We updated this piece on the four-day school week, originally published in June 2018, on July 15, 2023 to include new research and other information.

More than 2,100 public schools in 25 states have switched to a four-day school week, often in hopes of recruiting teachers, saving money and boosting student attendance, researchers estimate.

Small, rural schools facing significant teacher shortages have led the trend, usually choosing to take off Mondays or Fridays to give employees and students a three-day weekend every week. To make up for the lost day of instruction, school officials typically tack time onto the remaining four days.

In some places where schools made the change, school district leaders have marveled at the resulting spikes in job applications from teachers and other job seekers. Teacher shortages, made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic, have plagued public schools nationwide for decades.

“The number of teacher applications that we’ve received have gone up more than 4-fold,” Dale Herl, superintendent of the Independence, Missouri school district, told CBS News late last year.

The impact on students, however, has not been as positive. Although peer-reviewed research on the topic is limited, focusing only on a single state or small group of states, there is evidence that some groups of students learn less on a four-day schedule than on a five-day schedule.

A new analysis of student performance in six states — Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming — finds that students who went to class four days a week, as a whole, made less progress in reading during the academic year than students who went five days a week. Kids on a four-day schedule earned lower reading scores on a spring assessment known as the Measures of Academic Progress Growth, on average.

However, the authors of the paper, published last month, also found that the condensed schedule had little to no effect on the rural students they studied, on average. Schools located in towns and suburbs, on the other hand, saw student performance drop considerably after adopting a four-day week.

The authors also discovered differences among student groups. For example, Hispanic students going to class four days a week made less progress in math during the school year than white students on the same schedule. White students made less progress in math than Native American students during the 11-year study.

“For policymakers and practitioners, this study addresses previous ambiguity about the effects of four-day school weeks on academic outcomes and provides evidence supporting concerns about four-day school week effects on student achievement and growth, particularly for those implemented in non-rural areas,” write the authors, Emily Morton, Paul Thompson and Megan Kuhfeld.

In the spring before the COVID-19 pandemic, a total of 662 public school districts used the schedule — up more than 600% since 1999, Thompson and Morton write in a 2021 essay for the Brookings Institution. That number climbed to 876 during the 2022-23 academic year, they told The Journalist’s Resource in email messages.

In addition to studying the schedule’s effect on student achievement, researchers are also investigating its impact on other aspects of school operations, including education spending, student discipline and employee morale. To make the research easier to find, the University of Oregon’s HEDCO Institute for Evidence-Based Educational Practice has created the Four-Day School Week Research Database.

Anyone can use the interactive platform to sift through research completed as of May 2023. It’s worth noting that most research in the database is not peer-reviewed journal articles. Seventy of the more than 100 papers are student dissertations, theses and other papers.

If you keep reading, you’ll find that we have gathered and summarized several relevant journal articles below. To date, the scholarly literature indicates:

• Some schools cut instructional time when they adopt a four-day schedule.
• The impact of a four-day school week differs depending on a range of factors, including the number of hours per week a school operates, how the school structures its daily schedule and the race and ethnicity of students.
• The condensed schedule does not save much money, considering employee salaries and benefits make up the bulk of school expenses. In a 2021 analysis, Thompson estimates schools save 1% to 2% by shortening the school week by one day.
• Staff morale improves under a four-day school week.
• Fighting and bullying decline at high schools.

Both Thompson and Morton urged journalists to explain that the amount of time schools dedicate to student learning during four-day weeks makes a big difference.

“It’s pretty critical to the story that districts with longer days (who are possibly delivering equal or more instructional time to their students than they were on a five-day week) are not seeing the same negative impacts that districts with shorter days are seeing,” Morton, a researcher at the American Institutes of Research, wrote to JR in late 2023.

In a follow-up conversation with JR in July 2024, Morton pointed out that parents like the four-day schedule despite concerns raised by education scholars. In interviews with researchers, she wrote, “parents mention that they appreciate the additional family time and perceive other benefits of the schedule for their children, and they overwhelmingly indicate that they would choose to keep a four-day schedule over switching back to a five-day schedule.”

Morton would not recommend schools adopt a four-day schedule if their main aim is saving money, boosting student attendance or recruiting and retaining teachers. Research findings “do not provide much support for the argument that four-day school weeks are delivering the intended benefits,” she wrote to JR.

Keep reading to learn more. We’ll update this collection of research periodically.

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A Multi-State, Student-Level Analysis of the Effects of the Four-Day School Week On Student Achievement and Growth
Emily Morton, Paul N. Thompson and Megan Kuhfeld. Economics of Education Review, June 2024.

Summary: This study looks at how switching to a four-day school week affects student achievement over the course of the school year in Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming. A key takeaway: On average, across those six states, students on a four-day schedule learned less during the school year than students who went to class five days a week. However, students in rural areas fared better on that schedule than students in “non-rural” areas.

Researchers studied the scores that students in grades 3-8 earned on an assessment called the Measures of Academic Progress Growth, administered each fall and spring to gauge how much kids learned over the course of the school year. The analysis uses 11 years of test score data in reading and math, collected from the 2008-09 to the 2018-19 academic year.

Researchers found that students who went to school four days a week, as a whole, made smaller gains in reading during the academic year than students who went five days a week. They also earned lower scores in reading on the spring assessment, on average.

When researchers looked at the data more closely, however, they found differences between students attending rural schools and students attending schools located in towns and suburbs — communities the researchers dubbed “non-rural.”

Although adopting a four-day schedule had little to no impact on kids at rural schools, student performance fell considerably at schools in non-rural areas. Those children, as a whole, made less progress in reading and math during the academic year than children attending non-rural schools that operated five days a week. They also earned lower scores in both reading and math on the spring exam.

“The estimated effects on math and reading achievement in non-rural four-day week schools are ‘medium’ and meaningful,” the researchers write, adding that the difference is roughly equivalent to a quarter of a school year worth of learning in the fifth grade.

Researchers also discovered that student performance at schools with four-day schedules varied by gender and race. At schools using a four-day-a-week schedule, girls made smaller gains in reading and math than boys, on average. Hispanic students made less progress in math than white students, who made less progress in math than Native American students.

“The estimated effects on math and reading gains during the school year are not ‘large’ by the developing standards used to interpret effect sizes of education interventions, but they are also not trivial,” the researchers write. “For the many districts and communities who have become very fond of the schedule, the evidence presented in this study suggests that how the four-day school week is implemented may be an important factor in its effects on students.”

Impacts of the Four-Day School Week on Early Elementary Achievement
Paul N. Thompson; et al. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 2nd Quarter 2023.

Summary: This study is the first to examine the four-day school week’s impact on elementary schools’ youngest students. Researchers looked at how children in Oregon who went to school four days a week in kindergarten later performed in math and English Language Arts when they reached the third grade. What they found: Overall, there were “minimal and non-significant differences” in the test scores of third-graders who attended kindergarten on a four-day schedule between 2014 and 2016 and third-graders who went to kindergarten on a five-day schedule during the same period.

When the researchers studied individual groups of students, though, they noticed small differences. For example, when they looked only at children who had scored highest on their pre-kindergarten assessments of letter sounds, letter names and early math skills, they learned that kids who went to kindergarten four days a week scored a little lower on third-grade tests than those who had gone to kindergarten five days a week.

The researchers write that they find no statistically significant evidence of detrimental four-day school week achievement impacts, and even some positive impacts” for minority students, lower-income students,  special education students, students enrolled in English as a Second Language programs and students who scored in the lower half on pre-kindergarten assessments.

There are multiple reasons why lower-achieving students might be less affected by school schedules than high achievers, the researchers point out. For example, higher-achieving students “may miss out on specialized instruction — such as gifted and enrichment activities — that they would have had time to receive under a five-day school schedule,” they write.

Effects of 4-Day School Weeks on Older Adolescents: Examining Impacts of the Schedule on Academic Achievement, Attendance, and Behavior in High School
Emily Morton. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, June 2022.

Summary: Oklahoma high schools saw less fighting and bullying among students after switching from a five-day-a-week schedule to a four-day schedule, this study finds. Fighting declined by 0.79 incidents per 100 students and bullying dropped by 0.65 incidents per 100 students.

The other types of student discipline problems examined, including weapons possession, vandalism and truancy, did not change, according to the analysis, based on a variety of student and school data collected through 2019 from the Oklahoma State Department of Education and National Center for Education Statistics.

“Results indicate that 4-day school weeks decrease per-pupil bullying incidents by approximately 39% and per-pupil fighting incidents by approximately 31%,” writes the author, Emily Morton, a research scientist at NWEA, a nonprofit research organization formerly known as the Northwest Evaluation Association.

Morton did not investigate what caused the reduction in bullying and fighting. She did find that moving to a four-day schedule had “no detectable effect” on high school attendance or student scores on the ACT college-entrance exam.

Only a Matter of Time? The Role of Time in School on Four-Day School Week Achievement Impacts
Paul N. Thompson and Jason Ward. Economics of Education Review, February 2022.

Summary: Student test scores in math and language arts dipped at some schools that adopted a four-day schedule but did not change at others, according to this analysis of school schedule switches in 12 states.

Researchers discovered “small reductions” in test scores for students in grades 3 through 8 at schools offering what the researchers call “low time in school.” These schools operate an average of 29.95 hours during the four-day week. The decline in test scores is described in terms of standard deviation, not units of measurement such as points or percentages.

At schools offering “middle time in school” — an average of 31.03 hours over four days — test scores among kids in grades 3 through 8 did not change, write the researchers, Paul N. Thompson, an associate professor of economics at Oregon State University, and Jason Ward, an associate economist at the RAND Corp., a nonprofit research organization.

Scores also did not change at schools providing “high time in school,” or 32.14 hours over a four-day school week, on average.

When describing this paper’s findings, it’s inaccurate to say researchers found that test scores dropped as a result of schools adopting a four-day schedule. It is correct to say test scores dropped, on average, across the schools the researchers studied. But it’s worth noting the relationship between test scores and the four-day school week differs according to the average number of hours those schools operate each week.

For this analysis, researchers examined school districts in states that allowed four-day school weeks during the 2008-2009 academic year through the 2017-2018 academic years. They chose to focus on the 12 states where four-day school weeks were most common. The data they used came from the Stanford Educational Data Archive and “a proprietary, longitudinal, national database” that tracked the use of four-day school weeks from 2009 to 2018.

The researchers write that their findings “suggest that four-day school weeks that operate with adequate levels of time in school have no clear negative effect on achievement and, instead, that it is operating four-day school weeks in a low-time-in-school environment that should be cautioned against.”

Three Midwest Rural School Districts’ First Year Transition to the Four Day School Week
Jon Turner, Kim Finch and Ximena Uribe-Zarain. The Rural Educator, 2019.

Abstract: “The four-day school week is a concept that has been utilized in rural schools for decades to respond to budgetary shortfalls. There has been little peer-reviewed research on the four-day school week that has focused on the perception of parents who live in school districts that have recently switched to the four-day model. This study collects data from 584 parents in three rural Missouri school districts that have transitioned to the four-day school week within the last year. Quantitative statistical analysis identifies significant differences in the perceptions of parents classified by the age of children, special education identification, and free and reduced lunch status. Strong parental support for the four-day school week was identified in all demographic areas investigated; however, families with only elementary aged children and families with students receiving special education services were less supportive than other groups.”

Juvenile Crime and the Four-Day School Week
Stefanie Fischer and Daniel Argyle. Economics of Education Review, 2018.

Abstract: “We leverage the adoption of a four-day school week across schools within the jurisdiction of rural law enforcement agencies in Colorado to examine the causal link between school attendance and youth crime. Those affected by the policy attend school for the same number of hours each week as students on a typical five-day week; however, treated students do not attend school on Friday. This policy allows us to learn about two aspects of the school-crime relationship that have previously been unstudied: one, the effects of a frequent and permanent schedule change on short-term crime, and two, the impact that school attendance has on youth crime in rural areas. Our difference-in-difference estimates show that following policy adoption, agencies containing students on a four-day week experience about a 20 percent increase in juvenile criminal offenses, where the strongest effect is observed for property crime.”

Staff Perspectives of the Four-Day School Week: A New Analysis of Compressed School Schedules
Jon Turner, Kim Finch and Ximena Uribe–Zarian. Journal of Education and Training Studies, 2018.

Abstract: “The four-day school week is a concept that has been utilized in rural schools for decades to respond to budgetary shortfalls. There has been little peer-reviewed research on the four-day school week that has focused on the perception of staff that work in school districts that have recently switched to the four-day model. This study collects data from 136 faculty and staff members in three rural Missouri school districts that have transitioned to the four-day school week within the last year. Quantitative statistical analysis identifies strong support of the four-day school week model from both certified educational staff and classified support staff perspectives. All staff responded that the calendar change had improved staff morale, and certified staff responded that the four-day week had a positive impact on what is taught in classrooms and had increased academic quality. Qualitative analysis identifies staff suggestions for schools implementing the four-day school week including the importance of community outreach prior to implementation. No significant differences were identified between certified and classified staff perspectives. Strong staff support for the four-day school week was identified in all demographic areas investigated. Findings support conclusions made in research in business and government sectors that identify strong employee support of a compressed workweek across all work categories.”

The Economics of a Four-Day School Week: Community and Business Leaders’ Perspectives
Jon Turner, Kim Finch and Ximena Uribe–Zarian. Journal of Education and Training Studies, 2018.

Abstract: “The four-day school week is a concept that has been utilized in rural schools in the United States for decades and the number of schools moving to the four-day school week is growing. In many rural communities, the school district is the largest regional employer which provides a region with permanent, high paying jobs that support the local economy. This study collects data from 71 community and business leaders in three rural school districts that have transitioned to the four-day school week within the last year. Quantitative statistical analysis is used to investigate the perceptions of community and business leaders related to the economic impact upon their businesses and the community and the impact the four-day school week has had upon perception of quality of the school district. Significant differences were identified between community/business leaders that currently have no children in school as compared to community/business leaders with children currently enrolled in four-day school week schools. Overall, community/business leaders were evenly divided concerning the economic impact on their businesses and the community. Community/business leaders’ perceptions of the impact the four-day school week was also evenly divided concerning the impact on the quality of the school district. Slightly more negative opinions were identified related to the economic impact on the profitability of their personal businesses which may impact considerations by school leaders. Overall, community/business leaders were evenly divided when asked if they would prefer their school district return to the traditional five-day week school calendar.”

Impact of a 4-Day School Week on Student Academic Performance, Food Insecurity, and Youth Crime
Report from the Oklahoma State Department of Health’s Office of Partner Engagement, 2017.

Summary: “A Health Impact Assessment (HIA) utilizes a variety of data sources and analytic methods to evaluate the consequences of proposed or implemented policy on health. A rapid (HIA) was chosen to research the impact of the four-day school week on youth. The shift to a four-day school week was a strategy employed by many school districts in Oklahoma to address an $878 million budget shortfall, subsequent budget cuts, and teacher shortages. The HIA aimed to assess the impact of the four-day school week on student academic performance, food insecurity, and juvenile crime … An extensive review of literature and stakeholder engagement on these topic areas was mostly inconclusive or did not reveal any clear-cut evidence to identify effects of the four-day school week on student outcomes — academic performance, food insecurity or juvenile crime. Moreover, there are many published articles about the pros and cons of the four-day school week, but a lack of comprehensive research is available on the practice.”

Does Shortening the School Week Impact Student Performance? Evidence from the Four-Day School Week
D. Mark Anderson and Mary Beth Walker. Education Finance and Policy, 2015.

