A record share of children – about 35 percent of 4-year-olds and 7 percent of 3-year-olds – were enrolled in a state-funded preschool program last academic year, according to the 2023 State of Preschool report published last month by the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University.

Notably, though, the actual number of 4-year-olds enrolled in state-funded pre-K is lower than pre-pandemic levels due to declining birth rates.

The report also found that overall, states are spending more money on pre-K than ever before: $7,277 per child enrolled, or $11.7 billion total. Much of that funding increase is driven by the $571 million in federal Covid-19 relief aid that 28 states used to boost pre-K dollars. Researchers and advocates are concerned that spending will drop in states that don’t have a plan to replace those funds when they run out this year.

“We’ve seen it in the past: When budget belts tighten, preschool, in many places, is a discretionary program. And discretionary programs are easier to cut,” said Steven Barnett, founder and co-director of NIEER.

That said, states, on average, have not raised the amount they spend per child in pre-K by much over the years: In 2002, that figure was $6,945. And 16 states spent less on pre-K programs in 2023 than in the year prior; six still have no state-funded pre-K programs.

Meanwhile, California accounted for 70 percent of the nation’s rise in pre-K spending by itself last year, said Allison Friedman-Krauss, an assistant research professor with NIEER and co-author of the report.

Only five states (Alabama, Hawaii, Michigan, Mississippi and Rhode Island) met all 10 of NIEER’s quality benchmarks, which include caps on student-teacher ratios and class sizes as well as professional development and teacher licensing requirements. Although D.C. met only four of NIEER’s 10 quality benchmarks, the district was ranked highest in the nation on per child spending and access to programs for both 3- and 4-year-olds.

And while some states, like Florida, have a high share of 4-year-olds enrolled in pre-K (67 percent), the amount spent per child is far lower than the national average ($3,142).

“If you’re in Florida, you can have access to the program, but what you’re getting in Florida is not as good as what you’re getting in Alabama, on average,” Friedman-Krauss said.

Another report on pre-K issued last month, from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine and called “A New Vision for High Quality Preschool Curriculum,” made recommendations aimed at improving pre-K curriculum, with a focus on students from marginalized communities. (Research for this report, like the one from NIEER, received some financial support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is also one of The Hechinger Report’s many funders.)

While the researchers found that most pre-K programs in the U.S. use the two most common curricula (The Creative Curriculum and HighScope), the group reviewed 172 existing pre-K curricula.

“Basically none of them were fully meeting the vision that we have outlined, particularly around issues of anti-racist/anti-bias approaches, culturally and linguistically responsive, and the issues of being supportive of children’s home language,” said Sue Bredekamp, an early childhood specialist and editor of the report, during the webinar presentation.

The report, which is 376 pages long, includes more than a dozen recommendations for addressing bias, equity and inclusive teaching practices in pre-K curriculum.

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NEW ORLEANS — Last summer, Derrika Richard felt stuck. She didn’t have enough money to afford child care for her three youngest children, ages 1, 2 and 3. Yet the demands of caring for them on a daily basis made it impossible for Richard, who cuts and styles hair from her home, to work. One child care assistance program rejected her because she wasn’t working enough. It felt like an unsolvable quandary: Without care, she couldn’t work; and without work, she couldn’t afford care. 

But Richard’s life changed in the fall, when, by way of a new city-funded program for low-income families called City Seats, she enrolled the three children at Clara’s Little Lambs, a child care center in the Westbank neighborhood of New Orleans. For the first time, she’s earning enough to pay her bills and afford online classes.   

“It actually paved the way for me to go to school,” Richard said on a spring morning after walking her three children to their classrooms. It’s “changed my life.” 

Last year, New Orleans added more than 1,000 child care seats for children from low-income families after voters approved a historic property tax increase in 2022. The referendum raised the budget of the program seven-fold — from $3 million to $21 million a year for 20 years. Because Louisiana’s early childhood fund matches money raised locally for child care, the city gets an additional $21 million to help families find care.

New Orleans is part of a growing trend of local communities passing ballot measures to expand access to child care. In Whatcom County, Washington, a property tax increase added $10 million for child care and children’s mental health to the county’s annual budget. A marijuana sales tax approved by voters in Anchorage, Alaska last year will generate more than $5 million for early childhood programs, including child care.

The state of Texas has taken a somewhat different tack. In November, voters there approved a state constitutional amendment that allows property tax relief for qualifying child care providers. Under this provision, cities and counties can choose to exempt a child care center from paying all or some of its property taxes. Dallas was among the first city-and-county combo in Texas to provide the tax break at both levels. A handful of other cities, including Austin and Houston, as well as counties encompassing swaths of the state, have passed the proposal.

The recent local funding initiatives across the country are focused on younger children — namely infants and toddlers — more than ever before, said Diane Girouard, a senior state policy analyst with Child Care Aware, a nonprofit group that researches and advocates for child care access and funding.

“In the past, we saw more of these local or state driven initiatives focusing on pre-K, but over the last three years, we’ve seen voters approve ballot measures to invest in child care and early learning across a handful of states, cities, counties,” she said.

Part of that trend stems from the impact the lack of child care had on the economy during the pandemic, said Olivia Allen, a co-founder and vice president of the Children’s Funding Project, a nonprofit that researches and supports local efforts to fund early childhood programs.

“The value of child care and other parts of the care economy became abundantly clear to a lot of business leaders in a painful way during Covid,” Allen said.

The recent efforts also come during a time of reckoning in the U.S. over limited child care funding — and limited seats — that impacts families in myriad ways, including, for untold numbers, the ability to hold down jobs and advance in their careers. The number of parents who reported missing work because of child care surged in 2020 at the start of the Covid-19 outbreak; it has yet to recede to pre-pandemic levels.

In Louisiana, a 2022 poll of over 3,000 parents by the Louisiana Policy Institute for Children found that more than half adjusted their work or school schedule to take care of children in the months preceding the survey. About 75 percent said they had to take at least one day off of work in the preceding three months because of a child care closure.

Part of the crisis facing many families and child care centers is that care for young children is expensive. The cost is even higher when parents want to send their kids to a high quality center.

