in trouble. In a statement, the Texas Library Association also underscored the actual role that libraries play: “School libraries are for all students but not all students are the same — they have diverse interests, abilities, and maturity levels, and varied cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds.” The statement also pointedly rebuffed Abbott’s charge, adding, “Furthermore, school libraries do not collect obscene content.”

Yet the new Keller ISD school board was more than eager to take up removing “obscene content” from school libraries, and on July 8, 2022 passed an updated book policy that largely mirrored the new state guidelines. They weren’t done. A month later, on August 22, the board voted 4-2 (with one abstention) to adopt new district guidelines for selecting books. Each would be judged according to how often certain items appeared in its pages. Ill-defined terms like “prevalent,” “common,” “some” or “minimal” would indicate what amount of specific flagged content — profanity, kissing, horror, violence, bullying, drug or alcohol use by minors, drug use by adults, the glorification of suicide or self-harm or mental illness, brief descriptions of nonsexual nudity, and sexually explicit conduct or sexual abuse — would be permitted at different age levels.

Veteran board member, Ruthie Keyes, who had abstained, puzzled over how to apply the guidelines. In talking about violence, she asked, “Are they talking about military combat?” She had spoken with teachers who estimated having to remove two-thirds of their classroom library books. “That’s a lot,” she said. “And none were talking about explicit sex scenes.” (In November 2022, the board added one more rule: No mention of “gender fluidity” was permitted.)

The new policy created a selection process with more layers of librarians reviewing each purchase. Books would be also placed on a list open to review and challenge by members of the community for 30 days. The board would then approve the purchase of each book. This had an almost immediate effect. At the October 24, 2022, school board meeting, a librarian from the Bear Creek Intermediate School made her way to the mic, her hair piled in a messy swirl, glasses affixed to her face, and paper in hand. She spoke calmly about the policy, which she considered an affront to the training she and her peers had undergone. The board “has shown by its actions that Keller ISD librarians are not respected at all,” she said. “We are not even allowed to order the newest ‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid’ or the latest ‘Guinness World Records’ unless the board gives express permission for those specific titles. We can’t get any new nonfiction books about camels or squirrels or football without specific approval of the school board.”

“I just felt a cold chill. I was beyond shocked that somebody from our state government was asking what books were available in our school libraries. I never thought I would see anything like that.” 

Mary Woodard, president of the Texas Library Association

She described “a huge environment of fear” among librarians who “are not even trusted to order a new alphabet book like ABC Cats for pre-K students.” Students, she said, keep asking why there are no new books. She must constantly say that titles are coming soon and makes excuses for the lack of new books. What she doesn’t reveal is the truth: “I certainly don’t mention the role that politics is playing in our libraries and our district.”

But in a reminder that this is political, the far-right Keller ISD Family Alliance PAC used the new policy and book removals to fundraise, trumpeting that the board had “stood up against the left’s woke agenda in schools, now we MUST hold the line and protect our hard-earned victories and our children.” Then it asked, “Can we count on you today to support our school board with a donation of $25, $50, $100, $250 or even $500?” Below the text was a “donate” button.

Much as moves to ban books get cast by far-right activists as “protecting” students, they are —and long have been — baldly political. Just last week, a federal judge in Florida heard oral arguments in a case brought by PEN America, publishers, authors and parents against the Escambia County School District and Escambia County School Board. The plaintiffs charge that the board and district removed and restricted books “based on their disagreement with the ideas expressed in those books.” Further, they “have disproportionately targeted books by or about people of color and/or LGBTQ people.”

As this case proceeds, as state legislatures prepare to take up bills that threaten librarians, teachers and the freedom of students to read, however, it is important to remember that this is more than some theoretical debate. There are consequences — for librarians doing their jobs, for children who want ordinary books, and for those for whom these restrictions are received as an attack.

In Keller ISD, during the five-and-half-hour school board meeting at which the board adopted restrictive book selection policies, a high school senior spoke during public comments. He said that he was gay, and in middle school had been told by peers that he was “a freak.”  I began to agree with them,” he said. Then, he recounted, “I found a book about boys that felt the same way as I did.” Reading it made him less alone; he gained confidence as he reached high school. Yet the new library and book policies made students like him “feel attacked by the school board,” he said. “This pervasive censorship is about more than politics,” he added. “It is about lives.”

This is an adapted excerpt from “School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics and the Battle for Public Education” by Laura Pappano. Copyright 2024. Excerpted with permission by Beacon Press.

