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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Two years ago, when I visited Westwood High School in Mesa, a suburb of Phoenix, every incoming freshman started the year in a very unusual way.

Back when my mom attended Westwood in the early 80s, students made the typical walk from class to class, learning from one teacher in math and another for English or history or science. (My mom was one of two girls in Westwood’s woodworking class.) Flash forward a few decades, and in 2022, I observed four teachers and 135 freshmen – all in one classroom.

The model, known as team teaching, isn’t new. It dates back to the 1960s. But Arizona State University resurrected the approach, in which teachers share large groups of students, as a way to rebrand the teaching profession and make it more appealing to prospective educators.

Now, team teaching has expanded nationally, and particularly in the American West. The number of students assigned to a team of teachers tops 20,000 kids – an estimate from ASU that doubled from fall 2022. Mesa Unified, the school district that runs Westwood and the largest in Arizona, has committed to using the approach in half of its schools. And the national superintendents association last year launched a learning cohort for K-12 leaders interested in the idea.

Brent Maddin oversees the Next Education Workforce Initiative at ASU’s teachers college, which partners with school districts trying to move away from the “one teacher, one classroom” model of education.

“Unambiguously, we have started to put a dent in that,” Maddin said.

The Next Education Workforce Initiative today works with 28 districts in a dozen states, where 241 teams of teachers use the ASU model. It will expand further in the next two years: A mixture of public and philanthropic funding will support team teaching in dozens of new schools in California, Colorado, Michigan and North Dakota.

ASU has also gathered more data and research that suggest its approach has made an impact: In Mesa, teachers working on a team leave their profession at lower rates, receive higher evaluations and are more likely to recommend teaching to a friend.

Early research also indicates students assigned to educator teams made more growth in reading and passed Algebra I at higher rates than their peers.

“Educators working in these models — their feeling of isolation is lower,” Maddin said. “Special educators in particular are way more satisfied. They feel like they’re having a greater impact.”

Last year, the consulting group Education First shared its findings from a national scan of schools using different models to staff classrooms like team teaching. Among other groups, their report highlighted Public Impact, which supports schools in creating teams of teachers and has reached 800 schools and 5,400 teachers.* Education First itself works with districts in California to use a team structure with paid teacher residents and higher pay for expert mentor teachers.

In North Dakota, team teaching has caught the attention of Kirsten Baesler, the state superintendent of public instruction. Her office recently sent a group of lawmakers, educators and other policymakers to Arizona to learn about the model. Later this fall, Fargo Public Schools will open a new middle school where students will learn entirely from one combined team of teachers.

Jennifer Soupir-Fremstad, assistant director of human capital for the Fargo school district, recalled Mesa teachers telling her how much more supported they feel – by administrators and their fellow teammates. “That was a game changer,” she said.

The district’s new middle school will include a competency-based model where students can learn and work through content at their own pace. Five core teachers, whom the district refers to as mentors, will split responsibility for students in all three grades. Enrollment will be capped at 100 students for the first year, with plans to add more teams and serve up to 400 students in the future.

When my mom read my Hechinger Report story about what’s happening at her high school now, she questioned whether teachers could stay on top of 100-plus teenagers who just want to socialize. But she loved the idea of seeing her classmates more.

“I would have loved to be with my friends more,” she said. “We were separated for most of our classes. I think it’s awesome.”

*Clarification: This story has been updated to clarify the description of the work of Public Impact.

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What makes a first-generation college student? Well, that depends on who’s doing the defining.

Yes, there’s the federal definition: a student is first-generation if neither parent has a bachelor’s degree.  

Sounds simple enough. But it doesn’t account for those who had a highly educated parent who wasn’t involved in their lives, or those whose parent got a college degree in another country, with an academic system unlike ours, or those who have one degree-holding parent, but are being raised in a single-parent household.

Researchers argue that many students like these are still meaningfully less advantaged compared to students who have two parents with degrees. Despite the narrow federal definition, many believe these are students who need to be identified and given added resources and support both to get through the college application process and to thrive once they get on campus.

New research from Common App shows that expanding the definition of first-generation expands enrollment data, and thus can tell a different story about who is ready for college.