In New Orleans, a city with a large population of workers in the service industry and other low-wage jobs, the City Seats funding has been transformative for parents struggling to hold down demanding, mostly non-unionized jobs. The program has also been a boon for the child care centers themselves.

Richard had struggled to find affordable child care off-and-on since dropping out of college when her oldest son, now 12, was born. That’s in spite of the fact that she immediately put her name down for a spot at child care centers when she discovered she was pregnant. “Literally when you see the positive line, you fill out an application,” she said.

Now that she can think about building a career again, Richard has set her sights on finishing her college degree. Her dream is to have a career in forensics.

Another parent, Mike Gavion, who has two children enrolled through City Seats at Early Partners in the Garden District, said the subsidized care allowed his wife to finish school and get a nursing job at a local hospital. Before the program was available, Gavion’s wife had to care for the children, now 2 and 4, at home, and could only make slow progress through the coursework she needed to qualify for a job. 

“It really gave us an opportunity,” Gavion said. “If we had to pay for two kids, I don’t think she would have been able to do nursing school.”

Families in New Orleans who have children from newborn to age 3 and who earn within 200 percent of the federal poverty level qualify for City Seats. But many don’t immediately get a spot: As of April, City Seats had 821 students on its waitlist, according to Agenda for Children, a nonprofit policy and advocacy group that administers the program.

About 70 percent of the City Seats budget pays for children to attend centers that are ranked as high quality on the state’s rating system. The cut-off for income eligibility on City Seats is higher than in other programs to allow more families access to free child care; at Early Head Start centers, for instance, most families have to be within 100 percent of the poverty level ($31,200 for a family of four).

The rest of City Seats budget goes to improving quality: Child care providers have access to a team that includes a speech pathologist, a pediatrician, and social workers. (Those services are only available for children who attend centers through City Seats, however.) The programs are required to pay their staff at least $15 an hour — on average, Louisiana child care workers made $9.77 an hour in 2020 — and abide by strict teacher-to-child ratios and class sizes, as well as receive professional development from early learning experts, according to Agenda for Children.

Funding from City Seats has allowed Wilcox Academy’s three centers in the city’s North Broad, Central City and Uptown neighborhoods to raise average staff pay to $18 an hour. The Academy’s goal is to raise it even higher — to $25 an hour.

“Teachers deserve it. They deserve to go on vacation, they deserve to buy a home, they deserve to buy a car … This is not a luxury,” said Rochelle Wilcox, the Academy’s founder and director. 

At Sea Academy, a child care center in New Orleans East, every family qualifies for some level of assistance. Without it, families would pay $300 a week for toddlers and $325 for infants to attend the center. City Seats funds 90 of Sea Academy’s 175 — soon to be 250 — child care slots, and pays $1,000 per child per month.

The money from City Seats has helped centers like Sea Academy stay open and even expand. 

“We wouldn’t exist without City Seats because we couldn’t have a business that was sustainable,” said Ariann Sentino, the program’s director. “And if we did, it certainly wouldn’t be high quality.”

Valeria Olivares from the Dallas Morning News contributed reporting.

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Interest in artificial intelligence has surged among K-12 and college educators, who are looking at ways it can be used to support both students and teachers. But in the early childhood arena, those discussions are still in the beginning stages. I asked Isabelle Hau, the executive director of Stanford Accelerator for Learning, to share about the potential benefits and challenges of AI in early learning. Our conversation below is edited for length and clarity.

Interest in AI has obviously surged the past couple of years in K-12, for both teachers and students. With early childhood, the use of AI may be a little less obvious. Have you noticed that trend in early childhood classrooms — are teachers interested in using AI or teaching about it?

Hau: I’m observing some activity in a few areas. One is interest in novel forms of assessment, or assessment areas that have been a big pain point for early childhood teachers for a long time, because observational assessments take a long time. There are some innovations that are starting to materialize in making assessments less visible, or invisible maybe, at some point. So discussion around how to leverage, for example, computer vision or some form of voice inputs in classrooms, or some gamified approaches that are AI-based.

Are there any specific ways you’re seeing AI technology emerge in early childhood classrooms?

Hau: At Stanford, we have one super interesting project that is not necessarily in a classroom but could be in a classroom context. It’s a tool my colleague, Dr. Philip Fisher, has developed called FIND that looks at child-adult interactions and takes video of that interaction. It is very expensive for humans to look at those videos and analyze the special moments in those interactions. Now, artificial intelligence is able to at least take a first pass at those interactions in a much more efficient manner. FIND is now an application for early childhood educators; it used to be mostly for parents, initially.

Two of my colleagues, one in the school of medicine and one at the school of education, have partnered to build Google Glasses that children with challenges recognizing emotions can wear. And based on the advances that are happening with AI, especially in the area of image recognition, the glasses that young children can wear help them detect emotions from adults or other young people they are interacting with. Feedback, especially from parents and families of young children, is quite moving. Because for the first time, some of those young kids are able to actually recognize the emotions from the people they love.

Others have been working on language. Language is a complicated topic because we have, in the U.S., more and more children who speak multiple languages. As a teacher, it’s very complicated. Maybe you’re bilingual or trilingual at best, but if you have a child who speaks Vietnamese and a child who speaks Mandarin or Spanish, you can’t speak all of those languages as a teacher. So how do we correctively support those children with huge potential to thrive when they may not be proficient in English when they arrive in this classroom? Language is a really interesting use case for AI.

When you look up AI tools or products for early educators online, a lot comes up. Is there anything you would be cautious about?

Hau: While I’m excited about the potential, there are lots of risks. And here we are speaking about little ones, so the risks are even heightened. I’m excited about the potential for those technologies to support adults – I have a lot of questions about exposing young children.

For adults, where it’s very confusing right now is privacy. So no teacher should enter any student information that’s identifiable in any of those systems, especially if they are part of a district, without district approval.

That information should be highly private and is not meant to go in a system that seems innocuous but is, in fact, sharing information publicly. There are huge risks associated with that, the feeling of intimacy for a system that doesn’t exist. It’s a public place.