Abstract: “School districts use a variety of policies to close budget gaps and stave off teacher layoffs and furloughs. More schools are implementing four-day school weeks to reduce overhead and transportation costs. The four-day week requires substantial schedule changes as schools must increase the length of their school day to meet minimum instructional hour requirements. Although some schools have indicated this policy eases financial pressures, it is unknown whether there is an impact on student outcomes. We use school-level data from Colorado to investigate the relationship between the four-day week and academic performance among elementary school students. Our results generally indicate a positive relationship between the four-day week and performance in reading and mathematics. These findings suggest there is little evidence that moving to a four-day week compromises student academic achievement. This research has policy relevance to the current U.S. education system, where many school districts must cut costs.”

Other resources

• The Education Commission of the States offers a 50-state comparison of public school students’ instructional time requirements. For example, students in Colorado are required to be in school for a minimum of 160 days each academic year while in Vermont, the minimum is 175 days and in North Carolina, it’s 185.
• The State of the American Teacher project offers insights into how teachers feel about their jobs and the education field as a whole. In early 2022, RAND Corp. surveyed a nationally representative sample of teachers, asking questions on topics such as job-related stress, school safety, COVID-19 mitigation policies and career plans. Survey results show that 56% of teachers who answered a question about their attitude toward their job “strongly” or “somewhat” agreed with the statement, “The stress and disappointments involved in teaching aren’t really worth it.” Meanwhile, 78% “strongly” or “somewhat” agreed with the statement, “I don’t seem to have as much enthusiasm now as I did when I began teaching.”
• Opinions about the four-day school week vary among school board members, district-level administrators, school principals and teachers. These organizations can provide insights: the Schools Superintendents Association, National School Boards Association, National Association of Elementary School Principals and National Association of Secondary School Principals.

Looking for more research on public schools? Check out our other collections of research on student lunches, school uniforms, teacher salaries and teacher misconduct.

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Journalists can’t report accurately on research involving human subjects without knowing certain details about the sample of people researchers studied. It’s important to know, for example, whether researchers used a nationally representative sample.

That’s important whether a journalist is covering an opinion poll that asks American voters which presidential candidate they prefer, an academic article that examines absenteeism among U.S. public school students or a clinical trial of a new drug designed to treat Alzheimer’s disease.

When researchers design a study, they start by defining their target population, or the group of people they want to know more about. They then create a sample meant to represent this larger group. If researchers want to study a group of people across an entire country, they aim for a nationally representative sample — one that resembles the target population in key characteristics such as gender, age, political party affiliation and household income.

Earlier this year, when the Pew Research Center wanted to know how Americans feel about a new class of weight-loss drugs, it asked a sample of 10,133 U.S. adults questions about obesity and the effects of Ozempic, Wegovy and similar drugs. Pew designed the survey so that the answers those 10,133 people gave likely reflected the attitudes of all U.S. adults across various demographics.

If Pew researchers had simply interviewed 10,133 people they encountered at shopping malls in the southeastern U.S., their responses would not have been nationally representative. Not only would their answers reflect attitudes in just one region of the country, the individuals interviewed would not represent adults nationwide.

A nationally representative sample is one of several types of samples used in research. It’s commonly used in research that examines numerical data in public policy fields such as public health, criminal justice, education, immigration, politics and economics.

To accurately report on research, journalists must pay close attention to who is and isn’t included in research samples. Here’s why that information is critical:

1. If researchers did not use a sample designed to represent people from across the nation, it would be inaccurate to report or imply that their results apply nationwide.

A mistake journalists make when covering research is overgeneralizing the results, or reporting that the results apply to a larger group of people than they actually do. Depending on who is included in the sample, a study’s findings might only apply to the people in the sample. Many times, findings apply only to a narrow group of people at the national level who share the same characteristics as the people in the sample — for example, individuals who retired from the U.S. military after 2015 or Hispanic teenagers with food allergies.

To determine who a study is designed to represent, look at how the researchers have defined this target population, including location, demographics and other characteristics.

“Consider who that research is meant to be applicable to,” says Ameeta Retzer, a research fellow at the University of Birmingham’s Department of Applied Health Sciences.

2. When researchers use a nationally representative sample, their analyses often focus on what’s happening at a national level, on average. Because of this, it’s never safe to assume that national-level findings also apply to people at the local level.

“As a word of caution, if you’re using a nationally representative sample, you can’t say, ‘Well, that means in California …,” warns Michael Gottfried, an applied economist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education.

When researchers create a nationally representative sample of U.S. grade school students, their aim is to gain a better understanding of some aspect of the nation’s student population, Gottfried says. What they learn will represent an average across all students nationwide.

“On average, this is what kids are doing, this is how kids are doing, this is the average experience of kids in the United States,” he explains. “The conclusion has to stay at the national level. It means you cannot go back and say kids in Philadelphia are doing that. You can’t take this information and say, ‘In my city, this is happening.’ It’s probably happening in your city, but cities are all different.”

3. There’s no universally accepted standard for representativeness.

If you read a lot of research, you’ve likely noticed that what constitutes a nationally representative sample varies. Researchers investigating the spending habits of Americans aged 20 to 30 years might create a sample that represents this age group in terms of gender and race. Meanwhile, a similar study might use a sample that represents this age group across multiple dimensions — gender, race and ethnicity along with education level, household size, household income and the language spoken at home.

“In research, there’s no consensus on which characteristics we include when we think about representativeness,” Retzer notes.

Researchers determine whether their sample adequately represents the population they want to study, she says. Sometimes, researchers call a sample “nationally representative” even though it’s not all that representative.

Courtney Kennedy, vice president of methods and innovation at Pew Research Center, has questioned the accuracy of election research conducted with samples that only represent U.S. voters by age, race and sex. It’s increasingly important for opinion poll samples to also align with voters’ education levels, Kennedy writes in an August 2020 report.

“The need for battleground state polls to adjust for education was among the most important takeaways from the polling misses in 2016,” Kennedy writes, referring to the U.S. presidential election that year.

4. When studying a nationwide group of people, the representativeness of a sample is more important than its size.

Journalists often assume larger samples provide more accurate results than smaller ones. But that’s not necessarily true. Actually, what matters more when studying a population is having a sample that closely resembles it, Michaela Mora explains on the website of her research firm, Relevant Insights.

“The sheer size of a sample is not a guarantee of its ability to accurately represent a target population,” writes Mora, a market researcher and former columnist for the Dallas Business Journal. “Large unrepresentative samples can perform as badly as small unrepresentative samples.”

If a sample is representative, larger samples are more helpful than smaller ones. Larger samples allow researchers to investigate differences among sub-groups of the target population. Having a larger sample also improves the reliability of the results.

5. When creating samples for health and medical research, prioritizing certain demographic groups or failing to represent others can have long-term impacts on public health and safety.

Retzer says that too often, the people most likely to benefit from a new drug, vaccine or health intervention are not well represented in research. She notes, for example, that even though people of South Asian descent are more likely to have diabetes than people from other ethnic backgrounds, they are vastly underrepresented in research about diabetes.

“You can have the most beautiful, really lovely diabetes drug,” she says. “But if it doesn’t work for the majority of the population that needs it, how useful is it?”

Women remain underrepresented in some areas of health and medical research. It wasn’t until 1993 that the National Institutes of Health began requiring that women and racial and ethnic minorities be included in research funded by the federal agency. Before that, “it was both normal and acceptable for drugs and vaccines to be tested only on men — or to exclude women who could become pregnant,” Nature magazine points out in a May 2023 editorial.

In 2022, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued guidance on developing plans to enroll more racial and ethnic minorities in clinical trials for all medical products.

When journalists cover research, Retzer says it’s crucial they ask researchers to explain the choices they made while creating their samples. Journalists should also ask researchers how well their nationally representative samples represent historically marginalized groups, including racial minorities, sexual minorities, people from low-income households and people who don’t speak English.

“Journalists could say, ‘This seems like a really good finding, but who is it applicable to?’” she says.

The Journalist’s Resource thanks Chase Harrison, associate director of the Harvard University Program on Survey Research, for his help with this tip sheet.  

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School board elections have grown increasingly politicized in recent years as conservative politicians and advocacy organizations push to restrict how public schools address issues related to race, gender and sexuality.

But the job of school board members, many of whom are unpaid volunteers, isn’t just setting education policy. In fact, they oversee and make decisions about a range of programs and projects, including the school district’s annual budget, which, in the largest cities, can total tens of billions of dollars.

Their primary responsibility: Being a watchdog for their communities to ensure public money is well spent, schools and buses are safe, and students receive a high-quality education.

Nationwide, more than 82,000 people served on school boards in more than 13,000 public school districts during the 2022-23 academic year, according to Ballotpedia, a nonpartisan online political encyclopedia. Texas alone has 1,022 school districts.

The vast majority of board members are elected to office. And this fall, counties, cities and towns in many states will hold school board elections.

These races tend to be decided by a small number of people, however. A “discouragingly low” number of voters participate in school board elections — often 5% to 10%, according to the National School Boards Association. Even when voters show up at the polls, many skip school board races because they tend to appear at the bottom or on the back of their ballots.

Nonprofit groups such as Campaign for Our Shared Future and the XQ Institute are trying to change that by calling attention to the importance of school board elections.

Meanwhile, Moms for Liberty, a conservative political organization, and Run for Something, a progressive political organization, are vying to get their candidates seated on local school boards.

Moms for Liberty, founded in 2021 by two former school board members in Florida, has grown to 130,000 members and 300 chapters in 48 states, according to its X account. Of the 166 school board candidates it publicly endorsed in 2023, 54 won their elections, according to a recent analysis from the nonprofit think tank the Brookings Institution.

Last year, Run for Something endorsed 416 candidates running for various local offices across the U.S. and 226 won, according to the group’s 2024 Strategic Plan. Late last year, Run for Something announced its 50 State School Board Strategy to “fight back and recruit and train young, diverse progressive candidates for school board.”

Guidance for journalists

To help journalists cover school board elections, we’ve gathered and summarized six academic studies that look at how school board members are chosen and the impact they can have on school funding and student achievement.

Journalists need to keep in mind that while school boards make decisions on such things as book bans and which bathrooms transgender children use, their overarching goal is ensuring nearly 50 million students in pre-kindergarten through 12^th grade develop the skills necessary to get jobs, go to college or otherwise become responsible adults.

The most recent research suggests:

• Most people who vote in school board elections in California, Illinois, Ohio and Oklahoma are white and likely don’t have children in local public schools. Estimates further suggest that in at least two-thirds of school districts where the majority of students are racial and ethnic minorities, the majority of voters are white.
• Teacher unions maintain a strong influence over school board elections in Florida and California, where most candidates endorsed by teacher unions prevail.
• In North Carolina, public schools become less racially segregated when Democrats join school boards than when someone affiliated with another political party or someone with no party affiliation joins.
• Student test scores rise and schools serving large percentages of Hispanic students receive more funding in California when a white school board member is replaced by someone who is not white.

Although much of the most recent research on U.S. school board elections focuses on a small group of states, these studies provide insights on issues affecting school boards nationwide.

We elaborate on these studies below. But first, we’d like to spotlight three important pieces of context journalists should consider including in news stories about school board elections.

• Voter turnout in school board races is notoriously low in some parts of the U.S. In Newark, New Jersey, for example, about 3% to 4% of voters typically participate in school board elections, according to Chalkbeat Newark. Only a few hundred people voted in the school board election held in April in Oklahoma City, home to more than 700,000 people, the Oklahoma State Election Board reports.
• In many communities, most school board members are white men. Ballotpedia examined the demographics of more than 82,000 people who served on school schools during the 2022-2023 academic year and found that 52% were male and 43% were female. In Arkansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas, more than 60% were men. Meanwhile, 78% of school board members who participated in a survey the National School Boards Association conducted in 2017 and 2018 identified as white.
• School board elections are generally nonpartisan, but that may be changing. In nonpartisan races, candidates’ political party affiliation, if they have one, is not listed on the ballot. In November, Florida voters will decide whether to amend the state constitution to allow school board elections there to be partisan. In recent months, legislators in Arizona, Indiana, Kentucky and New Hampshire have introduced bills to make school board elections partisan in those states. In North Carolina, where counties can decide whether their school board races are partisan, a growing number of boards have made the change.

No organization tracks school board elections in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. However, Ballotpedia provides information on elections in 475 of the largest school districts, including the 100 most populous cities.

Research roundup

The Democratic Deficit in U.S. Education Governance
Vladimir Kogan, Stéphane Lavertu and Zachary Peskowitz. American Political Science Review, March 2021.

The study: Researchers looked at how the demographics of people who vote in school board elections in the U.S. differ from the demographics of students attending local public schools. They examined a variety of data on voters who participated in school board elections between 2008 and 2016 and students who attended public schools during that period. The researchers focused on four states — California, Illinois, Ohio and Oklahoma — because they are large states with numerous school districts and higher percentages of students who are racial and ethnic minorities.

Because votes are confidential, the researchers predicted the race or ethnicity of each voter by combining census surname distributions with demographic information from the Census block where each voter lived. This is a common procedure for this type of research and has a 90% accuracy rate, the researchers note.

The findings: The study documents a “demographic disconnect.” Most people who voted in school board elections in these four states during this period likely didn’t have children enrolled in local public schools. The authors also note that voters and students differed in terms of race and ethnicity. In at least two-thirds of school districts where the majority of students were racial and ethnic minorities, the majority of voters were white, according to the researchers’ analysis.

The researchers also discovered that the gaps in student achievement separating white students and non-white students tended to be “larger in districts where the electorate looks most dissimilar from the student population.”

In the authors’ words: “If elected officials are motivated to respond to voter preferences, our results suggest that school board members face the least political pressure to address persistent racial achievement gaps in precisely the districts where these gaps are largest because minority populations are most politically underrepresented in these jurisdictions.”

School Boards and Student Segregation
Hugh Macartney and John D. Singleton. Journal of Public Economics, August 2018.

The study: To better understand the role school boards play in student segregation, the researchers matched data on school board members in 105 North Carolina school districts with data on student enrollment patterns in those districts from 2008 to 2012. The researchers looked at whether student enrollment at local elementary schools became more racially diverse after a Democrat joined the school board.

Intentionally segregating students by race is illegal in the U.S. In many parts of the country, public schools are racially segregated as the result of residential sorting, school attendance boundaries and other factors.

The researchers measured changes in race-based segregation in North Carolina by calculating what they call the “black dissimilarity index.” During the study period, 26% of students in North Carolina school district were Black, on average. Meanwhile, 63% of students were deemed “economically disadvantaged.”

The findings: When a Democrat was elected to a school board in North Carolina, racial segregation in local public schools fell. The Black dissimilarity index dropped about 8 percentage points across schools within the district, the researchers write, adding that a main way school boards reduce segregation is by adjusting public schools’ attendance boundaries. 

The researchers note this change typically occurs two years after an election, but is likely temporary. “In the long run, much of it may be undone by household re-sorting,” they write. The researchers found that some white students left their public schools when attendance boundaries shifted and moved to private schools or charter schools.

In the authors’ words: “Taken together, our findings underscore the central role that school boards play in allocating students to schools, with likely implications for the production of learning and social inequality more generally. Understanding how school boards may influence human capital accumulation is of key policy interest and an important direction for future work.”

Are School Boards and Educational Quality Related? Results of an International Literature Review
Marlies Honingha, Merel Ruiterband and Sandra van Thiel. Educational Review, 2020.

The study: Researchers reviewed 16 academic studies published between 1996 and 2016 to better understand the relationship between school boards and educational quality in different countries. The 16 studies look at how various aspects of school boards, including their composition and the behavior of school board members, affect student test scores in the public schools they govern. Twelve studies focus on U.S. school boards, two focus on school boards in the United Kingdom and two examine them in the Netherlands.

The findings: Differences in how school boards and school districts operate in different countries and regions make it difficult to draw any conclusions that would apply to school boards globally, the researchers write. Because several studies examine a single school district or rely heavily on anecdotal evidence, their results cannot be broadly applied. The researchers write that, based on the literature they reviewed, it’s unclear whether school board members have an impact on student achievement in their school districts.Whatever affect they do have is indirect, the researchers add.

