Student-parents disproportionately give up before they reach the finish line. Fewer than 4 in 10 graduate with a degree within six years, compared with more than 6 in 10 other students.

Search to learn more about childcare availability at colleges and universities nationwide. Enter an institution name to see if child care is available and how many students are over the age of 24.

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Editor’s note: Substituting for Jill Barshay is Sarah Butrymowicz, The Hechinger Report’s investigations editor. Jill will return next week.

Every school day, thousands of students are suspended for vague, subjective reasons, such as defiance and disorderly conduct. Our investigative team recently took a deep dive into these punishments, based on 20 states for which we were able to obtain data. Our analysis revealed more than 2.8 million suspensions and expulsions from 2017-18 to 2021-22 under these ambiguous categories. 

Here’s a closer look at some of what we found:

1. Suspensions for these categories of behavior are incredibly common. 

Our analysis found that nearly a third of suspensions and expulsions reported by states was meted out under these types of categories, which also included insubordination, disruptive behavior, and disobedience. 

In Alabama, educators have 56 categories to choose from as justification for student punishment; a full third in our sample were assigned for one of four vague violations. This is what the state calls them: “defiance of authority,” “disorderly conduct — other,” “disruptive demonstrations,” and “disobedience — persistent, willful.” 

In North Carolina, Ohio and Oregon, about half or more of all suspensions were classified in similar categories. 

There are a few reasons why these categories are so widely used. For one, they often capture the low-level infractions that are most common in schools, such as ignoring a teacher’s direction, yelling in class or swearing. By comparison, more clearcut and serious violations, such as those involving weapons or illegal substances, are rarer. They made up only 2 percent and 9 percent of the discipline records, respectively. 

But experts also say that terms such as disorder or defiance are so broad and subject to interpretation that they can quickly become a catchall. For instance, in Oregon, the umbrella category of disruptive behavior includes insubordination and disorderly conduct, as well as harassment, obscene behavior, minor physical altercations, and “other” rule violations.

2. Educators classify a huge range of behavior as insubordination or disruption. 

As part of our reporting, we obtained more than 7,000 discipline records from a dozen school districts across eight states to see what specific behavior was leading to suspensions labeled this way. It was a wide range, sometimes even within a single school district. Sometimes students were suspended for behavior as minor as being late to class; others, because they punched someone. And it was all called the same thing, which experts say prevents school discipline decisions from being transparent to students and the greater public. 

There were some common themes though, behaviors like yelling at peers, throwing things in a classroom or refusing to do work. We developed a list of 15 commonly repeated behaviors and coded about 3,000 incidents by hand, marking whether they described that type of conduct. We used machine learning to analyze the rest. 

Related: Young children misbehave. Some are suspended for acting their age

In fewer than 15 percent of cases, students got in trouble for using profanity, or for talking back, or for yelling at school staff. In at least 20 percent of cases, students refused a direct order and in 6 percent, they were punished for misusing technology, including being on their cell phones during class or using school computers inappropriately.

3. Inequities can be even more pronounced in these ambiguous categories. 

We know from decades of research and federal data collection that Black students are more likely to be suspended from school than their white peers. In many places, that is especially true when it comes to categories like insubordination. 

In Indiana, for example, Black students were suspended or expelled for defiance at four times the rate of white students on average. In 2021-22, eight Black students received this punishment per 100 students, compared with just two white students. In all other categories, the difference was three times the rate. 

Research suggests that teachers sometimes react to the same behavior differently depending on a child’s race. A 2015 study found that when teachers were presented with school records describing two instances of misbehavior by a student, teachers felt more troubled when they believed a Black student repeatedly misbehaved rather than a white student.

They “are more likely to be seen as ‘troublemakers’ when they misbehave in some way than their white peers,” said Jason Okonofua, assistant professor at University of California-Berkeley and a co-author of the study. Teachers are usually making quick decisions in situations where they are removing a child from the classroom, he said, and biases tend to “rear their heads” under those circumstances.

Related: What happens when suspensions get suspended?

Similar disparities exist for students with disabilities. In all states for which we had demographic data, these students were more likely to be suspended for insubordination or disorderly conduct violations than their peers. In many states, those differences were larger than for other suspensions. 

4. Suspension rates vary widely within states. 

Further underscoring how much educator discretion exists in determining when or whether to suspend a student, individual districts report hugely different suspension rates. 

Take Georgia, for instance, which allows for students to be punished for disorderly conduct and “student incivility.” In 2021-22, the 3,300-student McDuffie County School System cited these two reasons for suspensions more than 1,250 times, according to state data. That’s nearly 40 times per 100 students. Similarly sized Appling County issued so few suspensions for disorderly conduct and student incivility that the numbers were redacted to protect student privacy. 

Editors’ note: The Hechinger Report’s Fazil Khan had nearly completed the data analysis and reporting for this project when he died in a fire in his apartment building. Read about the internship fund created to honor his legacy as a data reporter. USA TODAY Senior Data Editor Doug Caruso completed data visualizations for this project based on Khan’s work.

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

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For the first 57 minutes of the basketball game between two Bend, Oregon, high school rivals, Kyra Rice stood at the edges of the court taking yearbook photos. With just minutes before the end of the game, she was told she had to move.

Kyra pushed back: She had permission to stand near the court. The athletic director got involved, Kyra recalled. She let a swear word or two slip. 

Kyra has anxiety as well as ADHD, which can make her impulsive. Following years of poor  experiences at school, she sometimes became defensive when she felt overwhelmed, said her mom, Jules Rice. 

But at the game, Kyra said she kept her cool overall. Both she and her mother were shocked to learn the next day that she’d been suspended from school. 

“OK, maybe she said some bad words, but it’s not enough to suspend her,” Rice said. 

The incident’s discipline record, provided by Rice, lists a series of categories to explain the suspension: insubordination, disobedience, disrespectful/minor disruption, inappropriate language, non-compliance. 

Broad and subjective categories like these are cited hundreds of thousands of times a year to justify removing students from school, a Hechinger Report investigation found. The data show that students with disabilities, like Kyra, are more likely than their peers to be punished for such violations. In fact, they’re often more likely to be suspended for these reasons than for other infractions.

For example, between 2017-18 and 2021-22, Rhode Island students with disabilities were, on average, two and a half times more likely than their peers to be suspended for any reason, but nearly three times more likely to be suspended for insubordination and almost four times more likely to be suspended for disorderly conduct. Similar patterns played out in other states with available data including Massachusetts, Montana and Vermont. 

Federal law should offer students protections from being suspended for behavior that results from their disability, even if they are being disruptive or insubordinate. But those protections have significant limitations. At the same time, these subjective categories are almost tailor-made to trap students with disabilities, who might have trouble expressing or regulating themselves appropriately.

Districts have wide discretion in setting their own rules and many students with disabilities quickly earn reputations at school as troublemakers. “Unfortunately, who gets caught up in a lot of the vagueness in the codes of conduct are students with disabilities,” said attorney Robert Tudisco, an expert with Understood.org, a nonprofit that provides resources and support to people with learning and attention disabilities.

Related: When your disability gets you sent home from school

Students on the autism spectrum often have a hard time communicating with words and might yell or become aggressive if something upsets them. A student with oppositional defiant disorder is likely to be openly insubordinate to authority, while one with dyslexia might act out when frustrated with schoolwork. Students with ADHD typically have a hard time controlling their impulses.

Kyra’s disability created challenges throughout her school career in the Bend-La Pine School District. “Nobody really understood her,” Rice said. “She’s a big personality and she’s very impulsive. And impulsivity is what gets kids in trouble and gets kids suspended.” 

Kyra, now 17, said that too few teachers cared about her individualized education program, or IEP, a document that details the accommodations a student in special education is granted. She’d regularly butt heads with teachers or skip class altogether to avoid them. Her favorite teacher was her special ed teacher. 

“She understood my ADHD and my other special needs,” Kyra said. “My other teachers didn’t.”

Scott Maben, district spokesperson, said in an email he could not comment on specific disciplinary matters because of privacy concerns, but that the district had a range of responses to deal with student misconduct and that administrators “carefully consider a response that is commensurate with the violation.” 

In Oregon, “disruptive conduct” accounted for more than half of all suspensions from 2017-18 to 2021-22. The state department of education includes in that category insubordination and disorderly conduct, as well as harassment, obscene behavior, minor physical altercations, and “other” rule violations. 

Disruptive behavior is the leading cause of suspensions because of its “inherently subjective nature,” the state department of education’s spokesperson, Marc Siegal, said in an email. He added that the department monitors discipline data for special education disparities and works with school districts on the issue. 

The primary protections for students with disabilities come from the federal government, through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA. But that law only requires districts to examine whether a student’s behavior stems from their disability after they have missed 10 total days of school through suspension. 

At that point, districts are required to hold a manifestation hearing, in which officials must determine whether a student’s behavior was the result of their disability. “That’s where it gets very gray,” Tudisco said. “What happens in the determination of manifestation is very subjective.”

In his experience, he added, the behavior is almost always connected to a student’s disability, but school districts often don’t see it that way. 

“Manifestation is not about giving Johnny or Susie a free pass because they have a disability,” Tudisco said. “It’s a process to understand why this behavior occurred so we can do something to prevent it tomorrow.” 

Related: Senators call for stronger rules to reduce off-the-books suspensions

The connections are often much clearer to parents. 

A Rhode Island mother, Pearl, said her daughter was easily overwhelmed in her elementary school classroom in the Bristol Warren Regional School District. (Pearl is being referred to by her middle name because she is still a district parent and fears retaliation.) 