And then one concern is on bias. We’ve done some research at Stanford on bias sentiments in those systems, and we have shown that systems right now are biased against multilingual learners. I can see that myself, as a non-native English speaker. When I use those systems, especially when I use voice, they always mess up my voice and accent. These biases exist, and being very mindful that they do. Biases exist everywhere, but certainly they do exist in [AI] systems. And we have proven this in multiple ways. And then I also have huge concerns on equity. Because right now some AI systems are paid, some are free.

Are there any other ways you could see AI used to fill a need in early childhood?

Hau: Right now, a lot of parents are struggling to find care. You have people who are providing care – it could be center, it could be home-based, nanny, preschool, Head Start, you have all these different types. And then you have families. It’s a mess right now – the connection between the two. Of course it’s a mess because we don’t have enough funding, we don’t have enough slots, but generally, it’s a mess. This is an area that, over time, I’m hoping there will be better solutions powered by technology.

If I want to dine tonight at a restaurant in Palo Alto, this is really easy. Why don’t we have this for early childhood? ‘I’m a low-income parent living in X, and I’m looking for care in French, and I need hours from 8 to 5,’ or whatever it is. It would be really nice to have [technology] support for our millions of parents that are trying to find solutions like this. And right now, it doesn’t exist.

Do you have any tips for teachers who want to learn more about AI programs to use in class?

Hau: For safety, in particular, I really like the framework the EdSAFE AI Alliance has put together. It’s mostly oriented toward K-12, but I think a lot of their accommodations on when is it OK to use AI and when it is not are very clear and very teacher-friendly. There are some great resources at other organizations, like TeachAI or AI for Education, that I really like. At Stanford, we partner with those organizations because we feel like this is an effort that needs to be collaborative, where research needs to be at the table. We need to build coalitions for effective and safe and equitable use of those technologies.

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JOHNSBURG, Ill. — A group of fifth grade boys trailed into the conference room in the front office of Johnsburg Elementary School and sat at the table, their feet dangling from the chairs.

“It was brought to my attention yesterday that there was an incident at football,” Principal Bridget Belcastro said to the group.

The students tried to explain: One boy pushed a kid, another jumped on the ball, and yet another jumped on the boy on the ball. It depended on who you asked.

“I tripped — if I did jump on him, I didn’t mean to,” one student said. “Then I got up and turned around and these two were going at each other.”

Belcastro, listening closely, had the unenviable job of making sense of the accounts and deciding on consequences.

In elementary schools across the country, an incident as common as a playground fracas over a football could result in kids being suspended.

A Hechinger analysis of school discipline data from 20 states found widespread use of suspensions for students of all ages for ill-defined, subjective categories of misbehavior, such as disorderly conduct, defiance and insubordination. From 2017 to 2022, state reports cited these categories as a reason for suspension or expulsion more than 2.8 million times.

In many cases, young students were removed from their classes for behavior that is common for kids their age, according to additional discipline records from half a dozen school districts obtained through public records requests.

In Montana, students in K-5 made up almost 4,000 suspensions for disorderly conduct. In New Mexico, it was nearly 2,700.

Elementary school students are often punished for conduct that experts say is developmentally typical of children who are still learning how to behave and appropriately express themselves in school. Even severe behaviors, like kicking or punching peers and teachers, can be a function of young children still figuring out how to regulate their emotions.

In many other cases, the behavior does not appear serious. In Washington, a kindergarten student was suspended from school for two days for pulling his pants down at recess. A second grader in Rhode Island was suspended when he got mad and ran out of the school building. In Maryland, a third grader was suspended because she yelled when she wasn’t allowed to have cookies, disrupting class.

At Johnsburg Elementary School, which serves about 350 third through fifth grade students on the northern outskirts of Chicago’s suburbs, administrators are trying to limit the use of suspensions. Student conferences, like the one after the fight during football, are just one piece of a much larger effort aimed at preventing and addressing misbehavior. In the end, the boys didn’t lose time in the classroom, but they were no longer allowed to play football at recess.

Belcastro’s decision not to suspend the boys was based on research that consistently shows suspending students makes it more difficult for them to succeed academically and more likely they will enter the criminal justice system as adults.

Suspension can be particularly damaging when doled out to younger students, said Iheoma Iruka, a professor of public policy at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Being kicked out of the classroom can fracture kids’ trust in their teachers and the institution early on. Those early impressions can stay with students and cause long-lasting harm, Iruka said, particularly to students for whom school is the most consistent part of their lives.

“Over time, it erodes children’s sense of safety. It erodes their relationship with teachers,” said Iruka, who is also the founding director of the Equity Research Action Coalition at UNC, a group that researches and develops policies to address bias in the classroom.

In part because of concerns like these, advocates and policymakers across the country often focus on the early grades when pushing for discipline reform. At least 17 states and D.C. have passed laws to limit the use of suspension and expulsion for younger children, typically students in pre-K through third or fifth grade. In Illinois, where Johnsburg Elementary School is located, schools are allowed to suspend young students, but legislators passed a law in 2015 that encourages using suspension as a last resort.

Child development experts say that, ideally, suspensions should be used only in extremely rare circumstances, especially in elementary school.

Misbehavior at any age is often a symptom of deeper issues, experts say, but young children, especially, struggle to identify those issues and communicate them effectively. Students in the early grades are also still trying to figure out how to function in a school environment.

“We can hold older students accountable to know the rules of behavior in their schools,” said Maurice Elias, a professor of psychology who researches social emotional learning at Rutgers University. “We certainly can’t expect younger children to know all of those things and to anticipate the consequences of all their actions.”

And young students need to be specifically taught how to manage their emotions, added Sara Rimm-Kaufman, a professor of education at the University of Virginia.

“Helping kids understand what’s OK at home might not be OK at school, or making kids feel appreciated, respected, understood — that’s a really important issue and it keeps kids engaged,” she said.

Teachers at Johnsburg Elementary are trying to do just that.

The school adopted a new program this year called Character Strong, which is aimed at helping students with coping, emotional regulation, self-management and relationships. A few weeks into the school year, teachers filled out a screener to identify students struggling in those areas.

On a Thursday morning in November, four third graders left class to meet with social worker Dawn Mendralla. Twinkling lights lined the ceiling of her office; a small flip book depicting various emotions was opened to a page with a purple creature gritting its teeth and holding up its fists in frustration. A poster on the cabinet said: All feelings are welcome here.