According to 2022 data from Common App, about 450,000 applicants that year met the federal definition, meaning that neither parent had a bachelor’s degree, including about 300,000 students whose parents had never attended any college. But if the definition is expanded to include applicants who had one parent with a bachelor’s degree, the population increases to more than 700,000. And, according to the report, changing that definition changes other things, too, such as college readiness, socioeconomic status and the number of colleges students apply to.

Brian Heseung Kim, director of data science, research and analytics at Common App, said there isn’t one right way to define first-generation students; the question should be, “What kind of disadvantage are we trying to measure?”

After the Supreme Court ruled against the consideration of race in college admissions last summer, Kim said he was interested in looking at many different aspects of diversity in college applicants, including first-generation status. He said this analysis might help colleges that want to understand the diversity of their applicants; how certain home contexts and hardships might affect how competitive students appear in the application process; and how to support students from all different backgrounds.

“It would be great if everyone could kind of align on one definition for first-generation, it’d be so wonderful if we had that clarity,” Kim said.  “But the reality is that different contexts kind of require different identification methods.”

Related: Sick parents? Caring for siblings? Colleges experiment with asking applicants how home life affects them

The Common App’s analysis shows that, depending on the definition, the percentage of students identified as being part of an underrepresented minority group can range from 45 percent (for those who have one parent who earned a bachelor’s degree) to 58 percent (for students whose parents did not attend any college). And the percentage of those students from low-income families varies from 48 percent (for students who have one parent who earned a bachelor’s degree) to 66 percent (for students whose parents did not attend any college).

Sarah E. Whitley, vice president of the Center for First-generation Student Success, said most colleges define first-generation students as those whose parents do not have bachelor’s degrees or those whose parents did not earn bachelor’s degrees in the United States. She said the center doesn’t use one universal definition, and instead works with colleges to identify the definition that makes the most sense for them.

Whitley said the purpose of identifying students as first-generation is to understand whether they have people in their family who can support them with college-going knowledge, but that’s often harder to determine than asking simply “Are you the first in your family to attend college?”

Whitley discourages college from using this language because students may not categorize themselves as first-generation if they had an aunt or uncle or older sibling who attended college. She said it’s better to ask specific questions about parental education, as Common App does, but it can still be difficult to capture everyone. For example, asking about the education of biological parents might not capture students who had a highly educated birth parent but were raised by a stepparent, she said, or students who were raised in a family with two moms or two dads.

The Common App research found that there could be more than 100 definitions, considering the different combinations of parents and caregivers, whether they attended college or graduated, what degree they and many more factors. The analysis considered eight definitions:

• Neither parent earned a bachelor’s degree (the federal definition)
• No bachelor’s degrees among living parents (to focus on those who can provide support to the student)
• No bachelor’s degrees among caregivers (considers others in the household beyond biological parents, such as a stepparent)
• No domestic bachelor’s degree among caregivers (because degrees from other countries may be less relevant in helping students in the U.S. higher education system)
• No bachelor’s degrees earned by caregivers before the student was born (excludes those who earned degrees more recently and may not yet have “accrued some of the more socioeconomic benefits of a college degree,” according to the report)
• No associate degrees, either parent
• No college attendance, either parent
• One parent earned a bachelor’s degree

Yolanda Watson-Spiva, president of the advocacy group Complete College America, said it’s also important to think about the social capital that students have if both their parents went to college, such as access to college alumni and professional networks. She said there are big differences in resources between students who have one parent who earned a bachelor’s degree and students whose parents, grandparents and great-grandparents all went to college.

It makes more sense to think of first-generation status as a spectrum, she said, rather than a yes or no question.  Using only the federal definition of first-generation is too narrow and constrictive, she said.

Watson-Spiva’s mother earned a bachelor’s degree and her father went to community college, but one of her grandmothers only had an eighth grade education. She doesn’t identify as a first- generation student, but said she could imagine how someone in a similar situation might, even though they don’t meet the federal definition.

“Many of those folks still struggle,” she said. “There are still big variations between that person and a person who’s had like four generations of family members that are legacies, that went to college.”