The researchers stress the need for larger and more rigorous studies on this issue as well as the need to investigate school board impacts beyond student test scores.

In the authors’ words: “This article draws on a systematic literature review to show that there is a lack of solid empirical evidence on the relation between boards and educational quality. This means that we know less than is reflected in policy assumptions about school boards. The ambitions for school boards and the expectations upon them are not evidence-based.”

How Does Minority Political Representation Affect School District Administration and Student Outcomes?
Vladimir Kogan, Stéphane Lavertu and Zachary Peskowitz. American Journal of Political Science, July 2021.

The study: The researchers investigate whether student achievement changes after racial and ethnic minorities are elected to local school boards. The researchers reconstructed the composition of local school boards between 2000 and 2014 using election data obtained from the California Election Data Archive. They collected data on public school districts and student test scores during that period from the California Department of Education.

The findings: After a racial or ethnic minority was elected to a school board in California, test scores rose among students who were racial or ethnic minorities. While the increase did not materialize until several years after the election and then gradually declined in magnitude, it was substantial.

“The largest estimated effect occurs five years after the election, when the estimated effect of a pivotal minority candidate victory is approximately 0.15 standard deviations,” the researchers write, adding that the change is roughly equivalent to an additional 46 days of learning.

The researchers could not determine the effect on white students’ scores. However, they found “no evidence that the improvements in non-white student performance come at the expense of white students.” They suggest gains in minority students’ test scores may have been driven in part by increased operational spending and changes in school administration that happened after the election of the minority school board member.

In the authors’ words: “We find little evidence that minority representation on school boards affects the total number of employees or the racial and ethnic composition of rank-and-file workers. Nor does school board composition appear to have a consistent effect on school-level segregation. We do, however, find evidence that the share of school district principals who are non-white increases when minorities win more school board seats, providing another potential policy lever through which changes in board composition may affect student learning.”

No Spending without Representation: School Boards and the Racial Gap in Education Finance
Brett Fischer. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2023.

The study: This paper, which also focuses on California school boards, looks at whether replacing a non-Hispanic school board member with a Hispanic board member results in greater spending on Hispanic students. The researcher examined capital spending specifically — how local school boards used grant money that they received from the state’s School Facility Program to fund projects such as campus renovations between 1999 and 2016.

The findings: After a non-Hispanic school board member was replaced with a Hispanic board member, California school boards invested more money in schools where the majority of students were Hispanic. The researcher’s analysis “indicates that a 20 percentage point increase in Hispanic board representation raises [School Facility Program] modernization spending by $93 per student (81 percent) among high-Hispanic schools within the district.” Schools with relatively low Hispanic enrollment received an increase, too, although a smaller one. However, that increase was determined not to be statistically significant.

The analysis also suggests that after a Hispanic person joined a school board, that school district directed more construction funding to schools with a high percentage of students who qualify for free or reduced-price meals at school. There’s also evidence that having a Hispanic school board member is linked to improvements in teacher retention at “high-Hispanic” schools.

In the author’s words: “My analysis confirms that school boards play an integral role in education finance. Using spending data from the [School Facility Program], I find that an additional minority (Hispanic) school board member increases spending on school renovations using state transfer grants. In particular, SFP spending on high-Hispanic and high-poverty schools within the district increases by up to 69 percent, which juxtaposes smaller, insignificant changes among low-Hispanic and relatively affluent schools.”

Teachers’ Unions and School Board Elections: A Reassessment
Michael T. Hartney. Chapter in Groups in U.S. Local Politics, September 2023.

The study: The researcher examines the impact that teacher-union endorsements have on school board elections in California and Florida. The researcher chose to study California because it’s a large, racially diverse state where unions representing government employees are especially powerful, he writes. He chose Florida, another large, racially diverse state, because labor law there has historically been less favorable to teacher unions.

He analyzed union endorsements given to 3,336 school board candidates across 468 school districts in California between 1995 and 2020. He also analyzed endorsements of 361 school board candidates running for office in 36 Florida school districts between 2010 and 2020.

The findings: In both states, school board candidates backed by local teacher unions did “exceptionally well” in most elections. In California, about 90% of union-backed incumbents were reelected and two-thirds of union-backed candidates running against an incumbent won their races. Meanwhile in Florida, about 80% of incumbents endorsed by teacher unions won reelection and more than half of candidates who challenged an incumbent and had union endorsements prevailed.

In the author’s words: “I have shown, quite simply, that union power in school board elections remains both robust and resilient. Irrespective of the very real setbacks that unions have faced in state and national politics, in the local trenches of school board electioneering, the data tell an unambiguous story: teacher-union interest groups remain an important player, they are still the ones to beat.”

Additional resources

• In “Outside money targets school board elections,” we examine research on how wealthy individuals and national advocacy groups have used their money to influence local school board elections.
• The National School Boards Association offers various national reports on school boards. Organizations such as the Illinois Association of School Boards and Texas Association of School Boards provide state-level data and reports.
• We created a tip sheet to help journalists understand and cover teacher unions, including their influence on local school boards.
• This article warns journalists about the dangers of horse race coverage of elections — focusing on who’s in the lead and who’s behind instead of policy issues. It can harm political candidates, the public and news outlets themselves.
• Tammy Patrick, a former federal compliance officer for the Maricopa County Elections Department in Arizona, offers eight tips to help journalists improve their overall coverage of U.S. elections.

The image above was obtained from the Flickr account of Joe Brusky and is being used under a Creative Commons license. No changes were made.

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Uri Simonsohn is an outspoken advocate for open science — adding transparency to the research process and helping researchers share what they’ve learned in greater detail with a broad audience.

Many people know Simonsohn for his data analyses on Data Colada, a blog about social science research he writes with two other behavioral scientists, Leif Nelson and Joseph Simmons. The three scholars, who co-direct the Wharton Credibility Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, occasionally use the blog to spotlight evidence of suspected fraud they’ve found in academic papers.

In his role at the Credibility Lab and as a professor at Esade Business School in Barcelona, Simonsohn travels to speak on issues around scientific integrity and data science. During his recent visit to Harvard University, The Journalist’s Resource asked for his thoughts on how journalists can improve their coverage of academic fraud and misconduct.

Here are three big takeaways from our conversation.

1. Before covering academic studies, ask researchers about preregistration.

Preregistration is “the practice of documenting your research plan at the beginning of your study and storing that plan in a read-only public repository such as OSF Registries or the National Library of Medicine’s Clinical Trials Registry,” according to the nonprofit Center for Open Science. Simonsohn says preregistration helps prevent research fraud. When researchers create a permanent record outlining how they intend to conduct a study before they start, they are discouraged from changing parts of their study — for instance, their hypothesis or study sample — to get a certain result.

Simonsohn adds that preregistration also reduces what’s known as “p-hacking,” or manipulating an analysis of data to make it seem as though patterns in the data are statistically significant when they are not. Examples of p-hacking: Adding more data or control variables to change the result or deciding after the analysis is complete to exclude some data. (For more on statistical significance, read our tip sheet on the topic.)

Preregistration is particularly important when researchers will be collecting their own data, Simonsohn points out. It’s easier to alter or fabricate data when you collect it yourself, especially if there’s no expectation to share the raw data.

While preregistration is the norm in clinical trials, it’s less common in other research fields. About half of psychology research is preregistered as is about a quarter of marketing research, Simonsohn says. A substantial proportion of economic research is not, however, because it often relies on data collected by other researchers or nonprofit organizations and government agencies such as the U.S. Census Bureau.

Simonsohn urges journalists to ask researchers whether they preregistered their studies before reporting on them. He likened reporting on research that isn’t preregistered to driving a car that hasn’t been inspected. The car might be perfectly safe, but you can’t be sure because no one has had a chance to look under the hood.

“If the person says ‘no,’ [the journalist] could ask, ‘Oh, how come?’” he says. “And if they don’t provide a compelling reason, the journalist could say ‘You know, I’m not going to cover work that hasn’t been preregistered, without a good rationale.’”

Research registries themselves can be a helpful resource for journalists. The Center for Open Science lets the public search for and read the thousands of preregistered research plans on its Open Science Framework platform. Researchers who preregister their work at AsPredicted, a platform Simonsohn helped create for the Wharton Credibility Lab, can choose whether and when to make their preregistered research plan public.

2. Report on the lack of oversight of research data collection.

Journalists and the public probably don’t realize how little oversight there is when it comes to collecting and analyzing data for research, Simonsohn says. That includes research funded by the federal government, which gives colleges, universities and other organizations billions of dollars a year to study public health, climate change, new technology and other topics.

Simonsohn says there’s no system in place to ensure the integrity of research data or its analysis. Although federal law requires research involving human subjects to be reviewed by an Institutional Review Board, the primary goal of these independent committees is protecting the welfare and rights of study participants.

Academic papers are reviewed by a small group of experts before a scholarly journal will publish them. But the peer-review process isn’t designed to catch research fraud. Reviewers typically do not check the authors’ work to see if they followed the procedures they say they followed to reach their conclusions.

Simonsohn says journalists should investigate the issue and report on it.

“The lack of protection against fraud is a story that deserves to be written,” he says. “When I teach students, they’re shocked. They’re shocked that when you submit a paper to a journal, [the journal is] basically trusting you without any safeguards. You’re not even asked to assert in the affirmative that you haven’t done anything wrong.”

Journalists should also examine ways to prevent fraud, he adds. He thinks researchers should be required to submit “data receipts” to organizations that provide grant funding to show who has had access to, changed or analyzed a study’s raw data and when. This record keeping would be similar to the chain of custody process that law enforcement agencies follow to maintain the legal integrity of the physical evidence they collect.  

“That is, by far, the easiest way to stop most of it,” Simonsohn says.

3. Learn about open science practices and the scientists who expose problematic research.

Nearly 200 countries have agreed to follow the common standards for open science that UNESCO, the United Nations’ scientific, educational and cultural organization, created in 2021. In December, UNESCO released a status report of initiatives launched in different parts of the globe to help researchers work together in the open and share what they’ve learned in detail with other researchers and the public. The report notes, for example, that a rising number of countries and research organizations have developed open data policies.

As of January 2024, more than 1,100 open science policies were adopted by research organizations and research funders worldwide, according to the Registry of Open Access Repositories Mandatory Archiving Policies, which tracks policies requiring researchers to make their “research output” public.

In the U.S., the universities and university departments that have adopted these policies include Johns Hopkins University, University of Central Florida, Stanford University’s School of Education and Columbia University’s School of Social Work. Such policies also have been adopted at Harvard Kennedy School and one of its research centers, the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, which is where The Journalist’s Resource is housed.

Simonsohn recommends journalists learn about open science practices and familiarize themselves with research watchdogs such as Nick Brown, known for helping expose problems in published studies by prominent nutrition scientist Brian Wansink.

Retraction Watch, a website that tracks research retractions, maintains a list of more than two dozen scientific sleuths. Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist and science integrity consultant who has been called “the public face of image sleuthing,” was a guest speaker in The Journalist’s Resource’s recent webinar on covering research fraud and errors.

Here are some of the open science organizations that journalists covering these issues will want to know about:

• The Virginia-based Center for Open Science.
• The Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences.
• Yale University Open Data Access (YODA) Project, an online platform for sharing clinical trial research data.
• VEDA (Visualization, Exploration, and Data Analysis), NASA’s open-source platform that allows researchers to collaborate on Earth science studies.
• MedRxiv (pronounced “med-archive”) is an online platform owned and operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Researchers can use it to share preprint research — academic papers that present preliminary findings and have not been peer reviewed — on medical, clinical and health science topics.

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U.S. lawmakers have introduced a flood of legislation to limit or eliminate colleges’ DEI initiatives, which are designed to improve diversity, equity and inclusion on campus. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education’s DEI Legislation Tracker, a total of 82 such bills have been filed in 28 states and Congress since early 2023.

Diversity, equity and inclusion are three closely linked values that, together, have become an umbrella term for efforts to ensure people from various backgrounds are included and supported. DEI programs at colleges and universities tend to focus on students, faculty and staff from groups that historically have been marginalized — for example, racial and religious minorities, military veterans and students who start college later in life.

Anti-DEI legislation often targets DEI offices or staff as well as schools’ diversity statements, training programs and policies on hiring and promoting employees and admitting students, The Chronicle of Higher Education reports.

To help journalists better understand what DEI is and how anti-DEI legislation could impact higher education nationwide, The Journalist’s Resource co-hosted a webinar March 28 with Harvard Kennedy School’s Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project.

If you missed it, you can watch the recording. Keep reading for five key takeaways based on presentations from:

• Kristen Renn, the Mildred B. Erickson Distinguished Chair and Professor of Higher, Adult, & Lifelong Education at Michigan State University and a former dean in Brown University’s Office of Student Life.
• Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the Ford Foundation Professor of History, Race and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and director of the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project.
• Erica Licht, IARA’s research project director and co-host of the podcast Untying Knots.

1. A wide variety of student groups benefit directly from DEI initiatives.

“DEI efforts often get, particularly in some parts of the country, framed simply around race, sometimes around gender or sex,” Renn said.

She noted that framing is incomplete. In fact, two broad categories of students benefit directly from DEI initiatives: those with minoritized identities and those whose experiences are underrepresented on campus, she explained.

Minoritized students are from groups that historically have been marginalized, discriminated against and excluded from higher education based on race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, gender identity and disability, Renn added.

Students whose experiences are underrepresented include neurodiverse students, students who are military veterans, first-generation college students, low-income students, students who returned to college later in life, international students and students who are raising children or caring for older adults.

2. Many colleges and universities have tried to incorporate DEI values across campus — from student housing, dining services and health care to coursework, academic advising and mentoring.

Institutions often use a variety of approaches across campus to promote DEI, including revising course syllabi so students study the work of diverse authors, and launching programs that celebrate or raise awareness about different cultures and world views. Ohio State University’s Native American and Indigenous Frybread Community Social and South Dakota State University’s World Languages and Cultures Film Festival are examples of such programs.

Many colleges and universities have created communities within student housing to make it easier for students of the same identity group — first-generation college students and transfer students, for instance — to find and support one another.

Hiring faculty and staff from different backgrounds also promotes DEI. Not only does it provide career opportunities for diverse groups of people, it allows students to seek help from academic advisers, mental health specialists, professors and other campus authorities who have similar life experiences.

Some DEI programs offer support and resources for specific identity groups, like Bristol Community College’s Women’s Center, the University of Georgia’s Pride Center and Duke University’s Her Garden, a mentoring program for female students of color.

3. Journalists reporting on anti-DEI legislation must familiarize themselves with academic research on the impacts of DEI in higher education.

In the webinar, Licht spotlighted several studies suggesting students who attend schools with DEI programs perform better academically, work better in teams and are more engaged in their classes. Meanwhile, Muhammad introduced the Race, Research & Policy Portal, a free online collection of research summaries created by the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project.

Muhammad stressed the need for journalists “to show extreme skepticism” for claims that critics of DEI make to justify anti-DEI legislation. Elected leaders and organizations that oppose DEI efforts often mischaracterize research findings on the topic or claim there’s no research to support the need for DEI at higher education institutions.

“Much of what is being blamed on DEI doesn’t actually have a basis in fact other than a few anecdotal examples, you know, of some terrible training models that went haywire,” Muhammad said.

He acknowledged that it’s difficult to know what programs are offered at each institution and how they’re working. Schools customize their programs to serve their own student populations.

“There are thousands of DEI offices around the country,” Muhammad said. “No one can actually know exactly what everyone is doing.”

4. Because of the number of people and institutions affected, curbing or eliminating DEI initiatives will have a bigger impact than banning race-based affirmative action in admissions.