Her child has autism and easily experiences a sensory overload. If the classroom was too loud or someone new walked in, she might start screaming and get out of her seat, Pearl said. Teachers struggled to calm her down, as other students were escorted out of the room. 

Sometimes, Pearl was called to pick up her daughter early, in an unrecorded informal removal. A few times, though, she was suspended for disorderly conduct, Pearl recalled. 

Between 2017-18 and 2020-21, students with disabilities in the Bristol Warren Regional School District made up about 13 percent of the student body, but accounted for 21 percent of suspensions for insubordination and 30 percent of all disorderly conduct suspensions. 

The district did not respond to repeated requests for comment. 

The Rhode Island Department of Education collects data on school discipline from districts, but special education and discipline reform advocates in the state say that the agency rarely acts on these numbers. 

Department spokesperson Victor Morente said in an email that the agency monitors discipline data and is “very clear that suspension should be the last option considered.” He added that the department has published resources about alternatives to suspension and discipline specifically for students with disabilities. 

A 2016 state law that limits the overall use of out-of-school suspensions also requires that districts examine their data for inequities. Districts that find such disparities are supposed to submit a report to the department of education, said Hannah Stern, a policy associate at the Rhode Island American Civil Liberties Union.

Her group submits public records requests for copies of their reports every year, but has never received one, she said, “even though almost every single school district exhibits disparities.”

Related: Sent home early: Lost learning in special education

Pearl said that her daughter needed one-on-one support in the classroom instead of punishment. “She’s autistic. She’s not going to learn her lesson by suspending her,” Pearl said. “She actually got more scared to go back. She actually felt very unwelcome and very sad.”

Students with autism often have a hard time connecting their actions to the punishment, said Joanne Quinn, executive director of The Autism Project, a Rhode Island-based group that offers support to family members of people with autism. With suspension, “there’s no learning going on and they’re going to do the same thing incorrectly.”

Quinn’s group provides training for schools throughout Rhode Island and beyond, aimed at helping teachers understand how the brain functions in people with autism and offering strategies on how to effectively respond to behavior challenges that could easily be labeled disobedient or disorderly. 

Federal law provides a road map for schools to improve how they respond to misconduct related to a student’s disability. Schools should identify a student’s triggers and create a behavior intervention plan aimed at preventing problems before they start, it says. 

Related: How a disgraced method of diagnosing learning disabilities persists in our nation’s schools

But, doing these things well requires time, resources and training that can be in short supply, leaving teachers feeling alone, struggling to maintain order in their classrooms, said Christine Levy, a former special education teacher and administrator who works as an advocate for individual special education students in the Northeast, including Rhode Island. 

Levy recently worked with a student with disabilities who was suspended after he tickled a peer at a locker on five straight days. But, she said, the situation should have never reached the point of suspension: Educators should have quickly identified what the boy was struggling with and set a plan in motion to help him, including modeling appropriate locker conduct. 

Had this boy’s teachers done that, the suspension could have been avoided. “The repair of that is so much longer and so much harder to do versus, let’s catch it right away,” she said.

Many parents described similar situations, though, in which a child routinely got in trouble for repeated behavior. When Michelle Gomes’s daughter became upset in her kindergarten classroom, she’d often run out and refuse to come back in. Sometimes, she’d tear things off the walls.

“Whenever she gets like that, it’s hard to see,” Gomes said. “I hurt for her. It’s like she’s not in control.”

Gomes received regular calls from Cranston Public School officials to come pick her daughter up. A couple of times, the child was formally suspended, Gomes said. The school described her as a safety risk, Gomes recalled.

“She obviously doesn’t feel safe herself,” she said. 

Cranston Public Schools did not respond to requests for comment. 

Gomes’s daughter had a speech delay and anxiety and qualified for special education services. A private neurological evaluation concluded that she was compensating for that delay with her physical responses, Gomes said. 

This can be a common cause of behavior challenges for students with disabilities, experts say.

“Behavior is communication,” said Julian Saavedra, an assistant principal and an expert at Understood.org.* “The behavior is trying to tell us something. We as the IEP team, the school team, have to dig deeper.” 

On her own, Gomes found strategies that helped. Gomes’ child struggled with transitions, so they’d go over her day in advance to prepare her for what to expect. A play therapist taught both her and her daughter breathing exercises. 

Her daughter was switched to another district school where a social worker would sometimes walk the girl to class. When the child got worked up, she’d sometimes be allowed to sit with that social worker or in the nurse’s office to calm down. That helped, but sometimes, those staff members weren’t available. 

In the end, Gomes moved her daughter to a school outside the district that was better equipped to help the girl deescalate. Her behavior problems lessened and she started enjoying going to school, Gomes said.

But Gomes still can’t understand why more teachers weren’t able to help her child regulate herself. “Do we need retraining or do we need new training?” she said. “Because this is mindblowing to me, not one of you can do that.”

Note: The Hechinger Report’s Fazil Khan had nearly completed the data analysis and reporting for this project when he died in a fire in his apartment building. USA TODAY Senior Data Editor Doug Caruso completed data visualizations for this project based on Khan’s work.

CORRECTION: This article has been updated with the correct spelling of Julian Saavedra’s name.

This story about suspension of students with disabilities 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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A Rhode Island student smashed a ketchup packet with his fist, splattering an administrator. Another ripped up his school work. The district called it “destruction of school property.” A Washington student turned cartwheels while a PE teacher attempted to give instructions. 

A pair of Colorado students slid down a dirt path despite a warning. An Ohio 12th grader refused to work while assigned to the in-school suspension room. Then there was the Maryland sixth grader who swore when his computer shut off and responded “my bad” when his teacher addressed his language. 

Their transgressions all ended the same way: The students were suspended.

Discipline records state the justification for their removals: These students were disorderly. Insubordinate. Disruptive. Disobedient. Defiant. Disrespectful. 

At most U.S. public schools, students can be suspended, even expelled, for these ambiguous and highly subjective reasons. This type of punishment is pervasive nationwide, leading to hundreds of thousands of missed days of school every year, and is often doled out for misbehavior that doesn’t seriously hurt anyone or threaten school safety, a Hechinger Report investigation found. 

Districts cited one of these vague violations as a reason for suspending or expelling students more than 2.8 million times from 2017-18 to 2021-22 across the 20 states that collect this data. That amounted to nearly a third of all punishments recorded by those states. Black students and students with disabilities were more likely than their peers to be disciplined for these reasons. 

Many discipline reform advocates say that suspensions should be reserved for only the most serious, dangerous behaviors. Those, the analysis found, were much less common. Violations of rules involving alcohol, tobacco or drugs were cited as reasons for ejecting students from classes about 759,000 times, and incidents involving a weapon were cited 131,000 times. Even infractions involving physical violence — such as fighting, assault and battery — were less common, with about 2.3 million instances. (Learn more about the data and how we did our analysis.)

Because categories like defiance and disorderly conduct are often defined broadly at the state level, teachers and administrators have wide latitude in interpreting them, according to interviews with dozens of researchers, educators, lawyers and discipline reform advocates. That opens the door to suspensions for low-level infractions.  

“Those are citations you can drive a truck through,” said Jennifer Wood, executive director for the Rhode Island Center for Justice. 

The Hechinger Report also obtained more than 7,000 discipline records from a dozen school districts across eight states through public records requests. They show a wide range of behavior that led to suspensions for things like disruptive conduct and insubordination. Much of the conduct posed little threat to safety. For instance, students were regularly suspended for being tardy, using a phone during class or swearing. 

Decades of research have found that students who are suspended from school tend to perform worse academically and drop out at higher rates. Researchers have linked suspensions to lower college enrollment rates and increased involvement with the criminal justice system.

These findings have spurred some policymakers to try to curtail suspensions by limiting their use to severe misbehavior that could harm others. Last year, California banned all suspensions for willful defiance. Other places, including Philadelphia and New York City, have similarly eliminated suspensions for low-level misconduct. 

Elsewhere, though, as student behavior has worsened following the pandemic, legislators are calling for stricter discipline policies, concerned for educators who struggle to maintain order and students whose lessons are disrupted. These legislative proposals come despite warnings from experts and even classroom teachers who say more suspensions — particularly for minor, subjective offenses — are not the answer. 

Roberto J. Rodríguez, assistant U.S. education secretary, said he was concerned by The Hechinger Report’s findings. “We need more tools in the toolkit for our educators and for our principals to be able to respond to some of the social and emotional needs,” he said. “Suspension and expulsion shouldn’t be the only tool that we pull out when we see behavioral issues.”

In Rhode Island, insubordination was the most common reason for a student to be suspended in the years analyzed. Disorderly conduct was third. 

In the Cranston Public Schools, these two categories accounted for half of the Rhode Island district’s suspensions in 2021-22. Disorderly conduct alone made up about 38 percent. 

Behavior that led to a such a suspension there in recent years included:

• Getting a haircut in the bathroom;
• Putting a finger through the middle of another student’s hamburger at lunch;
• Writing swear words in an email exchange with another student;
• Throwing cut up pieces of paper in the air;
• Stabbing a juice bottle with a pencil and getting juice all over a table and peers; and
• Leapfrogging over a peer and “almost” knocking down others.

Cranston school officials did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Rhode Island Department of Education spokesperson Victor Morente said in an email that the agency could not comment on specific causes for suspension, but that the department “continues to underscore that all options need to be exhausted before schools move to suspension.” 

The department defines disorderly conduct as “Any act which substantially disrupts the orderly conduct of a school function, [or] behavior which substantially disrupts the orderly learning environment or poses a threat to the health, safety, and/or welfare of students, staff, or others.”