This story about first-generation students was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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IQ tests created by French psychologist Alfred Binet in the early 20th century paved the way for widespread intelligence testing in American schools  — including of the youngest learners.

But Binet also had early doubts as to whether intelligence could be measured at all and he was adamant that his tests, adapted into the Stanford-Binet intelligence scales in the U.S., could not be used to determine how much progress an individual student was capable of making in the long term.

“I have often observed, to my regret, that a widespread prejudice exists with regard to the educability of intelligence,” Binet wrote in 1909. “The familiar proverb, ‘When one is stupid, it is for a long time’ seems to be accepted indiscriminately by teachers … [They] lose interest in students with low intelligence.”

I learned about Binet, and his ideas about how IQ tests should — and should not — be used in elementary schools while reporting a piece last month for The Hechinger Report and Slate on the debate over cognitive testing in school placement and psychology. In recent decades, more states and school districts have shifted in the direction of downplaying the role of intelligence testing in special education evaluations. Yet change isn’t happening fast enough for some educators and experts, who argue the tests should be used less frequently and more thoughtfully.

Binet’s interest in early childhood stemmed from watching his two young daughters develop and from observing firsthand the very different cognitive strengths and processes they brought to learning. He made his first attempt at crafting a formal assessment in 1905, when asked by French officials to devise a way to identify which students had intellectual disabilities and could benefit most from specialized support.

French officials asked for his help because they saw a need for something distinct from a medical doctor or a classroom teacher to help in diagnosing and supporting children with disabilities. In that sense, Binet was an early forerunner in the field of school psychology.

Many experts believe he was prescient on three main tensions and challenges that persist in the field today:

Binet wanted to avoid testing the quality of a child’s school and their exposure to books and learning at home.

“None of the tests in the original 1905 version assumed that the child could read or write,” wrote Derek Briggs in his 2021 book, “Historical and Conceptual Foundations of Measurement in the Human Sciences,” which has a chapter focused on Binet. His tests “were intended to be insensitive to information or skills that a child would have acquired through instruction.”

This effort to separate out innate intelligence from school-acquired knowledge remains a holy grail of contemporary intelligence testing, with test creators including Jack Naglieri, trying to assess “thinking” rather than “knowledge.”

Binet held the conviction that intelligence was changeable with access to high quality schooling.

While he was aware that some children could be more easily helped than others, Binet likely would have opposed some contemporary policies or practices that steer kids away from academic instruction based on their IQ score, or indirectly withhold learning disability diagnoses — and the academic support that should come with it — to children with lower cognitive scores.

“The aim of his scale was to identify in order to help and improve, not to label in order to limit. Some children might be innately incapable of normal achievement, but all could improve with help,” wrote biologist Stephen Jay Gould in the 1981 book, “The Mismeasure of Man.”

Ranking children within a group was not Binet’s goal.

Binet was more interested in what cognitive tests showed about an individual child’s strengths, weaknesses and idiosyncrasies. As such, biographers say he likely would have opposed gifted programs that cull students from the top percentiles of intelligence test scorers. “He would have greatly objected to using IQ tests to classify — first, second, third, fourth,” Briggs, based at the University of Colorado-Boulder’s College of Education, told me. “Binet was interested in the immediacy of what to do next for an individual student, particularly for those with some sort of need of support.”

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Imagine interacting with an avatar that dissolves into tears – and being assessed on how intelligently and empathetically you respond to its emotional display.

Or taking a math test that is created for you on the spot, the questions written to be responsive to the strengths and weaknesses you’ve displayed in prior answers. Picture being evaluated on your scientific knowledge and getting instantaneous feedback on your answers, in ways that help you better understand and respond to other questions.

These are just a few of the types of scenarios that could become reality as generative artificial intelligence advances, according to Mario Piacentini, a senior analyst of innovative assessments with the Programme for International Student Assessment, known as PISA.

He and others argue that AI has the potential to shake up the student testing industry, which has evolved little for decades and which critics say too often falls short of evaluating students’ true knowledge. But they also warn that the use of AI in assessments carries risks.