Over the past year or so, politically conservative organizations and politicians have worked together to sway public opinion against DEI initiatives and push anti-DEI legislation, news outlets have reported. Earlier this year, The New York Times characterized the movement as a backlash against “wokeism.”

The focus on DEI has grown sharply since last summer, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down race-based affirmative action in college admissions. The nation’s military academies are now the only higher education institutions that can consider race and ethnicity when selecting students.

That ruling will affect students at dozens of selective colleges and universities. Anti-DEI legislation, however, will have a significantly larger impact on American higher education, Renn said.

Race-based affirmative action policies have helped racial and ethnic minorities get into the most selective institutions, such as Ivy League schools. DEI initiatives, on the other hand, benefit a bunch of student groups across all types of colleges and universities.

Renn noted that anti-DEI bills target the institutions most U.S. college students attend — community colleges, state flagship universities and mid-tier public schools and universities. More than 10.2 million students — 35% of undergraduates nationwide — went to community colleges in the fall of 2021, according to a 2023 report from the U.S. Department of Education.

“It’s very important to talk about DEI as what’s happening on campuses,” Renn pointed out. “When politicians or legislators restrict curricula and campus climate efforts, that actually has a much greater harm than curtailing affirmative action in admissions.”

5. Journalists need to ask more probing questions about DEI efforts and higher education history.

Licht said journalists should delve more deeply into schools’ histories to better understand campus culture and the need for DEI programs.

“Journalists should be asking these questions of, does the university know its own history?” Licht said. “Do the people who work there know it?”

It’s also important, she added, to ask legislators and critics of DEI if they know how higher education institutions discriminated against, exploited or excluded certain groups of people well into the mid-20^th century.

Other questions worth exploring:

• Which initiatives work best for reaching the goals of diversity, equity and inclusion, according to peer-reviewed research?
• How will anti-DEI legislation affect historically Black colleges and universities?
• Could any anti-DEI bills infringe on student rights protected under Title IX, the federal law that prohibits colleges and universities from discriminating against students based on their sex?
• How does the amount of money an institution spends on DEI efforts compare with the amount of money it loses on other programs, including student athletics?
• What disparities have existed among different student groups over the past decade? For example, how do students compare in terms of graduation rates, debt accumulation and job placement? If DEI efforts are prohibited, how will schools address disparities?
• How should the perspectives and experiences of women, students of color and LGBTQ students shape campus policies and practices?

Further reading

• Last month, the University of Southern California’s Race and Equity Center released the 62-page report, “Truths About DEI on College Campuses: Evidence-Based Expert Responses to Politicized Misinformation.”
• Check out our tip sheet on covering race-based affirmative action. Although affirmative action is prohibited in nearly all college admissions offices, many of these tips will help journalists report on issues around college admissions and student diversity more broadly.
• Our collection of research on race-neutral alternatives to affirmative action examines colleges’ efforts to diversify enrollment when admissions officials cannot take students’ race or ethnicity into account.

This tip sheet was updated for clarification on April 4, 2024.

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We updated this tip sheet on private school choice, originally published Feb. 7, 2024, to provide more recent data on U.S. students participating in these programs as well as additional historical context.

About half of U.S. states offer private school choice programs, which help families pay for private school. It’s a highly politicized, complicated issue involving multiple types of tuition assistance, hundreds of thousands of children and billions of taxpayer dollars.

It’s also an issue journalists need to examine closely. News coverage grounded in academic research is particularly important as more states consider starting these programs and lawmakers in states that have them push to expand.

How can journalists strengthen their coverage? We put this question to seven university professors who study private school vouchers and other private school choice programs. Here’s their advice:

1. Explain how the various private school choice programs differ.

In the U.S., the three most common private school choice programs are tuition vouchers, tax-credit scholarships and education savings accounts, or ESAs. Journalists often refer to them all as “voucher” programs, but there are key differences.

“ESAs are radically different from school vouchers,” Patrick J. Wolf, a professor of education policy and the 21st Century Endowed Chair in School Choice at the University of Arkansas, wrote to The Journalist’s Resource.

In our roundup of research on private school choice, we briefly explain these three programs:

• Private school vouchers are public funds that generally cover all or a portion of private school tuition. Families typically do not receive this money, however. Program administrators tend to send it to the private schools. In a landmark ruling in 1998, the Wisconsin Supreme Court found that allowing religious schools to participate in the state’s voucher program did not violate the state or federal constitution, partly because of the way funds were distributed. Although the state sent voucher checks to participating private schools, it required parents and guardians to “restrictively endorse” the checks to the schools.

• Tax-credit scholarships also cover all or part of a student’s tuition bill. This money also tends to go to directly to the private schools. A primary difference between these two programs: While government agencies take money from their own coffers to offer vouchers, they fund tax-credit scholarships indirectly. They give businesses and other taxpayers tax credits in exchange for donating money needed to provide scholarships.

• Education savings accounts contain public funds that students can spend on a variety of education-related items and services. Allowable expenses frequently include private school tuition, online courses, tutoring, standardized testing fees and homeschooling materials. In Arizona, students also can use ESA dollars to buy laptops, telescopes, gym memberships, desks and tickets to zoos, museums and musicals. However, during the 2022-23 school year, 66% of Arizona’s ESA money went to tuition and fees at private schools, with the largest share going to schools created to serve students with disabilities, according to an analysis from KNXV-TV Channel 15.

2. Find out how families decide whether to participate in private school choice programs.

Vanderbilt University researcher Claire Smrekar urges journalists to ask families how they decide whether to participate in these programs and to ask school officials what kinds of information they provide.

Policymakers and school officials often assume incorrectly that parents and guardians have access to the same information, says Smrekar, an associate professor of public policy and education who’s also editor of the Peabody Journal of Education. But studies consistently show that lower-income families and parents with lower levels of formal education generally do not receive or seek out the same information that higher-income families and parents with college degrees do, she adds.

Parents and guardians who aren’t familiar with education jargon or certain terms might not fully understand what school officials convey about private school choice programs in person or in writing. The same is true for parents who don’t speak English or aren’t fluent.

The method of communication matters, too, Smrekar points out. School officials often use email and social media to share information. That’s a problem for families who don’t have internet service or use the same social media platforms. 

“This is not an indictment of or finding fault with parents,” she says. “It’s a problem with the assumption that all families have access to high levels of information.”  

Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University, says journalists should pay attention to enrollment patterns. Students aren’t leaving their public schools in droves. A lot of the kids using public money to pay for a private K-12 education were already enrolled in private schools, he notes.

In Iowa, for example, state officials reported in July that 40% of students approved for education savings accounts were public school students planning to transfer to private schools and 60% were students already enrolled in private schools, according to the Iowa Capital Dispatch.

In Florida, 84,505 students receiving private school vouchers were already enrolled in private school, Politico reports. And 22,294 children started kindergarten at private schools using tuition vouchers. Meanwhile, 16,096 kids — 13% of all voucher recipients — transferred from public to private schools.

3. Scrutinize private schools.

Researchers we interviewed stressed the need for more in-depth reporting on private schools in states that have introduced school choice programs and states where lawmakers are considering it.

Questions they say journalists should answer in their news coverage:

• What assumptions are being made about the quality and number of private schools willing to participate in these programs?
• What’s the history and track record of private schools that participate in these programs in your state or other states?
• What’s the capacity of private schools in your community and state?
• What are the types and locations of private schools that have the most room available for new students?
• Are the highest quality private schools willing to participate? If so, are they also willing — and able — to expand to accommodate students using vouchers, tax-credit scholarships or education savings accounts?
• What rules or other factors could deter the highest quality private schools from participating?
• If a private school has limited seats available, which types of students are most likely to be admitted?
• Do any private schools in your state or community bar certain types of students from enrolling — for example, pregnant students, LGBTQ students, students with disabilities or students who don’t speak English?
• If a student’s voucher, tax-credit scholarship or education savings account doesn’t cover the full tuition amount, which schools will help students cover the remainder? How?

4. Note that using public money to pay for private education is not a recent development.

State and local governments have funded private K-12 schools and private colleges and universities for generations. Rural communities in New England started offering “town tuitioning” to school children after the Civil War, starting with Vermont in 1869 and Maine in 1873.

In these communities, local governments give families money to pay for private school because they don’t operate public schools that serve all grades. Kids who cannot go to public school in these towns have the option of enrolling in a public or private school in another location. As of February 2023, 45 Vermont communities offered this option, the Valley News in New Hampshire reports. This school year, these towns are paying $18,266 in tuition, on average, for each student in grades 7 to 12 and $16,756, on average, per child in the lower grades, according to the Vermont Agency of Education.

In parts of the U.S. South in the 1950s and 1960s, governments paid for white students to attend private schools so they could avoid learning alongside Black students in public schools. “Securing public funding for all-white private schools was the go-to solution in the face of integration mandates,” researchers Kathryn Edin, H. Luke Shaefer and Timothy Jon Nelson wrote in November in the Daily Beast.

In 1989, Wisconsin enacted the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, which provided private school tuition vouchers to lower-income children in Milwaukee, the state’s largest city. The program has been expanded multiple times over the years. Florida launched the first statewide voucher program in 1999, giving students in failing public schools the option of transferring to private schools.

This year, an estimated 836,447 students across more than 20 states will receive a projected $6.2 billion through private school vouchers, tax-credit scholarships and education savings accounts, according to a recent report from EdChoice, a nonprofit organization that advocates for school choice. Almost one-third of those students are using vouchers averaging $8,566 to attend private schools.

State governments have long provided funding for private colleges and universities as well. As a comparison, state governments gave private higher education institutions a total of $2.8 billion in fiscal year 2022 — $297 million to help them with operating costs and $2.5 billion to help students pay for tuition and other education-related expenses, according to a report the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association released last year.

5. Push back on claims made by advocates on both sides of the issue.

“More journalists should challenge the slogans and talking points of policy advocates on both sides of the school choice debate,” Wolf wrote to The Journalist’s Resource. “For example, if a [school] choice supporter declares ‘school choice is a lifeline for needy students,’ ask them: ‘What proportion of students who switch from public to private schools clearly benefit from the change?’ [and] ‘What proportion leave the private school within two years and just end up bouncing around from school to school with no stability?’

Wolf also suggested journalists push back on claims from school choice critics who declare, for example, that private school vouchers will destroy public schools.

“Ask them: ‘Why are public schools so fragile that they can only endure if students have no other option?’ [and] ‘Where has school choice destroyed the public-school sector? Give me an example,’” he added.

Huriya Kanwal Jabbar, an associate professor of education policy at the University of Southern California, advised journalists to press supporters of private school choice to explain their reasons why.

“The slogan we hear is that choice is good in and of itself,” Jabbar wrote to The Journalist’s Resource. “I’d be curious to see if leaders advancing this are also concerned about school quality or accountability or student outcomes — or if their main goal is simply to give families more choices, even if they end up selecting schools that are worse for their children’s academic outcomes. In other words, what are the main priorities driving these policies? It seems important to be transparent about the aims so that we can then assess the evidence associated with those goals/aims.”

Christopher Lubienski, a professor of education policy who directs Indiana University’s Center for Evaluation and Education Policy, suggests journalists ask about potential learning loss. How would parents and guardians react if their children’s standardized test scores drop after enrolling in private school? How much of a decline is acceptable? Which should be policymakers’ priority: Getting the biggest positive impact they can for taxpayer dollars or giving families the ability to choose for themselves the type of education they want for their kids?

6. Familiarize yourself with the research on private school choice.

Academic journals are continually publishing new studies on private school choice. It’s critical for journalists covering the topic to stay up to date and incorporate new findings into their stories.

“The research has shifted — we’re seeing a different story from the research than we were 10 years ago,” Lubienski says.

While studies in the 1990s and early 2000s generally indicate U.S. students in these programs perform as well or better on standardized tests than their public school peers, more recent research finds private school choice students do about the same or worse. In Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio and the District of Columbia, test scores fell after public school students transferred to private schools, according to papers published or released in 2016 and 2018.

Cowen says the challenges associated with scaling up these programs are reflected in the newer studies.

“There are not enough good private schools to take these children,” he says. “It’s that simple.”

The Journalist’s Resource has gathered and summarized several peer-reviewed papers on private school choice. They are among the most recent and offer valuable insights into how these programs affect student achievement in the U.S., Chile, Colombia, Denmark, India and other countries.

For help spotting problematic research, check out our tip sheet, “How to Gauge the Quality of a Research Study: 13 Questions Journalists Should Ask.”

Also, because education researchers sometimes report their findings in terms of standard deviations instead of more common units of measurement such as points or rates, you might find this short explainer helpful: “What’s Standard Deviation? 4 Things Journalists Need to Know.”

7. Report on long-term trends in test scores and other indicators of progress.

M. Danish Shakeel, who co-edited the book Educating Believers: Religion and School Choice, says it’s important that journalists look at how individual private school choice programs perform over time. Academic studies often provide a snapshot of a program over the span of several months or a few years.

In addition to standardized test scores, journalists should examine other indicators of student achievement such as civic engagement, college graduation rates and the development of non-cognitive skills, including problem solving and communication skills, says Shakeel, a professor at the University of Buckingham in the United Kingdom and director of the E.G. West Centre for Education Policy there.

It’s also important that journalists know that families have many reasons for seeking a private school education. Not all parents who care deeply about their children’s academic progress consider large spikes in test scores the main priority, Shakeel adds.

Some families prefer religious instruction or that their children learn in a faith-based environment, neither of which is available in American public schools. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that religious schools cannot be excluded from government programs that help parents and guardians pay private school tuition.

Some families believe it’s just as important to instill morals and values in children as it is to teach them reading and math. Shakeel recommends journalists look at how students’ lives, as a whole, have changed since they began participating in private school choice programs.

“Start asking questions on outcomes that are not typically discussed,” he says. “[Academic] outcomes are important, but those things that are important to the family get missed in the news reports.”

Some questions to ask families:

• What have their children’s interactions with teachers and classmates been like at their private school? If their kids transferred from a public school, how has their learning experience changed?
• Have families’ attitudes about education or schools changed?
• Do parents and guardians feel supported by teachers and staff at the private school?
• How have their parenting styles changed since their children started private school?
• Has the family or child become more religious, compassionate or civic-minded?
• How has the child’s behavior at home and in the community changed?
• How satisfied are parents and guardians with their children’s education?

The post 7 tips for improving news coverage of private school choice appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

Last year, at least 31 states considered legislation to create or expand programs that use public money to help parents pay for a private, K-12 education, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In 2024, conservative leaders and political candidates — including the two Republicans vying for the U.S. presidency — are pushing to make private school vouchers and other forms of tuition assistance even more widely available.

Local governments in the U.S. have, on a limited basis, provided funding for their residents to attend private schools since the mid-1800s, starting with rural communities in Maine and Vermont. The practice has grown increasingly common in recent decades, and even more common the past few years. Florida introduced the first statewide private school voucher program in 1999, offering children in the lowest performing public schools the option of transferring to a private school.

A total of 310,770 students in 16 states, Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico used vouchers in 2023, according to a recent report from EdChoice. a nonprofit organization that advocates for school choice. Another 312,471 students in 21 states used tax-credit scholarships, which are similar to vouchers, to attend private school, EdChoice reports.

