Education

Why More States Don't Have Universal Pre-K

By Monica Potts

Feb. 3, 2023, at 1:07 PM

California is in the middle of implementing a plan that will create a free, universal pre-K program (known as transitional kindergarten) for every 4-year-old in the state by the 2025-2026 school year. It sounds like a big, blue state priority, but it’s also a red state one. California will join states like West Virginia, Alabama and Oklahoma in aiming to provide universal preschool programs that serve all of their states’ 4-year-olds.

Welcome to the weird, patchwork world of preschool politics. 

Both parties seem to agree that spending money to educate young children is a worthwhile mission, and there’s plenty of evidence that it is. Yet national plans for preschool programs have stalled in Congress. So, governors and state legislatures are taking the lead. During the current legislative term, at least 14 states are discussing preschool expansion.¹ But how states choose to do that can vary widely, making uneven contributions to an already uneven system.

Over the past decade, more and more research has found that investing in early childhood education can provide long-term benefits for children that far outweigh its short-term costs. That’s especially true for children from families who cannot currently afford to send them to preschool. Policymakers, advocates and researchers hope that making these programs universal and attaching them to existing public school systems will improve their reach, prove easier for families to enroll in and improve educational quality and teacher pay.

It’s the universal part that is at issue. All but four states — Idaho, Montana, South Dakota and Wyoming — have a state-run preschool program that reaches some students, but the scope of each varies. The programs usually target specific populations, either in certain cities or certain populations of students, like children from low-income families or with special education needs.

There are several different measures of how many kids are in preschool, but each shows there are many more kids who could be there. The National Institute for Early Education Research said that approximately 39 percent of 4-year-olds were enrolled across Head Start, state-funded preschool and early childhood special education public programs nationwide during the 2020-2021 school year.  NIEER and other research and advocate groups consider a program to be universal when its enrollment reaches 70 percent of all 4-year-olds in the state.²

Not all preschool programs are the same, of course. In general, as with other levels of education, the advocates and researchers I spoke with defined high-quality as having:

• Teachers who are educated at least through college; 
• Opportunities for continued professional development so they can stay updated on the latest education research; 
• Small class sizes and teaching assistants so that classroom student to teacher ratios remain low; 
• And quality materials and curriculum. 

Usually, that means more money, which makes hitting those targets even more difficult for states. Especially since there won’t be a new spigot of money specifically for preschool coming from the federal government. State budgets have been recently bolstered by COVID-19 stimulus packages, but that funding will disappear over the next few fiscal years. 

From the start of his tenure, President Biden has championed early childhood education. Universal, publicly funded pre-K for 3- and 4-year-olds became part of the “social infrastructure” priorities that were included in his Build Back Better Plan. The plan initially proposed funding preschool programs through the public school systems, with the federal government picking up the entire tab in the program’s first three years. The size and scope of the plan was whittled down as it worked its way through the House, passing in November 2021 before dying in the Senate. 

Now, many governors are pressing ahead, and Democrats are using Biden’s unpassed plan as a guide. Last spring, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis signed a universal preschool bill into law. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer announced a plan for pre-K for all 4-year-olds in her state-of-the-state address last week. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker promised state-funded preschool for every 3- and 4-year-old during his inauguration in January. Similar promises have come from governors in Arizona, Hawaii, Maryland, and New Mexico. Most of these plans are in the early stages, and governors say that increasing funding and classroom capacity for the new grades is a multi-year process. 

Build Back Better was an inspiration for California’s design, as well. “In California, people were looking to what was in that package and what was coming from the federal government and decided, like a lot of other states, that we were going to make this a priority,” said Hanna Melnick, a senior policy advisor at the Learning Policy Institute. “There was long standing support and pressure from advocates in the legislature, and then the governor's office, that all came together to make that possible, even without federal funding.” The state already has a state-funded preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds that is smaller and more targeted, as well as the federally funded Head Start, which is limited to children from families living in poverty. This new program will exist alongside those.

Republican governors are taking up the cause in many states, as well. Alabama, which earns top marks from NIEER for the quality of its programs, is opening up new classrooms this year as it moves toward a goal of 70 percent enrollment. A Mississippi lawmaker has vowed to introduce a bill to expand his state’s small preschool program over the next five years. Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders listed early childhood education as one of her education priorities, the subject of an executive order she signed on her first day in office.

All this action from Republicans comes despite their party resistance to Biden’s nationwide proposal. Federalism, as always, has been the issue. Republicans did not like the quality standards that would have been mandated by Biden’s plan, as well as the shift from federal to state funding over the years of the proposal. Now, as states cobble together their own plans, state programs are likely to be quite different from one another.

Money will be one reason why. Programs that would aim to recreate Biden’s plan will be very expensive for states implementing them on their own. Alabama has been able to meet NIEER’s quality benchmarks by starting small and slowly expanding, while a program like California’s is instead focused on bringing in as many children as possible, said Allison Friedman-Krauss, as assistant research professor at NIEER. “The smaller programs are sometimes able to meet more of the benchmarks in that they're investing in fewer kids.” More of these states are trying to improve quality over time, she said.

Staffing and teacher pay will be a problem nationwide. Gov. Gavin Newsom did increase California’s education spending by 13 percent in his most recent budget, but the increase is spread across priorities that range from raises in teacher pay to boosting state college financial aid. Some districts have said it is stretching resources.

“What we're looking at is no matter how you cut it, there's just a major workforce expansion that needs to happen,” Melnick said of the California program. There’s also the question of how the expansion of California’s new transitional kindergarten program will affect an already strained workforce in other early childhood education and childcare programs, since the new program’s teachers will earn more, she said.

All of this is why many advocates hope to see the return of some or all of the components of Build Back Better. The COVID-19 recovery plans created additional money for education, but that extra money is waning just as states face a possible economic slowdown. 

Education

Teaching In The Age Of AI Means Getting Creative

By Zoha Qamar

Jan. 23, 2023, at 6:00 AM

Alarm bells seemed to sound in teachers’ lounges across America late last year with the debut of ChatGPT — an AI chatbot that was both easy to use and capable of producing dialogue-like responses, including longer-form writing and essays. Some writers and educators went so far as to even forecast the death of student papers. However, not everyone was convinced it was time to panic. Plenty of naysayers pointed to the bot’s unreliable results, factual inaccuracies and dull tone, and insisted that the technology wouldn’t replace real writing.  

Indeed, ChatGPT and similar AI systems are being used in realms beyond education, but classrooms seem to be where fears about the bot’s misuse — and ideas to adapt alongside evolving technology — are playing out first. The realities of ChatGPT are forcing professors to take a long look at today’s teaching methods and what they actually offer to students. Current types of assessment, including the basic essays ChatGPT can mimic, may become obsolete. But instead of branding the AI as a gimmick or threat, some educators say this chatbot could end up recalibrating the way they teach, what they teach and why they teach it. 

At Santa Clara University this month, 32 students began a course called “Artificial Intelligence and Ethics” where the usual method of assessment — writing — would no be longer in use. The course is taught by Brian Green, who also serves as director of the university’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, and in lieu of essays, he’ll be setting up one-on-one sessions with each student to hold ten-minute conversations. He said it doesn’t take any more time to evaluate that than to grade an essay.

“In that context, you really remove any possibility of text-generating software. And in talking to them, it really becomes all about whether they understand the material,” he said.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/epa-finally-addressing-4-dangerous-forever-chemicals-4000-95750270

But such an approach may not be realistic in all educational contexts, especially in schools where resources are scarcer and teacher-to-student ratios are worse. 

On some campuses, the response to such technology has simply been to restrict access. Earlier this month, the New York City Department of Education announced that ChatGPT would be banned on networks and devices throughout its public schools. “While the tool may be able to provide quick and easy answers to questions, it does not build critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, which are essential for academic and lifelong success,” a department spokesperson said in a statement. 

And the country’s largest public-school system isn’t alone: Educators at different levels across the world have aired their concerns, and other districts in the U.S., like the Seattle public-school system, have also restricted the technology.

But such bans are hardly a solution. Anyone with access to a smartphone — such as 95 percent of Americans between the ages of 13 and 17, according to Pew Research Center polling conducted last spring — can easily bypass these restrictions without needing a school computer or campus Wi-Fi. 

And some teachers told FiveThirtyEight they see bans on ChatGPT as misguided responses that misunderstand what the tool can and cannot provide. 

“ChatGPT may have better syntax than humans, but it’s shallow on research and critical thinking,” said Lauren Goodlad, a professor of English and comparative literature at Rutgers University and the chair of its Critical Artificial Intelligence initiative. She said she understands where concern about the tool is coming from but that — at least at the college level — the type and caliber of written tasks that ChatGPT can offer does not replace critical thinking and human creativity. “These are statistical models,” she said. “And so they favor probability, as in they are trained on data, and the only reason they work as well as they do is that they are looking for probable responses to a prompt.”

These point to limitations that stifle chatbots’ originality, such as how statistical models favor using more common words at the expense of rarer ones that human authors might use. Goodlad also pointed out that, for now, the tool is not always accurate. For example, ChatGPT is prone to “hallucinations” — or providing false sources and quotations. 

It’s those kinds of markers that may also currently help teachers not only catch students attempting to pass ChatGPT-generated text off as their own writing, but also institute measures that encourage students to do the work themselves. Some suggestions that she and her colleagues have outlined include asking students to reference class discussions in their work, to attach a reflection video or blurb of why they chose the writing points they did and to require that specific rhetorical skills appear in the piece.

But it’s most important that schools evolve by changing what they emphasize in their syllabi, Goodlad said, suggesting that educators instead lean into teaching methods and written assessments that underscore critical thinking. Otherwise, these approaches could quickly become outdated. 

“The entire space has essentially become an arms race,” Green said, adding that anti-cheating technology remains in perpetual competition with the technology to circumvent it, as has been the case for years with plagiarism detectors like TurnItIn. The dynamic with ChatGPT will likely follow the same pattern. For example, earlier this month, Princeton student Edward Tian revealed that he’d developed software to detect ChatGPT-written work. And while the news did enjoy some praise, many also see it as merely a stopgap measure. 

“These tools are only going to get more advanced,” said Hod Lipson, a professor of mechanical engineering and Data Science at Columbia University. “This is not unlike the beginning of the internet or Wikipedia. And it would have been a mistake to prohibit students from using Wikipedia or Google search, right?” The question is not whether to ban the technology but how to evolve alongside it, he said.

Lipson is trying to integrate ChatGPT and similar technologies in his teaching. For example, in his introductory robotics course this semester, he’ll be asking his students to use DALL-E — an image-generating software developed by ChatGPT’s parent company, OpenAI, and underpinned by similar tech — to help ideate their initial sketches for the robotics project they’ll work on throughout the term. “With just a few keywords,” he said, “it takes the machine about 25 seconds to generate maybe 25 designs or concepts — something that would have otherwise taken students a week to produce.” 

In lieu of bans, then, the future of teaching may be some combination of new methods utilizing tools like ChatGPT and older approaches — like pen-and-paper exams, as some Australian universities are bringing back — that help regulate students’ reliance on technology. 

And many educators, no matter their current approaches to ChatGPT, continue to lean into the optimism that such technology will ultimately push us to get at the heart and soul of what it means to educate, with a focus on deeper comprehension rather than simply developing a skill. 

“We know calculators exist,” said Green. “But we still teach math.”

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/californias-senate-primary-doozy-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-96493536

Education

Conservatives Are Bringing An Old Policy to A New Fight Over Public Schools

By Monica Potts

Jan. 19, 2023, at 11:47 AM

School vouchers, which use public funds to send some students to private schools, are more than 30 years old. But this year, bills are being introduced around the country that would push school vouchers into a new frontier. 

While traditionally, vouchers and similar programs have been used for specific student populations, more states are seeking to create what’s known as education savings accounts. These accounts would grant money to each public school student under 18 and give it outright to parents to spend as they see fit, allowing them to spend the funds on a range of education expenses that include traditional private schools, but also religious schools, online schools and approved costs for homeschooled children. In the past, education savings accounts have been open to limited populations, like special needs K-12 students, but many of these new bills would make the programs open to everyone, regardless of a family’s ability to pay. 

Advocates have been pushing for education savings accounts, also sometimes called universal school vouchers, for at least a decade, but recent political changes have made them likelier to succeed than ever. They are empowered by a Supreme Court decision last summer allowing people to use taxpayer-funded tuition assistance for religious schools, along with attacks on teachings related to race and gender identity from right-leaning politicians that have eroded support for public schools, especially among Republican voters. 

Public school advocates argue the plans amount to an attack on the foundational idea of public education itself, in effect transferring a public good to a private benefit, and are driven more by culture-war concerns than the educational needs of students. If more states establish these education savings accounts, it could radically change public education, and how American families experience schools could vary a great deal based on where they live and who governs. 

That’s true in Iowa, where lawmakers held a hearing on the proposed legislation on Tuesday. State residents stepped forward to speak out for and against the plan during the hearing, which was streamed online and lasted more than an hour and a half. When a 12-year veteran of teaching approached the microphone, he echoed a common criticism: that the education savings plan will take desperately needed resources away from public schools.