“AI is going to eat assessments for lunch,” said Ulrich Boser, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, where he co-authored a research series on the future of assessments. He said that standardized testing may one day become a thing of the past, because AI has the potential to personalize testing to individual students.

PISA, the influential international test, expects to integrate AI into the design of its 2029 test. Piacentini said the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which runs PISA, is exploring the possible use of AI in several realms.

• It plans to evaluate students on their ability to use AI tools and to recognize AI-generated information.
• It’s evaluating whether AI could help write test questions, which could potentially be a major money and time saver for test creators. (Big test makers like Pearson are already doing this, he said.)
• It’s considering whether AI could score tests. According to Piacentini, there’s promising evidence that AI can accurately and effectively score even relatively complex student work.  
• Perhaps most significantly, the organization is exploring how AI could help create tests that are “much more interesting and much more authentic,” as Piacentini puts it.

When it comes to using AI to design tests, there are all sorts of opportunities. Career and tech students could be assessed on their practical skills via AI-driven simulations: For example, automotive students could participate in a simulation testing their ability to fix a car, Piacentini said.

Right now those hands-on tests are incredibly intensive and costly – “it’s almost like shooting a movie,” Piacentini said. But AI could help put such tests within reach for students and schools around the world.

AI-driven tests could also do a better job of assessing students’ problem-solving abilities and other skills, he said. It might prompt students when they’d made a mistake and nudge them toward a better way of approaching a problem. AI-powered tests could evaluate students on their ability to craft an argument and persuade a chatbot. And they could help tailor tests to a student’s specific cultural and educational context.

“One of the biggest problems that PISA has is when we’re testing students in Singapore, in sub-Saharan Africa, it’s a completely different universe. It’s very hard to build a single test that actually works for those two very different populations,” said Piacentini. But AI opens the door to “construct tests that are really made specifically for every single student.”

That said, the technology isn’t there yet, and educators and test designers need to tread carefully, experts warn. During a recent panel Javeria moderated, Nicol Turner Lee, director of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution, said any conversation about AI’s role in assessments must first acknowledge disparities in access to these new tools.

Many schools still use paper products and struggle with spotty broadband and limited digital tools, she said: The digital divide is “very much part of this conversation.” Before schools begin to use AI for assessments, teachers will need professional development on how to use AI effectively and wisely, Turner Lee said.

There’s also the issue of bias embedded in many AI tools. AI is often sold as if it’s “magic,”  Amelia Kelly, chief technology officer at SoapBox Labs, a software company that develops AI voice technology, said during the panel. But it’s really “a set of decisions made by human beings, and unfortunately human beings have their own biases and they have their own cultural norms that are inbuilt.”

With AI at the moment, she added, you’ll get “a different answer depending on the color of your skin, or depending on the wealth of your neighbors, or depending on the native language of your parents.”  

But the potential benefits for students and learning excite experts such as Kristen Huff, vice president of assessment and research at Curriculum Associates, where she helps develop online assessments. Huff, who also spoke on the panel, said AI tools could eventually not only improve testing but also “accelerate learning” in areas like early literacy, phonemic awareness and early numeracy skills. Huff said that teachers could integrate AI-driven assessments, especially AI voice tools, into their instruction in ways that are seamless and even “invisible,” allowing educators to continually update their understanding of where students are struggling and how to provide accurate feedback.

PISA’s Piacentini said that while we’re just beginning to see the impact of AI on testing, the potential is great and the risks can be managed.  

“I am very optimistic that it is more an opportunity than a risk,” said Piacentini. “There’s always this risk of bias, but I think we can quantify it, we can analyze it, in a better way than we can analyze bias in humans.”

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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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When Carlos Sanchez immigrated to Grand Rapids, Michigan, from Mexico City 25 years ago, he’d already completed two years of college at Universidad Iberoamericana, and he was determined to finish his degree. Already bilingual, he felt comfortable tackling the second half of his education in English. But the language barrier was only part of the challenge. 

When he tried to enroll, he found that colleges had no idea how to handle his international transcripts and credentials. He recalls finding (and paying a considerable amount for) an outside company that could convert his transcripts into something more comparable to the U.S. education system. 