Private school vouchers, tax-credit scholarships and education savings accounts

Three of the most common programs governments implement to help families pay for private school are private school vouchers, tax-credit scholarships and education savings accounts. Many politicians, journalists and others refer to all three as vouchers. But there are key differences:

• Private school vouchers are public funds that generally cover all or a portion of private school tuition. Families typically do not receive this money, however. Program administrators tend to send it to the private schools. In a landmark ruling in 1998, the Wisconsin Supreme Court found that allowing religious schools to participate in the state’s voucher program did not violate the state or federal constitution, partly because of the way funds were distributed. Although the state sent voucher checks to participating private schools, it required parents and guardians to “restrictively endorse” the checks to the schools.
• Tax-credit scholarships also cover all or part of a student’s tuition bill. This money also tends to go to directly to the private schools. A primary difference between these two programs: While government agencies take money from their own coffers to offer vouchers, they fund tax-credit scholarships indirectly. They give businesses and other taxpayers tax credits in exchange for donating money needed to provide scholarships.
• Education savings accounts contain public funds that students can spend on a variety of education-related items and services. Allowable expenses frequently include private school tuition, online courses, tutoring, standardized testing fees and homeschooling materials. In Arizona, students also can use ESA dollars to buy laptops, telescopes, gym memberships, desks and tickets to zoos, museums and musicals. However, during the 2022-23 school year, 66% of Arizona’s ESA money went to tuition and fees at private schools, with the largest share going to schools created to serve students with disabilities, according to an analysis from KNXV-TV Channel 15.

States offering ESAs usually call them scholarships. Florida and Arizona, for example, named their ESAs “empowerment” scholarships.

Academic researchers, meanwhile, often refer to these three programs, as a group, as “private school choice” programs. Some call them “voucher and voucher-like” programs.

Another important detail: In recent decades, private school choice programs in the U.S. have been largely restricted to certain student groups, including low- and middle-income youth, children in foster care, kids with disabilities and students attending poor performing public schools. Some states have made their programs “universal,” meaning all students within their boundaries can participate.

Arizona, in 2022, became the first state to introduce a universal education savings account program. As of November 2023, a total of eight states had enacted private school choice programs that are universal or nearly universal, Politico reports.

An extraordinarily divisive topic

In the coming months, journalists across the country will be reporting on legislative efforts to create or change private school choice programs. In many communities, journalists will need to cover new legislation as they also cover the challenges government officials will likely face implementing the policies lawmakers approved last year or in prior years.

Among the new proposals:

• A Republican legislator in Kentucky filed a bill Jan. 26 aimed at amending her state’s constitution to allow public funding to be spent on private education.
• Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee announced plans to introduce a bill during this year’s legislative session that would dramatically increase the number of students eligible for one of his state’s education savings accounts, which he has named Education Freedom Scholarships. Lee, a Republican, wants to open the program to all students statewide during the 2025-26 school year.
• Earlier this month, Republican lawmakers in New Mexico announced they plan to establish a tax-credit scholarship that would help lower-income students there afford private school, according to the nonprofit news outlet, Source New Mexico.
• Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, wants to overhaul — and shrink — school choice programs in that state, the Associated Press reports.

In the U.S., lawmakers’ support for or opposition to private school choice programs tends to follow political party lines. Conservative and conservative-leaning legislators often support programs that offer parents more control over where and how their children will be educated. Liberal and liberal-leaning legislators often oppose these programs because of concerns about program accountability, drops in test scores in some states, and using public money to support private schools, religious instruction, wealthy students and homeschooling families.

Researchers who study private school choice also are divided, in their opinions and their interpretations of what studies show, making it even tougher for journalists to distill research findings for the public.

Last year, Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University, wrote essays explaining his opposition to vouchers for Time magazine and the Brookings Institution last year.

He advises journalists to read studies of private school choice programs operating in Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio and the District of Columbia. In his Time piece, he links to four papers released or published in 2016 or 2018 — each examining one of those locations.

“Although small, pilot-phase programs showed some promise two decades ago, new evaluations of vouchers in Washington, D.C., Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio show some of the largest test score drops ever seen in the research record — between -0.15 and -0.50 standard deviations of learning loss,” he writes in Time in April 2023. “That’s on par with what the COVID-19 pandemic did to test scores, and larger than Hurricane Katrina’s impacts on academics in New Orleans.”

Patrick J. Wolf, a professor of education policy and the 21st Century Endowed Chair in School Choice at the University of Arkansas, has spoken out in favor of private school choice. He recommends journalists rely most heavily on the most rigorous studies to help them explain the impacts of vouchers and voucher-like programs.

Wolf also stresses the importance of journalists checking the quality of the studies that politicians, government officials, advocates, critics and others cite.

The Journalist’s Resource steers journalists toward research that has undergone peer review, an evaluation process performed by independent experts that is designed for quality control. We also encourage journalists to seek out randomized, controlled trials and meta-analyses, when possible.

A randomized, controlled trial, a method of studying the effect of a program or intervention, is widely considered the gold standard in research. A meta-analysis, also one of the most reliable forms of research, is a systematic study of the numerical data collected from a group of studies on the same topic.

When it comes to complicated, politicized topics like school choice, though, journalists should cautiously vet findings even from peer-reviewed studies using these research methods.

Both Cowen and Wolf created short documents to present the research to date in simple terms. We got permission to share Cowen’s “Quick Hits of Voucher Research” and Wolf’s “Summary of Research Findings Regarding the Effects of Private School Choice Programs.”

A November 2022 policy brief coauthored by Christopher Lubienski, a professor of education policy who directs Indiana University’s Center for Evaluation and Education Policy, also examines private school choice research. In it, Lubienski warns against evaluating a program by simply comparing the number of studies that show benefits against the number of studies that shows harms.

Such an assessment does not take into account differences in study quality or size or the magnitude of the impacts that were found.

“Such simplistic representations of the research evidence obscure important factors in understanding the effectiveness and potential of voucher programs,” Lubienski and doctoral student Yusuf Canbolat write in the policy brief.

Research to help journalists report on private school choice

We recommend familiarizing yourself with the breadth of academic research on this topic. It’s important to have a basic understanding of how private school choice programs work and how they affect students — those using public funds for private school as well as their peers who remain in neighboring public schools.

To help you get started, we’ve gathered and summarized a sampling of studies of vouchers and voucher-like programs. These four peer-reviewed papers are not meant to be representative of all the research to date. But they are among the most recent and offer insights into how these initiatives impact student achievement in various countries, including the U.S., Canada, Chile, India, New Zealand and Sweden.  

We included two meta-analyses, both of which analyze more than a decade of numerical data to provide a broad overview of the effects of vouchers and voucher-like programs.

Together, these four papers suggest:

• Studies from the 1990s and early 2000s generally indicate that U.S. students participating in these programs do as well or better on standardized tests than their public school peers. But studies released or published after around 2015 show a shift in performance. They indicate program participants do about the same or worse — in some cases, student scores have dropped considerably.
• When researchers looked at student achievement in the U.S., India and Colombia, they found that kids who participate in these programs, as a whole, earn higher test scores as they progress through private school. But the change is driven largely by Indian and Colombian students. The researchers note this might be due to large differences in the quality of education provided by public and private schools in developing countries.
• U.S. public school students earn slightly higher test scores in communities where private school vouchers and similar tuition assistance programs are available. Researchers explain that this appears to be a response to competition from area private schools. They also note the increase is very small.
• There’s evidence that high school graduation rates are higher among private school choice students in the U.S.

———————-

Effects of Maturing Private School Choice Programs on Public School Students
David N. Figlio, Cassandra M. D. Hart and Krzysztof Karbownik. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2023.

The study: Researchers look at how the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program affected public schools in the first 15 years after it was launched. They examine data from the Florida Department of Education and Florida Department of Health to better understand how public school students fared when tens of thousands of their peers left public schools to attend private schools using vouchers from 2002-03 to 2017-18.

This paper analyzes changes in standardized test scores, absenteeism and suspension rates among public school students in grades 3 to 8. It also compares public schools in terms of the amount of competition they faced from private schools even before voucher programs began. Researchers created a “Competitive Pressure Index” for public schools, based on factors such as the proximity and number of private schools operating in the same area and the religiosity of the surrounding community.

The findings: As the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program grew during its first 15 years, public school students in grades 3 to 8, as a whole, earned slightly higher test scores and missed fewer days of class. The impact was strongest at public schools that faced competition from private schools in 2000, the year before the voucher program was created.

The authors write: “We find that as public schools are more exposed to private school choice, their students experience increasing benefits as the program matures,” the researchers conclude. “We find that the public school students most positively affected by increased exposure to private school choice are comparatively low-socioeconomic status (SES) students (those with lower family incomes and lower maternal education levels).”

The Competitive Effects of School Choice on Student Achievement: A Systematic Review
Huriya Jabbar; et al. Educational Policy, March 2022.

The study: Researchers analyzed 92 studies published from 1992 to 2015 to determine whether competition generated by school choice programs reduces or improves student achievement. All the studies examined focus on school choice programs in the U.S.

The findings: When a private school choice program launches and public schools must compete for students, student scores on standardized exams rise very slightly for students who leave their public schools to attend private schools and for their peers who stay behind.

The results indicate that competition created by private school choice programs has a more positive impact on student achievement than the competition created by charter schools. However, the changes are so small they are, for practical purposes, negligible, lead author Huriya Kanwal Jabbar, an associate professor of education policy at the University of Southern California, wrote in an email to The Journalist’s Resource.

In the authors’ words: “A key argument for school choice made by policymakers and advocates is that school choice has the potential to benefit historically disadvantaged students in particular, due to its ability to break up strong links between poor neighborhoods and underfunded local schools. We tested this relationship, and we found that our measure of poverty, the percentage of students eligible for [free or reduced-price school meals], did not moderate the effects of competition. However, we found some evidence that the sample percentage of minority students was a significant moderator, suggesting that school competition may have a larger influence on student achievement for minority students. This is consistent with advocates’ claims that choice may improve educational opportunities for marginalized students in particular, not just for those who choose, but also for those ‘left behind’ in traditional public schools.”

The Participant Effects of Private School Vouchers Around the Globe: A Meta-Analytic and Systematic Review
M. Danish Shakeel, Kaitlin P. Anderson and Patrick J. Wolf. School Effectiveness and School Improvement, April 2021.

The study: Researchers examined 21 studies of voucher and voucher-like programs in the U.S., India and Colombia to evaluate how well students who use vouchers performed on standardized tests. This paper is the first meta-analysis of evidence collected from randomized, controlled trials of voucher programs conducted in multiple countries, the researchers write.

The 21 studies, dated from 1998 to 2018, represent a total of 11 voucher programs serving low-income students in these locations: Toledo, Ohio; Dayton, Ohio; Charlotte, North Carolina; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Washington D.C.; the state of Louisiana; Delhi, India; Andhra Pradesh, India; and Bogota, Colombia.

The findings: When researchers focused on the most recent year of data provided by each study, they found that the 11 voucher programs, overall, had a “generally modest positive” effect on test scores in those locations. Voucher programs in India and Colombia had a larger impact than programs in the U.S. “The results indicate that voucher programs tend to moderately increase test scores, particularly in developing countries with a large private-public school quality gap,” the researchers write.

In the authors’ words: “Many of the programs included here are still relatively small scale,” they write. “More experimental work should take place on larger programs in order to understand whether or not the achievement benefits of private school vouchers replicate at scale.”

School Vouchers: A Survey of the Economics Literature
Dennis Epple, Richard E. Romano and Miguel Urquiola. Journal of Economic Literature, June 2017.

The study: Researchers examine more than two decades of economic research on private school vouchers in the U.S., Canada, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, Holland, India, New Zealand and Sweden to answer five key questions, including “What effects do vouchers have on the students who use them?” The papers they analyzed span from 1990 to 2014.

The findings: The researchers determined that the answers to their questions vary depending on “the characteristics of the program analyzed and the context into which it is introduced.” When they looked specifically at how vouchers affect the academic achievement of U.S. students who use them, they discovered that the evidence, overall, “finds not very robust effects on test scores” and that the effects are “most frequently nonexistent.”

The researchers note, however, that three studies of private school choice programs in Louisiana and Ohio, published in 2015 and 2016, show large declines in test scores. They point out that the data does indicate an uptick in high school graduation rates among voucher users in the U.S., and Black students in particular.

In the authors’ words: “Vouchers have been neither the rousing success imagined by proponents nor the abject failure predicted by opponents,” they write. “While the evidence does not make a case for wholesale adoption of vouchers, recent theoretical and empirical results suggest a need for — and reasons for cautious optimism about — potential gains from improving voucher design.”

Other resources

• The Education Commission of the States provides a state-by-state look at private school choice policies plus a 50-state comparison summary.
• The EdChoice Dashboard provides detailed information about U.S. school choice programs, including the number of students participating in each program.
• The U.S. Government Accountability Office has compiled several lengthy reports on private school vouchers and other school choice programs. A report released in November 2017 finds that “private school choice programs inconsistently provide information on changes in rights and protections under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) when parents move a child with a disability from public to private school.” An October 2019 report looks at the characteristics of the 22 tax-credit scholarship programs operating in 17 states at that time.
• For journalists interested in comparing funding levels, the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association provides data on state funding for private colleges and universities. In fiscal year 2022, state governments gave private higher education institutions a total of $2.8 billion — $297 million to help with operating costs and $2.5 billion in student financial aid, the organization reports.
• Gallup, an analytics firm that has tracked Americans’ satisfaction with public schools annually since 1999, reports that 63% of the people it surveyed in August 2023 were somewhat or completely dissatisfied with the quality of the nation’s K-12 education. The sentiment among parents was a bit better — 59% were somewhat or completely dissatisfied.

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Do you like this piece so much that you want to republish it? Great!

This piece is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives 4.0 International License, which means you’re welcome and encouraged to republish it, provided you credit and/or link back to the original source. Our republishing guidelines can be found here.

Are you looking to republish the comic in a print publication or to distribute copies for a class you’re teaching? Download a high-resolution PDF here.

About the comic:

In “Empathy 101,” comics journalist Josh Neufeld uses the comic book form to highlight how medical schools across the U.S. have explored improv comedy, virtual reality and, yes, comics to improve communication and understanding between physicians and their patients. 

The comic self-reflectively discusses the growing field of graphic medicine, which uses comics as a tool to tell personal stories about health care experiences, as well as to distill and discuss complex medical topics. Neufeld considers comics an ideal medium for a nonfiction piece about topic at hand. As he explains, comics “engender a strong sense of empathy for the ‘characters’ in the story.”

Neufeld’s well-sourced comic draws on a large body of published academic research, newspaper articles, and interviews with expert sources, including Dr. Marshall Chin, a physician and professor who teaches health equity courses at U. Chicago Medicine; Dr. Mohammadreza Hojat, a research professor at Thomas Jefferson University, who developed the Jefferson Scale of Empathy to measure the capacity in health care providers; and Kriota Willberg, a visual artist and clinical massage therapist who practices and teaches graphic medicine.

The characters’ quotes, appearing in shaded pink speech bubbles or pink rectangles, come directly from their interviews with Neufeld, from their interviews in newspaper articles, or from research papers authored by the characters. The text in light green represents Neufeld’s own narrative.

Neufeld is the creator of several graphic medicine comics, including “Vaccinated at the Ball: A True Story about Trusted Messengers,” which won the 2023 GMIC Award for Excellence in Graphic Medicine, Short Form, from the Graphic Medicine International Collective.

Sources:

“Lessons From Improv Comedy to Reduce Health Disparities.” Marshall H. Chin. JAMA Internal Medicine, December 2019.

“5 Questions: How Doctors’ Empathy Improves Patient Care: Studies Have Shown That Physicians Who Score Higher on Empathy Have More Positive Patient Outcomes.” Sandy Bauers. The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 2019.

“Does Empathy Decline in the Clinical Phase of Medical Education? A Nationwide Multi-Institutional Cross-Sectional Study of Students at DO-Granting Medical Schools.” Mohammadreza Hojat, Stephen C. Shannon, Jennifer DeSantis, Mark R. Speicher, Lynn Bragan and Leonard H. Calabrese. Academic Medicine, June 2020.

“Changes in Empathy During Medical Education: An Example From Turkey.” Fusun Artiran Igde and Mustafa Kursat Sahin. Pakistan Journal of Medical Sciences, September/October 2017.