“Regulation means we’re controlling ourselves, we’re controlling our behaviors, we’re controlling our emotions,” Mendralla said to the students. “Do we have trouble sometimes controlling our behaviors in class? Sometimes we have the urge to talk to our neighbor, or we have the urge to look out the window, or to not pay attention or to fidget with something?”

Once a week, the identified students attend a group session with Mendralla focused on improving those skills. Children who need more help also briefly check in with Mendralla, individually, every day. Students who misbehave, like the group of boys who got into a fight at recess, are also sent to Belcastro’s office.

Like other schools throughout the country, Johnsburg Elementary has been dealing with the ongoing impact of the pandemic on children’s behavior.

“There’s an increase in emotional outbursts, frustration, and they don’t know how to manage their emotions effectively,” Belcastro said. “Secondly, would be social interaction changes, because they weren’t around other kids and other people for so long, they didn’t have that and now they’ve forgotten how or never learned how to make friends.”

During the 2022-23 school year, Johnsburg Elementary had 687 referrals, or disciplinary write-ups, involving a student misbehaving, up from 222 referrals in 2021-22 and 276 referrals in 2018-19.

Even with the rise in behavior challenges, the school has tried to limit student suspensions; Through February of this school year, only three students had been given an in-school suspension and one had been sent home.

Elsewhere, though, the post-pandemic rise in misbehavior has caused some states to backtrack on policies limiting exclusionary discipline and instead made it easier for schools to kick students out of class.

In Nevada last year, legislators lowered the age at which students can be suspended or expelled from 11 to 6 and made it easier for schools to suspend or expel students.

In 2023, Kentucky lawmakers gave principals the ability to permanently kick students out of school if they believe the student will “chronically disrupt the education process for other students” and if they have been removed from class three times for being disruptive.

“There’s just been more and more discipline problems across the nation, and definitely across the state. We’ve just gotta get things under control,” said Rep. Steve Rawlings, who was among the legislation’s sponsors. “We have to prioritize the safety of teachers in the classroom and fellow students so that the focus can be on academics and not be distracted by issues of discipline.”

Elias and other experts say suspension should act more as a rare safety measure in extreme cases, rather than a disciplinary measure.

In the discipline records The Hechinger Report obtained, some school districts reported suspending young children under disruptive conduct for punching peers or throwing items at teachers.

In such cases, suspension may make sense, experts say, while allowing educators time to develop a longer-term response to the misconduct. But schools should not expect that removing kids from class will magically improve their behavior. 

“When a child comes back into a classroom after a situation like this, it’s often that there’s just going to be a continuation of what was happening before, unless the child is brought back into the community in a way that changes the direction and nature of the relationships between the child and the people around them,” Rimm-Kaufman said

That’s something Belcastro has argued as well. Occasionally, there are tensions with parents who want to see other students punished when their own child has been harmed in some way. Belcastro doesn’t’t think that’s an effective approach.

“Punishments do not change behavior. No kid at this age level considers what the potential consequences might be before they do an action,” Belcastro recalled telling one parent who was upset about a student at the school. “So it really serves no purpose, it’s not helpful. But instead, working to prevent the behavior is what we need to do, so it doesn’t’t happen again.”

In Mendralla’s room, a small group of fourth grade boys showed up for a group session one day in November. The goal of this weekly session is for students to learn how to better regulate their emotions.

“What happens when we keep things all to ourselves, things build up, and we keep things bottled up inside us?” Mendralla asked.

“Then you explode,” a student said. “With emotions.”

Mendralla asked the students to think of rules they would like to have for these group sessions. A couple of students threw out suggestions: no running around the room, no interrupting, no blaming others, nobody is better than anybody else.

Another fourth grader raised his hand.

“If there’s another person making fun of another person because of the way they look and act, don’t join in,” he said. “We don’t know what they’re going through.”

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CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Starting at about 3 p.m. every day, buses line the driveway of this afterschool program for immigrant and refugee children in Charlotte. Kids, who range from kindergarten through eighth grade, hop off the bus and stream into the building. Inside, they get a meal and a chance to relax before starting activities aimed at improving their English. 

Enrollment in the program, ourBRIDGE for Kids, has bloomed over the last few years, from 35 students when it opened in 2014 to about 230 children in 2023, with more on waitlists. More than half the children speak Spanish, but it’s common to hear conversations in Dari, Pashto, Russian and other languages spoken in the hallways, too. 

To attend ourBRIDGE for Kids, students need to meet one simple requirement — they must attend classes during the regular school day before arriving. But in 2020, when a growing number of children stopped showing up for schooltime classes during the pandemic, ourBRIDGE decided to expand its focus.  

In addition to running its afterschool program, staffers and volunteers started working with families to address the issues that prevented kids from logging into class online or showing up to school buildings. The school district noticed the impact: While other students in Charlotte were becoming chronically absent, children in ourBRIDGE were staying connected to school.  

“We realized before trying to address why your child isn’t going to school, we needed to ask, ‘What’s worrying you right now?’ That question really opened up all the reasons why going to school was not the first priority for many families: housing insecurity, food insecurity, job loss,” said Sil Ganzó, the program’s founder and executive director, who emigrated from Argentina two decades ago. 

Before 2020, the school attendance rate for English language learners across the country was high. In many schools, these students were more likely to show up to class than other groups.  

But that changed when schools shut their doors and classes went virtual. 

The number of students who are chronically absent — generally defined as missing 18 or more days in a school year — has swelled since the pandemic, and the problem is even more alarming among English language learners.  

In California, only 10 percent of English learners were chronically absent in 2019. By 2022, the rate had more than tripled to 34 percent. Other states reported similar trends: Forty percent of English learners in Colorado were chronically absent last year, 10 percentage points higher than the rate for the overall student population.  

The problems are similar in Charlotte, a community with a fast-growing immigrant population and the largest share of English learners in North Carolina by a wide margin. Since before the pandemic, the rate of chronically absent English language learners more than doubled, from 16 percent in 2019 to 36 percent in 2022.  

Related: OPINION: Creating better post-pandemic education for English learners 

Those numbers improved slightly in 2023, but nearly 1 in 3 English learner students are still chronically absent from school, while the overall rate of absenteeism for students is down to 1 in 4. 