Eventually, Davenport University recognized the academic work he’d done in Mexico and he was able to finish his bachelor’s degree in international business there, without having to start from scratch. 

Sanchez is now the executive director of Casa Latina, a new bilingual college program at Davenport that will cater to students exactly like the one he was 25 years ago. He hopes it will help many highly trained or qualified people who are underemployed because they believe their English isn’t good enough to earn a college degree.

“I’ve been here 25 years and I’ve met engineers that are Uber drivers,” he said. “I’ve met accountants that have worked on a manufacturing line. Not that there’s anything wrong with those positions, but these individuals have four-plus years of college in their countries and they are underutilized.”

Beginning this fall, Casa Latina will offer 12 online undergraduate and graduate programs in an entirely bilingual and bicultural format. The curriculum will be offered entirely in Spanish one week and entirely in English the next, and all support services will be available in both languages.

Davenport’s tuition prices will apply to the Casa Latina programs, but accepted students will be awarded scholarships of $9,200 per year to help make the program more accessible financially. Those enrolled part time will receive a proportionate amount of scholarship funding, Sanchez said. Students are eligible for the scholarship award regardless of their immigration status, which Davenport does not ask about, he said. If students are eligible for federal financial aid, they can also use that funding to pay tuition.  

Once students are accepted, Sanchez said, Davenport will assess their education and work experience to see what can count toward degree progressions. The idea is to help students finish their education as efficiently and affordably as possible and get them into the workforce so they can provide better lives for their families. 

Latinos are the fastest growing demographic group in the United States, but data shows they are less likely than other racial and ethnic groups to have earned a college diploma. About 23 percent of Latino adults between the ages of 25 and 29 have a bachelor’s degree, compared to 45 percent of their white peers, according to a 2022 Pew Research Center report.

Davenport, like colleges across the country, has struggled with declining undergraduate enrollment since the pandemic. It has six campuses in Michigan along with its online program. In the 2018-2019 academic year, the university enrolled 6,763 undergraduate students, compared to 5,372 in the 2021-2022 academic year (the most recent year available from the National Center for Education Statistics). And colleges across the country are bracing for a shrinking number of graduating high schoolers after 2025 to have an effect on their enrollment. 

But Davenport’s president, Richard J. Pappas, said that the college has had good enrollment for the last three semesters, and the Casa Latina program is not just about boosting those numbers.

“It’s not a recruiting tool. Because if we don’t retain them and graduate them, this is a failure,” Pappas said. 

About 7 percent of Davenport’s undergraduate students identify as Hispanic or Latino, and 34 percent as nonwhite, according to data from the Department of Education. 

Deborah Santiago, president of the national advocacy group Excelencia in Education, said she’s excited about Casa Latina because it is advancing what it means to support not only Latino students but Latino communities more broadly. 

For these students to thrive in college and afterwards, Santiago said, the bilingual curriculum has to be connected to services that support students’ lives outside the classroom and resources that help them prepare for the workforce. 

“There is intentionality, there’s leadership here,” she said of the Davenport program. “They see the Latino community, they want to connect them to employment, they want to make sure that they get the academic rigor.”

Pappas said Davenport has worked with state and local Hispanic business leaders to make sure that Casa Latina is an opportunity for higher education and career development for “people who don’t feel comfortable, who may feel like they’re not capable because of the language barrier.”

Degree programs to be offered include accounting, business administration, education, human resource management, health services administration and technology project management.

Latino adults with work experience or some higher education in their home country are one of three demographic groups that Davenport expects to serve with this new program. Another is the college-aged children of those immigrants, who speak Spanish at home but are English dominant, and who have not yet harnessed their Spanish skills in academic or professional settings. 

Sanchez said they also expect to serve non-Latino students who attended immersion programs in high school, are bilingual and want to develop Spanish-language proficiency in their field of study and prepare to work as fully bilingual professionals. 

Regardless of their backgrounds, Pappas said he thinks that having a bilingual degree will help set these students apart in the workforce. 

“We still have some heavy lifting to make sure we do it well,” Pappas said. “But I think it’s going to have a big impact, not only on the people who go to our program, but the places that employ them.” 