“Empathy Decline and its Reasons: A Systematic Review of Studies with Medical Students and Residents.” Melanie Neumann, Friedrich Edelhäuse. Diethard Tauschel, Martin R Fischer, Markus Wirtz, Christiane Woopen, Aviad Haramati, and Christian Scheffer. Academic Medicine, August 2011.

“Characterizing Changes in Student Empathy Throughout Medical School.” Daniel C. R. Chen, Daniel S. Kirshenbaum, Jun Yan, Elaine Kirshenbaum, and Robert H. Aseltine. Medical Teacher, March 2012.

“A Cross-sectional Measurement of Medical Student Empathy.” Daniel Chen, Robert Lew, Warren Hershman, and Jay Orlander.  Journal of General Internal Medicine, July 2007.

“Improvisational and Standup Comedy Graphic Medicine and Theatre of the Oppressed to Teach Advancing Health Equity.” Marshall H. Chin, Nicola M. Orlov, Brian C. Callender, James Dolan, Doriane C. Miller, Monica E. Peek, Jennifer M. Rusiecki and Monica B. Vela. Academic Medicine, December 2022.

“Cultivating Empathy Through Virtual Reality: Advancing Conversations About Racism Inequity and Climate in Medicine.” Robert O. Roswell, Courtney D. Cogburn, Jack Tocco, Johanna Martinez, Catherine Bangeranye, Jeremy N. Bailenson, Michael Wright, Jennifer H. Mieres and Lawrence Smith. Academic Medicine, November 2020.

“Increasing Empathy for Children in Dental Students Using Virtual Reality.” Shijia Hu and Bien Wen Pui Lai. International Journal of Pediatric Dentistry, February 2022.

“Using Virtual Reality in Medical Education to Teach Empathy.” Elizabeth Dyer, Barbara J. Swartzlander and Marilyn R. Gugliucci. Journal of the Medical Library Association, October 2018.

“Best of Graphic Medicine – The 2023 Graphic Medicine International Collective Awards.” Michael J. Green and Kevin Wolf. JAMA, December 2023.

“Our Cancer Year.” Harvey Pekar (author), Joyce Brabner (author), and Frank Stack (illustrator). Da Capo Press, 1994.

“The Bad Doctor: The Troubled Life and Times of Dr. Iwan James.” Ian Williams. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015.

“Documenting serious issues with comics journalism: An interview with Josh Neufeld.” Carmen Nobel.  The Journalist’s Resource, November 2020.

“A Tale of Two Pandemics: A Nonfiction Comic About Historical Racial Health Disparities.” by The Journalists’ Resource on Nov. 16, 2020: https://journalistsresource.org/race-and-gender/pandemics-comic-racial-health-disparities/

“Review: ‘The Bad Doctor’ and ‘Graphic Medicine Manifesto’.” Abigail Zuger. The New York Times Book Review, June 2015.

“The Graphic Medicine Manifesto.”  MK Czerwiec, Ian Williams, Susan Merrill Squier, Michael J. Green, Kimberly R. Myers, and Scott T. Smith. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015.

“Difficult Doctors, Difficult Patients: Building Empathy.” Patricia F. Anderson, Elise Wesco and Ruth C. Carlos. Journal of the American College of Radiology, December 2016.

“Comics and Medicine: Helping Med Students Form Their Professional Identities.” Penn State Health News, May 2015.

“Green Gets Serious About Comics: Professor Discusses Benefits of Graphic Medicine at National Institutes of Health.” Penn State, April 2018.

Dr. Green’s 7-class online higher education curriculum on graphic medicine, which can be found here. 

“Don’t Understand How Diabetes Works? Dr. Michael Natter Can Draw It Out for You.” NYU Langone  Health News Hub, November 2023.

“Comics and Medicine: Peering Into the Process of Professional Identity Formation.” Michael Green.  Academic Medicine, June 2015. 

The post Empathy 101: How medical schools are using improv theater, virtual reality and comics to help physicians understand their patients appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

In 2022, academic journals retracted more than 4,600 scientific papers, often because of ethical violations or research fraud, according to the Retraction Watch blog and database.

Although retractions represent a tiny fraction of all academic papers published each year, bad research can have tremendous impacts. Some studies involve new drugs, surgical procedures and disease prevention programs — all of which directly affect public health and safety. Also, government leaders rely on scholarly findings to help guide policymaking in areas such as crime, education, road safety, climate change and economic development.

On Nov. 30, The Journalist’s Resource hosted a free webinar to help journalists find and report on problematic research. Three experts who have covered research misconduct or have hands-on experience monitoring or detecting it offered a variety of tips and insights.

For those of you who missed the webinar, here are four of the big takeaways from our presenters, Ivan Oransky, a former president of the national Association of Health Care Journalists who teaches medical journalism at New York University and co-founded Retraction Watch; Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist and science integrity consultant who has been called “the public face of image sleuthing;” and Jodi Cohen, an award-winning investigative reporter at ProPublica whose series “The $3 Million Research Breakdown” exposed misconduct in a psychiatric research study at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

1. Retraction Watch and PubPeer are two online resources that can help journalists identify and track research fraud and errors.

Retraction Watch, a blog launched in 2010, is a treasure-trove of information about research papers that have been removed from academic journals. The website features:

• The Retraction Watch Database, which journalists can use to search for retractions connected to a specific researcher, university or research organization. Use it to look for patterns — for example, retractions among groups of researchers who tend to work together or among multiple researchers working at the same institution.
• The Retraction Watch Leaderboard, an unofficial list of researchers with the highest number of paper retractions.
• A list of scientific sleuths, including self-described “data thug” James Heathers and Michèle B. Nuijten, who, along with Chris Hartgerink, created statcheck, designed to find statistical mistakes in psychology papers. Some of these experts use aliases to protect against retaliation and harrassment.

Retraction Watch helped Cohen report on and provide context for a ProPublica investigation into the work of prominent child psychiatrist Mani Pavuluri.

It “was a huge resource in trying to understand this,” Cohen told webinar viewers. “The amount of information there and the ability to use that database — completely amazing.”

In her series, co-published in The Chronicle of Higher Education in 2018, Cohen revealed that Pavuluri “violated research rules by testing the powerful drug lithium on children younger than 13 although she was told not to, failed to properly alert parents of the study’s risks and falsified data to cover up the misconduct, records show.” The University of Illinois at Chicago, Cohen wrote, “paid a severe penalty for Pavuluri’s misconduct and its own lax oversight.” The federal government required the school to return the $3.1 million the National Institutes of Health gave it to fund Pavuluri’s study.

PubPeer is a website where researchers critique one another’s work. Comments are public, allowing journalists to observe part of the scientific process and collect information that could be useful in a news story.

Bik noted during the webinar that PubPeer is “heavily moderated” to reduce the likelihood of name-calling and speculation about a researcher’s work. The website explains its commenting rules in detail, warning users to base their statements on publicly verifiable information and to cite their sources. Allegations of misconduct are prohibited.

“You cannot just say, ‘You’re a fraud,’” Bik explained. “You have to come with evidence and arguments similar to a peer review report.”

PubPeer played a key role in student journalist Theo Baker’s investigation of academic papers co-authored by Stanford University President Marc Tessier-Lavigne. Tessier-Lavigne ultimately resigned and Holden Thorp, the editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals, announced in late August that two of Tessier-Lavigne’s papers had been retracted.

The Journalist’s Resource created a tip sheet on using PubPeer in August. Tip #1 from that tip sheet: Install a free PubPeer browser extension. When you look up a published research paper, or when you visit a website that links to a research paper, the browser extension will alert you to any comments made about it on PubPeer.

2. Early in the reporting process, ask independent experts to help you confirm whether a research study has problems.

Getting guidance from independent experts is critical when reporting on research fraud and errors. Experts like Elisabeth Bik can help you gauge whether problems exist, whether they appear to be intentional and how serious they are.

During the webinar, Bik advised journalists to ask for help early in the reporting process and seek out experts with the specific expertise needed to assess potential problems. Bik specializes in spotting misleading and manipulated images. Others specialize in, for example, statistical anomalies or conflicts of interest.

Bik’s work has resulted in 1,069 retractions, 1,008 corrections and 149 expressions of concern, according to her Science Integrity Digest blog. Journal editors typically issue an expression of concern about an academic paper when they become aware of a potential problem, or when an investigation is inconclusive but there are well-founded indicators of misleading information or research misconduct.

Bik stressed the importance of journalists helping correct the scientific record and holding researchers accountable.

“It seems that there’s relatively very few papers that have big problems that get corrected or retracted,” she said. “Institutional investigations take years to perform and there’s very rarely an action [as a result]. And senior researchers, who are the leaders, the mentors, the supervisors and the responsible people for these things happening in their lab, they are very rarely held accountable.”

Oransky encouraged journalists to get to know the scientific sleuths, some of whom are active on X, formerly known as Twitter.

“You can find dozens of people who do this kind of work,” he said. “It’s like any kind of whistleblower or source that you can develop.”

Oransky also highlighted common types of misconduct that journalists can look out for:

• Faked data.
• Image manipulation.
• Plagiarism.
• Duplication or “self-plagiarism” — when researchers reuse their own writings or data, taking them from a study that has already been published and inserting them into a newer paper.
• Fake peer review — a peer review process that has, in whole or in part, been fabricated or altered to ensure a paper gets published.
• Paper mills — organizations that create and sell fraudulent or potentially fraudulent papers.
• Authorship issues.
• Publisher errors.

3. One of the best ways to get tips about research fraud is to report on research fraud.

Oransky shared that he and other people at Retraction Watch continually receive tips about research misconduct. Tipsters will come to journalists they think will report on the issue, he said.

“You write about it and then people come to you,” Cohen added. “They don’t know you’re there unless you’re covering it regularly. And not even regularly, but like you start writing about it and show it’s something your interested in, you’re going to get more ideas.”

Another place journalists can go to check for allegations of research misconduct: court records, including subpoenas. They can also ask public colleges and universities for copies of records such as investigative reports and written communication between researchers and their supervisors, Cohen pointed out. If the research involves human subjects, journalists could request copies of reports and communications sent to and from members of the Institutional Review Board, a group charged with reviewing and monitoring research to ensure human subjects’ safety and rights are protected.

Cohen suggested journalists ask local colleges and universities for records tied to research funding and any money returned to funders. The National Institutes of Health maintains a database of organizations that receive federal grant money to conduct biomedical research.

“You could just start digging around a little bit at the institutions you cover,” Cohen said. “Be skeptical and ask questions of the data and ask questions of the people you cover.”

4. Discuss with your editors whether and how you’ll protect the identities of whistleblowers and experts who want to remain anonymous.

Many experts who leave comments on PubPeer or raise questions about research on other online platforms use aliases because they don’t want their identities known.

“You can imagine that not everybody wants to work under their full name so some of them are using all kinds of pseudonyms, although recently some of these people have come out under their full names,” she said. “But it is work obviously that doesn’t leave you with a lot of fans. Especially the people whose work we criticize are sometimes very mad about that, understandably so. But some of them have sued or threatened to sue some of us.”

Oransky said he has no issues letting scientific sleuths stay anonymous. They can explain their concerns in detail and show journalists their evidence. As with any source, journalists need to check out and independently confirm information they get from an anonymous source before reporting on it.

“Anonymous sources that are vulnerable — which a whistleblower is, which someone in a lab whose pointing out problems is, especially a junior person — as long as you know who they are, your editor knows who they are, that’s my rule,” he said. “We want to understand why they want anonymity, but it’s usually pretty obvious.”

Download Oransky’s slides from his presentation.

Download Bik’s slides from her presentation.

The post How to cover academic research fraud and errors: 4 big takeaways from our webinar appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

In her inaugural address as Dartmouth College’s new president Sept. 22, Sian Leah Beilock vowed to make student mental health a central part of her leadership agenda.

“Fortunately, understanding how anxiety and stress play out in the brain and body has been the focus of my research for the past 20 years,” said Beilock, a leading scholar and former psychology professor at the University of Chicago who was president of Barnard College the last six years.

“The single greatest service we can do for our students, our faculty, and our staff is to support them on their wellness journeys,” she added.

Choosing a cognitive scientist to lead the Ivy League school reflects a broader trend across higher education in the U.S. College presidents nationwide say they are committed to making mental health an institutional priority amid what public health researchers call a national college student mental health crisis.

In fact, when the American Council on Education asked presidents in late 2021 about the issues they consider most pressing, they cited “mental health of students” most frequently.

College student mental health has worsened over time, as has the mental health of high school students, researchers find. During the 2022-23 academic year, an estimated 41% of college students had symptoms of depression and 36% had symptoms of anxiety disorder, according to a national survey conducted by the Healthy Minds Network, a group of scholars who study mental health among U.S. adolescents and young adults.

Of the 76,406 college students who participated, 14% said they had seriously considered suicide during the previous 12 months. The same proportion had symptoms of an eating disorder.

When the organization surveyed college students back in 2018-19, 21% reported symptoms of depression and 22% had symptoms of anxiety disorder. Meanwhile, 10% of students said they had seriously considered suicide and 7% had symptoms of an eating disorder.

Mental health problems more common among minority, LGBTQ students

Published studies indicate some groups of students fare worse than others. For example, racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to experience mental health problems than white students. Likewise, LGBTQ students tend to have poorer mental health than those who aren’t sexual or gender minorities.

Another group that college administrators worry about: first-generation college students — those who are the first in their families to go to college and often must navigate their higher education careers with little to no guidance from parents and other family members.

When researchers compared first-generation students and students whose parents went to college from 2018 to 2021, they learned that symptoms of depression and anxiety disorder were common in both. However, first-generation college students were much less likely to get help from professionals.

“Just 32.8% of first-generation students with symptoms received therapy in the past year, relative to 42.8% among continuing-generation students, and this disparity widened during the COVID-19 pandemic,” the researchers write in the paper, published in June.

In December, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a public health advisory calling attention to the rising number of youth attempting suicide. Last week, Murthy and seven former surgeons general traveled to Dartmouth for a historic meeting about the country’s mental health crisis.

Tips for journalists

Considering the urgency and importance of this issue, we asked two mental health experts for advice on how journalists can improve their coverage.

In the five tips we outline below, you’ll find suggestions and insights from Gino Aisenberg, an associate professor of social work and co-director of the Latino Center for Health at the University of Washington, and Tony Walker, senior vice president of academic programs for The Jed Foundation, a nonprofit that helps higher education institutions, high schools and school districts implement strategies to prevent suicide and protect emotional health.

1. Make it clear to your audiences that the COVID-19 pandemic didn’t cause this crisis. Student mental health had been declining for years before the virus reached the U.S.

Several research studies and reports chronicle this trend, including a paper published last year that finds the proportion of college students with symptoms of depression and anxiety disorder nearly doubled between 2013 and 2019. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced the first laboratory-confirmed case of COVID-19 in America in January 2020.

However, the pandemic has exacerbated the problem, especially among the most marginalized students, researchers find.

“College students now face increasing housing and food insecurity, financial hardships, a lack of social connectedness and sense of belonging, uncertainty about the future, and access issues that impede their academic performance and well-being,” researchers write in the 2021 paper, “More Than Inconvenienced: The Unique Needs of U.S. College Students During the COVID-19 Pandemic.”

Psychiatrist Annelle Primm and other mental health professions have spoken out about the mental health impacts of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ban on affirmative action in higher education admissions. Higher education leaders expect it to reduce the number of underrepresented minorities attending the nation’s most competitive colleges and universities.

”We believe that the discontinuation of affirmative action will increase isolation and decrease a sense of belonging among students of color, both of which pose risks to mental health,” Primm, the senior medical director of the Steve Fund, a nonprofit organization that focuses on the mental health of young people of color, writes in Diverse Issues of Higher Education.

She cites a 2019 report from the University of Michigan, which stopped practicing affirmative action in 2006, as evidence. One-fourth of its Black, Latino and Native American students said they did not feel they belonged at the school — a 66% increase over 10 years, she notes.