On the other side, Jennifer Turner, a parent and supporter of the accounts, made it clear that she was far more worried about culture than cash. “I hear others talk about how great public schools are, but they’re underfunded,” she said. “That’s not why most of us parents want to move our children out of the public schools. It’s the new curriculums and social, emotional learning and social justice and all of the things that are brought into our schools that don’t align with our values.” 

A similar bill failed in the state legislature last year, but now Republicans have supermajorities in both chambers and a governor who has prioritized the cause. Republican confidence in the bill is so high that it was the first bill introduced in the Iowa House this term. It was passed by committees in both chambers of the state legislature Wednesday, the day after the hearing.³ And legislators in at least 10 more states have introduced bills expanding or creating such programs, and more are reportedly considering them for the current term.

These bills are coming amid a broader effort among some Republican politicians and right-leaning advocates to give parents a greater voice in their children’s education. “The public schools are waging war against American children and American families,” Christopher Rufo, the documentary filmmaker turned activist, told New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg in November 2021. 

Efforts to expand school vouchers and programs like education savings accounts have been blocked by state courts in the past. But now, with the Supreme Court’s ruling, states are revisiting those plans. Arizona and West Virginia implemented the broadest plans in the nation recently.

In a 2020 speech, Betsy DeVos, former President Donald Trump’s education secretary, framed her push for these programs as a way to give parents power. “The ‘Washington knows best’ crowd really loses their minds over that. They seem to think that the people’s money doesn’t belong to the people,” she said. “That it instead belongs to ‘the public,’ or rather, what they really mean — government.” DeVos’s organization, the American Federation for Children, now advocates broadly for “school choice,” and supports education savings accounts. Details and numbers vary, but the general idea of the education savings accounts is that each parent receives the money the state would otherwise spend on their children, and let parents decide how to spend it instead.

Tools that allowed parents to use government funding to pay for private schools were first introduced in Milwaukee in 1990, but in the beginning they were used almost exclusively for kids with disabilities who had needs local schools couldn’t meet, families with low incomes, and children in high-poverty school districts. Eventually, this expanded to include students who were enrolled in schools deemed failing under the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act.

Now those limits are being removed. For example, the Iowa program, if it passes, would only be available to children in families who earn less than about $84,000 a year (up to three times the federal poverty line). But after three years, the program would open to all families, regardless of income. Those who are organizing against these bills argue that the money to reimburse or subsidize middle-class and wealthy families would come at the expense of already insufficient public education funding, while simultaneously failing to provide low-income families with enough money to cover the cost of private education outright. Nationwide, the average cost of private K-12 tuition is more than $12,000 per year.  

Legislators are also helped by falling support for public schools, especially among Republican voters. A Pew Research Center survey from August 2021 found that just 42 percent of Republicans thought public schools had a positive effect on the way things are going in the country today. A year later, Gallup found that 55 percent of those surveyed said they were dissatisfied with the quality of K-12 education in the United States, while 42 percent were satisfied. In an open-ended question, the fourth-most-cited reason for this dissatisfaction was “political agendas being taught.” 

School funding is more complicated than a per-pupil allocation. Public schools rely on tax dollars contributed to state general funds by all taxpayers and from the federal government, and distribute them based on a district’s enrollment and needs. They are also obligated to educate all students. If enrollment drops because parents withdraw their children from public schools, a district’s budget could fall. That is most likely to hurt children from families with low incomes or who live in neighborhoods that lack non-public options.

Indeed, opposition to these school choice programs have sometimes come from Republicans representing rural districts in very rural states, where public schools are often the only option and a major employer. In other states, such as Texas and Tennessee, school-choice advocates have floated the idea of exempting rural districts from the voucher programs and concentrating their efforts only on cities, potentially draining urban districts — with diverse, and sometimes high-poverty student populations — of students and cash. 

Democrats, long opposed to school vouchers, are also opposed to educational savings accounts. President Biden’s secretary of education, Miguel Cardona, has advocated for increased school funding and expanded public schools. Democratic governors around the country echo these priorities, including spending more on improving school facilities and improving teacher pay.

But in many states, Republican leaders are leaning into the culture war aspect. Some have already passed legislation banning critical race theory, a legal framework for understanding systemic racism that is not often taught in public K-12, and many more are reaffirming their anti-CRT positions this year, along with rules surrounding gender expression and education. Advocates are also demanding further “curriculum transparency” and “Parents’ Bill of Rights” legislation, which often means a power to view classroom instruction and remove their child from a lesson if they disagree with a topic.

These moves come after a decade of decreases in school funding across the country and teacher strikes and protests for higher pay from West Virginia to Oklahoma. “We’ve all just lost so much over the last 12 years that we just don’t even know what a fully funded classroom would even feel like,” said Beth Lewis, a former teacher who works with Save Our Schools Arizona.

As these fights continue to unfold this year, they further enmesh public education itself in America’s broader political wars.

With one week left until Election Day, we are analyzing some of the high-profile races and which issues Americans value most as they enter the voting booth. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew discuss how voters have responded to Mehmet Oz and John Fetterman’s performances in the Pennsylvania Senate debate last week. Then, they review the final ranking of the most important issues for voters surveyed in the final pre-election installment of FiveThirtyEight’s collaboration with Ipsos.

Lastly, the team breaks down why Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams is underperforming in the FiveThirtyEight midterm forecast compared to the last gubernatorial election and what future Democratic stars in purple states can learn from her.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

There are just two weeks until Election Day, and according to the FiveThirtyEight midterm forecast, the race for the Senate has been a “dead heat.” In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew discusses whether the airtime reservations for each party’s Senate campaign ads are impacting the forecast’s shift. Then, Equis Research co-founder Carlos Odio joins the pod to break down a new Ipsos poll that asked Latino Americans which party they favor in the midterm elections.

Lastly, the team analyzes how an educational divide is shaping American politics and how a college diploma can influence an individual’s beliefs and preferences.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

Education

Americans Don’t Want Books Banned, But They’re Divided Over What Schools Teach

By Zoha Qamar

Aug. 26, 2022, at 6:00 AM

Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup.

Recently, an image that listed books banned in Florida libraries and schools began making the rounds on Twitter. The 25 titles, spanning classics from “To Kill a Mockingbird” to “A Wrinkle in Time,” caught the eyes of many, including Randi Weingarten, who is president of the American Federation of Teachers, a major teacher’s labor union in the U.S.

Only one problem: The list was fake. There is no banned-book list at the state level in Florida.

This isn’t to say that books haven’t been banned in Florida public schools. Earlier this year, the nonprofit organization PEN America reported that between July 2021 and March 2022, they’d found over 200 instances of book banning across seven Florida school districts. It’s just that these bans usually don’t include books like “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Rather, many of the books that banned in some districts in Florida — and elsewhere — are books that tackle race, gender identity and sexual orientation.

Lately, Republican-controlled states like Florida have experienced increased efforts to ban books that touch on these issues. In 2019, the American Library Association tracked 377 challenges to materials in schools, libraries and universities, and in 2021, the ALA tracked 729 — an increase of over 90 percent. And as we head into a new academic year, some students are already attending schools where their reading options are now more restricted. In Keller, Texas, for example, over 40 books have been banned this year, including a graphic-novel adaptation of “The Diary of Anne Frank” as well as multiple texts with LGBTQ characters. And in some parts of the country, there aren’t book bans, per se, but community members can challenge any book taught in schools that they find to be inappropriate.

Yet polls suggest that most Americans aren’t on board with banning books, not even those on controversial topics. In February, a CBS News/YouGov poll found that 87 percent of Americans opposed bans on books that discuss race, and the same share opposed bans on books depicting slavery. This aligns with two other polls from this year: A UChicago Harris/AP-NORC survey from March found that only 12 percent of Americans supported schools banning books that concern “divisive topics,” and a March poll by Hart Research Associates/North Star Opinion Research, on behalf of the ALA, found that 71 percent of voters opposed efforts to remove books from public libraries.

In fact, the ALA poll found little difference between Republicans (70 percent) and Democrats (75 percent) on the issue. Similarly, that CBS News/YouGov poll found that Americans on both sides of the political aisle were opposed to banning books, although it also found stark differences when it came to how issues of race should be taught in the classroom, and it’s this divide that has muddied the banned-book debate currently raging in schools.

For instance, even though there isn’t evidence that critical race theory, an academic legal framework asserting that racism is systemic and embedded in many American institutions, is being taught in classrooms across the U.S., many parents are worried that it is being taught thanks to Republican politicians’ and conservatives’ messaging on the topic. And as that CBS/YouGov poll found, Republicans have a very negative view of critical race theory, with 86 percent viewing it unfavorably, compared with 81 percent of Democrats who viewed it favorably. Moreover, in a YouGov poll published this week, Americans were asked how concerned they were about 17 different issues facing their local schools, and Republicans said they were most concerned that students were being “indoctrinated with liberal ideas” (62 percent), while Democrats said they were most concerned about book bans (57 percent).

But despite the partisan differences over education in public schools, it isn’t currently a top issue for many voters in this year’s midterms. Earlier this month, the Pew Research Center asked registered voters about the importance of 15 issues to their vote this fall, and while 58 percent did consider education “very important,” that result was clustered among a few others like gun policy (62 percent), voting policies (59 percent) and Supreme Court appointments (58 percent). The No. 1 issue was the economy, with 77 percent saying it was very important to their vote.

Ultimately, education may not be the top priority that Americans expect to influence their vote this November, but it remains a controversial topic. And if the overwhelming unpopularity of book bans is any measure, the issue could still influence how voters make their decisions.

Other polling bites 

• A YouGov poll conducted Aug. 24 found that over half of Americans “strongly” (37 percent) or “somewhat strongly” supported (20 percent) President Biden’s recent decision to forgive $10,000 of student loan debt for Americans earning less than $125,000. Support rose to 80 percent among Democrats, while only 35 percent of Republicans supported the decision. Opinions were also skewed heavily by age, with 30- to 44-year-old Americans voicing the most support (66 percent) and those over 65 most likely to oppose the news. 
• When it comes to eating out and how Americans get their groceries, concerns about the pandemic largely seem to have abated. Dining out is on the rebound, with 83 percent saying they now eat at restaurants once a month or more, compared to 87 percent in 2019 and 74 percent in 2021, according to a July 5-26 Gallup survey. Meanwhile, almost all Americans also said they shop for groceries in person at least weekly (82 percent) or monthly (15 percent). That’s comparable to pre-pandemic data, although the coronavirus does seem to have changed at least some Americans’ grocery habits for good: Twenty-eight percent now say they now order groceries online at least once a month, up slightly from last year (23 percent) and considerably from 2019 (11 percent).
• Following Kansas’s referendum on abortion earlier this month, a Navigator Research poll found that a clear majority (60 percent) of Americans self-identified as “pro-choice,” while only about a third identified as “pro-life.” Notably, there’s a distinct divide among racial groups, though, with a lower share of white Americans (57 percent) who were pro-abortion-rights compared to Black Americans (65 percent), Hispanic Americans (66 percent) and Asian American/Pacific Islander Americans (68 percent). And unsurprisingly, there continue to be party divides, although gender is also a significant factor among independents. Asked where they’d stand if a similar referendum took place in their own state, Democratic men (87 percent), Democratic women (85 percent) and independent women (75 percent) were far more likely to say they’d vote in favor of protecting abortion rights than independent men (48 percent), Republican women (40 percent) and Republican men (35 percent). 
• While a Morning Consult analysis from last year suggested reality TV is increasing in popularity, recent data from YouGov found a split in whether Americans prefer watching it or potentially starring in it. Only about a fifth said they’d be very (10 percent) or somewhat interested (11 percent) in appearing on a dating reality show, as opposed to 62 percent who were not interested at all. Those numbers tick up a little in the context of a makeover reality show: Thirty-two percent said they’d be very or somewhat interested versus 49 percent who voiced no interest at all. And enthusiasm trends upward even more for home-renovation reality shows, with half of Americans saying they’d be interested in participating and only 34 percent reporting no interest at all. So much for Bachelor Nation. 

Biden approval

According to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker,⁴ 41.5 percent of Americans approve of the job Biden is doing as president, while 53.8 percent disapprove (a net approval rating of -12.3 percentage points). At this time last week, 40.5 percent approved and 54.8 percent disapproved (a net approval rating of -14.3 points). One month ago, Biden had an approval rating of 37.7 percent and a disapproval rating of 57.1 percent, for a net approval rating of -19.4 points.

Generic ballot

In our average of polls of the generic congressional ballot,⁵ Democrats currently lead by 0.4 percentage points (44.0 percent to 43.6 percent). A week ago, Democrats led Republicans by 0.5 points (43.9 percent to 43.4 percent). At this time last month, voters preferred Republicans by 1.1 points (44.2 percent to 43.1 percent).

Since January 2021, 11 states have enacted laws limiting how teachers can talk about race and racism in schools, and close to 200 bills have been introduced in 40 states. What are these laws actually doing? What is their impact in the classroom and at the ballot box? And why has this issue become such a focus in our politics?

In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Galen Druke discusses these questions with Theodore R. Johnson, the director of the Fellows Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

Education

Why Trans Rights Became The GOP's Latest Classroom Target

By Jean Yi

Graphics by Elena Mejía

May 12, 2022, at 6:00 AM

In 2016, North Carolina passed its infamous “bathroom bill”, which prevented transgender people from using public bathrooms that aligned with their gender identity. Today, anti-trans legislation is taking aim at children. Dozens of states have introduced bills limiting transgender students’ participation on school sports teams that match their gender identity. Thirteen states, all Republican-leaning, have passed such bills in the last two years, turning an issue that affects less than 1 percent of the country’s youth into the latest battle in the culture wars.