Overall, many students are chronically absent now for the same reasons they were before the pandemic, such as illness, disengagement from school or unreliable housing and transportation, said Joshua Childs, an assistant professor at the University of Texas, Austin, who studies chronic absenteeism. But the pandemic intensified these problems.  

“It increased existing inequities around students attending schools,” Childs said. “Our schooling system wasn’t adequately prepared for what a different model, or a disruption, in schooling would look like.” 

That lack of preparation was even more evident in instruction for English language learners. Nationwide, schools struggled to provide a remote curriculum in other languages, and translation services faltered under the weight of virtual learning. And teachers had trouble explaining the logistics of remote learning through translators, a report from the Office of Civil Rights detailed.  

One study out of Virginia found schools were also struggling to keep track of English learners during this time. And a report from a federal watchdog agency on the challenges English learners faced offered, as an example, a district that mailed a workbook home to students in English and Spanish, intending to help Spanish-speakers access the online learning curriculum. However, the effort did nothing to help students who spoke any of the other 90 languages used in the district. 

In the midst of these challenges, ourBRIDGE for Kids found that it could fill some of those gaps. 

The afterschool program, which Ganzó started in 2014, now has more than three dozen employees and over 100 volunteers. The center rents its main campus from a Methodist retirement community for $1 and operates an additional program out of an elementary school.  

Within the last couple of years, the group has hired a few employees to lead its new family services program. 

“We realized we needed to help the families address those and provide some stability so that the kids can actually go to school,” Ganzó said. When parents lost their jobs, volunteers helped connect them to resources, delivered groceries to students’ homes and acted as a call center when families needed help navigating the online learning system.   

Because of its success, the Charlotte school district hired ourBRIDGE to help track down English language learners who haven’t been showing up to school. Charlotte uses a small portion of its ESSER funds to help pay for the services, but the overwhelming majority of ourBRIDGE’s funding comes from donations and grants. The services it provides to families and students are free. 

Related: International newcomer academies offer lessons on how to quickly catch up children who are learning English 

The district contacted ourBRIDGE when staff noticed the positive effect the group had on students and their families, said Nadja Trez, director of learning and language acquisition in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools.  

“I took the initiative to reach out and say, ‘I need your help,’” said Trez, who also partners with the nonprofit Latin American Coalition for similar services.  

The district’s English learner population has grown significantly in the past year, from 27,405 students to 30,151. And for the first time in years, the make-up of student languages is changing. In prior years, the top spoken languages in Charlotte schools were Spanish and Vietnamese, Trez said. Now, schools are welcoming a large proportion of Russian speakers, refugees fleeing the war in Ukraine. Overall, students in the district speak 194 different languages.   

But it’s hard for schools to track down families in every community, and families often have needs that go beyond the scope of what a school can offer.  

“Many of our multilingual students, especially at the high school level, have circumstances outside of their control,” Trez said.  

When ourBRIDGE reached out to one family whose student hadn’t been attending class, the group learned the absences were due to a combination of setbacks: both parents were laid off from work, their youngest child recently had a medical emergency that required surgery, and the owners of the apartment they lived in were filing to evict them. The afterschool program connected the family with an organization that provides crisis emergency funding for low-income families and attended court hearings with them to help translate. The family was able to raise the money they needed and stay in their home. 

Another absent student ourBRIDGE was able to locate had a chronic illness, and the family didn’t know how to submit a medical excuse on the online portal. 

“The biggest part of what we do is say, ‘You have to speak up about things,’” said Yeferline Gomez, a family support manager who works at ourBRIDGE. “It’s your right to know these things. It’s your right to ask questions, and it’s your right to have things translated in a way that you understand.” 

Related: Seeking asylum in a time of Covid 

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools has its own teams to knock on doors and try to find students who have been missing from class for long periods of time. But it can be difficult for schools to gain trust with families who speak another language and are new to the country, said Brian Harris, a social worker with Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools who speaks Spanish.  

“When I show up to the door, I represent something to the Latino population that is not always good — I’m a tall white guy. I look like immigration or police, and I sound like it,” Harris said. “Once you gain their trust, you have it. You’re in, it’s like you’re family. And you can go knock on their door and they’ll answer. But it takes a while to get there.” 

Part of the reason ourBRIDGE has been successful is a simple change the program made a few years ago — it doesn’t communicate with families through translators. Instead, it hires staff and volunteers who are immigrants themselves and speak the same languages. When a new student arrives who speaks a language the current staff do not, the program makes an effort to hire someone who can talk to them.   

“It was day and night. Because parents have a trusting relationship with people from the same country and they have shared experiences,” Ganzó said. “They come to the events and we all have a relationship with them, but they know that person that speaks their language is going to be there, and it’s not a different person every time.” 

On a Thursday in December, third and fourth grade students sat at half a dozen tarp-covered tables at ourBRIDGE’s main campus, paint up to their elbows: red, green, yellow, and a muddy combination of all three.  

Some were talking to each other excitedly in Spanish, others were using their fingers to draw in the paint. 

Flags from various countries are strung across the campus’ hall and classroom ceilings, large letters spelling out “diversity” sit in the entryway across from a painting of a woman in a hijab. Teaching English to students who are new to the country is just one goal of ourBRIDGE, another is to make them feel welcome and celebrate their heritage.  

“We want them to feel proud of their background and their cultures and their traditions and their language and their accents as they learn English and get used to living in the United States,” Ganzó said.  

This story about ourBridge for Kids 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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Consider this a head’s up: This week’s newsletter is about poop.

Specifically, potty training.

In January, Utah Rep. Doug Welton introduced a bill that would require kindergarten students be potty trained before parents enroll them in school. Children who aren’t potty trained would be referred to a social worker or counselor.

Potty training — or the lack of it — clearly strikes a nerve with teachers.

“The fastest and number 1 way to get parents to potty train their kids at home is to call them to the school every time the child needs a diaper to be changed,” said a self-identified kindergarten teacher in one potty-training focused Reddit thread.