2. Familiarize yourself with two ongoing studies of college student mental health: the Healthy Minds Study, which focuses on U.S. college students, and the World Mental Health International College Student Initiative, which collects data from college students across the globe.

Academic researchers affiliated with these two projects conduct regular surveys of college students to track the prevalence of mental health problems and better understand the factors that affect their mental health and discourage them from seeking help. These researchers also publish studies examining and interpreting the data they collect through annual, web-based surveys.

The Healthy Minds Study, launched in 2007, has been fielded at more than 530 U.S. colleges and universities. Tens of thousands of undergraduate and graduate students complete the survey each year.

Four university faculty members lead the project: Sarah Lipson, an associate professor in Boston University’s department of health law policy and management; Daniel Eisenberg, a professor of health policy of management at the University of California, Los Angeles; Justin Heinze, an associate professor of health behavior and health education at the University of Michigan; and Sasha Zhou, an assistant professor of public health at Wayne State University.

In 2019, the World Health Organization started the World Mental Health International College Student Initiative. The project, commonly referred to as WMH-ICS, aims to collect data from college students worldwide. But as of early October 2023, only the U.S. and 17 other countries, eight of which are in Europe, participate.

The two lead U.S. researchers on that project are Randy Auerbach, an associate professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, and Ronald Kessler, the McNeil Family Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School.

3. Emphasize that improving student mental health will require much more than hiring additional campus counselors.

The Jed Foundation advises administrators to focus on the wellness of the entire student body, not just students experiencing distress and those with a diagnosed mental illness. It also encourages schools to invest in programs aimed at preventing mental health issues and detecting them earlier. 

That guidance falls in line with recommendations that a committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine made in 2021, following an 18-month investigation into how campus culture affects college student mental health and well-being. Committee members stressed the need for a comprehensive approach — one in which everyone on campus, including faculty and staff across departments, pitch in to change campus culture.

Walker, The Jed Foundation’s senior vice president of academic programs, urges journalists to take a broader look at the problem as well.

“When we talk about mental health — and sometimes the media is inadvertently guilty of this — we tend to just focus on therapists and we tend to focus on access to mental health care,” Walker tells The Journalist’s Resource. “Mental health is not just counseling.”

Interventions that show promise, according to research studies, include peer counseling, mindfulness training and activities that connect students with similar backgrounds, such as students who are the first in their families to go to college.

4. Explain that all college students face a range of stressors, but certain groups, including racial minorities and LGBTQ students, grapple with additional ones.

College can be stressful, requiring students to juggle class assignments, work and personal relationships while preparing for careers and making sure there’s enough money for food, housing, tuition and other basic needs. A lot of students worry about shootings and other forms of violence on college campuses.

Some student groups face additional stressors, such as racism and discrimination — topics that news stories about college mental health often overlook or gloss over. Many racial and ethnic minorities experience racism throughout their lives, including at their institutions, notes Aisenberg, who co-founded the Latino Center for Health, a research center at the University of Washington focused on improving the health of Latino people across Washington and the U.S.

Sometimes, racism is blatant, he adds. Sometimes, it comes in the form of microaggressions, offensive or insensitive remarks or questions aimed at some aspect of a person’s identity, such as their race, physical appearance, immigration status or cultural traditions.

“For some individuals, one microaggression might not throw them off,” says Aisenberg, who is Mexican American. “Another microaggression I experience the same day and another one and another one — over time, it can weigh [a person] down.”

When Gallup Inc., a company known for its public opinion polls, interviewed 1,106 Black college students last fall, about 1 in 5 reported feeling “frequently” or “occasionally” discriminated against at school. Almost 1 in 3 Black students attending schools where there’s little racial or ethnic diversity among the student body indicated they feel discriminated against “frequently” or “occasionally.”

Nearly one-third of Black students enrolled at such institutions also said they feel physically unsafe, disrespected and psychologically unsafe, according to an analysis released early this year by Gallup and the Lumina Foundation, a private foundation working to increase the share of Americans who continue their education past high school.

Aisenberg says it’s important journalists understand the role racism and discrimination play in student mental health. He’d like to see colleges invest more heavily in culturally responsive counseling, hiring mental health professionals who recognize and draw on the cultural strengths of students from minoritized backgrounds to help them.

Such counselors will understand why some student groups tend to resist therapy more than others.

“Latinos might be going to an indigenous healer, a priest, a minister long before seeking mental health services,” Aisenberg says.

5. Consult style guides that mental health experts have created specifically to help journalists use correct language and avoid perpetuating stereotypes about people with mental illness.

Several U.S. and international organizations have created style guides and tip sheets to help journalists provide a more complete and more accurate picture of mental health. They often offer guidance on word choices and point out common errors.

The California Mental Health Services Authority, for instance, warns journalists to be careful not to insinuate mental illness drove someone to commit a crime.

“Most people with a mental illness don’t commit crimes; most people who commit crimes don’t have a mental illness,” according to the government agency’s style guide. “People with psychiatric issues are far more likely to be victims than perpetrators of violence.”

Some other recommendations: Consider whether someone’s mental illness is relevant to a news story before including that information. Also, don’t rely on hearsay about a person’s mental health diagnosis.

Check out these resources, too:

• The Disability Language Style Guide, created by the National Center on Disability and Journalism at Arizona State University.
• The Mental Health Media Guide, an interactive guide developed by a coalition of mental health and entertainment industry professionals.
• Safe and Effective Messaging, which features phrasing recommendations from The Jed Foundation.
• Improving College Student Mental Health: Research on Promising Campus Interventions, a roundup of research from The Journalist’s Resource on interventions that scholars have found successful.
• Trauma-Informed Journalism: What It Is, Why It’s Important and Tips for Practicing It, a tip sheet and explainer from The Journalist’s Resource that features advice from two experts.
• The Journalism Resource Guide on Behavioral Health, written by the Carter Center, a charity that focuses on issues such as public health, human rights and democracy. It also offers Rosalynn Carter Fellowships for Mental Health Journalism.
• Preventing Suicide: Information for Journalists and Others Writing About Suicide is a tip sheet from the World Health Organization that outlines what journalists should and should not do when reporting on suicide.
• Recommendations for Reporting on Suicide, developed by experts across multiple fields and based on the findings of more than 50 international studies of suicide contagion.
• Covering Suicide is a guide the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma at Columbia Journalism School created for college media organizations and student journalists.

The post 5 tips to help you cover the college mental health crisis appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

If you’re a journalist covering higher education in the U.S., you’ll likely be reporting this fall on what many healthcare professionals and researchers are calling a college student mental health crisis.

An estimated 49% of college students have symptoms of depression or anxiety disorder and 14% seriously considered committing suicide during the past year, according to a national survey of college students conducted during the 2022-23 school year. Nearly one-third of the 76,406 students who participated said they had intentionally injured themselves in recent months.

In December, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a rare public health advisory calling attention to the rising number of youth attempting suicide, noting the COVID-19 pandemic has “exacerbated the unprecedented stresses young people already faced.”

Meanwhile, colleges and universities of all sizes are struggling to meet the need for mental health care among undergraduate and graduate students. Many schools have hired more counselors and expanded services but continue to fall short.

Hundreds of University of Houston students held a protest earlier this year, demanding the administration increase the number of counselors and make other changes after two students died by suicide during the spring semester, the online publication Chron reported.

In an essay in the student-run newspaper, The Cougar, last week, student journalist Malachi Key blasts the university for having one mental health counselor for every 2,122 students, a ratio higher than recommended by the International Accreditation of Counseling Services, which accredits higher education counseling services.

But adding staff to a campus counseling center won’t be enough to improve college student mental health and well-being, scholars and health care practitioners warn.

“Counseling centers cannot and should not be expected to solve these problems alone, given that the factors and forces affecting student well-being go well beyond the purview and resources that counseling centers can bring to bear,” a committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine writes in a 2021 report examining the issue.

Advice from prominent scholars

The report is the culmination of an 18-month investigation the National Academies launched in 2019, at the request of the federal government, to better understand how campus culture affects college student mental health and well-being. Committee members examined data, studied research articles and met with higher education leaders, mental health practitioners, researchers and students.

The committee’s key recommendation: that schools take a more comprehensive approach to student mental health, implementing a wide range of policies and programs aimed at preventing mental health problems and improving the well-being of all students — in addition to providing services and treatment for students in distress and those with diagnosed mental illnesses.

Everyone on campus, including faculty and staff across departments, needs to pitch in to establish a new campus culture, the committee asserts.

“An ‘all hands’ approach, one that emphasizes shared responsibility and a holistic understanding of what it means in practice to support students, is needed if institutions of higher education are to intervene from anything more than a reactive standpoint,” committee members write. “Creating this systemic change requires that institutions examine the entire culture and environment of the institution and accept more responsibility for creating learning environments where a changing student population can thrive.”

In a more recent analysis, three leading scholars in the field also stress the need for a broader plan of action.

Sara Abelson, a research assistant professor at Temple University’s medical school; Sarah Lipson, an associate professor at the Boston University School of Public Health; and Daniel Eisenberg,  a professor of health policy and management at the University of California, Los Angeles’ School of Public Health, have been studying college student mental health for years.

Lipson and Eisenberg also are principal investigators for the Healthy Minds Network, which administers the Healthy Minds Study, a national survey of U.S college students conducted annually to gather information about their mental health, whether and how they receive mental health care and related issues.

Abelson, Lipson and Eisenberg review the research to date on mental health interventions for college students in the 2022 edition of Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research. They note that while the evidence indicates a multi-pronged approach is best, it’s unclear which specific strategies are most effective.

Much more research needed

Abelson, Lipson and Eisenberg stress the need for more research. Many interventions in place at colleges and universities today — for instance, schoolwide initiatives aimed at reducing mental health stigma and encouraging students to seek help when in duress – should be evaluated to gauge their effectiveness, they write in their chapter, “Mental Health in College Populations: A Multidisciplinary Review of What Works, Evidence Gaps, and Paths Forward.”

They add that researchers and higher education leaders also need to look at how campus operations, including hiring practices and budgetary decisions, affect college student mental health. It would be helpful to know, for example, how students are impacted by limits on the number of campus counseling sessions they can have during a given period, Abelson, Lipson and Eisenberg suggest.

Likewise, it would be useful to know whether students are more likely to seek counseling when they must pay for their sessions or when their school charges every member of the student body a mandatory health fee that provides free counseling for all students.

“These financially-based considerations likely influence help-seeking and treatment receipt, but they have not been evaluated within higher education,” they write.

Interventions that show promise

The report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and the chapter by Abelson, Lipson and Eisenberg both spotlight programs and policies shown to prevent mental health problems or improve the mental health and well-being of young people. However, many intervention studies focus on high school students, specific groups of college students or specific institutions. Because of this, it can be tough to predict how well they would work across the higher education landscape.

Scientific evaluations of these types of interventions indicate they are effective:

• Building students’ behavior management skills and having them practice new skills under expert supervision. An example: A class that teaches students how to use mindfulness to improve their mental and physical health that includes instructor-led meditation exercises.
• Training some students to offer support to others, including sharing information and organizing peer counseling groups. “Peers may be ‘the single most potent source of influence’ on student affective and cognitive growth and development during college,” Abelson, Lipson and Eisenberg write.
• Reducing students’ access to things they can use to harm themselves, including guns and lethal doses of over-the-counter medication.
• Creating feelings of belonging through activities that connect students with similar interests or backgrounds.
• Making campuses more inclusive for racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+ students and students who are the first in their families to go to college. One way to do that is by hiring mental health professionals trained to recognize, support and treat students from different backgrounds. “Research has shown that the presentation of [mental health] symptoms can differ based on racial and ethnic backgrounds, as can engaging in help-seeking behaviors that differ from those of cisgender, heteronormative white men,” explain members of National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine committee.

Helping journalists sift through the evidence

We encourage journalists to read the full committee report and aforementioned chapter in Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research. We realize, though, that many journalists won’t have time to pour over the combined 304 pages of text to better understand this issue and the wide array of interventions colleges and universities have tried, with varying success.

To help, we’ve gathered and summarized meta-analyses that investigate some of the more common interventions. Researchers conduct meta-analyses — a top-tier form of scientific evidence — to systematically analyze all the numerical data that appear in academic studies on a given topic. The findings of a meta-analysis are statistically stronger than those reached in a single study, partly because pooling data from multiple, similar studies creates a larger sample to examine.

Keep reading to learn more. And please check back here occasionally because we’ll add to this list as new research on college student mental health is published.

Peer-led programs

Stigma and Peer-Led Interventions: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
Jing Sun; et al. Frontiers in Psychiatry, July 2022.

When people diagnosed with a mental illness received social or emotional support from peers with similar mental health conditions, they experienced less stress about the public stigma of mental illness, this analysis suggests.

The intervention worked for people from various age groups, including college students and middle-aged adults, researchers learned after analyzing seven studies on peer-led mental health programs written or published between 1975 and 2021.

Researchers found that participants also became less likely to identify with negative stereotypes associated with mental illness.

All seven studies they examined are randomized controlled trials conducted in the U.S., Germany or Switzerland. Together, the findings represent the experiences of a total of 763 people, 193 of whom were students at universities in the U.S.

Researchers focused on interventions designed for small groups of people, with the goal of reducing self-stigma and stress associated with the public stigma of mental illness. One or two trained peer counselors led each group for activities spanning three to 10 weeks.

Five of the seven studies tested the Honest, Open, Proud program, which features role-playing exercises, self-reflection and group discussion. It encourages participants to consider disclosing their mental health issues, instead of keeping them a secret, in hopes that will help them feel more confident and empowered. The two other programs studied are PhotoVoice, based in the United Kingdom, and

“By sharing their own experiences or recovery stories, peer moderators may bring a closer relationship, reduce stereotypes, and form a positive sense of identity and group identity, thereby reducing self-stigma,” the authors of the analysis write.

Expert-led instruction

The Effects of Meditation, Yoga, and Mindfulness on Depression, Anxiety, and Stress in Tertiary Education Students: A Meta-Analysis
Josefien Breedvelt; et al. Frontiers in Psychiatry, April 2019.

Meditation-based programs help reduce symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress among college students, researchers find after analyzing the results of 24 research studies conducted in various parts of North America, Asia and Europe.

Reductions were “moderate,” researchers write. They warn, however, that the results of their meta-analysis should be interpreted with caution considering studies varied in quality.

A total of 1,373 college students participated in the 24 studies. Students practiced meditation, yoga or mindfulness an average of 153 minutes a week for about seven weeks. Most programs were provided in a group setting.

Although the researchers do not specify which types of mindfulness, yoga or meditation training students received, they note that the most commonly offered mindfulness program is Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and that a frequently practiced form of yoga is Hatha Yoga.

Meta-Analytic Evaluation of Stress Reduction Interventions for Undergraduate and Graduate Students
Miryam Yusufov; et al. International Journal of Stress Management, May 2019.

After examining six types of stress-reduction programs common on college campuses, researchers determined all were effective at reducing stress or anxiety among students — and some helped with both stress and anxiety.

Programs focusing on cognitive-behavioral therapy, coping skills and building social support networks were more effective in reducing stress. Meanwhile, relaxation training, mindfulness-based stress reduction and psychoeducation were more effective in reducing anxiety.

The authors find that all six program types were equally effective for undergraduate and graduate students.

The findings are based on an analysis of 43 studies dated from 1980 to 2015, 30 of which were conducted in the U.S. The rest were conducted in Australia, China, India, Iran, Japan, Jordan, Kora, Malaysia or Thailand. A total of 4,400 students participated.

Building an inclusive environment

Cultural Adaptations and Therapist Multicultural Competence: Two Meta-Analytic Reviews
Alberto Soto; et al. Journal of Clinical Psychology, August 2018.