But the current push to restrict trans rights goes beyond athletics — Republicans are also increasingly pushing to restrict trans rights in the classroom.

Using data from the American Civil Liberties Union, Freedom for All Americans and the Human Rights Campaign,⁶ as well as additional bills found in the course of my research, I identified 40 bills introduced since January 2021 that seek to restrict how gender and gender identity are taught at schools. Bills ranged from requiring parental consent or notification before teaching these subjects to limiting these topics for students in certain grades to outright prohibiting learning about gender identity.⁷ Other bills prevent students from using different names and pronouns without parental consent or remove antidiscrimination guidelines.

Moreover, underscoring just how closely this movement is linked to the push around banning critical race theory — an academic legal framework that asserts that racism is systemic and embedded in many American institutions — in the classroom, 13 of these bills also included language restricting how schools can teach about race and racism. Several bills targeted critical race theory directly, despite the fact that critical race theory is not taught in K-12 schools.

Limiting or banning classroom discussions is “going to have just an enormous chilling effect to prohibit teachers from being able to really have any kind of conversation whatsoever … effectively, they’re not going to be able to talk about LGBTQ people at all,” said Cathryn Oakley, the state legislative director for the Human Rights Campaign.

Reading the text of these bills is like a Cliffs Notes summary of all the ways in which education has become a wedge issue. Of the 13 bills that limit both how gender and gender identity and race and racism are talked about in the classroom, three proposed bills — in Rhode Island,⁸ South Carolina⁹ and West Virginia¹⁰ — explicitly ban schools from teaching The New York Times’s 1619 Project, which has long been a target of right-wing attacks in schools. There is also an Oklahoma bill¹¹ that proposes to ban books in public school libraries “that make as their primary subject the study of lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender issues.”

These fights of what can — and can’t — be taught in schools aren’t new. “Schools have been a site of many political battles and many political interventions,” said Adrienne Dixson, a professor of education at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, citing the historical examples of Brown v. Board of Education (a landmark Supreme Court case that banned racial segregation in public schools) and legal battles over providing bilingual education. And as FiveThirtyEight’s Alex Samuels and Kaleigh Rogers explained last year, conservatives have long used schools as a battleground for culture war issues over everything from evolution to sex education to racial equality.

Conservatives’ attacks on schools ratcheted up during the Trump administration. Following the murder of George Floyd and protests for racial justice in the summer of 2020, then-President Donald Trump tried to control how the federal government talked about issues of race, banning federal agencies and contractors from conducting racial sensitivity training in an executive order issued in September 2020. The federal government can’t actually dictate what’s taught in public schools, but Trump also threatened to pull funding from some schools that used the 1619 Project in its curriculum.

While Trump ultimately wasn’t able to ban what was taught in schools, the rhetoric in his executive order was significant in that it helped “legitimize the discontent that his base had, and has probably had for a while as it relates to racial equity,” according to Dixson. Moreover, the language in his executive order has cropped up repeatedly in the anti-trans bills I’ve studied.

In fact, many of these bills are part of a coordinated legislative effort. Oakley told me that Promise to America’s Children, an anti-LGBTQ coalition, was the source of many of these anti-trans bills. And one of the organizations behind Promise to America’s Children, the Heritage Foundation, has created model legislation opposing the “tenets” of critical race theory being taught in K-12 classrooms.

As of March 15, 154 anti-trans bills that limit access to health care, sports, bathrooms and education have been introduced in state legislatures across the country, according to NBC News. This is already more than the 153 such bills introduced in 2021. More broadly, the number of anti-LGBTQ bills has also grown from 41 in 2018 to 238 in just the first few months of 2022. (Some states with Democratic-controlled legislatures are fighting back. Connecticut, for instance, became the first state to respond to this sort of legislative action this week with a bill containing a pro-trans provision, proposing a “safe-state law” that would guarantee protections for transgender individuals leaving other states.)

Republicans are using tools beyond legislation to attack trans rights. In February, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott instructed the state’s Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate reports of gender-affirming health care for trans children as child abuse — a move that left many parents of trans children in Texas feeling “frantic,” according to Emma, the mother of an eight-year-old trans girl from Austin. (Emma preferred to use a pseudonym out of privacy concerns.) “I go between feeling a rage and just sheer panic,” she said, adding that she knows six families who are leaving the state over this.

Only one of these bills, Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act,¹² has been signed into law so far. But even if many of these bills aren’t passed, they can still create an atmosphere that is hostile to trans people. Often, too, it falls to trans kids to fight back.

One student who knows this particularly well is 18-year-old Amira Pierotti, a senior at James Madison Memorial High School in Madison, Wisconsin, who helped rewrite their local health education curricula twice to make it more LGBTQ-inclusive — Pierotti said the original curriculum had “no LGBT+ representation, nothing on safe sex, nothing on consent, very little on sexual assault.” For the last two years, they say they’ve also been involved  in a lawsuit brought on by a local conservative advocacy group over whether staff can call students by different names or pronouns, without parental consent. (Several student clubs at local high schools, including one where Pierotti is a member, intervened as defendants in the lawsuit.)

It’s not just this lawsuit, either — Pierotti also helped organize against a bill introduced by Wisconsin Republicans last September that would have required schools to give parents notice before providing any instruction related to sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression. One of Pierotti’s friends, Cameron Craig, a 16-year-old sophomore, stayed up the night before and skipped school the next day to testify against the bill. Craig told me that they were motivated to do this because it was important to them that legislators understand what their experience of being a trans student was like.

The bill ultimately failed, but at that point, a similar bill had already passed both chambers of the Wisconsin legislature. And while that bill was later vetoed by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, when trans rights at school are up for debate, “it’s an invitation toward discrimination,” said Stephen Russell, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin who studies the health and well-being of LGBTQ+ adolescents. For some trans kids, the difference between a supportive and an unsupportive school environment can be a matter of life or death. According to my analysis of data from a late 2020 poll from the advocacy group The Trevor Project, trans and nonbinary youth who felt that their school was not a gender-affirming space were almost 30 percent more likely to have attempted suicide in the last year.

For Craig, the loss of school as a potential safe outlet for self-expression especially makes them concerned for friends who are closeted at home because they don’t have a supportive family. “School is their safe space right now, where we can be kind of openly LGBTQ a good amount of the time,” said Craig. “[T]hat being taken away from them would be really, absolutely devastating.”

But with the number of anti-trans bills growing, school might not be a safe space for trans kids anytime soon.

CORRECTION (May 12, 2:20 p.m.): An earlier version of this article misattributed data to the Human Rights Center. It is the Human Rights Campaign.

Critical Race Theory

How Anti-Critical Race Theory Bills Are Taking Aim At Teachers

By Theodore R. Johnson, Emelia Gold and Ashley Zhao, Theodore R. Johnson, Emelia Gold and Ashley Zhao and Theodore R. Johnson, Emelia Gold and Ashley Zhao

Graphics by Ryan Best

May 9, 2022, at 6:00 AM

This spring, a high school English teacher in Missouri lost her job following parents’ complaints that one of her assignments taught critical race theory.

The teacher had assigned a worksheet titled “How Racially Privileged Are You?” as prep material for reading the school-approved book “Dear Martin,” a novel about a Black high school student who is physically assaulted by a white police officer. But despite the teacher’s insistence that she wasn’t teaching her students critical race theory, an academic legal framework that asserts that racism is systemic and embedded in many American institutions, the local school board disagreed and determined that the material was objectionable.

The Missouri incident wasn’t an anomaly. In Tennessee, a teacher was reprimanded — and later fired — after telling his class that white privilege is a “fact” and assigning a Ta-Nehisi Coates essay that argued that white racial resentment was responsible for the rise of former President Donald Trump. Meanwhile in Texas, a principal was suspended after parents accused him of promoting critical race theory based on a letter he had written more than a year earlier, calling for the community to come together and defeat systemic racism in the days following the murder of George Floyd. His contract was subsequently not renewed.

In none of these schools was critical race theory actually being taught, but that is largely beside the point. Rather, these fights make up the latest chapter in the GOP-initiated culture war and are more broadly about how teachers should — and shouldn’t — talk about race and racism in America.

Since January 2021, Republican state legislators have introduced nearly 200 anti-critical race theory bills in 40 states, according to data compiled by the nonprofit organization PEN America.¹³ According to our analysis of the 11 states that have already signed bills targeting K-12 schools into law,¹⁴ and the 84 such bills that are still pending in state legislatures, few of these bills actually target the teaching of critical race theory. Instead, these bills are largely messaging bills that draw on talking points from the Trump administration. That said, many still seek to impose severe penalties for those found to be in violation. Even if the primary purpose of these laws seems to be to inflame the Republican base and win elections, these bills have created a chilling atmosphere for teachers who may decide to avoid discussing race, identity and contemporary issues in the classroom altogether, rather than risk their jobs.

First, despite governors and legislators often describing these measures as bans of critical race theory in schools, just 17 of the 84 pending bills and two of the 11 state laws (Idaho and North Dakota) make any explicit mention of “critical race theory.” Mississippi’s law mentions critical race theory in its title but nowhere in the text. 

Moreover, in the pieces of legislation that do mention critical race theory, few specify what is meant by it and the ones that do are often inaccurate. A pending New Jersey bill states that critical race theory includes ideas like one race is “inherently superior” to another and that the United States is “irredeemably racist” — neither of which are actually tenets of critical race theory. A bill introduced in South Carolina says that critical race theory includes the belief that the advent of slavery “constituted the true founding of the United States,” which is not a precept of critical race theory but rather a swipe at The New York Times’s 1619 Project. Incidentally, 12 of the 84 pending bills, plus Texas’s law, specifically forbid teaching or using the 1619 Project in a course.

In fact, in examining the language of these pieces of legislation, we found that more than two-thirds of the pending bills and every single one of the state laws (except for North Dakota’s) contained text essentially identical to an executive order Trump issued in September 2020, entitled “Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping.” That executive order didn’t actually mention critical race theory by name, but it has still served as a blueprint for Republican lawmakers trying to ban critical race theory in schools. Indeed, there has been a concerted effort to get Republican legislatures across the country to adopt language from Trump’s executive order in the bills they put forward, as evinced in circulated documents like “Model School Board Language to Prohibit Critical Race Theory,” which was produced by a conservative advocacy group founded by Trump’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget.

In other words, these bills aren’t concerned with critical race theory as much as they are focused on enshrining Trump’s agenda in law. They’re what political scientists call message bills, or “hopeless legislation constructed not to change public policy but instead to signal desirable attributes of incumbents to constituents.” But as the teacher and principal firings cited earlier suggest, these bills can still result in real harm to teachers and students alike.

Of the 84 proposed bills we looked at, we found that 47 outlined punishments for those found to be in violation of the legislation. The most common punishment, found in 27 of the pending bills as well as two of the state laws, is financial — often involving fines or funding cuts for the school or district, generally imposed by a school board or governing state agency. Two other common punishments, include legal action brought by parents, students or the state’s attorney general against a teacher or school district found to be in violation (11 bills) and the termination of a teacher accused of promoting critical race theory (12 bills).

An additional 15 bills imposed other forms of disciplinary action, such as verbal or written reprimands, revocation of certifications and school accreditations, suspension without pay or corrective action plans for school curricula.

We found that it’s often school principals and local superintendents who must enforce these laws. That means these administrators must determine whether a teacher’s history lesson was sufficiently objective or whether the teacher was responsible when a student reports feeling guilt or discomfort. Some of the punishments are very severe, too. A pending Virginia state law, for instance, states that anyone determined to have violated its anti-critical race theory law is guilty of a misdemeanor crime and faces termination or revocation of their teaching license. Meanwhile in Kentucky, one introduced bill would’ve allowed any person aggrieved by the violation of the law to seek damages of up to $100,000.

Some bills also impose a penalty if teachers don’t teach something. For example, a pending Illinois bill mandates that students be taught that socialism and similar political systems would lead to the overthrow of the United States, and it would punish any school board found to be in violation with fines of up to $5,000 per student. In Missouri, meanwhile, one proposal mandates that teachers explore the “contending perspectives” of contemporary controversial issues, meaning both sides of the racist replacement theory currently being pushed by some far-right commentators must be presented while the 1619 Project would be effectively banned from the classroom by other bills currently pending in the state legislature.

These bills often don’t give accused teachers an opportunity to defend themselves against the charges, either. For instance, the Missouri teacher who was fired for assigning the racial privilege worksheet was let go by the school board in a closed-door session that she was not permitted to attend. Upon being notified of the board’s decision, she said, “If this is how they terminate teachers — without asking questions, without speaking to the teacher — then no one is secure.”

Though only 11 of the nearly 200 anti-critical race theory bills introduced in the last year and a half have been signed into law, the very presence of these bills, including their often ambiguous language, have created a chilling atmosphere for teachers who may decide to avoid discussing race, identity and contemporary issues in the classroom altogether, rather than risk losing their jobs.