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Though college enrollment seems to be stabilizing after the pandemic disruptions, predictions for the next 15 years are grim. Colleges will be hurt financially by fewer tuition-paying students, and many will have to merge with other institutions or make significant changes to the way they operate if they want to keep their doors open.

At least 30 colleges closed their only or final campus in the first 10 months of 2023, including 14 nonprofit colleges and 16 for-profit colleges, according to an analysis of federal data by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, or SHEEO. Among nonprofits, this came on the heels of 2022, when 23 of them closed, along with 25 for-profit institutions. Before 2022, the greatest number of nonprofit colleges that closed in a single year was 13. 

Over the past two decades, far more for-profit colleges closed each year than nonprofits. An average of nine nonprofit colleges closed each year, compared to an average of 47 for-profit colleges. 

This time last year, experts predicted we’d see another wave of college closures, mostly institutions that were struggling before the pandemic and were kept afloat by Covid-era funding. Since then, keeping their doors open has become unrealistic for these colleges, many of which are regional private colleges. 

“It’s not corruption, it’s not financial misappropriation of funds, it’s just that they can’t rebound enrollment.”

Rachel Burns, a senior policy analyst at SHEEO. 

For many, the situation has been made worse by the enrollment declines during the pandemic. 

“It’s not corruption, it’s not financial misappropriation of funds, it’s just that they can’t rebound enrollment,” said Rachel Burns, a senior policy analyst at SHEEO. 

Data from the National Student Clearinghouse shows that undergraduate enrollment has stabilized and even slightly increased for the first time since the pandemic, but a continuing decline in birth rates means that fewer high school seniors will be graduating after 2025, so these colleges will face even greater enrollment challenges in the years to come.

Hundreds of colleges are expected to see significant enrollment declines in the coming years, according to David Attis, managing director of research at the education consulting company EAB. Among the reasons, he said, are declining birthrates, smaller shares of students choosing college, and college-going students veering toward larger and more selective institutions.

By 2030, 449 colleges are expected to see a 25 percent decline in enrollment and 182 colleges are expected to see a 50 percent decline, according to an EAB analysis of federal enrollment data. By 2035, those numbers are expected to rise to 534 colleges expecting a 25 percent decline and 227 colleges expecting a 50 percent decline; by 2040, a total of 566 colleges are expected to see a 25 percent decline and 247 are expected to see a 50 percent decline, according to  EAB’s analysis. 

These are predictions, of course, and they certainly don’t ensure that all those colleges will close. But with these drops in enrollment expected to continue, colleges need to plan now and make significant changes in order to survive, Attis said.

“Imagine if you lose half your students – that is a threat to your continued existence.”

David Attis, managing director of research at the education consulting company EAB.

“Imagine if you lose half your students – that is a threat to your continued existence,” Attis said. “You’ll have to make some pretty dramatic changes. It’s not just a ‘We’ll cut a few academic programs,’ or ‘We’ll trim our administrative staff a little bit.’ That requires a real reorientation of your whole strategy.”

Many colleges face the decision to merge with another institution or close down entirely, Attis said. And if they wait too long to find a college to merge with, they really won’t have a choice. 

“If you wait until you’re on the verge of closure, you’re not a particularly attractive partner,” Attis said. “But if you’re not on the verge of closure, then you’re not as motivated to find that partner.”

Attis said that he’s been surprised to hear from several leaders of regional colleges – both private and public – that they are in talks about mergers. 

“Whether they’ve pursued them or not, they’ve either made a call or gotten a call,” Attis said. “They’re thinking about it in a way I hadn’t heard in the past.” 

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

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Pleasantville is a mostly Black and Hispanic community located between two major freeways, the I-10 and the 610, in Houston, Texas. This placement is no accident, said Bridgette Murray, a retired nurse and local community leader: “The highway plan in the 1950s was used to divide communities of color.” Today, an estimated 300,000 vehicles stream by on a daily basis, she said. The neighborhood is also close to the Houston Ship Channel, exposing it to heavy industrial pollution.

But state air monitoring stations aren’t placed to capture all the hazards concentrated in that small area. So Murray’s group, ACTS (Achieving Community Tasks Successfully), has been partnering for almost a decade with urban planning expert Robert Bullard at Texas Southern University, to do their own air quality monitoring. ACTS just won a grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to expand the program.

Bullard has been called the father of the environmental justice movement. His 1990 book “Dumping in Dixie” documented the systemic placement of polluting facilities and waste disposal in communities of color, as well as those communities fighting back. He said scientists and communities need each other.