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

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Last week the Massachusetts Senate unanimously passed a child care bill that would significantly expand state investment in child care. 

Less publicized: The bill also includes provisions that could make it harder for private equity-owned child care providers to expand significantly in the state.

Specifically, the bill takes steps to ensure that any given for-profit provider operating more than 10 programs in the state consumes no more than 1 percent of the $475 millions in grants being proposed.

Investor-backed chains now manage an estimated one in 10 child care centers in the country. That figure is likely to grow, according to several child care researchers, as states — and potentially the federal government — put new funding into the area, attracting investors interested in low start-up costs and access to public money.

As a result, advocates and experts are pushing for more extensive and widespread regulations of the kind that are moving forward in Massachusetts. “We need to make sure there are real guardrails,” said Melissa Boteach, the vice president overseeing child care and early learning at the National Women’s Law Center. Along with colleagues, she plans this June to release a report outlining recommended regulations and safeguards.

In making the push, Boteach and others cite private equity’s troubling record in managing other government-backed social services, including nursing homes and autism services. “Private equity’s track record in other sectors supported by public dollars – including home care, hospice care, and housing – foreshadows challenges the child care sector could face,” Boteach wrote in an email. In child care, profit-driven companies will take “money out rather than using that public funding to pay child care providers and teachers a living wage, upgrading facilities, [and] expanding into under-served communities,” she said.

In a written statement, Mark Bierley, CEO of the Learning Care Group, one of the largest for-profit child care operators in the U.S., offered a very different take, calling it “our duty to prepare children socially, emotionally and developmentally for their transition into K-12 education.”

“We have the resources to upgrade facilities, equipment and technology to ensure we fulfill that commitment,” he added.

The proposed regulations in Massachusetts follow a couple other related state efforts. Vermont recently put ownership disclosure requirements into its package expanding funding for child care, and also capped tuition hikes by providers. New Jersey limits for-profit programs that participate in its public pre-K system to a 2.5 percent profit margin.

But Elliot Haspel, a senior fellow at the think tank Capita, who has been tracking private equity expansion in child care closely, described the proposed Massachusetts measures as “the most targeted guardrails we’ve seen to date” against investor-backed companies consuming the lion’s share of new public investment. 

Haspel points out that there’s been similar momentum internationally, with British Columbia specifying that priority for public funding goes to public and nonprofit programs, and Australia requiring larger providers that manage more than 25 sites to submit more extensive financial reports.

The U.S. has historically spent very little on child care compared to other wealthy nations. Partly as a result, investor-backed, for-profit chains in the U.S. operate predominantly in middle-income and wealthier neighborhoods and communities, where they can often charge substantial tuition. That could change if more public funds flow into child care, leading to significantly increased government subsidies for lower-income children.   

Last year, President Biden’s administration pushed for greater transparency and accountability in nursing home ownership after research showed that private-equity owned facilities on average had worse outcomes, including more patient deaths. But there’s not much information that compares the quality of for-profit and nonprofit child care programs, which could hinder efforts to put restrictions and regulations on the companies.

Haspel said “the first step for the federal government is trying to get a lot more information” in a landscape where the quality can vary dramatically within all ownership types — investor backed or not. That said, he added that there’s no reason not to take such steps as ensuring a certain percentage of public funding is used to pay educators and requiring centers to disclose financial and ownership information.

“Some of the potential guardrails are common-sense,” he said.

This story about private equity and child care 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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People who read college applications are a lot like detectives. Without having been there for the event (the student’s K-12 education and life), they must find clues in documents (high school transcripts and student essays) and eyewitness accounts (letters of recommendation) to solve the case (decide whether a student might be able to thrive at the college). 

But even with the extensive applications that each student submits, the detectives (college application readers) must do a lot of reading between the lines, said Tim Brunold, dean of admission at the University of Southern California. 

The clues they have on how students spend their time outside of school are typically limited to a list of sports teams they’ve captained, clubs they joined, volunteer work they’ve done and awards they’ve won. But the application readers often lack key information on other responsibilities or life circumstances students may have, such as caring for siblings or sick family members, working part-time jobs to help pay family bills, or living in a home without a stable internet connection.