Related: In New York state, students can be suspended for up to an entire school year

Many states use similarly unspecific language in their discipline codes, if they provide any guidance at all, a review of state policies found. 

For education departments that do provide definitions to districts, subjectivity is frequently built in. In Louisiana’s state guidance, for instance, “treats authority with disrespect” includes “any act which demonstrates a disregard or interference with authority.”

Ted Beasley, spokesperson for the Louisiana Department of Education, said in an email that discipline codes are not defined in state statutes and that “school discipline is a local school system issue.” 

Officials in several other states said the same.

The result, as demonstrated by a review of discipline records from eight states, is a broad interpretation of the categories: Students were suspended for shoving, yelling at peers, throwing objects, and violating dress codes. Some students were suspended for a single infraction; others broke several rules. 

In fewer than 15 percent of cases, students got in trouble for using profanity, according to a Hechinger analysis of the records. The rate was similar for when they yelled at or talked back to administrators. In at least 20 percent of cases, students refused a direct order and in 6 percent, they were punished for misusing technology, including being on the cell phones during class or using school computers inappropriately. 

“What is defiance to one is not defiance to all, and that becomes confusing, not just for the students, but also the adults,” said Harry Lawson, human and civil rights director for the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union. “Those terms that are littered throughout a lot of codes of conduct, depending on the relationship between people, can mean very different things.”

But giving teachers discretion in how to assign discipline isn’t necessarily a problem, said Adam Tyner, national research director at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. “The whole point of trusting, in this case, teachers, or anyone, to do their job is to be able to let them have responsibility and make some judgment calls,” he said.

Tyner added that it’s important to think about all students when considering school discipline policies. “If a student is disrupting the class, it may not help them all that much to take them and put them in a different environment, but it sure might help the other students who are trying to learn,” he said. 

Johanna Lacoe spent years trying to measure exactly that — the effect of discipline reforms on all students In Philadelphia, including those who hadn’t been previously suspended. The district banned out-of-school suspensions for many nonviolent offenses in 2012. 

Critics of the policy shift warned that it would harm students who do behave in class; they’d learn less or even come to school less often. Lacoe’s research found that schools faithfully following the new rules saw no decrease in academic achievement or attendance for non-suspended students. 

But, the policy wasn’t implemented consistently, the researchers found. The schools that complied already issued the fewest suspensions; it was easier for them to make the policy shift, Lacoe said. In schools that kept suspending students, despite the ban, test scores and student attendance fell slightly.

Overall, though, students who had been previously suspended showed improvements. Lacoe called eliminating out-of-school suspensions for minor infractions a “no brainer.”

“We know suspensions aren’t good for kids,” said Lacoe, the research director of the California Policy Lab’s site at the University of California, Berkeley.* The group partners with government agencies to research the impact of policies. “Kicking kids out of school and providing them no services and no support and then returning them to the environment where nothing has changed is not a good solution.” 

Related: Hidden expulsions? Schools kick students out but call it a ‘transfer’

This fall, two high schoolers in Providence, Rhode Island, walked out of a classroom. They later learned they were being suspended for their action, because it was disrespectful to a teacher.

On her first day back after the suspension, one of the students, Sara, said she went to her teacher to talk through the incident. It was something she wished she’d had the chance to do without missing a couple days of school.

“Suspending someone, not talking to someone, that’s not helping,” said Sara, whose last name is being withheld to protect her privacy. “You’re not helping them to succeed. You’re making it worse.”

In 2021-22, disorderly conduct and insubordination made up a third of all Providence Public School suspensions. 

District spokesperson Jay Wegimont said in an email that the district uses many alternatives to suspension and out-of-school suspensions are only given to respond to “persistent conduct which substantially impedes the ability of other students to learn.”

Some parents and students interviewed asked not to have their full names published, fearing retaliation from their school districts. But nearly all parents and students who have dealt with suspension for violations such as disrespect and disorderly conduct also said that the punishment often did nothing but leave the student frustrated with the school and damage the student’s relationships with teachers. 

At a Cincinnati high school in 2019, Yousuf Munir led a peaceful protest about the impact of climate change, with about 50 fellow students. Munir, then a junior, planned to leave school and join a larger protest at City Hall. The principal said Munir couldn’t go and threatened to assign detention.

Munir left anyway.

That detention morphed into suspension for disobeying the principal, said Munir, who remembers thinking: “The only thing you’re doing is literally keeping me out of class.”

The district told The Hechinger Report that Munir was suspended for leaving campus without written permission, a decision in line with the district’s code of conduct. 

The whole incident left Munir feeling “so angry I didn’t know what to do with it.” They went on to start the Young Activists Coalition, which advocated for fair discipline and restorative practices at Cincinnati Public Schools.

Now in college, Munir is a mentor to high school kids. “I can’t imagine ever treating a kid that way,” they said. 

Parents and students around the country described underlying reasons for behavior problems that a suspension would do little to address: Struggles with anxiety. Frustration with not understanding classwork. Distraction by events in their personal lives. 

Discipline records are also dotted with examples that indicate a deeper cause for the misbehavior.

In one case, a student in Rhode Island was suspended for talking back to her teachers; the discipline record notes that her mother had recently died and the student might need counseling. A student in Minnesota “lost his cool” after having “his buttons pushed by a couple peers.” He cursed and argued back. A Maryland student who went to the main office to report being harassed cursed at administrators when asked to formally document it. 

To be sure, discipline records disclose only part of a school’s response, and many places may simultaneously be working to address root causes. Even as they retain — and exercise — the right to suspend, many districts across the country have adopted alternative strategies aimed at building relationships and repairing harm caused by misconduct. 

“There needs to be some kind of consequence for acting out, but 9 out of 10 times, it doesn’t need to be suspension,” said Judy Brown, a social worker in Minneapolis Public Schools.

Related: Preventing suspensions: Tackle discipline problems with empathy first

Some educators who have embraced alternatives say in the long run they’re more effective. Suspension temporarily removes kids; it rarely changes behavior when they return. 

“It’s really about having the compassion and the time and patience to be able to have these conversations with students to see what the antecedent of the behavior is,” Brown said. “It’s often not personal; they’re overwhelmed.” 

In some cases, students act out because they don’t want to be at school at all and know the quickest escape is misbehavior. 

On Valentine’s day 2022, a Maryland seventh grader showed up to school late. She then refused to go to class or leave the hallway and, according to her Dorchester County discipline record, was disrespectful towards an educator. “These are the behaviors [the student] typically displays when she does not want to go to class,” her record reads. 

By 8:30 she was suspended and sent home for three days.

Dorchester County school officials declined to comment. In 2021-22, 38 percent of suspensions and expulsions in the district were assigned for disrespect and disruption.

Last year, administrators in Minnesota’s Monticello School District spent the summer overhauling their discipline procedures and consequences, out of concern that students of color were being disproportionately disciplined. They developed clearer definitions for violation categories and instituted non-exclusionary tools to deal with isolated minor misbehaviors.

Previously, the district suspended students for telling an “inappropriate joke” in class or cursing, records show. Those types of behavior will now be dealt with in schools, Superintendent Eric Olsen said, but repeated refusals and noncompliance could still lead to a suspension.

“Would I ever want to see a school where we can’t suspend? I would not,” he said. “Life is always about balance.”

Olsen wants his students — all students — to feel valued and be successful. But they’re not his only consideration. “You also have to think of your employees,” he said. “There’s also that fine line of making sure your staff feels safe.” 

Related: Some kids have returned to in-person learning only to be kicked right back out

Monticello, like most school districts across the country, has seen an increase in student misconduct since schools reopened after pandemic closures. A 2023 survey found that more than 40 percent of educators felt less safe in their schools compared with 2019 and, in some instances, teachers have been injured in violent incidents, including shootings. 

And even before 2020, educators nationwide were warning that they lacked the appropriate mental health and social service supports to adequately deal with behavior challenges. Some nonviolent problems, like refusal to put phones away or stay in one’s seat, can make it difficult for teachers to effectively do their jobs. 

And the discipline records reviewed by The Hechinger Report do capture a sampling of more severe misbehavior. In some cases, students were labeled defiant or disorderly for fighting, throwing chairs or even hitting a teacher. 

Shatara Clark taught for 10 years in Alabama before feeling too disrespected and overextended to keep going. She recalled regular disobedience from students. 

“Sometimes I look back like, ‘How did I make it?’” Clark said. “My blood pressure got high and everything.” 

She became so familiar with the protocol for discipline referrals that she can still remember every step two years after leaving the classroom. In her schools, students were suspended for major incidents like fighting or threatening a teacher but also for repeated nonviolent behavior like interrupting or speaking out in class. 

Clark said discipline records often don’t show the full context. “Say for instance, a boy got suspended for talking out of turn. Well, you’re not going to know that he’s done that five times, and I’ve called his parents,” she said. “Then you see someone that’s been suspended for fighting, and it looks like the same punishment for a lesser thing.”

In many states, reform advocates and student activists pushing to ban harsh discipline policies have found a receptive audience in lawmakers. Many teachers are also sympathetic to their arguments; the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers support discipline reform and alternatives to suspension. 

In some instances, though, teachers have resisted efforts to curtail suspensions, saying they need to have the option to remove kids from school.

Many experts say the largest hurdle to getting teachers to embrace discipline reforms is that new policies are often rolled out without training or adequate staffing and support. 

Without those things, “the policy change is somewhat of a paper tiger,” said Richard Welsh, an associate professor of education and public policy at Vanderbilt University. “If we don’t think about the accompanying support, it’s almost as if some of these are unfunded mandates.”  

In Monticello, Olsen has focused on professional development for teachers to promote alternatives to suspension. The district has created space for students to talk about their actions and how they can rebuild relationships. 