“Our climate scientists are great at science, but not good translators when it comes to taking that data to people,” he said. “We need the principle of environmental justice embedded in our climate policies. The overarching principle is that the people who are most impacted must speak for themselves and must be in those rooms and at those tables when decisions are being made about their lives.”

“It’s a mutual respect,” Murray said of the relationship between her group and the Texas Southern researchers. “You have to have a partner that respects the ideas you are bringing to the table and also allows you to grow.”

Bullard is co-founder, with Beverly Wright, of the HBCU Climate Change Consortium, which brings together historically black universities and community-based organizations in what Wright has termed the “communiversity” model. There are partnerships like the one in Houston all over the South: Dillard and Xavier Universities, in New Orleans, working on wetlands restoration and equitable recovery from storms; Jackson State is working in Gulfport, Mississippi, on legacy pollution; and Florida A&M in Pensacola on the issue of landfills and borrow pits (holes dug to extract sand and clay that are then used as landfill).

Bullard said it’s no accident that so many HBCUs are involved in this work. “Black colleges and universities historically combined the idea of using education for advancement and liberation, with the struggle for civil rights.”

When these partnerships go smoothly, Bullard said, universities provide community-based organizations with access to data and help advocating for themselves; students and scholars get opportunities to do applied research with a clear social mission.

“We need the principle of environmental justice embedded in our climate policies. The overarching principle is that the people who are most impacted must speak for themselves and must be in those rooms and at those tables when decisions are being made about their lives.”

Robert Bullard, demographer, Texas Southern University

A lot of growth is happening in environmental justice right now. ACTS’ $500,000 EPA grant is part of what the White House touts as “the most ambitious environmental justice agenda ever undertaken by the Federal Government.” Notably, President Biden’s Justice40 initiative decrees that 40 percent of all federal dollars allocated to climate change, clean energy, and related policy goals flow to communities like Pleasantville: marginalized, underserved, and systematically overburdened by pollution.

Expanding on this model, the EPA has allocated $177 million to 16 “Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Centers” — a mix of nonprofits and universities that will help groups like ACTS get federal grants to achieve their goals.

But, warned Bullard, all the new funding might cause a gold rush, raising the danger of attracting bad actors. Sometimes, he said, universities act like “grant-writing mills,” exploiting communities without sharing the benefits. “You parachute in, you mine the data, you leave and the community doesn’t know what hit them. That is not authentic partnership.”

Murray, at ACTS, has seen that kind of behavior herself. “A one-sided relationship where they came in to take information,” she recalled. “The paper was written, the accolades [for researchers] happen, and the community is just like it was, with no ability to address anything.”

“Our climate scientists are great at science, but not good translators when it comes to taking that data to people.”

Robert Bullard, demographer, Texas Southern University

It takes sensitivity and hard work to overcome what can be a long history of town-gown tensions between universities and local communities. “You have to earn trust,” said Bullard. “Trust is not given by a memorandum of understanding.” One way to break down barriers is to make sure that all participants — whether they have a GED or a PhD — share the air equitably at meetings between researchers and community leaders. And those meetings might be held in the evenings or on weekends, because community groups are often run by volunteers. 

Denae King, a PhD toxicologist, works with Bullard as an associate director at the Bullard Center. She said she’s always looking for a chance to give space to community partners like ACTS, and reduce or equalize any power dynamic.

“I just ended a meeting where someone was asking me to put together a proposal to showcase environmental justice at a conference,” she said. “Before I would be willing to do that, I want to make sure it’s OK to showcase community leaders in this space. I might split my time in half and we co-present. Or it may look like me helping the community leader to prepare their presentation. I might be in the room and say nothing, but my presence says, I’m here to support you.”

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

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

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

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

Additional information gathered from the survey:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Harvard University President Claudine Gay’s resignation ends the shortest tenure in the university’s history — six months. It’s not a coincidence that the record is set by the school’s first Black woman president. We were headed for this moment since she started in July.

Some pundits are blaming antisemitism and plagiarism, ignoring the white supremacist politics at the center of her ouster: the same politics shaping higher education at schools like Harvard since the creation of higher education in the United States.

Less than a month before Gay’s resignation, these politics were on display as Ivy League early admissions decisions sparked the annual accusations of reverse racism, with non-Black students and parents blaming Black students for stealing their spots in the class of 2028.

Such accusations are perpetual fallacies in a long narrative about Black people that claims we undeservedly get jobs, opportunities and admittance to the country’s most selective colleges and universities that “should” go to white people.

Gay’s appointment was both applauded as a sign of Harvard’s racial progress and derided as a “diversity hire.”