“My friend just started teaching kindergarten and says she has at least 1 in a diaper and probably another 2 in pull ups. I cannot fathom this,” said a daycare teacher in another Reddit thread that drew more than 1,000 comments.

So, are more children coming to school in diapers?

It’s a difficult question to answer, in part because it’s not data that is tracked, and also because there aren’t a lot of recent studies on potty training and the average age of children who master it. In the 1940s, toilet training generally started before children were 18 months old, according to an article in the magazine American Family Physician. Around 60 years later, in the mid-2000s, the same article said parents were generally starting toilet training when a child was 21 to 36 months old.

Those numbers haven’t significantly changed in the last couple of decades, according to Dr. Ari Brown, a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics and a pediatrician of 28 years, based out of Austin, Texas. Typically developing children will be day trained between ages 2 to 3 1/2, and night-time training can take a few years longer, she said.

By 5, most children know how to use the bathroom. But having an accident at that age isn’t uncommon, and there are plenty of medical and behavioral reasons for these mishaps that have nothing to do with knowing how to use a toilet, Brown said. They can include physical complaints like constipation, fear of loud auto-flushing toilets, anxiety about large, crowded school bathrooms, or worry about asking a teacher for permission to leave.

“This is not a ‘toilet training’ issue and it should not preclude a child from attending school,” Brown said.

Although the legislation proposed in Utah allows for exceptions among students with a documented disability, Brown said medical issues like constipation might not show up on an individualized education program.

The Utah Department of Education does not track bathroom incidents in classrooms, and several local districts said they also have no data on this. The communications director for Alpine School District, the largest school system in Utah, said potty training incidents in the classroom is “not a trend that has surfaced as a concern (knock on wood).”

A communications administrator for the Nebo School District — located in an area represented by the bill’s sponsor — echoed that sentiment. “According to the teachers we have heard from, the rates are the same as they have always been, and there has not been a noticeable change,” he said.

But state leaders have heard otherwise.

Christine Elegante, a K-3 literacy specialist with the Utah Department of Education, said she heard from school districts that potty training kindergarteners was not a concern.

But she heard a different story when she had a statewide meeting with kindergarten program leaders.

“I was really taken aback by how many said that it was a problem, that they were seeing more and more kids that did not have the skillset they needed to be able to toilet themselves. If they had an accident, they weren’t capable of changing themselves,” Elegante said. “It was a bigger, more widespread problem that we hadn’t really heard of.”

After that meeting, Elegante said she heard from more elementary school principals who reported that potty training has become a bigger problem in kindergarten classrooms since the pandemic, particularly during this school year.

Elegante doesn’t know why students might be struggling with potty training more this year than any other, but she said schools have increased the number of full-day kindergarten classes they offer starting this year. Last year, 46 percent of kindergarteners in Utah were in a full-day program. This year, 77 percent attend full-day kindergarten. A full-day program essentially doubles the amount of time students are at school, from being in class for two to three hours a day to six or seven hours.

The increase in the amount of time in class could account for the rise in the likelihood that a child will have an accident at school. However, it doesn’t explain the claim that more kindergarteners do not know how to use the bathroom.

This isn’t the first time in recent years potty training in school has come up — pre-K teachers in Buffalo, New York, petitioned the school district to create a policy on potty training in 2019 because they said diaper-changing was taking up class time.

Unlike Utah, New York and New Jersey have laws that prevent schools from barring children from class because they are not potty trained.

Child care workers have always dealt with potty training, but schools are increasingly dealing with this for a simple reason: Children are coming to school at younger ages because there are far more pre-K classes located in schools than in years past, said Zeynep Ercan, president of the National Association of Early Childhood Teacher Educators.

“You have public school teachers who are not used to seeing this kind of variation in development, and now they feel as though they have to be the caregivers [as well as] educators. These two concepts are always a conflict in child care and education systems,” Ercan said.

The expansion of pre-K is a good thing, Ercan said, but it also requires schools to adapt their environments.

“The issue is, how can we make our environments more developmentally appropriate for children? How are we ready for the children, versus how are children ready for it?” Ercan said.

Even though it’s unclear if schools are seeing more kindergarten students attend class in diapers, teachers can help prevent accidents by being flexible about when children go to the bathroom, said Brown, the Austin pediatrician.

“Teachers can play a pivotal role in normalizing the need to use the bathroom when the urge occurs and not stigmatizing a child who needs to stop their learning to do so,” Brown said.

This story about potty training 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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South Carolina’s sweltering summer months are often the busiest time of year for the Lowcountry Food Bank, an organization that gives meals to children year-round. When school lets out in June, the group opens nearly two dozen U.S Department of Agriculture-funded feeding sites in Myrtle Beach, Charleston, Yemassee and other coastal communities where low-income families can bring their children for a meal during the day.

Last summer, the food bank provided more than 18,000 meals to families. But there are far more children in need than the sites can reach, said Misty Brady, the community meals coordinator at the Lowcountry Food Bank.

“There’s definitely a need out there, and the struggle is finding the gaps,” Brady said. “Because there’s families that aren’t getting those meals because transportation is a huge barrier.”

States had the opportunity this summer to participate in a program this year intended to fill those holes. The Summer Electronic Benefit Transfer Program — Summer EBT for short — will give eligible low-income families an additional $40 per month, or $120 per child, to pay for groceries. The summertime program is a modification of a pandemic-related emergency food benefit and is intended to make getting food easier for families who cannot get to a feeding center.

But South Carolina is one of 15 states that missed the January 1 deadline to opt in for this year. The state also has one of the highest rates of food insecurity in the nation; 15 percent of residents reported they were uncertain they could meet the food needs of all their household members at some point during the year, compared to 11 percent nationwide.

During a press conference in January, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster said the state decided not to participate in Summer EBT because officials are trying to move past pandemic aid.

“That was a COVID-related benefit. We’ve got to get back to doing normal business. We just can’t continue that forever, but we’re still continuing all the other programs that we have,” McMaster told reporters. Some leaders in other states couched their opposition to the program in political terms — Gov. Tate Reeves of Mississippi said that the program is an expansion of “the welfare state”—while others said they didn’t have the staffing or money.