Take Jen Given, a 10th grade history teacher in New Hampshire. She used to teach her students about racial economic disparities via lessons on Jim Crow laws, redlining and other topics. However, following the passage of a bill that included anti-critical race theory provisions in June of last year, she stopped including those subjects in her curriculum. “The law is really, really vague,” she told The Washington Post this year, continuing, “We asked for clarification from the state, from the union, from school lawyers. The universal response is no one’s really sure.”

The ultimate effect of these laws appears to create uncertainty for teachers and administrators, while deputizing parents and students to shape school curricula and influence how — or in some cases, if — teachers discuss difficult aspects of our history and contemporary society.

Is the Republican tent big enough to include both Reps. Liz Cheney and Madison Cawthorn? Or might the two of them be on the outs come fall?

Cheney is facing one of the toughest primaries in the country after voting to impeach former President Donald Trump for his role encouraging supporters to raid the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Cawthorn, on the other hand, is all-in on Trump’s vision for the Republican Party — and then some. Last week, after Cawthorn suggested his colleagues in Washington, D.C., host orgies and use cocaine, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said he’d lost trust in Cawthorn and Republican Sen. Thom Tillis, from Cawthorn’s home state of North Carolina, endorsed Cawthorn’s primary challenger.

In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew discusses how these two primaries serve as a test of what the Republican Party and its voters will and won’t accept. They also try to get to the bottom of whether Americans support the “Parental Rights In Education Bill” — or what its critics call the “Don’t Say Gay Bill” — which Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law last week.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

Over the past year, many Republicans have repeatedly claimed that education has run amok under Democratic control and that parents need more say in the classroom. There have been debates over school closures, masking, transgender students competing in school sports, and how teachers talk about race, gender and sexuality.

You could say that education has become something of a wedge issue — in other words, an issue that parties use to try to divide the opposing party to shake loose new voters. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Galen Druke speaks with political science professors Sunshine Hillygus and Patrick Egan about the history of wedge issues and how they have shaped U.S. politics.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

Rand’s study found that summer school offered modest, short-term improvements in math scores at best, but those improvements faded by the fall. Other metrics — performance in language arts, student attendance and overall grades — showed no meaningful link to summer school. “The effects were pretty underwhelming,” said Megan Kuhfeld, a senior research scientist with NWEA, a nonprofit educational testing and research organization.

Overall, summer school programs didn’t deliver on their promises. But some subgroups did benefit: the students who regularly attended the programs that were better at navigating hurdles like student retention. 

It’s perhaps never been so urgent to make educational interventions like summer school work for kids. Two years into the pandemic, children across the nation are behind where they would have been academically if the pandemic hadn’t happened. To help bridge the gap, educational theories will have to adapt to the unique realities of actual kids’ lives and families’ needs. If they don’t, even the best ideas, with tons of evidence behind them, won’t work in the real world.   

Kids learned plenty during the pandemic, Kuhfeld told me. The problem, she said, is that they aren’t learning as much or as quickly as they were each year before the pandemic. Nationally, third-graders in fall 2021 were, on average, testing significantly below where third-graders were testing in fall 2019 in reading and math. The NWEA assessments showed these declines extended across third-graders through eighth-graders, too.¹⁶

Most of the experts I spoke to said the popular term “learning loss” is a misnomer — it’s not that kids have lost ground, they’re just not progressing as fast. But the slower progression is real, and there are patterns to it. The effects were particularly pronounced among Black, Hispanic and American Indian and Alaska Native students.  

In the NWEA data, the median percentile ranks for Black third-graders went down 10 points in reading and 14 points in math. For white third-graders, the median percentile ranks declined by exactly half of that (5 points in reading and 7 in math), while the median percentile ranks for Asian American third-graders fell by 3 points in both subjects. 

In addition, there’s evidence of declines in attendance and high school graduation rates, something that could signal a broad sense of emotional disconnection from school. Which, in turn, could help explain slowed learning — or exacerbate it, said Dan Goldhaber, director of the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research.

Slowed learning during the pandemic doesn’t necessarily mean kids are doomed, however. In fact, other researchers like Torrey Trust, a professor of learning technology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said kids actually learned a lot of things during the pandemic that they might not have learned otherwise. For many, virtual classes meant more time with family, more skills with technology, and for some, even better educational experiences, free from bullying. 

The other good news: Research shows that the slower progress documented by these test scores should be able to be fixed with small-group tutoring. “It’s not rocket science,” said Thurston Domina, a professor of educational policy and organizational leadership at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “You get the kids in small groups and you can really give them customized instruction and focus on them.” When Matthew Kraft, a professor of education and economics at Brown University, reviewed several meta-analyses of the effectiveness of various educational interventions in 2021, he found that tutoring in small groups had a significantly greater effect on student test scores than changes in class size, longer school days or summer-school-type programs. 

But while it’s relatively simple for researchers to run studies on classrooms or schools and figure out which interventions produce the best results, it’s hard for educators to take those findings and put them to work across America. The evidence doesn’t produce a solution — it just shows you how hard it’s going to be to craft a wide-reaching solution. 

Case in point: those summer school studies. One of the biggest factors affecting the overall failure of summer school programs in the Rand analysis was that only around half the kids who attended one year didn’t come back for the next — and some kids didn’t even attend each day the first year. The kids who attended summer school habitually, for both years, did improve their math and language skills in ways that lasted all school year. But that group represented only about 35 percent of all the kids involved in the study. 

So summer school works just fine — if you can get kids to actually go. And that sets up a whole other set of logistical complications that have to be studied and analyzed and implemented. It takes hiring the right teachers who have the motivation and specific interest in teaching summer school, Kuhfeld said. It also takes long-term dedicated recruitment of kids into the programs. Unlike with regular school, students don’t have to attend summer school, so getting them and their families to choose the programs means you have to build both interest and trust — neither of which is a given. And all of this takes money. “There’s a big gap between what should work in theory and what works in practice,” Kuhfeld said. 

This kind of effect is depressingly common. When the George W. Bush administration set up a program to compile evidence-based educational resources in 2002, education specialists told me they’d hoped this program — the What Works Clearinghouse — would bridge the gap between academia and classrooms. They envisioned it as a way for teachers to get a better handle on how to use evidence-based interventions in the classroom. “We thought we would punch in third-grade math and get an answer,” said Rachael Gabriel, a professor of literacy education at the University of Connecticut.

But it never worked out to be that simple. 

In many cases, researchers I spoke to found that teachers — the people tasked with educating students and bringing those test scores up — didn’t have much control over which interventions they could use and how. Those decisions were made higher up in the chain of administration. A teacher might want to try something and not be allowed. Or they might be excited to try something that was allowed but not be given the funding or staff or bus transport to make it happen effectively. 

Making things work in a classroom is different from making things work in a whole district or a whole state or the whole country. That’s something Domina learned when California’s State Board of Education tried to mandate all eighth-graders to take and be tested on algebra. The idea was very much based on evidence, he said. Studies showed that separating some kids into elite math and others into remedial math served to widen inequality and narrow kids’ futures. Giving kids higher expectations leads them to do better. So expanding access to algebra for all should have reduced test-score gaps between rich and poor, white and Black. 

But it didn’t. In fact, the opposite happened. Domina sees problems of scale — particularly staffing issues — at the heart of that failure. Offering algebra to everyone meant that schools needed a lot more algebra teachers, and quickly. But there were only so many fully qualified, highly skilled algebra teachers. A lot of kids, particularly the ones in lower-income schools, ended up with teachers who didn’t have as much experience and weren’t as effective at teaching the material, he said.

That story is particularly poignant now. Small-group tutoring can help students catch up on what they didn’t get a chance to learn during the pandemic. But small-group tutoring takes staff — and schools are one of many industries suffering from staffing shortages. Experts like Kraft are concerned that schools might create failing tutoring programs by using irregular volunteers or older students in place of dedicated staff. 

Much like students, schools themselves aren’t necessarily functioning at a neutral, pre-pandemic state, either. “The biggest trend I’ve seen in the last 6-12 months is that schools are struggling to get the basics down. Staying open is hard,” said Chase Nordengren, the principal research lead for Effective Instructional Strategies at NWEA. He’s seen many cases where federal funds, which otherwise may have been spent on staffing tutoring programs to mitigate learning loss, were spent instead on things like better ventilation, personal protective equipment and substitute teachers. 

“I think tutoring is a really promising initiative,” Goldhaber said. “But we have never tried to do tutoring at the scale that we are trying it today.” Because of that, he said, parents should be advocating for real-time evaluation and course-correction to go along with these learning-loss interventions. There should be tools in place to help teachers know when something isn’t working for their specific school and allow them to make the kind of personalized adjustments we know are necessary to make any intervention effective. But that, again, takes resources. 

In the end, it’s not kids’ pandemic test scores that really make researchers feel gloomy about the future of education. Instead, it’s the way educational systems have been set up to fail those kids. Schools have been running with limited resources and little wiggle room for change for at least the past decade, Domina said. “And now we’ve hit a crisis. And they’re not resilient.”

Sarah Caswell is stressed about her job every day. The science and special-education teacher in Philadelphia sees things going wrong everywhere she looks. Her high school students have been falling behind during the COVID-19 pandemic, the students and even the teachers in her school rarely wear masks, and a shooting just outside her school in October left a bystander dead and a 16-year-old student in the hospital with critical injuries. 

She’s unhappy. But her solution isn’t to quit — it’s to get more involved.

“We need to double down,” Caswell said.

She isn’t the only one who thinks so. Throughout the past year, surveys and polls have pointed to an oncoming crisis in education: a mass exodus of unhappy K-12 teachers. Surveys from unions and education-research groups have warned that anywhere from one-fourth to more than half of U.S. educators were considering a career change. 

Except that doesn’t seem to have happened. The most recent statistics, though still limited, suggest that while some districts are reporting significant faculty shortages, the country overall is not facing a sudden teacher shortage. Any staffing shortages for full-time K-12 teachers appear far less severe and widespread than those for support staff like substitute teachers, bus drivers and paraprofessionals, who are paid less and encounter more job instability.  

In a female-dominated profession, these numbers notably contrast trends showing that women in particular have been leaving their jobs at high rates throughout COVID-19. While labor-force participation for women dropped significantly at the start of the pandemic, and still remains about 2 percentage points below pre-pandemic levels, teachers by and large seem to be staying at their jobs.

So, why have the doomsday scenarios not come true? There are many explanations — and the ways they overlap tell us something about the state of American schools, the inner workings of America’s economy and the way gender shapes the American workforce.

By many accounts, teachers have been particularly unhappy and stressed out about their jobs since the pandemic hit, first struggling to adjust to difficult remote-learning requirements and then returning to sometimes unsafe working environments. A nationally representative survey of teachers by RAND Education and Labor in late January and early February found that educators were feeling depressed and burned out from their jobs at higher rates than the general population. These rates were higher for female teachers, with 82 percent reporting frequent job-related stress compared with 66 percent of male teachers. 

In the survey, 1 in 4 teachers — particularly Black teachers — reported that they were considering leaving their jobs at the end of the school year. Only 1 in 6 said the same before the pandemic. 

Yet the data on teacher employment shows a system that is stretched, not shattered. In an EdWeek Research Center report released in October, a significant number of district leaders and principals surveyed — a little less than half — said that their district had struggled to hire a sufficient number of full-time teachers. This number paled in comparison, though, with the nearly 80 percent of school leaders who said they were struggling to find substitute teachers, the nearly 70 percent who said they were struggling to find bus drivers and the 55 percent who said they were struggling to find paraprofessionals. 

More concrete jobs data suggests that school employees have largely stayed put. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, fewer public-education professionals quit their jobs between the months of April and August the past two years than did so during that same time immediately before the pandemic. In 2019, around 470,000 public-education employees quit their jobs between April and August compared with around 285,000 in the same period in 2020 and around 300,000 in 2021. Notably, this data includes both full-time teachers, support staff and higher-education employees, though teachers make up a majority of those included, says Chad Aldeman, policy director of Edunomics Lab, an education-policy research center, at Georgetown University.

Experts point to multiple reasons for this trend. While women have been disproportionately affected by mass COVID-related job losses, teachers haven’t faced the types of widespread layoffs experienced by workers in other professions — including other types of public school employees like bus drivers. Moreover, relative to other types of jobs disproportionately held by women, teachers have more job stability and receive more generous benefits. Educators often get into their work for specifically mission-driven purposes, too, making them uniquely positioned to decide to stay at their jobs, even during particularly stressful periods, experts say. 

“The early indicators we have show turnover hasn’t spiked this year as we anticipated,” said Aldeman. 

Instead, he said, data shows that the hiring crunch might be because there are more jobs to hire for. Vacancies have increased, suggesting that districts might be beefing up hiring after a year of uncertainty and an influx in federal aid. In other words, labor shortages are not totally attributable to increased turnover. And while early data on teacher retirements suggests that there might have been increases on the margins in some places, fears of mass retirements have not borne out so far.

Still, some local districts are hurting. Sasha Pudelski, the assistant director for policy and advocacy for the School Superintendents Association, has spoken to school leaders around the country who are facing teacher shortages, sometimes at crisis levels. But her sense is that these shortages are uneven depending on a district’s resource level and how well they’re able to pay. Based on what she’s heard from school-district leaders, she suspects shortages are more acute in low-income communities with a lower tax base for teacher salaries, potentially causing a further shortage of educators from underrepresented groups, who disproportionately teach in these areas.