However, in December, Gay’s controversial testimony before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce’s hearing on antisemitism on college campuses and, in particular, her repeated defense of free speech on campus, opened the door to calls for her removal. Widely reported accusations of plagiarism against her led to additional scrutiny which facilitated her resignation. On closer inspection, that alleged plagiarism amounted to a relatively small number of “citation errors” in her 1997 dissertation and a few other academic papers. Similar comments on free speech also felled University of Pennsylvania President M. Elizabeth Magill, yet she managed to resign without the racialized questioning of her entire professional career that Gay has had to face.

Related: Students have reacted strongly to university presidents’ Congressional testimony about antisemitism 

After her resignation, Gay noted that she was a victim of a campaign against Black faculty, one that “recycled tired racial stereotypes about Black talent and temperament.”

It is not a coincidence that Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT were targeted for those House Committee hearing. They are representative of the cultural zeitgeist at many prestigious institutions — and a political battleground for those seeking control over American ideology.

Harvard, in particular, has been at the center of these battleground narratives — one about “unqualified” Black leadership and the other by students who believe below-average Blacks have taken their spots.

Established in 1636, Harvard is an institution that prides itself on its lack of access. Initially, Harvard, and schools fashioned after it, were institutions for upper-class white men only; it has always existed at the nexus of white supremacy in the United States.

The goalposts for Black people to display merit keep changing; seemingly no matter our credentials, we are perceived as gaming entrance where we don’t belong.

Harvard’s mission has facilitated the creation of a constant supply of wealthy white politicians and businessmen from the so-called right families and with the “right” education to lead this country. It would be over 300 years until Black people were regularly admitted — and another 70 years before a Black woman would be appointed president of the university.

This was by design. As discussed in my book, “Black Women, Ivory Tower,” Ivy League schools are meant to be exclusionary. Attending Harvard has always been a dream to strive for, a way to perpetuate race and class-based hierarchies — to effectively define who belongs at the “top” of society and who doesn’t.

 As a symbol of a well-working meritocracy, though, Harvard fails. Instead, the goalposts for Black people to display merit keep changing; seemingly, no matter our credentials, we are perceived as gaming entrance where we don’t belong.

Gay’s resignation signals the embeddedness of racism at these prestigious schools. She had to go because she didn’t belong. And the political pressure that was used to get her to resign without just cause provides another opportunity to show Black people they don’t belong, regardless of their professional achievements, and to keep schools like Harvard white. The Supreme Court’s affirmative action ban effectively ensures that they will stay that way.

All of this tells us that the presence of any Black people in prestigious institutions is still a problem for many people. Even when affirmative action was in place, Black students made up less than 7 percent of Harvard’s overall campus population. Harvard accepts less than 4 percent of all applicants.

With those numbers, it is empirically impossible to claim that Black people are inundating Harvard and schools like it; yet there’s still this clear illogic focused squarely on us to explain Harvard’s elusiveness to white people more broadly.

Without Black people to blame, the more than 96 percent of applicants who are not admitted must face the reality of higher ed in America — that schools like Harvard were never likely to admit them, because these schools are meant to perpetuate not only whiteness but also wealth and power.

Admissions offices at Harvard, Princeton and Yale were created in response to concerns about high percentages of Jewish students starting in the 1910s. New admissions policies set quotas on Jewish students in a given class and created checklists of desirable characteristics, including racial and ethnic identities, to more specifically shape the makeup of the student body.

Admissions policies became even more important in the 1940s when the potential for Black student applicants returning from war to use the GI bill to cover tuition again threatened the white wealth culture these schools had established.

Hierarchical ranking systems and the introduction of the “Ivy League” in 1954 further stratified schools by race and class.

Affirmative action policies that came later only slightly increased the percentage of Black students at these schools in any given year.

Related: COLUMN: Colleges decry Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, but most have terrible track records on diversity

A similar fate to Gay’s will likely befall the next Black woman Harvard president, should it ever appoint another, just as every year, nameless, faceless Black students are erroneously accused of taking the spot of “more deserving” white students to assuage those white students’ feelings of failure.

Ivy League schools, the most important gatekeepers of higher education, are institutionally racist. And Harvard is the blueprint.

Black people will never belong there because we weren’t meant to — not then, not now, not ever.

Jasmine Harris, is the author of “Black Women, Ivory Tower,” and an associate professor of African American Studies and coordinator of the African American Studies program at the Department of Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

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

The post OPINION: Harvard President Claudine Gay’s resignation and the end of affirmative action signal to Black people that they will never belong appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Education and education access are directly connected to economic growth. Despite the dysfunction in Congress, especially over border issues and foreign aid, there are key education bills that can provide not only solutions for the issues they address but also models for getting things done across a range of other issues.