But other summer meals programs in South Carolina are struggling to keep up with demand. The state’s biggest program is run by the USDA and relies on sponsors, like the Lowcountry Food Bank, to distribute the food. But each year since 2019, fewer sponsors have signed up to participate, going from 78 in 2019 to 45 in 2023, according to the South Carolina Department of Education.

A little more than a week after the Summer EBT deadline had passed, the South Carolina Department of Education sent out a request asking for more volunteers.

“Our 2024 goal is to increase the number of meal sites to allow more children access to nutritious meals this summer,” said Virgie Chambers, SCDE’s deputy superintendent of district operations, safety and student wellness, in a statement. “To do that, we are currently searching for more community partners, especially in rural and low-income areas.”

But there are other barriers to the program as well: Transportation is a common problem for families trying to access the meals, and since the sites are open during the morning and early afternoon, parents who work during those hours are unable to make the trip.

South Carolina participates in another, similar USDA program that allows some schools to continue providing meals for students who receive free and reduced-price lunch during the summer months, but the barriers for families remain the same – they must find a way to the school building during the day to get the meals.

“The summer meals programs really only reach a portion of students who are eligible,” said Kelsey Boone, a senior child nutrition policy analyst at the Food Research and Action Center. “So the Summer EBT program really comes in to fill the gaps that are left by those traditional summer meals programs.”

For both programs, families typically have to eat on-site, with the exception of rural areas, which were given the option last year of letting families take several meals home at a time.

Lisa Davis, senior vice president of Share Our Strength and its No Kid Hungry Campaign, is hopeful more states will opt in to the program next year because of barriers that made it harder for states this time around: The USDA did not release its rules and guidelines for Summer EBT until a few days before the deadline to opt in. And, although the federal government is covering the cost of the program’s benefits for families, states now have to pay for 50 percent of the administrative cost to run the program.

“I’m actually reassured as we’re talking to states. We’re not hearing a lot of, ‘We don’t want to do this, ever.’ We are hearing a lot of, ‘We’re not quite sure how we’re going to do this, we don’t have all of the pieces together,’” Davis said.

It’s too late for South Carolina to participate this year, but Brady, with the Lowcountry Food Bank, would like the state to consider joining the program next summer.

“That is my hope, that they see that the need is there, and the tremendous positive effect it will have on families,” Brady said.

This story about Summer EBT 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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Researchers have found kindergarten through third grade classes spend, on average, 89 minutes a day on English language arts, 57 minutes a day on math — and just 18 minutes a day on science.

One way advocates are trying to encourage more science time? Adding outdoor classrooms to elementary schools.

Such efforts can only improve current practices. According to the 2018 National Survey of Science and Mathematics Education, which compiled the information on minutes spent learning science, only 17 percent of early elementary classes had science lessons most days of the week.

“We think the best kind of science that happens at that level is real-world based,” said Jeanne McCarty, CEO of Out Teach, a national nonprofit that promotes new approaches to science education and builds outdoor learning labs at schools. “We work with schools to engage kids in much more hands-on science learning outdoors, that not only gives them that foundational knowledge they need early on, but it also helps inspire them to see themselves as scientist and think about science as a future career path.”

Schools that get an outdoor learning lab also get coaching on teaching science in the lab. The outdoor lessons are tailored to where students live — a school in Texas, for example, uses a section of their lab to grow a salsa garden and native yucca plants. The labs vary, but typically include garden beds, weather stations, earth science stations and signs to reinforce concepts students are learning.

One goal of installing the labs, McCarty said, is to give teachers an outdoor space where they can not only teach science, but also embed science instruction into other subjects. The hope is these lessons will also spark students’ interest in science at a young age.

Some research seems to back this idea up — a study from 2017 found that, after an innate interest in science, women in STEM-related fields were more likely to point to playing or spending time outdoors as the spark for their initial interest in STEM than other activities. Most respondents said they became interested in STEM prior to sixth grade.

“Anything we can do to help get kids to see science and STEM as things that are useful to them and things they can interact with and they can do, or recognize things around them in the world that are happening — that’s going to be really valuable,” said Adam Maltese, one of the study’s authors and a professor of science education at Indiana University.

With a set amount of instructional time each day, elementary schools are less likely to significantly shift class time to science because most states do not have accountability measures tied to science as they do for reading and math. But embedding science instruction into other subjects has had positive results, said Jenny Sarna, director of director of the NextGenScience project of nonpartisan research agency WestEd. The project is a multi-state effort to create common teaching standards for science from kindergarten through 12th grade.

“Students who have positive science identities are more likely to see themselves as a science person, or good at science, and then they’re more likely to pursue STEM careers,” Sarna said.

A study of first grade students whose classroom used a curriculum that embedded science into language arts found that the students performed higher than their peers on standardized science tests at the end of the school year, and their reading performance was the same.

“Those students learn more science and the same amount of literacy, so if you could pick between your kid having science and reading every day, or just reading, it’s kind of a no-brainer,” Sarna said.

This story about outdoor learning labs 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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In some states, child care can cost as much as college tuition. But those costs don’t translate into higher wages for those who work in the industry; child care staff aren’t paid like college professors.

On average, child care employees and early educators earn less than half as much as K-12 teachers. They are more likely than other educators to live in poverty and less likely to have health insurance.

Billions in federal aid propped up the industry during the pandemic, but those funds ran out this fall. As a result, child care centers have already started reporting decreased wages and benefits.

In the midst of this crisis, some states are trying to come up with their own creative solutions. The Early Educator Investment Collaborative, a coalition of philanthropies that provide grants to support early childhood programs, is sending about $9 million in grants to Louisiana, Colorado and D.C. to find long-term answers for raising early educators’ pay.

“We knew that the federal investment was coming to a close,” said Ola Friday, director of the collaborative. “So, we turned our attention to what was happening at the state and local levels and thought that this was now a really ripe opportunity to support those states and localities that were trying to be innovative and creative and think outside the box.”

As one example, a $2.4 million grant to the District of Columbia will go toward improving work the district already started on boosting wages and benefits. Two years ago, D.C. started an Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund, one of the first large-scale programs in the nation to put child care and early educator pay on par with K-12 teacher starting wages.

That program, which the D.C. Council paid for with a wealth tax, uses between $53 million and $73 million annually to raise early educator pay by up to $14,000 a year so that it aligns with the minimum salary received by D.C. public school teachers with a similar education.