Indeed, a fall 2021 study of school-staffing shortages throughout the state of Washington shows that high-poverty districts are facing significantly more staffing challenges than their more affluent counterparts. In some places, there are significant numbers of unfilled positions.

Study co-author Dan Goldhaber, who directs the Center for Education Data & Research at the University of Washington and serves as a vice president of the American Institutes for Research, is cautious about drawing conclusions about such an abnormal year. But he believes that fears of teacher shortages in the past have been overblown, pointing to a study by the Wheelock Education Policy Center at Boston University, which found that teacher-turnover rates in Massachusetts remained largely stable throughout the 2020-21 school year.

“I have seen three different waves of people talking about teacher shortages, and I’ve seen policy briefs come out that suggest there are going to be 100,000 to 200,000 slots that can’t be filled for teachers,” said Goldhaber. “Those kinds of dire predictions have never come to pass.”

Rather than lean out, a significant number of teachers have become more engaged in workplace issues amid the turbulence. Evan Stone, the co-founder and co-CEO of Educators for Excellence, points to recent union elections in multiple cities that have seen unprecedented turnout. In late September and early October, for example, nearly 16,000 United Teachers Los Angeles members participated in a vote over school-reopening issues, while less than 6,000 voted in a 2020 election of union leaders.

Indeed, the American Federation of Teachers saw a slight increase in membership this year. Randi Weingarten, the union’s president, traveled across the country this fall to get a sense of how her members were feeling.

“Every place I went, yes, there’s trepidation, a lot of agita over the effects of COVID, but there’s a real joy of people being back in school with their kids,” said Weingarten. 

Still, this increase in union participation isn’t across the board. The National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, has lost around 47,000 members, or about 1.6 percent of its membership, since this point last year, according to figures the NEA supplied to FiveThirtyEight and The Fuller Project. The organization attributes most of the losses to a decline in hiring at the higher-education level and decreased employment for public K-12 support staff.

For teachers like Caswell, the past two years have driven her to get more involved with her union, unhappy as she may be at her job and unsafe as she may feel. (A spokesperson for Philadelphia public schools notes that the district has an indoor mask mandate that all individuals are expected to follow.) For a single mother supporting three kids, quitting isn’t an option. Caswell can’t imagine switching schools within the same district either, even though she describes her work environment as miserable. Her students, some of whom she’s worked with for years, mean too much to her. 

Instead, Caswell has started working to organize members in her school to represent their interests on a larger level and effect change.

“I can’t just walk out, though there’s definitely moments where I would have liked to,” said Caswell. “We’re tired. The demands keep coming, and we can’t do it all.”

She sees her advocacy as directly related to her gender, believing the profession receives less support and resources than it deserves because the composition of the workforce is largely female. Indeed, union representation, and the perks that come along with it, is something that other sectors facing massive shortages of female workers, like service and hospitality industries, don’t necessarily receive. As of 2017, about 70 percent of teachers participated in a union or professional association, according to federal data. By comparison, the same is true for only about 17 percent of nurses, another predominantly female workforce.

“Female professions are undervalued by society, and I think that’s part of the reason teachers are more densely organized than almost any other worker in America right now,” said Weingarten.

Still, plenty of teachers are quitting — and they’re quitting at least in part because of the pandemic. According to a survey by the RAND Corporation, almost half of former public school teachers who left the field since March 2020 cited COVID-19 as the driving factor. The pandemic exacerbated already-stressful working conditions, forcing teachers to work longer hours and navigate a challenging transition to remote learning.

For some teachers, the decision to quit was easy. High school science educator Sara Mielke, who had recently returned to teaching after taking time off to stay home with children, quit her job several weeks into this school year over the lack of COVID-safety protocols in her Pflugerville, Texas, school. 

“I felt like I couldn’t trust these people to prioritize safety in general,” said Mielke, who adds that she was chastised by school administrators for showing her students accurate information about vaccine effectiveness and enforcing the school’s mandatory mask policy. (The district did not respond to a request for comment.) 

Other teachers say that while they wanted to leave, the prospect of saying goodbye to their students was too much. So, they decided to stay and push for changes.

That was part of the calculation for Kiffany Cody, a special-education teacher in Gwinnett County, Georgia. She took a stress-related medical leave of absence last year, in part because she felt her district was neglecting worker safety. But Cody returned to the classroom after several months, noting she is “really, really, really passionate about the kids.” 

This year she’s banded together with other educators to speak out about unsafe working conditions and start tracking violations of district safety protocols. They’ve become close friends, a support group who feel determined to hold their district accountable and make schools kinder and safer for students and staff. (A representative from Gwinnett County schools said that the “district follows the CDC recommendations for schools regarding layered mitigation strategies, isolation, and quarantine guidelines to promote a healthy and safe environment for our students, staff, and visitors.”)

Every now and then, Cody looks at LinkedIn and ponders working in another field. But for now, she’s in it for the long haul — for her students. 

“We’re trying to work within the system to do what we can to help the students,” said Cody. “We can leave and find jobs in other districts and industries, but at the end of the day, the kids can’t go anywhere.”

Art direction by Emily Scherer. Copy editing by Jennifer Mason. Photo research by Jeremy Elvas. Story editing by Chadwick Matlin and Holly Ojalvo.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/americans-talking-politics-thanksgiving-table-fivethirtyeight-81117079

One day last spring, Naima Kaidi waited nearly an hour for her kindergartener and first-grader to get home from school. She stood on the corner near her house, but the bus was nowhere to be seen and there was no word why it was so late. Northport Elementary in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, had only recently reopened for in-person classes, and day after day, Kaidi’s family had been struggling with late school bus drop-offs. This day was the worst. Cold and worried, she eventually carried her younger children back home to get her phone and try to find out what was going on — and that was when she got a knock on the door. 

It was Roberta Steele, who had driven the school bus in Kaidi’s neighborhood for years, there to bring the two children home. Steele knew where the kids on her route lived. She knew who their parents were. And even though it wasn’t her fault that the bus was late, Steele made sure the kids arrived home safely. “She helped me, she [brought] my kids over here,” Kaidi said. Even if the bus system wasn’t reliable, the driver was. 

But that was last school year. Even then there was already a shortage of bus drivers in the district. Steele said that had been the case for years, though district representatives were quick to point out that there had never been a shortage of this magnitude. This fall, the shortage became dire enough that Steele’s old route — the one where she knew all the kids well enough to take them to their doorsteps when needed — was consolidated out of existence. In October, the district told parents that 12 routes probably wouldn’t be staffed this year. Steele was transferred to a different route with new kids, and sometimes the chaos of route changes and late buses meant she also had to drive kids home from other, equally unfamiliar routes.

It isn’t an easy job. The kids don’t behave. Some, unsure of their own addresses, can’t tell Steele where to go. When parents get angry at a system that isn’t working, they blame Steele. And the company that runs the buses has packed her schedule to the point that there’s no longer time left to pee between runs. She’s thinking of quitting, even though she knows that will make things even harder for the families relying on her.

Meanwhile, Kaidi’s family spent the first two months of school with no bus at all. Instead of waiting at her corner with other parents, she spent her afternoons sitting in her car in the pickup line outside school. The line backed up for blocks, 40 or 50 cars deep, threading out of the parking lot and down an undulating suburban road. Kaidi had to get there an hour before school ended just to make sure she was near the front. She says she turned down a job so she could do this. Likewise, other parents had to change their hours, lose pay and go without sleep — all to sit in their cars, waiting for their children. 

As the bus driver shortage continues, parents and drivers, often women on both sides, have been stretched to the breaking point as they try to do more with less — less time, less money, less help, less of a sense of safety and respect. “This problem existed before COVID, but nobody wanted to hear about it, especially the school districts,” said Zina Ronca, a driver supervisor for DuVall Bus Service in West Grove, Pennsylvania, who has been in the industry for nearly two decades. There haven’t been enough school bus drivers nationwide for years. But it took a pandemic to make that shortage visible and painful to more than just the drivers themselves. 

And in that way, what’s happening at Northport Elementary reflects an even bigger problem for schools nationwide. Across the country, reports have documented shortages of substitute teachers, school nurses, cafeteria workers and the paraprofessionals who help teachers manage their workloads and give kids more small-group attention. As with drivers, those shortages existed before anyone had ever heard of COVID-19. The problems were there, waiting, and then the pandemic came along and made them simultaneously more visible and more … just more. 

All these jobs are about service and care, at pay scales that simply aren’t competitive with jobs that use similar skills but don’t require child care balanced precariously on top of other demands. And when the people who do those jobs quit, the effects get tangled up with other parts of the economy and other parts of society. Amid the pandemic, individual workers are making choices for themselves and their families that affect other people’s families and jobs in ways nobody quite expected. The bus driver shortage isn’t just a bus driver shortage — it’s a knot nobody knows how to cut.

When I pictured the village of people who would help me raise my children, the person driving them to and from school didn’t come immediately to mind. But in the third year of school disruption, it turns out that the bus driver is a person in your neighborhood whom you miss when you don’t see them every day. The job involves only a minimal amount of interaction, Roberta Steele told me. But it’s daily interaction. “You know you’re making a difference for some kids, and that brings me great joy,” she said. “I have kids that I had in middle school that are now in high school. And they will walk from the high school to the middle school just to say hi.”

Steele, 50, is a barrel-chested woman with cropped, spiky hair the color of her last name. She comes off as perky and outgoing, basically the vibe of a favorite grade-school gym teacher. She doesn’t have kids of her own but places a lot of value in the role she can play in the lives of other people’s. 

Steele has been driving a school bus since 2014, all of it for Robbinsdale School District 281, one of those sprawling suburban districts that encompass schools and children in multiple cities on the fringes of Minneapolis. She took the job after leaving the Minneapolis Police Reserve but almost quit in the first two years. The kids were just a lot. A typical school bus can carry 70 children when full. They get bored, or they just plain don’t know how to behave. “I resorted to bribery as a method of training,” she told me, using small treats to manage the threat of prepubescent uprisings. 

Today, she can quell most bad behavior with a look delivered through the rearview mirror. Her starting pay, driving a 15-ton vehicle down the winding, narrow roads of inner-ring suburbs while managing the behavior of a small village worth of kids, and for which she needed to take classes and earn a special license, was $14 an hour. “It’s really rewarding, or it can be, if you like children, right?” Steele said. 

But not everyone does. Or, at least, not at that price point. Steele’s entire bus driving career has been marked by not having enough colleagues. She told me she found the job in the first place because the district was recruiting heavily to fill a shortage, though representatives from the district stressed that they had never had a shortage like this before. Nationwide, more than 50 percent of districts have experienced a shortage of drivers every year since at least 2006, according to annual surveys conducted by School Bus Fleet magazine. Most years, the driver shortage affected more than 70 percent of districts. The lowest the shortage has been in all that time was in the depths of the Great Recession.

Over the years, as shortages continued, Steele’s pay did increase. Today, after a big post-COVID pay raise, she’s making $23.75 per hour, well above the nationwide average starting pay for school bus drivers, $18.82 per hour according to a 2021 survey.

At year-round, full-time hours — the way the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates an annual wage — the average school bus driver makes more than $39,000 a year. But school bus drivers don’t work year-round, full-time hours. “We’re only guaranteed four hours of pay a day,” Steele said. 

There are no paid holidays or sick days, she and other bus industry experts say. Benefits vary from company to company, and there’s no guaranteed work at all in summer. “Spring break is all unpaid. Every teacher-compensatory day, every snow day, any time they cannot pay us they will,” Steele said. She added that a recent, failed unionization effort among the Robbinsdale bus drivers started in part as a fight for snow-day pay. 

Working as a school bus driver means, essentially, needing another source of income. This is part of why the job has long attracted women — particularly mothers — who were able to work while their children were at school. In 2020, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 58.5 percent of all school bus drivers were women. The hours are predictable and short, with a gap in the middle of the day when your time is your own, during which some drivers earn money doing other jobs, like working as a mechanic for the bus company, or doing a different caregiving job in schools. And the job comes with unusual perks like the ability to take the bus home, turning the morning commute into a walk to the driveway. At some bus companies and school districts, drivers have the freedom to take their young children on the bus with them during their rounds — a chance to bring in money without adding to the ever-rising cost of day care. 

But it doesn’t pay enough to live on. For Steele, the job works only because her partner brings in a paycheck and benefits. Other drivers depend on a second job, performed between roughly 9 a.m. and 1:30 p.m., when they aren’t on the clock. LaShawn Favors, a bus driver in the Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park, had a second part-time job as a paraprofessional in a school while his wife worked from home in the health-care industry. His route didn’t overlap with where his own kids, who lacked reliable bus service, needed to go, so his wife and his daughter’s boyfriend were stuck shuttling the kids to and from school while Favors rushed from one job to another and back to the first.

Drivers spackle their work lives together this way, with voluntary overtime and luck, and they still struggle. COVID didn’t make the job hard, it just made it harder.

Pay is the problem, and COVID made it worse by threatening the unique benefits that kept people driving buses, despite the low pay, to begin with. Older drivers suddenly had to deal with the increased risk of sickness and death, risks that haven’t really been properly calculated anywhere. No one knows how many bus drivers are no longer in their jobs because they died from COVID-19 infections acquired on the job, because no one is keeping track. 