It’s still a work in progress. Teacher training, Olsen says, is key. 

“You can’t just do a policy change and expect everyone to magically do it.”

Reporting contributed by Hadley Hitson of the Montgomery Advertiser and Madeline Mitchell of the Cincinnati Enquirer, members of the USA TODAY Network; and Amanda Chen, Tazbia Fatima, Sara Hutchinson, Tara García Mathewson, and Nirvi Shah, The Hechinger Report. 

Editors’ note: The Hechinger Report’s Fazil Khan had nearly completed the data analysis and reporting for this project when he died in a fire in his apartment building. Read about the internship fund created to honor his legacy as a data reporter. USA TODAY Senior Data Editor Doug Caruso completed data visualizations for this project based on Khan’s work.

*CLARIFICATION: This article has been updated to clarify Johanna Lacoe’s title. She is the research director of the California Policy Lab’s site at the University of California, Berkeley.

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

The post Vague school rules at the root of millions of student suspensions appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

The Hechinger Report spent the last year investigating a major subset of school discipline: suspensions and expulsions for vague, subjective categories like defiance, disruption and disorderly conduct. 

We started this project with some basic questions: How often were states suspending students for these reasons? What kinds of behavior do educators say constitute defiance or disorder, anyway? And were some students more likely to be punished for these kinds of things than others?

Answering these questions revealed how overwhelmingly common these types of suspensions are for a broad range of behavior, including minor incidents. Here’s how we did it.

How did we get state and district level suspension data?

We attempted to get data from all 50 states, but there is no single place to get school discipline data broken down by suspension category. States do not report this information to the federal government. In fact, some states don’t even collect it from their districts. 

When possible, we downloaded the data from the state’s department of education website. When it wasn’t readily available we submitted public records requests.

In the case of New Mexico, we used data obtained and published by ProPublica.

What did we ultimately collect? 

In the end, we obtained the data we were looking for from 20 states: Alabama, California, Georgia, Indiana, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Vermont, Washington, Minnesota, Mississippi, Massachusetts, Alaska, Colorado, Louisiana, Montana, North Carolina, Oregon and Rhode Island.

In most cases, we received data from 2017-18 to 2021-22. In the case of Vermont, however, we did not have data for 2021-22 and in North Carolina, we had data only for 2019-2020 and 2020-2021.

We had demographic data that allowed us to examine the racial and special education disparities in California, Indiana, Vermont, New Mexico, Montana, Maryland, Ohio, Rhode Island, Mississippi and Massachusetts.

Was the data uniform?

Far from it. Each state has its own categories for student discipline, ranging from just six reasons a student can get suspended in California to more than 80 in Massachusetts. 

First, we identified any of the categories that had to do with disrespect, disorder or disruption and singled them out. These were the primary focus of our analysis. But we also wanted to know how suspensions for these reasons compared to others. 

To do that, we looked for common threads among suspension categories and created our own larger categorizations. For example, any offense category that had involved alcohol, drugs or tobacco was grouped into the category “alcohol/drugs/tobacco.”  Any offense  that involved fighting or physical aggression we put into a category called “physical violence.” These groupings were made following research into state discipline codes and discussion. We also showed our groupings to experts to get their feedback. In the end, we had 16 unique categories. We added the numbers from all state categories that fell into one of our larger groups. 

This allowed for an overall look at how many punishments were assigned for broad types of behavior. Yet because of discrepancies in discipline definitions in each state, direct comparisons between states are not advisable.

How did we deal with missing or redacted data?

In all of the states, suspensions below a specific count (generally fewer than 10 but in some cases fewer than five) were redacted to make sure no student could be identified. We considered them as zero since there was no way to accurately assess that number. In most states, this did not affect the overall findings. In smaller states or districts, where we saw or expected significant redactions, we only looked at grand totals.

Did the data have any other limitations?

Yes, once again, we had to contend with a lack of uniformity in how states gather this information. In some places, we obtained information only for suspensions. In others, the data included expulsions. In Alabama, instances of corporal punishment and alternative school placement were also included.

Some states only allowed districts to report a single reason for a suspension. Others allow several reasons to be selected. And, muddying the waters further, some states reported numbers of students who were suspended, while others reported the number of incidents that led to suspension. We’ve made a list available with details about individual states. 

How did we analyze demographic disparities?

We calculated the rate of suspension by looking at the number of students of a particular race suspended per 100 students of that race in a state or district. The comparisons between rates of suspensions of Black students and white students were made by dividing the rate of suspension for the former by the rate of suspension for the latter. For instance, if Black students were suspended at a rate of four students per 100 Black students in a state and white students were suspended at a rate of two students per 100 white students, then Black students were suspended at twice the rate of suspension of white students (4/2 = 2).

We did the same analysis for students with disabilities relative to their general-education peers.

How do we know what kind of behavior students were suspended for?

We submitted public records requests to dozens of school districts across the country asking for the most recent year or two years of discipline records for any suspensions assigned in their category of defiance or disorderly conduct.  

Most districts denied our request or never responded. Some estimated it would cost tens of thousands of dollars for them to pull the records. In all, 12 districts in eight states granted our request for free or for a more affordable cost. This gave us more than 7,000 discipline records to analyze.

So how did you analyze them? 

After reading through many of the records to begin to identify patterns, we once again made some broad categories of behavior that kept coming up, including talking back to an educator, swearing or refusing a direct order. 

About 1,700 of the records were in PDFs (including some with handwritten notes) that could not easily be converted to a spreadsheet. We coded all of these by hand, checking if the incident contained any of our categories and marking yes or no. We also hand-coded 1,500 of the remaining records. Each incident could have as many “yeses” as merited. We checked each other’s work to make sure we were being consistent. 

We then used a machine-learning library and trained a model with our labeled dataset and used the trained model to predict the remaining incident reports for the same categories. The accuracy of the model in predicting the incidences (on a test dataset which was taken out from the labeled dataset) varied across categories but, overall, the model had a low rate of false positives. We also spot checked the findings to make sure records were not being miscategorized. 

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

The post Hechinger’s school discipline project: How we did it appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

To Florina Caprita, the mother of three young children, the paralegal studies program at Ashworth College seemed like the perfect route to a much-needed career. The classes were entirely online, and an admissions officer told her she could make small monthly payments toward the $4,465 tuition while she was taking classes, instead of having to pay it all at once.

But in 2018, a family emergency forced her out of school, just six credits shy of her degree. To make matters worse, she fell behind on her monthly payments, which had steadily increased from $25 to more than $200.

She struggled financially for several years as her health declined, but last spring, she got an opportunity to earn a degree at a different college. The problem? Ashworth, a for-profit school in Georgia, refused to release her transcript until she paid – in full – the more than $2,200 that she owed them.

This practice, known as transcript withholding, has become a growing worry for state and federal regulators. Critics say that it makes it harder for students to earn a degree or get a job, which would allow them to earn enough to pay back their debts. But the system of oversight is patchwork; no single federal agency bans it, state rules vary and there are significant challenges with monitoring the practice. That means students like Caprita can fall through the cracks.

In October, the Department of Education released new rules that would bar colleges from withholding a transcript for any semester for which a student used federal student aid money and paid their balance in full. The move was lauded by advocates as a huge step forward in eradicating the practice – but would not apply to any of the thousands of schools that don’t accept federal student aid to begin with, including Ashworth College.

Experts have long criticized authorities for not providing better oversight of these schools.

“Some of these schools exist that way because they would never qualify, and that’s usually because they provide very low value to students, unfortunately,” said Edward Conroy, a senior policy advisor at the progressive think tank New America. “Not in all cases, but a lot of these programs are not lifting people out of poverty, they’re not providing a route to middle class jobs or middle-class income, and so I think sometimes they’re of questionable value.”

Unlike the Department of Education, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau does have jurisdiction over colleges that don’t qualify to receive federal money. And in the past year, the agency has begun investigating colleges for refusing to release transcripts because of a loan balance owed directly to the school.

“If they help me, I can help to pay them. If they withhold [the transcript] from me, then I how can I ever pay them?”

Florina Caprita, who has an outstanding loan from an online for-profit university

In 2022, the agency found that transcript withholding was an abusive practice under the Consumer Protection Act, “designed to gain leverage over borrowers and coerce them into making payments.”

The CFPB has adopted a broad definition of what a student loan is. They include in that category things like payment plans, arguing that those are essentially forms of credit. Money owed for things like unpaid room and board balances or overdue fines, however, is not covered. 

By their definition, Caprita should have been eligible to access her transcript. But she says she called and emailed the college repeatedly to no avail. She even asked to re-enroll in a new payment plan but college officials said their hands were tied and she would have to take up the matter with a collection agency.

“If they help me, I can help to pay them,” said Caprita, who is 44 years old and is hoping to join a Christian ministry. “If they withhold it from me, then I how can I ever pay them?”

Ashworth College did not respond to requests for comment.

A CFPB official acknowledged that it’s impossible to examine the policies of all of the thousands of colleges and universities across the country. The bureau has tried to make enough public statements for institutions to take note and change their policies without additional intervention, the official said. The agency has investigated some colleges for transcript withholding and made them change their practices but has not released any institution names publicly.

The education department’s rule on transcript withholding will go into effect in July 2024, joining other federal and state regulations meant to protect students from transcript withholding.

An education department spokesperson said that the agency plans to adjust its oversight procedures to ensure that schools that receive federal funding are following new regulations and that all student complaints alleging transcript withholding are investigated. Schools may eventually lose eligibility to receive federal student aid if they don’t comply with the new rule.