Two pieces of legislation that could improve our economic future by advancing education and workforce development passed the Committee on Education and the Workforce a few weeks ago with broad and bipartisan support, demonstrating that consensus is not only possible and practical but achievable.

The success of these bipartisan solutions could break down walls of division and better the lives of our nation’s students while bolstering our cities’ economies.

In mid-December, the committee approved the Bipartisan Workforce Pell Act, with support from both Republican Chairwoman Virginia Foxx and ranking Democratic member Bobby Scott, who co-sponsored the legislation.

The bill would expand Pell Grants to provide needed tuition assistance for short-term education and training directly linked to career opportunities, easing the costs of attaining the education and skills that all students, and especially low-income students, desperately need.

The bill would also fund access to online learning, further cutting costs and making education more flexible and accessible.  A vast array of students across red and blue states would benefit from the bill’s commonsense approach, as would our community colleges, employers and, by extension, all Americans.

Related: ‘August surprise’: That college scholarship you earned might not count

That same House Committee voted, a bit earlier, also with bipartisan support, to reauthorize the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. This legislation includes federal funding to support education and skills-based training directly connected to career opportunities and economic success.

This too will directly impact our nation’s community colleges, which are the key engines of economic mobility.

Under the bill, existing Labor Department funding could be repurposed to provide eligible workers with individual, customized education and training accounts, leading to improved career opportunities.

The bill would also specifically address the education and training needs of our incarcerated youth by providing them with the education and skills needed to ease their transition into a stable future. And it would add accountability provisions to ensure that spending for education will lead to concrete job growth. Like the Pell legislation, the bill has broad support among education and business leaders.

Passing short-term Pell along with passing workforce and education legislation would provide a clear pathway from high schools to colleges and careers, ensuring a brighter future for millions of students across the nation.

Both pieces of legislation could potentially pass the House and the Senate and be signed into law early in the New Year. 

Smart investments in Education can be both the answer to governmental gridlock and spur economic progress.

Of course, as is usually the case with legislation that clears committee hurdles, the bills contain small flaws that demand fixes. 

For example, in the Pell bill, one item that could derail passage in the full House and Senate and set back the nation’s commitment to social mobility for students is a provision calling for a reduction in student loan eligibility for students at some of the most selective colleges. Another flaw is that the legislation could open the door to abuse by predatory for-profit colleges. These parts of the plan can easily be fixed to ensure passage.

Passing short-term Pell and workforce and education legislation would provide a clear pathway from high schools to colleges and careers, ensuring a brighter future for millions of students across the nation. 

Related: OPINION: It’s time to put the brakes on student debt and give more students a shot at higher education

We’ve seen bipartisan support deliver dynamic education and economic growth before, most recently when Democrats and Republicans in both the House and the Senate united behind Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer’s CHIPS and Science Act.

That act mobilized efforts to restore American leadership in the semiconductor industry while creating good-paying jobs and reducing the cost of automobiles, refrigerators and computers.

The CHIPS and Science Act, with bipartisan support, also included a huge investment in education research, and became a model for the progress that can be achieved when parties come together to better the lives of the people.   

Now is the time for more bipartisan progress. Passage of these two critical education bills would be a fine start, fueling job creation and bettering the skills and future incomes of our nation’s students, who need our support now more than ever. And the bills’ passage would provide a model for how to eliminate gridlock and address our core economic challenges in a positive manner.

Most polling suggests that the top-of-mind topics for most Americans are the proverbial “kitchen table issues,” led by the economy and its effect on working-class Americans.

These bills address those issues. Americans with the education and skills to be employed in growing industries will earn higher wages, and the increased tax revenues from those wages will support our nation’s schools at all levels. And these bills’ prioritization of our community colleges will help them become an even stronger engine for jump-starting and sustaining America’s growth.

In recent years, it’s begun to seem that dysfunction is the one thing that Washington can be reliably counted on to provide. But let’s not simply accept that Congress can no longer come together to support initiatives that meet our needs and provide enhanced opportunities.

For many years, education issues have divided Americans; these core education bills can unite us. They deserve prompt action.

Stanley Litow served as deputy chancellor of schools for New York City and as president of the IBM Foundation. He now serves as adjunct professor at Columbia University and as trustee of the State University of New York where he chairs the Academic Affairs Committee.

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

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