Other drivers had no real choice but to find other work during the long months when schools were remote and had no need of them, while drivers who were mothers found themselves trying to juggle home and work in a job they’d taken precisely so they wouldn’t have to do this in the first place. When schools moved to hybrid systems, the districts needed drivers every day, but those drivers’ own kids’ schedules may not have been in sync, said Erin Ducharme, vice chair of membership for the Women in Buses Council and an executive at Bloom Tour and Charter Services in Taunton, Massachusetts. 

Schools are filled with essential workers whose difficult jobs were made even harder, and their ranks even thinner, by the pandemic. School nurses, for instance, have also been in short supply for years, even more so amid the pandemic. Like drivers, school nurses are most likely to be women, and they earn far less than what they could get if they took their skills and training elsewhere — as little as $58,810 in median annual wages compared with more than $75,000 if they worked in a hospital. 

Nationwide, there have been reports of shortages of cafeteria workers, custodians, substitute teachers and paraprofessionals. According to a survey conducted by EdWeek Research Center in late September and early October, 40 percent of district leaders and principals said they were experiencing “severe” or “very severe” staffing shortages. The bus driver shortage is part of a larger, longer problem in schools — one that extends beyond the school building. When “women’s jobs” go unfilled, other women, namely moms, pick up the slack — and the effects reverberate across the economy.

Caregiving is interconnected. Roberta Steele doesn’t just drive a bus. She drove a bus to pick up and drop off Naima Kaidi’s children. Without Steele’s services, Kaidi still had to get the kids to school. But the task became harder and required her to make more sacrifices. 

Parents like Kaidi depend on the services of bus drivers, nurses, lunch ladies and subs. Statistically, the parents who depend on those services the most are moms — they still do more of the parenting labor, and their own jobs become more disrupted when there aren’t other women doing the outsourced work for things like transportation or food preparation. A 2019 Pew Research Center survey of adults in opposite-sex relationships found that 59 percent of women reported handling more of the household chores and responsibilities than their partners, and among those with children under 18 at home, 78 percent of women reported doing more work to manage their children’s activities and schedules. Working mothers were more likely than working fathers to report having to reduce work hours to deal with household or family needs. And during the pandemic, women were twice as likely as men to say they had to juggle “a lot” of parenting duties while simultaneously teleworking. 

Low-paid caregiving jobs bind together a lot of big trends happening in the economy, said Abigail Wozniak, a labor economist at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve. And you can see those themes play out in the lives of the women whose children used to ride to school on Roberta Steele’s bus — and now have no bus service at all.

Take Amanda Swanson, a neighbor of Kaidi’s, who spent the first months of school making a point of being first in the hour-long pickup line every day at Northport Elementary. She’s supporting her family working as a manager at an Amazon fulfillment center while her husband stays home with their youngest children because child care is too expensive. He used to be able to walk the children to the bus stop. But after the bus stopped running, Swanson switched to an overnight shift and frequently left her job early so she could drive them in the family’s only car. 

Not long ago, Swanson (or her husband) would have been a prime candidate to be a school bus driver. Instead, she’s working a job that didn’t exist a decade ago but pays enough to keep her family solvent. It’s not just that school-support jobs don’t pay enough, it’s that they’re in direct competition for workers with jobs that pay more. 

“At least since the 1970s, wages for the majority of Americans have barely budged, and if anything they've decreased for workers that don't have a college degree,” said Krista Ruffini, a professor of economics at Georgetown University. Even before COVID-19, that squeeze is part of what has made jobs like bus driving less attractive today than they were 20 or 30 years ago, and it’s also put those jobs in competition with newer kinds of work — gig-economy jobs or delivery and warehouse jobs that require the same kinds of skills, pay the same or more, and require less emotional labor, Wozniak said.

So far, these newer jobs are still a relatively small portion of all jobs and because of that probably can’t explain big, economy-wide trends. “But there will be some employers now who are competing with, basically, Amazon,” she said. A school bus driver could instead drive a delivery vehicle. School support staff like paraprofessionals and lunch ladies have logistics skills that are needed in a warehouse. 

And when there’s a shortage of school bus drivers, that makes it hard for some parents to take a job. Once her children were finally old enough to be in school during the day, Kaidi had intended to go back to work this fall for the first time in years. But, she said, she’s received multiple job offers she couldn’t accept because of the time she has to spend ferrying her children to and from four different school buildings. 

Her conundrum makes it easy to understand how the pandemic has disproportionately affected women’s careers. “On the female side of the labor market, we know that there's been an increase in people that say that they can't work because they're providing care,” Ruffini said. Some have had to quit; others just don’t reenter the workforce, even when they have an opportunity. That’s been a feature of the pandemic, affecting a wide swath of the kinds of service and emotional-labor jobs that disproportionately employ women — jobs like the ones in schools. Kaidi’s experience shows how shortages in one field can create or exacerbate shortages in another. 

Meanwhile, many of the women who have stayed in their emotional-labor jobs are being pushed to a breaking point — women like Swanson and Kaidi’s neighbor Christiana Metzger, a nursing assistant who works nights and has been running on almost no sleep since the beginning of the school year in September. She described breaking the speed limit, exhausted, trying to get home fast enough to take her older children to class on time, preparing meals and picking kids up from school and checking their homework, and the headache she’d had for several days straight. 

The jobs done by people like Metzger are what middle-level jobs look like today, said Nicole Smith, chief economist at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. Along with the lack of growth in real wages, there’s the idea that the job spectrum has hollowed out, leaving nothing but the worst-paying jobs and the ones that pay well but require college degrees. But that’s not exactly the case, Smith says. There are jobs left in the middle, but they’re no longer in manufacturing — they’re jobs that involve caring for people (like nurses) or supporting other workers (like school paraprofessionals). Again, women’s jobs. Jobs that continually conflict with women’s labor at home.

The emotional and psychological aspects of work are something economists are only just beginning to pay attention to, Wozniak said. But when shortages happen — whether through the cost-saving design of a lean staffing model or a chain of unfortunate events — it’s those intangible, immeasurable parts of a job that can quickly spiral out of control. “Now there are three people in the lunchroom instead of five or eight,” she said. “It’s the same job but not at all the same because you’re doing it faster and with less help.”

The bus driver shortage is a pay issue, but it’s also clearly more than that. It’s about how your job treats you. It’s about what you’re expected to do outside of the office. It’s about the narrow space women are squeezed into where we need to be better paid for the hard work we do at caregiving jobs but also need other women to do caregiving jobs at a lower price we can afford. It’s about being forced to make a choice between fulfilling your responsibilities at work and getting your children home safely. And it’s about how schools do, and don’t, function.

At the end of October, Kaidi, Metzger and Swanson finally got bus service again. But they didn’t get it from Steele, who remains relegated to a different route, increasingly unhappy with the way the bus company and the district are treating her and other drivers. The immediate crisis ended for some of the moms of Brooklyn Center. But the problem isn’t solved. Not for the drivers. Not for the school districts suffering disruption on top of disruption. And not for the nation as a whole. “What’s going on in the labor market is something that we certainly haven’t seen in my lifetime,” Ruffini said. People have been out of work and out of their normal routines for a long time, she noted. Their responsibilities have changed at home. And so have the ways they spend their time and their resources. Nobody knows what happens next. 

But we do know that what happens with bus drivers is going to affect what happens with a lot of other people. The pandemic didn’t create these shortages. But it made clear how inextricably linked one job is to a whole bunch of others — how our lives and livelihoods are lashed together with cords we can’t usually see. When a time of stress and tragedy makes those invisible bonds more tangible, we can’t go back to pretending they don’t exist. All we can do is try to untangle them together.

Art direction by Emily Scherer. Charts by Simran Parwani. Copy editing by Jennifer Mason. Story editing by Chadwick Matlin and Holly Ojalvo.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/exit-polls-explain-voters-vote-81047251

Election Day is Tuesday, and the latest polling shows Republican Glenn Youngkin with a small lead over Democrat Terry McAuliffe in Virginia’s gubernatorial race. If Youngkin wins, he will be the first Republican elected governor there in 12 years.

In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Republican polling and research firm Echelon Insights co-founder Kristen Soltis-Anderson joins the crew to discuss the issues shaping the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races. They also debate whether a poll asking Americans to choose what they think is or will be the best decade of their lives is a good or bad use of polling. Finally, they round up some of the other noteworthy local elections and ballot measures around the country, including a police-reform initiative in Minneapolis.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/election-day-2021-virginia-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-80913077

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/polls-consistently-show-close-governors-race-virginia-80671465

These days, sex ed is more widely accepted, especially following the HIV/AIDS epidemic (though conservatives have still managed to beat back more progressive school curricula when it comes to sexual health), but the Republican Party’s habit of identifying a bogeyman in America’s education system hasn’t wavered. 

Then it was sex ed. Now, it’s critical race theory.  

Critical race theory is a legal scholarship framework that has been around in academia for four decades and asserts that racism is systemic and embedded in many American institutions. But over the past few months, the term has been co-opted by Republicans as a catch-all buzzword to signify the perceived threat of anti-white indoctrination in American schools. This has motivated a slate of proposed legislation outlawing a wide range of teachings. Since the start of this year, at least six states have enacted bans on the teaching of critical race theory or discussions of racism in the classrooms, according to a Brookings Institute analysis, while almost 20 other states have introduced similar bills. Moreover, a handful of states, like Florida and Texas, have also successfully banned the teaching of the New York Times’s 1619 Project curriculum, which explores the central role of slavery in the development of the U.S. The project has been harshly criticized by conservatives who have accused its writers of recasting history through a racial lens. To be sure, the bills vary. Some bills mention critical race theory directly, while others only reference bans on “divisive concepts” or any teachings that imply “one race or sex is inherently superior.” But this concerted effort to limit what can be taught in our schools isn’t new — it’s the latest chapter in the GOP’s long-standing push to target curricula that goes against its political ideology.

Republican attacks on cultural issues within America’s public schools follow a familiar pattern. First, they’re usually in response to a vague idea of what might happen — that is, teaching sexual health might lead to more school-aged teenagers having sex (although there’s actually been a decline in the percentage of American high schoolers having sex since the early 1990s). Second, when there is a debate over teaching often taboo, complex social issues, like racism, evolution and sex, elected school board members can exert an outsized amount of control. Considering school board members are more likely to be white and are often partisan, Republicans’ political agenda can get a disproportionate amount of weight in school board decisions. And if the contemporary Republican Party has taught us anything as of late, it’s that “anti-wokeness” is political catnip for its base, so it’s unlikely that this crusade goes away any time soon. In fact, because critical race theory deals so explicitly with racism and discrimination, it has arguably animated the GOP base in a way that previous education battles haven’t.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/racial-justice-protests-started-contemporary-culture-war-77883986

One of the oldest education battles revolves around the teaching of evolution. It’s one that until recently didn’t have clearly drawn partisan lines. After all, the most famous example of a legislative attempt to prohibit teaching evolution in schools was actually introduced by a Democrat: a 1925 Tennessee state law to ban teaching evolution in schools. That law was later challenged in a showy court case (complete with chimpanzees) that same year, where it was upheld, and ultimately not repealed until 1967. (It was also a Democrat who introduced a 1981 bill in Louisiana’s state legislature that mandated the teaching of “creation science” — which presents religious beliefs as alternative scientific theories — whenever evolution was taught. The Supreme Court has since banned states from requiring creation science to be taught, but it has remained a popular conservative cultural flashpoint.)

In the last two decades, Republicans at the state level have introduced over 100 bills aimed at undermining evolution, through tactics such as allowing teachers to “question” established scientific concepts. Most of these bills never go anywhere — a 2016 study found just six anti-evolution bills out of 110 introduced between 2000 and 2012 were enacted into law — but the fact that legislatures keep proposing them means one of the U.S. public education system’s oldest bogeyman is still alive and well.

Similarly, sex education in public schools has long been a target of Republicans, although once it became clear that sex education programs actually help reduce the risk of teen pregnancy and STIs and delay the age when teens become sexually active, sex ed became more socially accepted. This means that Republicans opposed to sex ed have had to change their strategy to curtailing what’s taught. Sixteen states, for instance, require educators to “stress” abstinence education and do not require anything be taught about contraception, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that advances sexual and reproductive health and rights.¹⁷ Another popular strategy is giving parents the right to opt their child out of sex ed, or making sex ed opt-in to begin with.

And more recently, beginning in the late 2000s, a culture war clash emerged following the adoption of the Common Core State Standards Initiative — a set of K-12 academic standards that was aggressively pushed by the federal government. While the initiative was designed to promote a good education by giving students specific guidelines about what they should know, grade by grade, in subjects like math and English language arts, it faced fierce opposition from Republicans and Democrats alike. 

But around 2015, the Core standards became especially politicized by politicians on the right who thought curriculum standards should be left to local officials. For instance, when Donald Trump ran for the White House in 2016, his early ads argued that “education has to be at a local level.” And in 2018, Trump’s former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos falsely declared the Common Core was “dead” — even though it’s up to individual states, and not the federal government, whether to ditch the Core standards.¹⁸

It’s clear culture war issues have always had a place in how Republicans think about education, but as Terry Moe, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank, told us, Republicans also used to advocate for more policy-focused solutions. He pointed to Republican-led initiatives like the No Child Left Behind Act, which, in part, sought to use standardized testing to help improve student achievement. These kinds of initiatives have since received their own criticism, but they represent a very different strategy than the one that currently dominates the Republican Party. 