“It wouldn’t completely surprise me if one of the institutional reactions was, ‘We’re just going to stop doing this, period.’ ” 

Edward Conroy, senior policy advisor, New America

Despite the fact that the regulation only applies to students who have used federal money to pay for their education, advocates hope that colleges will respond in a broader way.

“It wouldn’t completely surprise me if one of the institutional reactions was, ‘We’re just going to stop doing this period,’ ” Conroy said. “The number of students who are paying completely out of pocket isn’t that big; you don’t want to have separate administrative systems.” 

Indeed, that’s what some policymakers have seen happen at the state level. Some states have only banned the practice at public institutions or for debts of up to a certain amount. In other cases, schools are only required to release transcripts for certain uses.

For instance, in 2022, Colorado passed a law prohibiting withholding transcripts from students requesting them for several reasons including needing to provide it to an employer, another college or the military. Carl Einhaus, a senior director at the Colorado Department of Education says that most institutions found it too burdensome to differentiate between which transcript requests were required by law to be honored and which weren’t and have opted to grant all requests.

“They’re not going to bother trying to figure out how to operationalize this very difficult thing to operationalize,” he said.

Starting next summer, the Colorado law also requires institutions to submit data about how many students requested transcripts and how many were withheld. Einhaus said that some schools initially resisted the new law, arguing that it would take away one of their main tools to recover money owed from students. “It will be interesting to see if this really is having an impact on the amount of debt they’re able to collect back,” he said.

But Brittany Pearce, a program manager at the higher ed consulting firm Ithaka S+R, is skeptical that withholding transcripts was ever an effective way to recoup debt. “From a really practical business sense, nobody is winning,” she said.

Correction: This story has been updated to remove the description of Ashworth as unaccredited. It is accredited by the Distance Education Accrediting Commission. 

This story about transcript withholding was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Check out our College Welcome Guide.

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To create our College Welcome Guide we relied on more than a dozen data sources. If you haven’t seen our tool, you can find it here. Read on to learn more about where the information comes from.

Campus-level data

All of the data other than what is shown on the maps or otherwise noted comes from IPEDS, the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. IPEDS data is reported directly by colleges to the U.S. Department of Education. Our dataset includes all two- and four-year colleges.

Figures for total enrollment and enrollment by race/ethnicity and gender show the 12-month unduplicated undergraduate student numbers in 2021-22, the latest year for which the information is available. When 12-month enrollment was unavailable, as was the case for enrollment by age and attendance status (part- or full-time), data from the fall 2021 semester has been used. Pell Grant enrollment data is from 2020-21.

Institutional affiliation indicates whether a private, nonprofit institution is associated with a religious group or denomination.

Graduation rates were calculated using the most recent five years of data. In the case of institutions for which those five full years were not available, the graduation rate was calculated from the available years. This figure represents the percentage of students who complete a bachelor’s degree within six years or an associate degree within three years.

The proportion of students with disabilities represents the percentage of undergraduates in the fall who formally registered with their institutions’ offices of disability services.

Under the IPEDS definition, a point of contact for veterans refers to whether a school has dedicated support services for veterans, military service members and their families. An institution is shown as having services for student veterans if it offers at least one of the following: the Yellow Ribbon Program, academic credit for military training or a recognized student veteran organization; or if it is a member of the Department of Defense Voluntary Education Partnership Memorandum of Understanding. The number of students receiving Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits and tuition assistance includes spouses and dependents. Only benefits awarded through or certified by the institution are shown.

Hate crimes are reported by institutions to the U.S. Department of Education and are defined as crimes for which there is evidence “that the victim was intentionally selected because of the perpetrator’s bias against the victim.” The data, which was downloaded from the department’s Campus Safety and Security Data Analysis Cutting Tool, includes hate crimes committed in any building owned or controlled by an institution or student organization or on any public property within or adjacent to a campus, such as streets, sidewalks and parking facilities.

Data about first-generation students came from the Department of Education’s College Scorecard, which gets it from the National Student Loan Data System. Under the federal definition, students are considered first generation if they do not have a parent who graduated with a four-year degree. First-generation status is self reported by the student.

Data about whether or not there is an LGBTQ+ student resource center on a campus comes from the Consortium of Higher Education LGBT Resource Professionals.

In addition to indicating which institutions are designated as historically Black, Hispanic-serving or affiliated with a religion, we used data from the MSI Data Project to show colleges and universities that have Black, Hispanic, Asian-American and Indigenous enrollments that exceed the proportion of the general population for those categories. We also used data from the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges to indicate which institutions are considered rural-serving, meaning they’re in rural places or serve students from those places.

State-level data

Information about whether a state allows undocumented immigrants residing in that state to pay in-state tuition comes from the Higher Ed Immigration Portal.

Veterans’ tuition status was determined on a state-by-state basis by a review of policies of public higher education institutions, as well as state higher education and veterans’ agencies.

States that restrict the teaching of critical race theory are tracked by PEN America. Legislatures that have constrained or banned the use of diversity, equity and inclusion programs were identified through legislative tracking services and news reports. Some states that have not yet limited or banned DEI have ordered that public universities disclose how much they spend on those programs. We included this measure because it is a step that has historically been a precursor for legislatures to cut public institutions’ budgets by those amounts.

Anti-LGBTQ+ laws affecting college students are monitored by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Trans Legislation Tracker. Anti-trans laws are those passed since 2022 and include legislation restricting trans athletes or medical procedures for trans people including those of college age.

Information on state laws allowing or restricting the use of student IDs to vote comes from the Voting Rights Lab.

LGBTQ+ Profile scores produced by the Movement Advancement Project are based on measures including the proportion of adults and of workers who are LGBTQ+ and a state’s policies and laws around LGBTQ+ issues.

Data from the Center for Reproductive Rights has been used to show abortion laws by state.

Download the data here.

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

The post How we made our College Welcome Guide appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

When Sarah Anderson travels to Texas middle schools to teach sex education, she brings props: a toy baby to represent unplanned pregnancy, a snake for bacterial infections, a pregnancy test for infertility, a skeleton for AIDS and cancer. 

The students are told that if they have sex before marriage, emotional risks include depression, guilt and anxiety. They’re taught that condoms — while often labeled as a method for “safe sex” — do not keep them safe from pregnancy or sometimes-incurable sexually transmitted infections. 

Her curriculum for high schoolers, meanwhile, says that people who “go from sex partner to sex partner are causing their brains to mold and gel so that it eventually begins accepting that sexual pattern as normal.” This, the curriculum says, could “interfere with the development of the neurological circuits” needed for a long-term relationship.

Anderson isn’t a school district employee. She works for the South Texas Pregnancy Care Center in Seguin, Texas, a group founded in 2001 to counsel women against getting abortions. The organization is one of dozens of crisis pregnancy centers across the state that send employees into schools to talk to students and, in some cases, teach sex education classes.

These groups, also known as pregnancy resource centers, began to sprout around the country in the late 1960s as states passed laws legalizing abortion. Sex education has sometimes been a feature of their work. But in Texas, which has among the most crisis pregnancy centers of any state and where state health standards dictate that sex education classes emphasize abstinence, those sex ed efforts are particularly widespread. A Hechinger Report investigation identified more than 35 examples of these centers involved in dozens of school districts across Texas, and the actual number is likely higher.

With the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade last summer and the near-total ban on abortion in Texas, crisis pregnancy centers are poised to play an even bigger role going forward. In April, the Texas state legislature approved $165 million over two years for the organizations through its Alternatives to Abortion program (recently rebranded as Thriving Texas Families), more than double the 2019 budgeted amount. The money funds the groups’ overall work, not sex ed, but went to at least 14 of the centers identified by Hechinger as working in schools.* 

“I’m concerned that our state is outsourcing sex education to outside groups with extreme political ideologies.”

Texas state representative and former middle school teacher James Talarico

The growing school-based work of some centers comes despite scant evidence that the sex ed they provide helps reduce teen pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections. According to public health experts, the approaches many of these groups take — such as emphasizing risks, inundating students with statistics and showing graphic pictures of STIs — aren’t effective in preventing or changing behavior. Instead, they can cause students to stop absorbing information that might help them make informed decisions about sex in the future. 

“You’ll tend to see that kind of overload on facts [that] steer into fear,” said Leslie Kantor, chair of the Department of Urban-Global Public Health at the Rutgers School of Public Health, in New Jersey. “We know very very well across many many health issues this is not what changes human behavior.”

Related: If more students become pregnant post-Roe, are we prepared to support them? 

Staff of crisis pregnancy centers argue that their approach works: Their students report directly to them or in internal surveys that they’ve changed their minds about having sex. Staff also say that their connections with schools grew out of a desire to teach young people how to avoid unplanned pregnancies in the first place, intervening before teens need their services. They say abstinence is the best, most effective way to prevent any risks associated with having sex and that they also teach students about healthy relationships and planning for their futures.

“We deal with unexpected pregnancies,” said Jennifer Shelton, the executive director of Real Options, a pregnancy resource center in Allen, which has taught sex ed in more than a dozen public school districts. “The best way to deal with that is at the beginning of the decision-making process.”

In Texas, sex education typically takes up just a few hours of instruction a year in a handful of grades, and many school districts use outside groups and online providers rather than hiring experts in-house or training their own staff. Sex ed curricula are recommended by councils made up primarily of parents and community members. Many pregnancy center programs, which tend to follow a “sexual risk avoidance” approach that in addition to stressing abstinence also includes discussion of birth control and the signs and symptoms of STIs, are offered for free and align with the Texas state standards requiring that abstinence be promoted as the “preferred choice.”