But the cost of this program will increase as minimum teacher wages rise, and the city must come up with a way to fund those additional costs.

Additionally, District of Columbia public school teachers are paid more based on experience, and they also receive a pay bump, or a salary step increase, each year. Currently, the early ed pay equity fund does not account for experience or annual step increases.

Sara Mead, deputy superintendent of early learning for the D.C. district, said it will use part of the Early Education Investment Collaborative grant on researching ways to fix those problems. And, she added, “part of what we’re doing with the grant money is also documenting what we’re doing so that other states can learn from us.”

Because child care is not primarily funded by the federal government, the quality and cost vary by state. A solution to raising child care wages in one state may not be feasible in another, but without significant federal investment, states will need to find their own funding sources to prop up an industry that has been collapsing for a while, said Annie Dade, a policy analyst with the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California, Berkeley.

“It is a shift, hopefully, that early education is a public good and should be funded as such,” said Dade. “And then looking for the public funding to do so is the next logical step.”

The collaborative is also sending Louisiana about $3 million; another $3.8 million in grant funding will go to Colorado. One step of Colorado’s grant proposal includes having a liaison dedicated to early ed compensation in various state agencies so that each department can contribute to finding solutions for low pay among child care staff. In Louisiana, part of the grant will be used to help local parishes come up with ways to raise money for early ed pay.

Friday, the collaborative’s leader, said the point of the grants is to help states “put into place the infrastructure, the capacity, the resources, the funding, so that we can get to the ultimate goal of increased long-term compensation for the workforce.”

This story about early childhood education salaries was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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Nearly one year ago, Tennessee school districts warned thousands of parents that because of a new state law, third grade students could be held back a year if they are not reading on grade level by spring.

The law — which created “a little bit of a firestorm” according to one of its legislative co-sponsors — was seen by supporters as a necessary step to address lagging literacy rates in the state. Concerned parents and school staff flocked to community meetings and legislative sessions to speak out against it.

But of the roughly 44,000 third grade students who scored low enough to be at risk of retention, just under 900 students, or 1.2 percent of all third graders who took the test, were actually held back because of their reading scores. That’s similar to retention rates in previous years — a report from the Tennessee Education Research Alliance shows that around 1 percent of third graders were held back each school year between 2010 to 2020.

Tennessee’s law was modeled after a much-praised literacy program in neighboring Mississippi that includes tutoring, improved literacy training for teachers and a retention policy for third graders who don’t pass its state test. Mississippi held back 8 percent of third graders in 2015, the first year its retention policy was in place. That includes some students held back for other reasons.  

So, what happened in Tennessee?

By the end of spring 2023, about 40 percent of third graders achieved a “met expectations” or “exceeded expectations” score on the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program, or TCAP. That was a higher passing rate than previous years, but 60 percent of third grade students were still set to be held back because they scored in the “below expectations” or “approaching expectations” range.

However, the law was written to offer several escape hatches for students with low scores.

About 24 percent of all third graders who took the test this spring were exempt from retention because they either had a disability, were an English language learner with less than two years of English instruction, were previously retained or “met other exemptions determined locally,” according to the state’s report.

An additional 10 percent of students were granted a waiver because their parents appealed.

Related: Tennessee law could hold back thousands of third graders in bid to help kids recover from the pandemic

Just under 5 percent of students re-took the test and earned a passing grade. About 2 percent of students scored “approaching expectations” on the test, attended summer school and showed “adequate growth” by the end of the summer.

That leaves more than 12,000 students, or just under 17 percent, who were promoted to fourth grade but are required to receive high-dosage tutoring throughout the year. For these students, the threat of retention still looms.

The law says students who are promoted but required to attend tutoring could still be held back in fourth grade if they do not pass the reading portion of the test or show “adequate growth” by the end of the year.

“For those 12,000 students, the story is not over,” said Breanna Sommers, a policy analyst with The Education Trust in Tennessee.

The definition of “adequate growth” is a complicated formula that includes student’s TCAP scores and the probability that they’ll reach proficiency by 10th grade. During a recent meeting of the Tennessee Board of Education, the department said they are projecting 5,000 to 6,000 fourth grade students will be held back this year.

In Metro Nashville Public Schools, 77 third graders — or 1.4 percent — were held back last school year when the law went into effect. In the five prior years, the district only held back between one and 10 third graders a year. Nearly 1,200 fourth grade students in the district are required to get tutoring interventions this year.

To fill the demand, the district is providing teachers with a stipend to tutor students during their planning periods. Metro Nashville Public Schools has also hired full- and part-time tutors and contracted with an online tutoring service called Varsity Tutors.

Sonya Thomas, co-founder of the parent advocacy group Nashville PROPEL and a supporter of the law, said Tennessee’s renewed focus on reading was a long time coming, though her own children are now too old to benefit from it.

“It’s one of the strongest literacy packages that this state has ever put into place,” Thomas said. “I’m excited about the momentum that it’s going to create in the state.”

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

But she’s still concerned that most children did not pass the reading portion of the third grade test this spring.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that we’re going in the right direction, it’s just a matter of the quality of instruction and the quality of interventions that need to be given to children with a sense of urgency. We should not have to wait until third grade to know whether a child is going to pass or fail,” Thomas said.

Studies on the impact of retaining students are generally mixed, but the practice is more successful with younger students and when it is coupled with resources and support aimed at helping students catch up.

Education analysts are still studying the effects of Tennessee’s law — the state has not released demographic data on who makes up the 1.2 percent of third graders held back or the more than 12,000 fourth graders who could be held back this spring. Research on retention laws in other states indicates Black, Hispanic and economically disadvantaged students are more likely to be retained.

“We all share a common goal of wanting our kids to read on grade level. We definitely want to maintain high expectations and know that our students can exceed and reach those. And we still believe that retention is a high-stakes intervention that should only be used in very limited cases in which it’s paired with extensive support,” said Sommers, the Education Trust analyst. “We’re looking forward to more long-term outcome impact data to see. We’ll be really excited if the tutoring was impactful or if summer camp was impactful.”

This story about grade-level reading 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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