“The Republican Party has really gotten further and further away from being a party of ideas about how to solve social problems — one of them being an education system that does not perform very well — and becoming a party of anger and resentment. That’s what they specialize in now,” Moe said. “They are, for the most part, fighting a culture war against the Democrats and trying to pander to their base.”

In that sense, critical race theory fits perfectly into the Republicans’ agenda, as it’s a cultural bugbear that conservatives have co-opted to encompass a range of trends they think are unpopular with Americans. (One of the lead architects pushing the anti-critical race theory backlash, Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, has said as much.) This is particularly true for topics centered specifically around race. 

“They’re worried about what happens when a reckoning takes hold in their kids’ schools where their kids might learn some things about American history — or about themselves or people like them — that are uncomfortable truths,” said Hakeem Jefferson, a FiveThirtyEight contributor and professor of political science at Stanford University. “This is merely another example of white Americans using schools as sites of their racial political projects, which set out to maintain dominance and do so by way of not telling the full truth of American history.”

Many Americans still don’t know what the debate over critical race theory is really about at this point. Just 24 percent have heard “a lot” about it, 25 percent know “some” and 51 percent know little or nothing at all, according to a June Morning Consult/Politico poll. But tellingly, Republicans were more likely than Democrats to have seen, heard or read a lot about critical race theory, 30 percent versus 21 percent. What’s more, those Republicans familiar with critical race theory overwhelmingly dislike it — 78 percent have a negative opinion of it compared to 7 percent of Democrats. When asked to describe critical race theory in that same survey, one Republican respondent called critical race theory “a farce,” while another said it was a “Marxist proposal.”

Considering how much more exposure Republicans have had to it — a Media Matters analysis shows Fox News has mentioned critical race theory 1,300 times in less than four months, and a query of data on the social media tool CrowdTangle from researchers at Miami University and Wright State University found that the share of posts that mention critical race theory on the Facebook pages of local Republican parties has risen exponentially — the blowback among members of the GOP is not entirely surprising. It’s also not just the volume of coverage: The conservative media’s coverage of critical race theory is overwhelmingly negative, too, as it’s decried by some on the right as anti-white.

Republicans have long fought specters within education that they claim threaten the American way of life. The current blowback against critical race theory follows in that tradition, but it also represents a broader transformation of the GOP into a populist party focused on waging culture wars. Though it may seem like a misguided crusade-du-jour, the tumult around critical race theory is both a reflection of the Republican Party’s past — and a glimpse at its future.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/republicans-happy-stoke-culture-wars-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-76546643

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/republicans-starting-make-climate-agenda-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-78546775

It’s been said that women are from Venus and men are from Mars. Broadly speaking, that’s a laughable bit of pop psychology, but there’s a measure of truth to it when it comes to politics. That’s because women have voted notably more Democratic than men in every presidential race since 1980 — and the 2020 contest between Joe Biden and then-President Donald Trump was no different. 

A new study of validated voters from the Pew Research Center suggests, however, that the gender gap — or how women voted compared with men — meaningfully narrowed from 2016 to 2020. Pew found that 55 percent of women supported Biden compared with 48 percent of men, a gender gap of 7 percentage points.¹⁹ This marked a 6-point reduction from the 13-point gap Pew found in 2016, when 39 percent of women and 52 percent of men backed Trump. And the gender gap seems to have shrunk for two main reasons. First, Biden significantly improved his standing among men — he won 48 percent of men versus Hillary Clinton’s 41 percent. Second, Trump significantly improved his standing among women — he won 44 percent of women in 2020 versus 39 percent in 2016.

It’s harder to pinpoint exactly why the gender gap shrunk from 2016 to 2020, but Pew’s numbers point to a couple of possible explanations, particularly the influence that educational attainment has on vote choice. Consider Biden’s improvement among college-educated men. He won 58 percent of this group, a giant leap from Clinton’s 49 percent in 2016. And his performance among college-educated men marked a 10-point advantage over how he did among men overall. Conversely for Trump, his gains among women were largely concentrated among those without a four-year college degree. His support among that group grew from 43 percent in 2016 to 50 percent in 2020. Taken together, this reflects the recent trend of Americans with higher education levels shifting toward the Democrats, and less-well-educated Americans moving toward the GOP. 

This shift was especially notable among white voters,²⁰ as educational attainment has tended to be a larger cleavage for them than for other racial or ethnic groups. Biden won 54 percent of white men with a college degree, up from Clinton’s 47 percent in 2016, while white women without a four-year degree moved in the other direction, as Trump’s support grew to 64 percent, up from 56 percent in 2016.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/best-2020-post-mortem-tells-us-electorate-78700694

Yet, educational attainment isn’t the whole story, as white men without a college degree also shifted significantly toward Biden in 2020. Although Trump still won that group by a huge margin, Biden won 31 percent of them compared with Clinton’s 23 percent — an improvement that may have been foreshadowed by Biden’s performance in the presidential primary, in which he did notably better than Clinton in many parts of the country with higher shares of white voters without a college degree.

So, another factor in the narrowing gender gap, especially for men, may have been the nature of Biden’s candidacy. As a white man in his late 70s, he may have simply come across as more moderate and may have also been less likely to elicit sexist reactions among male voters than Clinton did in 2016. This is reflected in the gains Biden made among men — there isn’t one clear pattern. Biden gained among men with and without a college degree. But he also gained among white men overall, winning 40 percent of that group, up from Clinton’s 32 percent in 2016. Additionally, Biden won 44 percent of married men — married voters tend to be more conservative-leaning than unmarried voters — which marked a major improvement over Clinton’s 32 percent in 2016.

More broadly, Biden won 52 percent of independents, up from Clinton’s 42 percent, and 16 percent of moderate or liberal Republicans, doubling Clinton’s 8 percent. In other words, in an era of political trench warfare, elements of Biden’s identity and political profile may have been just enough for him to appeal to a broad swath of the electorate, narrowing the gender gap and winning the election in the process.

Now, other surveys don’t align as neatly with some of Pew’s findings, and the reality is we’ll never know with absolute certainty how different groups voted last November. Nevertheless, this study offers another look at what happened in 2020 and the broader trends in the American electorate, including the possibility that the longstanding gender gap may have narrowed last November.

Other polling bites

• In June, Republican pollster Echelon Insights examined how cultural and economic attitudes relate to partisanship, and one survey question asked which sort of political party respondents would back if the U.S. had more than two major parties. Twenty-four percent of registered voters said they identified with a Trump-like nationalist party bent on stopping illegal immigration and “putting America first,” while 19 percent said they would support a more traditional conservative party that would “defend” free enterprise and “promote traditional family values.” Tellingly, 83 percent of nationalist party supporters and 78 percent of conservative party supporters backed Trump in the 2020 election. Meanwhile, 26 percent of voters said they would support a labor-oriented party looking to expand the social safety net, while 9 percent would back a green party promoting environmental, social and economic justice. Lastly, 10 percent said they would support a socially liberal but fiscally conservative “Acela” party. At least 80 percent of those who identified with the latter three parties voted for Biden in 2020.
• As vaccinations against COVID-19 become widespread and the economy reopens, Gallup’s measure of how Americans evaluate their own well-being found a record 59.2 percent “thriving,” according to the pollster’s categorization. This represented a marked shift from the low of 46.4 percent who said the same in April 2020, when the coronavirus was causing shutdowns and thousands of deaths. Notably, though, Americans’ reported life satisfaction and anticipated well-being is higher now than it was even before the pandemic.
• Newsy/Ipsos found that a large majority of Americans were at least somewhat comfortable behaving as they did before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Overall, 86 percent of employed workers said they were comfortable working outside the home, and 69 percent of all respondents said they were OK with being in a public place indoors without a mask. In terms of personal interactions, 64 percent said they were comfortable hugging another person, and 60 percent said they were comfortable shaking hands.
• The latest weekly survey from The Economist/YouGov asked Americans about climate change, and 61 percent said the world’s climate was changing due to human activity, while 30 percent said the climate was changing but not because of human activity (9 percent said the climate wasn’t changing at all). Considering the political divide over climate change, there were notable partisan splits on this question. Eighty-six percent of Democrats, 60 percent of independents and 32 percent of Republicans agreed that human activity was behind climate change, while 50 percent of Republicans, 32 percent of independents and 11 percent of Democrats said the climate was changing but humans weren’t responsible. Overall, though, the pollster didn’t find much movement on this question, as responses were similar back in March 2018.
• According to The Hill/HarrisX, Americans are pretty evenly divided over why Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg was indicted. Fifty-one percent of registered voters said the charges for tax fraud and other alleged crimes were politically motivated, while 49 percent said that prosecutors had uncovered criminal behavior. Unsurprisingly, 75 percent of Republicans said the indictment was politically motivated versus 70 percent of Democrats, who said the charges were due to criminal behavior.
• YouGov asked Americans who have been married whether they thought certain marriage traditions should be preserved or dropped. Overall, most traditions were still widely popular, but pluralities of respondents did want to drop two long-standing practices: 50 percent wanted to quit having the bride promise to obey her husband (32 percent wanted to preserve that tradition), and 43 percent wanted to stop having the bride’s family pay for the wedding (25 percent wanted to preserve this). However, women — and not men — seemed to be the ones primarily driving this: 61 percent of women wanted to do away with promising to obey their husbands (versus 38 percent of men), and 52 percent didn’t want the bride’s family to have to pay for the wedding (versus 34 percent of men).

Biden approval

According to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker,²¹ 51.7 percent of Americans approve of the job Biden is doing as president, while 42.1 percent disapprove (a net approval rating of +9.6 points). At this time last week, 52.1 percent approved and 42.2 percent disapproved (a net approval rating of +9.9 points). One month ago, Biden had an approval rating of 53.1 percent and a disapproval rating of 40.5 percent (a net approval rating of +12.6 points).

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/conservative-majority-shaped-supreme-court-term-fivethirtyeight-78655673

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/pandemic-changed-sex-work-industry-fivethirtyeight-78621101

Poll(s) of the week

Being a parent is hard enough — but being a parent during a pandemic is even harder. With many schools physically closed to prevent the spread of COVID-19, parents are now balancing their omnipresent concerns over their children’s education, development and emotional well-being with their own lives and careers. And the stress of that has bubbled over to the point where reopening schools is now a major political issue.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/dr-fauci-life-post-vaccine-bidens-approach-pandemic-74864671

But despite the increased volume of the debate, public opinion on reopening schools is complicated. The issue is not as black-and-white as many are depicting it, and the variations in wording that pollsters use to ask about it can produce different results. Here’s what the polls over the past month do say.

[How Americans View Biden’s Response To The Coronavirus Crisis]

When you ask Americans a binary question about reopening schools, support for reopening appears high. For example, a Jan. 28-30 poll by RMG Research for Just the News found that 53 percent of registered voters thought schools in their area should be open for in-person learning, while just 31 percent thought they should remain closed. And according to a Feb. 12-15 Morning Consult/Politico survey, 57 percent of registered voters thought it was a good idea for K-12 schools to reopen in fall 2021, while just 26 percent thought it was a bad idea.

Add an option for hybrid learning, however, and the nation is more ambivalent. According to a YouGov/HuffPost poll conducted Feb. 3-7, adults were evenly divided among the three options. Twenty-seven percent thought schools should be completely reopened, 29 percent thought schools should be partially reopened and 30 percent thought they should be closed or online-only.

In addition, the issue has been simplistically framed as pitting parents against teachers (with the latter resisting the former’s calls to reopen). But polls indicate that, despite being personally affected by the issue, these two groups have roughly the same opinions on it as the general public — and as each other. According to the crosstabs of the YouGov/HuffPost poll, 29 percent of parents of K-12 students supported completely open schools, 28 percent supported partially reopened schools and 34 percent supported closed or online schools. And on Feb. 4-6, the American Federation of Teachers (a major teachers union) partnered with Hart Research Associates to poll 800 of its members. Although the results should be taken with a grain of salt given the AFT’s stake in the school-reopening debate, the poll found that 24 percent of educators²² thought their school should be conducting fully in-person learning, 40 percent preferred a hybrid model and 34 percent thought they should be doing only remote learning.

[How COVID-19 Ended Flu Season Before It Started]

Another problem with the school-reopening debate is that polls about individual elements of the issue are all over the map — giving both those for and against remote learning a number of stats to use to their own advantage. For instance, 51 percent of parents and guardians of K-12 schoolchildren told YouGov/HuffPost that they were “very” or “somewhat” confident that it was safe for schools in their area to hold in-person classes now; 42 percent said they were “not very” or “not at all” confident of that. However, 60 percent of parents told the Harris Poll that they were “very” or “somewhat” concerned about their kids going back to school for the first time (40 percent were “not very” or “not at all” concerned).

Likewise, educators whose schools are doing at least some in-person instruction told Hart Research/AFT that they have felt comfortable returning to work this year, 63 percent to 33 percent. But those whose schools operate totally remotely would not feel comfortable resuming in-person work, 54 percent to 41 percent. Is this the result of educators finding in-person instruction not as unsafe as they feared? Or is it because schools that have already returned to in-person instruction are better equipped to implement proper precautions? Or is there another confounding variable, like schools remaining closed in areas with high numbers of coronavirus cases, or in liberal areas where some people might be more concerned about contracting the virus?