But some health experts, legislators and students say crisis pregnancy centers, which have been accused of offering women misleading or inaccurate information about abortion risks, have no place in public schools. They view the sex ed courses as a stealth way for the organizations to develop connections to teens so the young people will turn to crisis pregnancy centers if they do become pregnant later. 

State representative and former middle school teacher James Talarico has repeatedly introduced legislation to require all Texas districts to teach medically accurate sex education. “I’m concerned that our state is outsourcing sex education to outside groups with extreme political ideologies,” said Talarico, a Democrat who serves north Austin and surrounding areas. “If they are withholding information or emphasizing certain information to push an agenda on our kids, then that’s inappropriate.”

For three years as a student in Lewisville Independent School District, near Dallas, Nimisha Srikanth was taught by staffers of 180 Degrees, the education arm of Real Options. 

When she was in eighth grade, the group gave each student a cup and had them pour water back and forth, she said. The exercise was supposed to represent how easily they could become infected with an STI. Srikanth, who graduated from high school in 2019, said the classmates treated it as a joke and purposefully tried to maximize “infections.” 

In ninth grade, a lesson quickly derailed when the presenter started talking about how abstinence was best, and someone quipped, “I guess it’s too late for me.” The room erupted in laughter. The teacher “lost everybody’s attention after that,” Srikanth recalled.

Each year, she said, the message was always the same: “Don’t have sex before marriage. If you do, bad things will happen,” Srikanth said. “It’s so much fear-based, very opinion-based.” 

180 Degrees is among the state’s most widespread crisis pregnancy center-affiliated sex ed programs, noting on its website that it has sent presenters to 14 districts in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. In 2019, Real Options reached 18,329 students “with education presentations about sexual purity,” according to its federal tax filing.

In an emailed statement, Amanda Brim, the Lewisville district’s chief communications officer, said that 180 Degrees was never adopted districtwide, but individual schools could choose to use the program. In 2022, she wrote, Lewisville adopted a new sex ed program to meet updated state standards, which went into effect that year. 

Shelton, who taught for 180 Degrees for many years, said that her program avoids scare tactics, even if some of the statistics they share may be alarming, and that they are truthful with students about the risks associated with having sex. The program, she noted, covers many different topics beyond abstinence, including birth control, STIs and the emotional side to sex and relationships. 

Shelton said she believes that “no matter what side” people are on, they should agree abstinence is the best choice to prevent pregnancy and STIs. “We believe in raising the standard for young people,” she said. “They can and most likely will rise to that occasion.”

Related: Five things you need to know about sex ed in the US

The sex ed curriculum of 180 Degrees was one of six obtained by The Hechinger Report through public records requests and reviews of school and center websites. All of the pregnancy center curricula emphasize the potential harms of having sex and advocate waiting until marriage, suggesting that doing so will eliminate all risk. 

Seventh graders in 180 Degrees classes, according to a presentation for parents, are taught that there are 27 different STIs and that, with their various strains, the total number of sexually transmitted diseases nears 1,000. The curriculum used by South Texas Pregnancy Care Center, called SHARE, lists the potential consequences of STIs as pain and suffering, damage to organs, damage to babies, death, embarrassment and rejection.

LifeGuard, the sex ed program affiliated with the crisis pregnancy center The Source, in Austin and Houston, includes a series of graphic photos to give “a medically accurate understanding of how these STIs can impact a person’s health.” 

“They just tried to scare us,” said Samuel Ingram, a 2020 graduate of the Leander Independent School District, which says that it has used LifeGuard since 2005. Ingram added that he wished he had been given useful information on safe sex instead of being told “here’s what gonorrhea looks like, and you could have it forever.”

LifeGuard, whose curriculum says that it reaches 15,000 students annually, declined to comment for this article. Staff instructed two school districts not to provide copies of the group’s curriculum in response to Hechinger’s public records request. They also wrote to the attorney general seeking an exemption to the records law on the grounds that release of the material would “cause competitive harm” and that the curriculum contained trade secrets. The exemption was denied.

Alicia Westcot, Leander’s senior director of math, science and humanities, wrote in an email that the district uses LifeGuard because the program follows state health standards and has “created engaging content for our students at all grade levels.” She added that teachers have given positive feedback about having content experts come in to teach the courses.

Four public health experts who reviewed portions of the crisis pregnancy center curricula at the request of The Hechinger Report said the programs frequently fail to provide important context for students to assess the likelihood of various risks and that some parts were biased or misleading, including messaging on contraception effectiveness. 

The South Texas Pregnancy Care Center’s SHARE script, for example, instructs educators to tell students that teens don’t use condoms consistently because their brain is not fully developed. A copy of LifeGuard’s eighth grade curriculum instructs the presenter to read quickly through a list of bullet points about correct condom use to emphasize their number and then say, “Are you getting the idea of how consistent and correct use could be challenging?” 

While research on the effectiveness of sex ed is difficult to conduct, major  medical  organizations recommend comprehensive sex education — which typically discusses the benefits of delaying sexual intercourse along with information on methods for preventing pregnancy and STIs, gender identity and consent. They note that studies suggest such courses are more effective than abstinence-only programs at reducing teen pregnancy rates and increasing condom use if young people do choose to have sex, and that comprehensive sex ed produces other benefits, including improved interpersonal skills.

The sexual risk-avoidance approach that many crisis pregnancy centers use covers some content beyond abstinence. But health experts say the programs’ focus on the negative consequences of having sex before marriage echo strict abstinence-only approaches. 

“When we are able to show them a baby moving in the womb, it becomes a lot more tangible. This baby has its own heartbeat and fingers and toes and eyes and nose and is already developing a personality. When they can see that, suddenly things are different for them. It has planted a seed of life.”

Shannon Thompson, executive director, The Open Door, a pregnancy resource center in Cisco and Breckenridge  

They say this focus misses the chance to impart useful information and skills. Rather than presenting statistic after statistic about the ubiquitousness of STIs, for example, educators should make sure students feel equipped to talk with potential partners about protection, said Kantor. 

“If I have limited time with a young person, am I going to spend that time giving them a bunch of facts that are not very relevant to them in that moment, that frankly, if they were interested, they could look up on their phone?” Kantor said. Instructors “are making an unfortunate decision to spend precious time with a young person who really needs skills giving out what are probably going to be useless pieces of information.” 

In 2020, The Open Door, a crisis pregnancy center in Cisco and Breckenridge, tried something new. Its staff brought a mobile ultrasound unit and a volunteer pregnant woman to a school to perform a live ultrasound in front of students. 

Today, the center works with middle and high schoolers in 15 school districts in central Texas, providing education on sexuality and relationships and in some cases incorporating live ultrasounds into the instruction.

“When we are able to show them a baby moving in the womb, it becomes a lot more tangible,” said Shannon Thompson, The Open Door’s executive director. “This baby has its own heartbeat and fingers and toes and eyes and nose and is already developing a personality. When they can see that, suddenly things are different for them. It has planted a seed of life.” 

The live ultrasounds are part of a larger effort led by Thompson to “change the culture” beyond her organization’s walls, she said, rather than simply waiting for clients to come to them. Her staff tries to reach community members before they engage in “risky behavior,” teaching young people to feel empowered to “say no and mean it,” while also introducing her group as a safe place for people to turn to if they do get in trouble or become pregnant.

“I feel like it was almost a disservice to us. They might have gotten what they wanted and people to practice abstinence, but the people who didn’t weren’t really well-equipped with super good information.”

Samuel Ingram, graduate of the Leander Independent School District and Texas A&M Corpus Christi student 

To that end, The Open Door acquired a curriculum and hired an education liaison to teach sex ed in schools. Staffers have built relationships with school counselors, juvenile departments and camps, and they participate in an annual back-to-school bash.* This year, they adopted an additional curriculum to reach more grade levels and added a second education liaison to their staff, Thompson said. 

Under her leadership, Open Doors’ state funding is rising: In 2022, it received nearly $380,000 via the Alternatives to Abortion program, compared with approximately $102,000 in 2019.

Thompson said her group doesn’t engage in scare tactics, but rather focuses on “empowering” students to make smart decisions and recognize their self-worth by postponing sex.

“Student education has become a very, very important part of our focus,” Thompson said in April during a panel on her organization’s work at the annual meeting of Heartbeat International, a national network of pregnancy resource centers. “It’s a great way for us to begin to instill and teach and to educate these individuals on the pro-life message.”

Related: Inside the Christian legal campaign to return prayer to public schools

Other pregnancy center sex ed programs also use talking points associated with the anti-abortion movement and encourage students to visit their clinics.

The LifeGuard eighth grade curriculum, for instance, includes a game about fetal development in which students guess whether certain developmental milestones — such as the heart starting to beat and the brain beginning to function — occur at four, six or eight weeks. 

LifeGuard programs direct students to the affiliated clinic, The Source, if they need pregnancy tests or STI testing. “There are places like The Source that can provide all the information needed to make an informed decision about an unexpected pregnancy,” the curriculum reads. 

The Source received nearly $1.4 million in Alternatives to Abortion funding in 2022. Yet LifeGuard describes itself to parents and students as an “apolitical” program that doesn’t take a stance on controversial issues. Indeed, none of the crisis pregnancy center school curricula reviewed by The Hechinger Report contained explicit religious or anti-abortion content. 

But the groups do emphasize their religious values in other aspects of their operations, sometimes stipulating that job applicants be Christian and hold certain values. A LifeGuard job ad for a curriculum specialist noted that the new hire must have a “strong commitment and dedication to the sanctity of human life and sexual abstinence.” A job posting for an abstinence educator from 180 Degrees listed the top qualification as: “Pro-Life, Christ follower, and believes that the Bible is the inerrant word of God.”