And those missing clues often mean a student’s application doesn’t get a fair shake. If a student is getting good grades in spite of being responsible for siblings from after school until bedtime, that could mean the student is even more academically talented than a peer with no such burdens. 

In order to fill this gap, and signal to prospective students that these responsibilities matter, a set of 12 colleges participated in an experiment in which they asked every applicant to go through a list of extenuating home life circumstances or responsibilities and check off which ones they spend four hours or more per week doing.

“We want these kids to essentially get credit for these things that are taking a lot of skills and a lot of time, in the same way that kids who are doing traditional, school-based extracurricular activities are getting credit,” said Trisha Ross Anderson, the college admission director of the Making Caring Common project at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, which helped develop the questions with Common App. (The idea was in development before the Supreme Court ruled that race could not be considered in admissions decisions.)   

“We want to make it easier for students to report this information and talk about it. If students don’t want to have to write their essay about this, for instance, they shouldn’t have to.”

In order to make it fast and simple for prospective students, and to prevent application readers from having to play detective as they try to figure out, “Is there something else going on with this kid?,” they added this optional question to the Common App: 

Sometimes academic records and extracurricular activities are impacted by family responsibilities or other circumstances. We would like to know about these responsibilities and circumstances. Your responses will not negatively impact your application. You may repeat some information you already provided in the Common App Activities section. 

Please select which activities you spend 4 or more hours per week doing: 

• Assisting family or household members with situations such as doctors’ appointments, bank visits, or visa interviews
• Doing tasks for my family or household (cooking, cleaning, laundry, etc.)
• Experiencing homelessness or another unstable living situation
• Interpreting or translating for family or household members
• Living in an environment without reliable or usable internet
• Living independently or living on my own (not including boarding school)
• Managing family or household finances, budget, or paying bills
• Providing transportation for family or household members
• Taking care of sick, disabled and/or elderly members of my family or household
• Taking care of younger family or household members
• Taking care of my own child or children
• Working at a paid job to contribute to my family or household’s income
• Yard work/farm work
• Other (please describe)
• None of these

Across the 12 colleges, 66 percent of the students who applied to these colleges using the Common App checked at least one box, according to Karen Lopez, who manages this project at Common App. A quarter of the prospective students checked four or more boxes.

In the fall of 2022, these 12 colleges included the question in the Common App: Amherst College, Caltech, Cornell University, Harvey Mudd College, St. Olaf College, Transylvania University, University of Arizona, University of Dubuque, University of Maryland-Baltimore County, University of Pennsylvania, University of Southern California and Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

In the fall of 2023, these 23 colleges added the question: Allegheny College, Amherst College, Bard College at Simon’s Rock, Boston College, Caltech, College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University, College of the Holy Cross, Cornell University, Earlham College, Elon University, George Washington University, Harvey Mudd, Haverford College, Immaculata University, Lafayette College, Maryland Institute College of Art, Nazareth University, Providence College, University of Pennsylvania, University of Richmond, University of Rochester, University of Southern California and Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

Ross Anderson said that the second-year data will begin being processed in the coming months. She said they also plan to look at how this question affected admissions and enrollments, but they won’t be able to examine that until late summer. Lopez said these are among the factors that will help decide if this question should become a regular part of the Common App. 

Brunold, from USC, said that the people who read college applications are trying to get a “360-degree view of this young person who’s often baring their soul to you,” without knowing them personally. Giving students the opportunity to share information about their lives in this way helps colleges make a more thorough assessment. 

“For us, at a place that unfortunately doesn’t have the capacity to admit anywhere near the number of students who want to come here, we take great care in this process,” Brunold said. 

Whitney Soule, vice provost and dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania, said that asking this question and capturing a wider view of students’ lives can help level the playing field for applicants of different backgrounds. 

“What we are trying to do is understand how a student is moving throughout their lives, what their commitment of time is and their responsibility is, and their awareness of themselves relative to other people,” Soule said. “Because that’s going to be incredibly important in our environment when they arrive on our campus, and they’re living and learning within the community of our school.”

This story about student home life was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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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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