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/video/covid-19-vaccines-work-74654465

On the other side of the coin, polls disagree about whether remote learning is extremely unpopular, slightly unpopular or even slightly popular. For instance, a YouGov/Yahoo! News poll from Jan. 20-21 found that more adults believed distance learning was a good thing (40 percent) than a bad thing (35 percent). But Morning Consult/Politico found that more registered voters considered it ineffective (49 percent) than effective (42 percent). And when RMG Research asked registered voters on Jan. 28-30 whether students learn better with in-person learning or virtual classrooms, in-person won in a landslide (72 percent to 9 percent). Similarly, 79 percent of educators told Hart Research/AFT that distance learning works somewhat or much less well than in-person teaching (18 percent thought it worked just as well or nearly as well).

The polls don’t even agree on whether the pandemic is harming children themselves. A Jan. 14-19 poll by Echelon Insights for the National Parents Union found that 65 percent of parents of K-12 students worry “some” or “a lot” about how the pandemic is affecting their children’s mental health and emotional well-being. And according to the YouGov/Yahoo! News poll, parents of school-age children believe 57 percent to 34 percent that “[their] children have been falling behind academically during the pandemic.” But according to the Harris Poll, 58 percent of parents have not felt recently that their “kids are missing out on learning,” although 42 percent have felt that way.

But at this point, Republicans have seized on the school-reopening issue as a way to rebuild their political fortunes, arguing that schools should reopen ASAP. (Democratic politicians like President Biden agree that schools should ideally reopen but have been more cautious about it.) But there may not be as much dissatisfaction with the status quo as they think. According to a Feb. 11-14 Quinnipiac University poll, 47 percent of adults believe that schools are reopening in their community at about the right pace; just 27 percent believe it’s not happening quickly enough, and 18 percent think it’s happening too quickly. Likewise, a plurality (48 percent) of parents and guardians of K-12 students told YouGov/HuffPost that schools in their area were handling things “about right”; just 23 percent thought they were being too restrictive, while 19 percent thought they were taking too many risks. And educators are pretty happy too: 63 percent in the Hart Research/AFT poll said their school system has struck a good balance on the issue. Fifteen percent said that their school system had not done enough to resume in-person instruction, while 16 percent said it had gone too far to do so.

Unsurprisingly, then, people have largely positive views of those making decisions about reopening schools. In the YouGov/HuffPost poll, parents and guardians approved of their school district officials’ handling of the pandemic 54 percent to 30 percent. In the Hart Research/AFT poll, more educators said they were satisfied (68 percent) than dissatisfied (31 percent) with their school system’s handling of the pandemic. And according to Morning Consult/Politico, 59 percent of all registered voters said they trusted local school administrators “some” or “a lot” to decide whether to reopen schools in the fall; just 29 percent said they didn’t trust them “much” or “at all.”

Teachers unions don’t get quite as good a grade, but they are still viewed favorably overall. Their approval/disapproval rating among parents and guardians for handling the pandemic is 42 percent to 26 percent, per YouGov/HuffPost. And Morning Consult/Politico found that registered voters trusted national teachers unions 50 percent to 38 percent, while they trusted local teachers unions 54 percent to 34 percent. YouGov/HuffPost even found that the general public would support teachers unions going on strike to protest unsafe working conditions, 56 percent to 30 percent. Parents feel the same way, 55 percent to 36 percent.

[The Ethical Dilemmas Prompted By The Vaccine Rollout]

Finally, although Republicans have criticized the Biden administration for wobbling on reopening schools (something Biden has promised to do for K-8 schools within his first 100 days), it does not appear to be a political vulnerability for him yet. Morning Consult/Politico found that 52 percent of registered voters trusted Biden to decide whether to reopen schools in the fall versus 40 percent who did not. Quinnipiac also gave Biden a positive net approval rating on his handling of school reopenings (42 percent to 38 percent), including among parents of school-age children (43 percent to 37 percent), although a significant share of respondents (20 percent) had no opinion, suggesting they might be adopting a wait-and-see approach. Lastly, at least one poll (albeit from a liberal sponsor) thinks Biden still has the upper hand on this issue over Republicans. Global Strategy Group and GBAO, polling on behalf of Navigator Research, found in a Jan. 27-Feb. 1 survey that registered voters trusted Biden and Democrats to handle school reopening more than the GOP, 45 percent to 35 percent.

Other polling bites

• Republicans seem intent to make a major campaign issue out of “cancel culture,” or the perception that people are socially ostracized for conservative beliefs. And while a new poll from YouGov/HuffPost does find that 67 percent of those who are familiar with the term agree that cancel culture is a problem, only 52 percent of Americans say they have heard of it. Even though cancel culture was a big part of GOP messaging in the 2020 election, that’s essentially the same share of Americans who had heard of the term in the same poll last September (50 percent).
• New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was considered a paragon of coronavirus leadership early in the pandemic, but on Jan. 28, the state attorney general reported that around twice as many people had died of COVID-19 in nursing homes as the Cuomo administration had claimed. However, Siena College found that the story had not significantly damaged his reputation: Although a plurality (34 percent) of New York voters gave him a “poor” grade on publicizing data about nursing-home deaths, a combined 39 percent still gave him a “good” or “excellent” grade, and his approval rating on handling the coronavirus pandemic overall stood at 61 percent. This poll was taken before the latest developments in the story, in which a Cuomo aide suggested they withheld the death statistics on purpose for political gain, so it’s entirely possible the fallout is yet to come for Cuomo.
• According to new Gallup polling, 62 percent of Americans believe the Republican and Democratic parties do such a bad job representing the American people that a third major party is needed. That’s the highest such number Gallup has recorded since 2003. However, as my colleague Geoffrey Skelley has written, political realities in the U.S. make the formation of a third party very unlikely.
• In just a few weeks, it will be time for most Americans to “spring forward” into daylight saving time. But if some people had their druthers, we would never change our clocks at all. A new YouGov poll has found that 44 percent of adults believe their state should not practice daylight saving time; 36 percent support the practice.

Biden approval

According to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker,²³ 54.4 percent of Americans approve of the job Biden is doing as president, while 37.9 percent disapprove (a net approval rating of +16.5 points). At this time last week, 54.3 percent approved and 37.1 percent disapproved (a net approval rating of +17.1 points).

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/covid-19-vaccine-means-political-battles-74728009

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/bidens-response-pandemic-trumps-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-75622204

It was plain to see that Trump wasn’t talking to all suburbanites, though. He appeared to have a specific vision of the suburbs in mind: Something like the modern day equivalent of the white, well-to-do characters from 1950s sitcoms who had big, well-manicured lawns and white picket fences, agreed with their neighbors about most things — from which presidential candidate to support to what makes a good tuna casserole — and were, in the past, the targets of racial dog-whistles like Trump’s.

Only this strategy didn’t work. Because this version of suburbia is increasingly hard to find.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/electoral-problems-facing-republicans-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-74617710

Suburban and exurban counties turned away from Trump and toward Democrat Joe Biden in states across the country, including in key battleground states like Pennsylvania and Georgia. In part, this may be because the suburbs are simply far more diverse than they used to be. But suburbs have also become increasingly well-educated — and that may actually better explain why so many suburbs and exurbs are turning blue than just increased diversity on its own.

According to Ashley Jardina, a political science professor at Duke University who studies white identity politics, it’s not that racial diversity isn’t a factor. Among white people, at least, educational attainment is often a proxy for how open they are to growing racial diversity, with more highly educated white people likely to think increased racial diversity is a good thing. “Education is so important because it’s intertwined with racial attitudes among white people,” Jardina said.

[Raphael Warnock’s Dog Ads Cut Against White Voters’ Stereotypes Of Black People]

No matter how you slice it, it’s clear that communities that were pretty much uniformly white only a few decades ago are now far more racially diverse, with Black, Hispanic and Asian Americans making up larger shares of suburban and exurban populations than ever before. According to our analysis of data from a “diversity index” developed by USA Today that calculates the chance that any two people chosen at random from a given area are of different races or ethnicities, most suburbs have grown at least somewhat more diverse over the past 10 years. That’s particularly true in some of the states — like Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan — that were pivotal for Biden this year.²⁴

On the surface, those demographic shifts may seem like good news for Democrats, since nonwhite voters are much more likely to identify as Democratic than white voters. But when we dug into how these diversifying parts of the country have actually voted, we didn’t find a uniform shift toward Democrats.²⁵ Some suburbs that grew more racially diverse over the past decade saw a smaller swing toward Biden than others — or even moved slightly further into Trump’s column. And other suburbs that didn’t diversify much at all still became much bluer in 2020.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/video/suburban-votes-key-putting-biden-top-nate-silver-74448788

Rather, it was education — and particularly how much more educated a place has gotten over the past 10 years²⁶ — that was more closely related to increased support for Biden (especially once accounting for how educated a county was in 2010). Growing racial diversity in an area was still important, since the suburban counties that saw the biggest swing toward Trump were the ones that remained less racially diverse and less educated. But the political swing among diversifying counties was much less uniform than it was in counties that became more educated.

Take Henry County, Georgia, a mostly exurban part of the Atlanta metropolitan area. Voters there narrowly backed Hillary Clinton by 4 points in 2016, but they supported Biden by a whopping 20 points this past November — a 16-point Democratic swing. What happened? Henry County was already pretty diverse, but it became even more so in the past decade. Once majority non-Hispanic white, the share of its Black population is now nearly equal to its white share. Meanwhile, the share of the population with a college degree grew slightly faster than was typical across other suburban and exurban counties. This made Henry one of the many increasingly diverse and educated counties in the Atlanta area that shifted to the left from 2016 to 2020, helping Biden become the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry the state since 1992.

And it’s suburbs like Henry that produced some of the swiftest and most dramatic political shifts of the 2020 election, according to William Frey, a demographer and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program. The patterns we observed in Henry County can be seen in suburbs across the Sun Belt. Shifting suburban populations in states like Texas and Arizona have made presidential elections there much more competitive in a relatively short period of time, while according to Frey, demographic change has been happening in suburban areas in Rust Belt states like Michigan and Wisconsin too, but at a slower pace.

[Related: How The 2020 Election Changed The Electoral Map]

What about places that become either more diverse or more educated, but not both? Suburban and exurban counties that grew more diverse but did not become more educated still swung toward Biden in 2020, but by a much smaller margin. It’s especially striking when you compare these places to areas that became much more educated but not more diverse, as those places actually had moved more toward Biden, on average.

Consider Volusia County, Florida, a suburban-exurban county northeast of Orlando in central Florida. Volusia became marginally more Republican this year, as Trump won it by 14 points after winning it by 13 points in 2016. This, despite the fact that Volusia has become more diverse over the past decade, primarily through an increase in its Hispanic population (although the county is still roughly 70 percent non-Hispanic white). However, the share of Volusia’s population with a four-year college degree hasn’t increased as much as in other suburban and exurban places.

It’s also possible that because the population was less educated as a whole, the white residents were more likely to respond to the county’s growing diversity by becoming more conservative — canceling out some of the effects of having a growing nonwhite, Democratic-leaning share of the community. In her own research, Jardina has found similar dynamics at play, although she hasn’t focused on the suburbs specifically. In general, though, Jardina said, “[W]hites who have a higher level of racial identity and live in places where there’s been a much greater change in the foreign-born population are much more likely to vote conservatively.”

That may help explain why suburban and exurban areas like Volusia County that became notably more diverse but not more educated didn’t move as much to the left as places that became more educated but not more diverse. Take Ottawa County, Michigan, which sits along the coast of Lake Michigan as part of the Grand Rapids metropolitan area. The county remains pretty Republican, but Trump only carried it by 21 points this year after winning it by 30 points four years ago — a 9-point swing toward the Democrats. And although the racial and ethnic makeup of Ottawa’s population hasn’t changed much since 2010, the share that holds a bachelor’s degree has shot up from 29 percent to 34 percent, which might explain the county’s swing. Overall, the Democratic gains there were part of a larger swing in the traditionally Republican Grand Rapids region that helped Biden carry Michigan.

[Why So Many Men Stuck With Trump In 2020]

So what do these trends mean for Democrats — and Republicans — going forward? Jardina stressed to us that in the short term, demography is not destiny. Democrats might struggle to reproduce Biden’s strong performance in the suburbs, particularly if their Republican opponents don’t rely as heavily on racialized appeals and transparently racist tropes as Trump. “The big question mark for me is what happens in these suburban areas in two years or four years if [Republican candidates] adopt a similar strategy to Trump but with more competence and decorum,” Jardina said. “I’ll put it this way — I don’t think Republicans have lost their opportunity to stay competitive in the suburbs.”

On the other hand, both Frey and Jardina said it’s possible that the demographic realignment of the suburbs could end up creating a more lasting political shift — one in which the suburbs and exurbs look and vote a lot more like urban areas, and a lot less like more rural places. Frey predicted, though, that the big political shifts we saw this year in places like the Sun Belt might persist — or even accelerate — simply because they map better onto the speed and breadth of the demographic changes in those areas. But a lot will depend on Democrats’ ability to mobilize the diverse groups that now are looking more and more like typical suburban voters.

“The future of the Democratic Party is clearly with these younger, more diverse, more educated populations,” Frey said. “But they have to figure out how to keep them energized and voting.”

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/covid-19-vaccine-means-political-battles-74728009