“There is no public school district in the state of Texas that can legally screen educators based on their political beliefs. The fact that these organizations are hand-picking people that align with their extreme ideology should be incredibly concerning.”

James Talarico, Texas state representative and former middle school teacher 

Shelton of 180 Degrees said that while religion is “very important to us personally,” staff never bring “religious rhetoric” to the classroom or discuss abortion pros and cons, out of respect for students and a recognition that many come from different backgrounds. Similarly, Thompson said her group shares the “pro-life” message as “one option” but doesn’t take a “political stance” in schools. 

Speaking at the Heartbeat International conference, Thompson noted that it was, in fact, important for organizations like hers to avoid alienating young people with an anti-abortion, religious message. 

“If young women who could be your clients see you waving the pro-life flag loud and proud, remember they could feel like they can’t come to you,” said Thompson. “They are more likely to open up with you when they have a relationship with you, when they feel comfortable with you and feel like they can trust you.” 

Talarico, meanwhile, says it’s not enough for organizations to simply say that they are unbiased in the classroom. “There is no public school district in the state of Texas that can legally screen educators based on their political beliefs,” he said. “The fact that these organizations are hand-picking people that align with their extreme ideology should be incredibly concerning.”

The South Texas Pregnancy Care Center assures parents and educators that the religious beliefs that drive the group’s work do not influence its education program, SHARE.

“There is overlap between the message of abstinence from a health standpoint and the message of abstinence from a faith standpoint,” Anderson, the program’s lead teacher, said in a presentation to the Yorktown school district’s School Health Advisory Council, or SHAC, in spring 2022. “But that doesn’t discredit its value as the best message to give young people when it comes to their health,” she added. (Anderson declined interview requests for this story, but wrote in an email that many school districts had vetted and were happy with the SHARE curriculum and that it complied with state health standards.)

Related: Five things you need to know about sex ed in the U.S.

Part of Anderson’s job is to travel across central Texas attending SHAC meetings and pitching members, most of whom are district parents, on the advantages of choosing her sex ed program. The councils then make official recommendations to their school boards. 

And she’s been successful. South Texas Pregnancy Care Center’s SHARE program started in three schools in 2016; by the 2021-22 school year, two years after Anderson joined, its teachers were presenting in 10 schools.

After the 2022 meeting in Yorktown, she convinced the district to use SHARE, and this year added Seguin to the program’s growing list of districts. 

“It makes me so angry to see that crisis pregnancy centers are leading sexual education in the state and not healthcare professionals. They are taking advantage of one of the most vulnerable populations we have, which is young people.” 

Molly Davis, student, Texas A&M Corpus Christi

In that school district, Anderson plays an additional role — she serves on the SHAC. In April, at the group’s regular meeting, she encouraged its members to vote to endorse her SHARE curriculum, noting that it was one of just two under the council’s review that aligned with the state health standards. Moments later, council members voted to winnow their choices to those two, and a month later decided to officially recommend Anderson’s program. 

The case was one of two identified by The Hechinger Report of a pregnancy center employee who serves on a SHAC voting in favor of her own course, in what Talarico said appeared to be a “clear conflict of interest.” He said he plans to raise the issue with his colleagues to explore whether it needs to be addressed legislatively. 

Sean Hoffman, communications officer for the Seguin district, said that there was no evidence that Anderson had undue influence on the decision. 

“School districts and school boards have to rely on the pulse of their communities,” he said, adding that it can be difficult to find enough people to serve on SHACs and that the process of evaluating sex ed curricula took more than a year. “When folks come forward and say they want to serve, we’re going to accept them with the knowledge that the intent is to come on and do what’s best.” 

Related: Child care, car seats and other simple ways to keep teen moms in school 

Like many pregnancy resource centers, the South Texas Pregnancy Care Center has been expanding its work in the wake of the fall of Roe. This spring, it started construction on a new building, supported, in part, by donations from Seguin nonprofits and agencies. A construction class at Seguin High School is building the interior walls. 

Demand for its services is rising too. The center previously averaged around 20 pregnancy tests a month. In January 2023, it administered 41 tests, Janice Weaver, the group’s executive director, said at a city council meeting in February. “There is a big need in Seguin, and we are so excited about the possibility of a new building,” she said.

Other groups, including The Open Door, are starting prenatal care units, to position themselves as a resource for more women who need medical help. Open Door’s Thompson said the group is located in a medical desert, and it will help provide transportation for pregnant women to prenatal appointments and other support. “Abortion basically being outlawed in the state of Texas did not change the circumstances of the women who find themselves pregnant and scared and not knowing what their future looks like,” said Thompson. “If anything, it’s increased the need.” 

“Abortion basically being outlawed in the state of Texas did not change the circumstances of the women who find themselves pregnant and scared and not knowing what their future looks like. If anything, it’s increased the need.”

Shannon Thompson, executive director, The Open Door, a crisis pregnancy center that works with 15 school districts

Molly Davis is a senior at Texas A&M Corpus Christi and president of the college’s Islander Feminists club, which is leading a campaign against a crisis pregnancy center that’s expanding near campus. She said she’s troubled by the growing role of the groups in Texas and sees their work in schools as being of a piece with their larger efforts to persuade people, sometimes through misinformation, to carry pregnancies to term. 

“It makes me so angry to see that crisis pregnancy centers are leading sexual education in the state and not healthcare professionals,” said Davis, who has classmates who were taught by the groups. “They are taking advantage of one of the most vulnerable populations we have, which is young people. … They are teaching young people things to specifically lead them down roads they want them to walk down.” 

Related: Overturning Roe created new barriers, not just to abortion, but to OBGYN training

Texas has the ninth-highest teen birth rate of any state, 20.3 births per 1,000 females ages 15 to 19. And while teen birthrates have been falling in the U.S. as a whole since 1991, they remain among the highest in the developed world. 

Ingram, the student from Leander, recalls that several of his classmates went on to become pregnant in high school. 

“I feel like it was almost a disservice to us,” Ingram, now a senior at Texas A&M Corpus Christi where he is also a member of the Islander Feminists, said of the sex ed he received. “They might have gotten what they wanted and people to practice abstinence, but the people who didn’t weren’t really well-equipped with super good information.” 

Srikanth, meanwhile, says she didn’t learn useful information until she got to college at Texas A&M University and joined the campus group FREE (Feminists for Reproductive Equity And Education) Aggies. 

On a Monday morning in May, Srikanth spent two hours giving out free condoms, dental dams, pregnancy tests and Plan B in the student center. She assured people stopping by the table that they were in a “no judgment zone,” mindful that some of them likely had also had years of messages that sex was dirty and would give them a disease. 

Those middle and high school experiences helped shape her career plans: This fall, she began a master’s program at Yale University and hopes to work in the areas of sexual and reproductive health and justice.

She said, “I want people to have better information than I did growing up.” 

*Correction: This story has been updated with correct information on the Alternatives to Abortion program’s funding details and rebranded name. It has also been updated to clarify The Open Door’s involvement with the back-to-school event.

This story about sex education curriculum 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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The landscape of sex ed in the United States is confusing. What students are taught, and in what grades, varies widely from one school district to another. In many communities, how to talk with kids and teens about sex is hotly debated. Educators, parents, outside groups and state regulations all play a role in shaping sex ed curriculums.

Here’s what you need to know to understand the different kinds of sex ed programs and what’s taught in your district.

What are the different types of sex education?

There are four broad categories of sex ed: abstinence only, abstinence plus, sexual risk avoidance and comprehensive sex education. The first three typically promote postponing sexual activity until after marriage to avoid risks including pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections, while comprehensive sex education focuses on equipping students with skills for staying safe when they do choose to have sex.

That said, there is no single, agreed-upon definition for any of these terms. Designers of sex ed curriculums are responsible for labeling their own programs, and the distinctions between them can be blurry. For example, comprehensive sex education programs often present abstinence as the surest way to eliminate risks, while programs in any of the categories may include information on contraception, STIs and healthy relationships.

Related: ‘They just tried to scare us:’ How anti-abortion centers teach sex ed inside public schools

What are some of the main points of contention between different types of sex education?

The main differences between the various types of sex education are in the degree of emphasis on abstinence and the ways in which teen sex and premarital sex are discussed. But there are other differences as well. For example, comprehensive sex education often includes lessons on gender identity, while other forms of sex ed typically leave that information out.

Comprehensive sex education also often includes lessons on consent. While some sexual risk avoidance and abstinence plus programs also discuss this topic, many focus on so-called refusal skills. The concepts are related — both involve teaching students that they can say no to sex. But instruction on consent often includes teaching that people can agree to have sex, whereas proponents of refusal skills say that approach ends up telling teens how to “negotiate” for sex.

What grade is sex ed taught in schools and by whom?

This varies widely. Comprehensive sex education advocates argue that courses should start as early as kindergarten, with lessons on topics like personal boundaries and names for body parts. They also say that sex ed should be taught every year; a few states, like California and Oregon, require this. In many places, however, sex ed is only taught in a few grade levels and not until middle and high school. In some districts, it’s not taught at all.

In schools that do teach it, sex ed typically takes up a small portion of a student’s overall time in school and, when taught by school staff, is often incorporated into health, physical education or science classes. Outside providers of sex education curriculums are also common, including Planned Parenthood, crisis pregnancy centers and online programs.

Related: PROOF POINTS: The research evidence for sex ed remains thin

What types of sex education are most effective?

People on all sides of this question — from proponents of comprehensive sex education to sexual risk avoidance advocates to abstinence-only supporters — say that their approach works best and often point to research. All major medical organizations recommend comprehensive sex education. But it’s difficult to conduct quality research determining which programs succeed at reducing rates of teen sex or high-risk sexual behavior. You can find more on what we do and don’t know about sex ed effectiveness here.

How do I figure out what my kid is learning in sex ed and who is teaching it?

The first step is to ask your school or district what sex ed curriculum they are using, who developed it and who will be teaching it. In some places, including Texas, districts are required to show any parent who asks a copy of the curriculum. Outside providers also often have information for parents available on their websites, and some conduct presentations for parents in advance of teaching students.

Most states allow parents to opt their children out of sex ed, while some, including Arizona, Nevada, Utah and Texas, require parents to opt in. If you live in one of those states and you want your child to participate in sex ed classes, be aware that you’ll have to give permission in order for them to do so.

This story 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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Dora Bray Magilke had been unemployed for over a month when someone from her local career center in Branson, Missouri, reached out in the summer of 2020 with an offer. Magilke qualified for a government grant to go back to school, she was told, at a place the center suggested: an online company called MedCerts.

Having previously worked as a certified nursing assistant, Magilke leapt at the chance to move up in the medical field with the full $4,000 tuition for a medical-assistant training program covered. But she said she was never told that she needed in-person clinical training — which MedCerts did not provide — to make her a viable candidate for a job as a medical assistant. After finishing the roughly seven-month-long program and passing her certification exam in late 2021, she found that no one would hire her. Would-be employers told her she lacked the experience they required.

She asked MedCerts for help finding a clinical training placement, but said she was told the company could not help. She tried going back to the local career center, too. “They couldn’t do anything,” Magilke, now 53, said. “That’s a lot of wasted money in my eyes.”

MedCerts, which offers short-term training in industries like health care and information technology, is a large workforce training provider enrolling thousands of students annually. Like hundreds of similar programs, it receives millions in tuition dollars, not from traditional student aid, but from the Departments of Labor and Defense.

Since 2018, just 54 percent of people who attended WIOA-approved programs became employed at all after completing their program.

The appeal of training for a good job in a short program paid for by the government is obvious. But for hundreds of thousands of Americans like Magilke who have tried to take advantage of this, there is virtually no way to find out whether the programs actually lead to good jobs.

That’s because these schools aren’t eligible for federal student financial aid from the Department of Education, placing them in a sort of no man’s land of accountability.Students enrolling in traditional two- and four-year colleges can easily find graduation rates and can even get some employment data. But the Department of Defense does not release information on how many students complete specific programs for some of its grants – or even how much money the providers get. The Department of Labor does track and publish results, but the state and federal data on how many students finish a program and get jobs is often contradictory or is simply unavailable.

Related: Blurring the lines between education and workforce

Between 2018 and 2021, these schools took in more than $239 million in federal workforce grants from the Department of Labor — most of which went to for-profit institutions like MedCerts. On top of that, such schools received unspecified millions of dollars in tuition money from Department of Defense grants for military service members and their spouses.

“There isn’t enough oversight,” said Shalin Jyotishi, a senior analyst at the progressive think tank New America, adding that information about how students fare “is excruciatingly difficult to obtain for for-profit institutions.”

MedCerts, owned by the publicly traded corporation Stride, Inc., is approved to provide workforce training in more than 30 states. It promises quick, affordable paths to jobs; most courses take less than nine months to complete and cost less than $5,000. Yet it’s impossible to know how many MedCerts students finish their programs or how many of those who use taxpayer money to do so ultimately get jobs in the fields they trained for.

In an interview, Rafael Castañeda, vice president of workforce development at MedCerts, said that more than 85 percent of students who sit for certification exams pass them.

Asked repeatedly for specific graduation rates and employment rates, Castañeda replied only that the “vast majority” of students work in the field they studied and that in “our best-performing programs, completion rates are 86 percent.”

MedCerts, and other such providers, must submit data to state agencies, which use that information to decide whether to approve them for funding. The data in MedCerts’ applications to the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity, obtained through a public records request, shows that, at most, a third of students who went through MedCerts programs had a job of any kind a year after leaving. Castañeda said the data was imprecise because it was based on self-reported information. But MedCerts has told state regulators in Michigan, where the company is based, that “often times” students receiving federal grants fail to finish or to become employed because of “life obstacles.”

Related: Many certificate programs don’t pay off, but colleges want to keep offering them anyway

Michigan state officials said companies use such disclaimers to justify any exception to the required performance metrics. Department officials said that MedCerts had been meeting or exceeding its goals for the number of students who pass a certification exam.

Complicating matters further, agencies don’t track what kinds of jobs the students get, meaning they have no way of knowing whether the students ended up in the field they were studying. Magilke, for instance, began working as a medication aide while taking classes and still has that job. On paper, she would count as a win for MedCerts. But her job pays less than what she could earn as a medical assistant, the job she was training for. 

In 2021, the most recent year for which information is available, the government spent roughly $547 million on training for more than 220,000 people. 

“You’re still working in that same job that you were trying to get out of,” she said. “It’s just frustrating.”

The data about student performance is also rife with inconsistencies. For example, Michigan’s public website says that fewer than three students were enrolled in MedCerts’ phlebotomy technician program for the most recent one-year time period available. But MedCerts’ applications to the state indicate that, in the same time period, 60 students exited the program, 40 of whom completed it. And an unwieldy federal database says that 1,041 Michigan residents have exited MedCerts’ phlebotomy technician program over the past three years.

Officials at the federal Department of Labor said that states bear the responsibility for making sure their data is accurate. 

Local workforce boards play a crucial role in connecting students with training programs, including those funded by the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, known as WIOA. In 2021, the most recent year for which information is available, the government spent roughly $547 million on training for more than 220,000 people. The inspector general from the Department of Labor, which is primarily responsible for administering WIOA, audited a sample of participant data in 2020 and said it was not “accurate, valid and reliable.”

The data that does exist paints a bleak picture: Since 2018, just 54 percent of people who attended WIOA-approved programs became employed at all after completing their program, according to the Department of Labor.

Related: Impatient for workers, businesses help students take college shortcuts

Officials said the agency “does not regulate training providers or their programs” because states do. States are required to set goals for the training programs WIOA funds, including graduation and job placement rates. But these criteria are often so weak or poorly enforced that schools that fail to help a majority of students get a job, according to federal data, can continue to enroll new ones year after year.

Many local workforce boards don’t have enough staffers or the technology to track what’s effective, experts say.

“Some workforce boards are persistently under-resourced, and they lack an understanding of how to best use WIOA money,” said Justin Birch, program director of workforce development at the Rural Local Initiatives Support Corporation.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, companies like MedCerts, which received about $3 million through WIOA grants from 2018 to 2021, lobby local job centers to send students to their programs.

“I was under the impression that there would be an actual teacher uploading videos and that there would be a way for me to get in contact with that teacher to get better explanations.”

Jon Oue, former MedCerts student

In marketing materials, the company also promises students access to subject-matter experts, personal one-on-one mentoring and job search assistance. But Isa Partee, a former student success adviser for the company who had a caseload of about 500 students for the year she worked there, remembers feeling ill-equipped to help students understand the course material. She’d sometimes try to puzzle through the content with them, having nowhere else to send them for assistance. Partee said many students didn’t have access to a computer, despite having been admitted to an online-only program.

“It really started to feel like I wasn’t a student success adviser that genuinely cares about students’ overall success,” Partee said, which is why she quit.

Related: Are colleges finally going to start training students for the workforce?

Castañeda said MedCerts had “more than tripled the size of our team and increased the training and level of proactive program support” since Partee left the company in November 2021. While subject matter experts are available to students, he said, the courses are designed for them to progress on their own.

“The need to talk to a faculty member, if you will, is somewhat redundant,” he said.

That’s not how Jon Oue understood it. As the Covid pandemic and widespread unemployment raged in the summer of 2020, Oue, an Army specialist, was looking for a job that would earn him a decent paycheck when he left the military.

“I was Googling classes I could take, and MedCerts popped up. It said it was quick and easy and interactive,” said Oue from his home in Georgia. “It said you could talk to an instructor and it doesn’t take long.” He enrolled in the PC Technician program using an Army grant administered through the Department of Defense.

Significant federal funding for workforce training programs like those MedCerts offers comes from military grants, including a military spousal benefit known as MyCAA and the grant Oue used. And these grants receive even less oversight than WIOA’s; no information is collected about how many students get jobs or continue their education elsewhere. 

Army officials said they do not track how much funding it directs to individual providers; Department of Defense officials said information on the spousal grant was not public. MedCerts has enrolled more MyCAA students than almost any other school or training program in the country, though, with nearly 16,000 having attended.

Oue’s problems with MedCerts began almost immediately. Delivery of his textbook was delayed, and he had questions about the material.

Related: PROOF POINTS — Number of students enrolled in job-focused degree programs dropping by double digits

“When I signed up, I was under the impression that there would be an actual teacher uploading videos and that there would be a way for me to get in contact with that teacher to get better explanations,” said Oue, 23. “That wasn’t the case.”

Instead, he was assigned a career counselor to answer questions. MedCerts officials said Oue’s counselor offered career support services such as resume assistance and interview coaching — not what Oue said he needed.

Between August 2020 and January 2021, Oue said he tried to reach his counselor several times with questions about the course material, but she responded only twice — and once was to tell him whether he needed to pass the state licensing exam to graduate from the course.

The answer to that was no. He worked hard to finish the course, in part to make sure he didn’t have to reimburse the military for the tuition, he said, but never learned enough to enable him to take the state licensing exam.

“I didn’t understand enough,” he said. “There was no way I could have passed the state test. It was just a big waste of my time.”

This story about workforce training programs was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.

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