If racial and ethnic minorities believe their therapist understands their background and culture, their treatment tends to be more successful, this analysis suggests.

“The more a treatment is tailored to match the precise characteristics of a client, the more likely that client will engage in treatment, remain in treatment, and experience improvement as a result of treatment,” the authors write.

Researchers analyzed the results of 15 journal articles and doctoral dissertations that examine therapists’ cultural competence. Nearly three-fourths of those studies were written or published in 2010 or later. Together, the findings represent the experiences of 2,640 therapy clients, many of whom were college students. Just over 40% of participants were African American and 32% were Hispanic or Latino.

The researchers note that they find no link between therapists’ ratings of their own level of cultural competence and client outcomes.

Internet-based interventions

Internet Interventions for Mental Health in University Students: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
Mathias Harrer; et al. International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research, June 2019.

Internet-based mental health programs can help reduce stress and symptoms of anxiety, depression and eating disorders among college students, according to an analysis of 48 research studies published or written before April 30, 2018 on the topic.

All 48 studies were randomized, controlled trials of mental health interventions that used the internet to engage with students across various platforms and devices, including mobile phones and apps. In total, 10,583 students participated in the trials.

“We found small effects on depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms, as well as moderate‐sized effects on eating disorder symptoms and students’ social and academic functioning,” write the authors, who conducted the meta-analysis as part of the World Mental Health International College Student Initiative.

The analysis indicates programs that focus on cognitive behavioral therapy “were superior to other types of interventions.” Also, programs “of moderate length” — one to two months – were more effective.

The researchers note that studies of programs targeting depression showed better results when students were not compensated for their participation, compared to studies in which no compensation was provided. The researchers do not offer possible explanations for the difference in results or details about the types of compensation offered to students.

The post Improving college student mental health: Research on promising campus interventions appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

This tip sheet on covering corporal punishment in schools, originally published in March 2023, was updated on Aug. 31, 2023 to reflect the number of states that allow the practice and the results of a new study on public support for laws banning physical forms of child discipline. We also added a link to a policy statement the American Academy of Pediatrics released Aug. 21, 2023.

Despite academic studies noting the harms associated with corporal punishment, U.S. public schools use it to discipline tens of thousands of students a year, data from the U.S. Department of Education show.  

Public schools in 22 states reported using physical discipline on students during the 2017-18 academic year, the most recent year for which national data is available. The practice was most common in Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas and Oklahoma. Today, 18 states allow public school personnel to spank, hit or otherwise inflict pain on children to control their behavior, according to Elizabeth Gershoff, a professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin.

Corporal punishment is legal in private schools in all but three states: Iowa, Maryland and New Jersey.

It’s not yet clear whether schools have relied on this type of discipline more or less often amid the COVID-19 pandemic. However, school district officials reported a marked increase in student misbehavior in 2021-22, compared with before the coronavirus arrived in the U.S. in 2019. News stories and research studies have documented the pandemic’s widespread effects on kids’ mental and physical health.

When the U.S. Department of Education surveyed public school districts in 2022, 84% agreed or strongly agreed the pandemic has negatively affected students’ behavioral development.

Almost 6 out of 10 public schools reported “increased incidents of classroom disruptions from student misconduct” and 48% reported increased “acts of disrespect towards teachers and staff.” About half reported more “rowdiness outside of the classroom.”

Even if the number of children physically punished at school has fallen in recent years, the issue warrants journalists’ attention considering the serious injuries students sometimes suffer and the fact that Black children and children with mental or physical disabilities have, for many years, received a disproportionate share of school corporal punishment.

The federal government requires public schools and public preschools to report the number of students who receive physical punishment. In 2017-18, public schools physically disciplined a total of 69,492 students at least once — down from 92,479 kids in 2015-16.

That year, public preschool programs, which are often housed within public elementary schools, reported using corporal punishment on a combined 851 children aged 3 to 5 years.

It’s unclear how common corporal punishment is in private schools because the federal government does not require them to report their numbers. Gershoff, one of the country’s foremost experts on corporal punishment, says she knows of no government agency or organization that tracks that information.

She urges journalists to help their audiences understand the various ways schools use physical discipline and its potential impacts on student behavior, mental and physical health, and academic achievement.

“Physical punishment in schools typically involves an adult hitting a child with a two-foot-long wooden board, known euphemistically as a ‘paddle,'” Gershoff writes in an essay published last week in The Hill. “Consider this: If a principal were to hit an adult, say a teacher or a parent, with a two-foot-long board, that person would be charged with assault with a weapon or aggravated assault. School personnel are hitting children with boards that, in any other context, would be considered weapons — and they do so legally.”

The global use of school corporal punishment

The U.S. is the only member of the United Nations that has not yet ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, an international treaty adopted in 1989 that, among other things, protects children “from all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, maltreatment or exploitation.” Somalia ratified the convention in 2015 — the 196^th country to do so.

Globally, about half of all children aged 6 to 17 years live in countries where school corporal punishment is “not fully prohibited,” according to the World Health Organization.

But legal bans do not necessarily mean corporal punishment ceases to exist, a team of researchers from the University of Cape Town learned after examining 53 peer-reviewed studies conducted in various parts of the planet and published between 1980 and 2017.

In South Africa, for instance, half of students reported being corporally punished at school despite a ban instituted in 1996, the researchers note.

“There is also concern that school staff and administrators may underreport school corporal punishment even where it is legal,” they write, adding that a study in Tanzania found that students tended to report twice as much corporal punishment as teachers.

While there’s limited research on corporal punishment in U.S. schools, numerous studies of corporal punishment in U.S. homes have determined it is associated with a range of harms. When Gershoff and fellow researcher Andrew Grogan-Kaylor combined and analyzed the results of 75 research studies on parental spanking published before June 1, 2014, they found no evidence it improves children’s behavior.

In fact, they discovered that kids spanked by their parents have a greater likelihood of experiencing 13 detrimental outcomes, including aggression, antisocial behavior, impaired cognitive ability and low self-esteem during childhood and antisocial behavior and mental health problems in adulthood.

Gershoff says children who are physically disciplined at school likely are affected in similar ways.

“There’s nothing to make me think that wouldn’t hold for corporal punishment in schools,” she tells The Journalist’s Resource. “In fact, I think it might be more problematic in schools because of the lack of a strong relationship in the schools between the children and the person who’s doing the paddling.”

Other research by Gershoff offers insights into the types of misbehavior that lead to corporal punishment. She found that public school principals, teachers and other staff members have used physical punishment for a range of offenses, including tardiness, disrespecting teachers, running in the hallways and receiving bad grades.

Some children have been disciplined so harshly they suffered injuries, “including bruises, hematomas, nerve and muscle damage, cuts, and broken bones,” Gershoff and colleague Sarah Font write in the journal Social Policy Report in 2016.

The Society for Adolescent Medicine estimated in 2003 that 10,000 to 20,000 students require medical attention each year in the U.S. as a result of school corporal punishment. The organization has not updated its estimate since then, however.

Black students disciplined disproportionately

James B. Pratt Jr., an associate professor of criminal justice at Fisk University who also researches corporal punishment, encourages news outlets to dig deeper into the reasons schools in many states still use pain as punishment.

He says reporters should press state legislators to explain why they allow it to continue, even as public health organizations such as the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention oppose its use. Last week, the American Academy of Pediatrics released a policy statement stressing that corporal punishment “is not an effective or ethical method for management of behavior concerns” and calling for it to be abolished in all school settings.

News coverage of corporal punishment needs historical context as well, Pratt says. His research finds that school corporal punishment, which is most concentrated in the U.S. South, plays a role in sustaining a long history of racialized violence in the region.

“Tell the story of corporal punishment as a form of social control,” Pratt says. “There is research to illustrate how corporal punishment has been used historically and today.”

In the U.S., enslaved Black people were whipped, as were Black prisoners in the early 20^th century and Black children who went before juvenile courts in the 1930s, Pratt and his fellow researchers write in “Historic Lynching and Corporal Punishment in Contemporary Southern Schools,” published in 2021 in the journal Social Problems.

For generations after emancipation, white supremacists in the South whipped and lynched Black people to intimidate and control them.

When Pratt and his colleagues examined data on student discipline in 10 southern states in 2013-14 and lynchings between 1865 and 1950, they learned that school corporal punishment was more common for all students — but especially Black students — in areas where lynchings had occurred.

Pratt and his coauthors write that banning school corporal punishment “would help dismantle systemic racism, promoting youth and community well-being in a region still haunted by histories of racial terror.”

Guidance from academic scholars

Both Pratt and Gershoff have lots of ideas for helping journalists frame and strengthen their coverage of corporal punishment in schools. Here are some of the tips they shared with The Journalist’s Resource.

1. Find out whether or how schools in your area use corporal punishment, and who administers it.

Public schools generally share only basic information about corporal punishment to the U.S. Department of Education. School officials submit the total number of students they corporally punish in a given academic year and they break down that number according to students’ sex and race and whether they had a disability, were Hispanic or were enrolled in special programs teaching them to speak English.

Not only does the data lack detail — it does not indicate the type of corporal punishment used, for example, or the type of disability the student had — the information is several years old by the time the federal government finishes collecting it and releases it to the public.

Pratt says journalists can help researchers, parents and the public get a clearer picture of what’s happening in local communities by seeking out more details. To get a sense of how often and how local schools use corporal punishment, ask public school districts for copies of disciplinary reports and policies governing the use of corporal punishment.

Interview teacher union leaders and individual teachers to better understand what’s happening in classrooms and what teachers have seen and learned. Reach out to parents whose children have been disciplined to ask about student experiences.

“We know there’s something there, but how it functions on the ground is what we need to understand,” Pratt says.

Some questions to investigate:

• Which misbehaviors lead to corporal punishment?
• Who administers physical discipline?
• What are children hit with and how many times?
• Where on their bodies are they struck?
• How often have children been seriously injured and how were those situations handled?
• Have local schools been sued over corporal punishment?
• In areas where corporal punishment is banned, have school employees been disciplined or terminated for using corporal punishment?

2. Ask how schools’ use of corporal punishment and other forms of discipline changed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Students, teachers and other school staff members experienced a lot of stress during the pandemic, as schools struggled to provide instruction and other student services while also monitoring and responding to COVID-19.

At the start of the pandemic, many schools closed their campuses temporarily and taught lessons online. When everyone returned to campus, the situation was, at times, confusing or somewhat chaotic. Many schools discovered they needed to rely more heavily on substitute teachers, who often do not have classroom management training, to fill in when regular teachers were sick, in quarantine or caring for loved ones.

It’s a good idea for journalists to try to gauge how such changes have affected student behavior and discipline. Local school districts and state departments of education should be able to provide more recent records than the U.S. Department of Education. Another source of data: colleges and universities where faculty are studying school discipline.

A September 2022 analysis from the University of Arkansas, for example, shows a sharp decline in several types of student discipline in that state since before the pandemic began. However, the authors write that they “cannot tell if the decline is the result of improved student behavior or inconsistent reporting by schools.”

“Corporal punishment was used [as] a consequence for 16% of infractions in 2008-09 and declined to being used in 3% of infractions in 2020-21,” they write.

Gershoff expects corporal punishment numbers to continue to fall nationally.

“69,000 is still too many kids being traumatized at school,” she says.

There are parts of the country where school officials in recent months have reinstated corporal punishment or voiced support for it, however. In 2022, the school board in Cassville, Missouri, voted to bring it back after two decades of not using it. And a school board member in Collier County, Florida, announced after his election last November that he wanted schools across the region to reintroduce physical discipline.

3. Learn the legal history of school corporal punishment in the U.S.

It’s important that journalists covering corporal punishment understand the history of the practice, including the stance the U.S. Supreme Court and lower courts have taken on the issue.

Individual states have the authority to create and enforce discipline policies for children attending schools within their borders. Generally speaking, Supreme Court justices have been reluctant to intervene in the day-to-day operations of public schools, so long as educators do not heavily infringe on students’ constitutional rights.

Two Supreme Court cases decided in the late 1970s reinforced public schools’ right to use physical discipline. In 1975, in Baker v. Owen, justices ruled that public schools have the right to use corporal punishment without parents’ permission. In Ingraham v. Wright, decided in 1977, the court decided that corporal punishment, regardless of severity, does not violate the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.

In writing the majority opinion for Ingraham v. Wright, Justice Lewis Powell asserts that “corporal punishment serves important educational interests.”

“At common law a single principle has governed the use of corporal punishment since before the American Revolution: Teachers may impose reasonable but not excessive force to discipline a child,” Powell writes.

The Supreme Court did not, however, explain what actions would be considered “excessive.” In 1980, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit established a test for determining that. Since then, circuit courts in several federal districts have required lawsuits challenging schools’ use of corporal punishment to meet that threshold, often referred to as the “shocking to the conscience” test.

Under that very high standard, corporal punishment is deemed excessive if “the force applied caused injury so severe, was so disproportionate to the need presented, and was so inspired by malice or sadism rather than a merely careless or unwise excess of zeal that it amounted to a brutal and inhumane abuse of official power literally shocking to the conscience.”

An example of corporal punishment a U.S. appeals court decided was excessive: A football coach in Fulton County, Georgia, struck a 14-year-old freshman so hard in the face with a metal lock, the boy’s left eye “was knocked completely out of its socket,” leaving it “destroyed and dismembered.”  

An example of corporal punishment an appeals court did not consider excessive: A teacher in Richmond, Virginia, allegedly jabbed a straight pin into a student’s upper left arm, requiring medical care. The court, in its ruling, notes that “most persons are with some degree of frequency jabbed in the arm or the hip with a needle by physicians or nurses. While it is uncommon for a teacher to do the jabbing, being jabbed is commonplace.”

Over the years, legal scholars have written multiple law journal articles examining the Ingraham v. Wright decision and its implications. An article by Michigan State University law professor Susan H. Bitensky, for example, looks specifically at its impact on Black children.

She argues corporal punishment has impeded Black children’s educations, undercutting the commitment to social progress the Supreme Court made when it decided in 1954, in the landmark civil rights case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, that segregating public schools by race was unconstitutional.

“The whole foundation for [the Brown v. Board of Education] holding on segregated schools is a fervent concern that the schools should imbue children, especially black children, with a positive sense of their intellectual worth and should provide them with a commensurate quality of educational experience,” Bitensky writes in the Loyola University Chicago Law Review in 2004.

4. Explain that corporal punishment is a form of social control and that public schools use various types of discipline disproportionately on Black children.

Pratt stresses the importance of putting corporal punishment reports into context.

For many years, public schools have used that disciplinary approach disproportionately on Black youth, according to U.S. Department of Education records. But Black students also are disproportionately suspended, expelled, physically restrained and arrested on suspicion of school-related offenses.

According to the education department’s Civil Rights Data Collection,  37.3% of public school students who were spanked, paddled or otherwise struck by school employees in 2017-18 were Black. Meanwhile, Black kids comprised 15.3% of public school enrollment nationwide that year.

As a comparison, 50.4% of corporally punished students and 47.3% of all public school students were white.

In public preschools, black children and children with mental and physical disabilities were disproportionately expelled.

Pratt says journalists need to help the public understand how school discipline and other forms of social control such as targeted policing programs and laws prohibiting saggy pants are connected. He encourages reporters to incorporate research into their stories to illustrate how implicit bias and misperceptions about Black children can influence how educators view and interact with Black students.

Research, for example, suggests white adults perceive Black boys to be older than they are and that prospective teachers are more likely to perceive Black children as angry than white children.

“All of [these factors] relate to one another and set the tone,” Pratt says. “This is a collection of harms, and a nefarious one.”

5. Check for errors in school disciplinary reports.

Several news reports in 2021 and 2022 indicate the U.S. government’s tally of children receiving corporal punishment at school may be incorrect.

An investigation the Times Union of Albany published in September reveals hundreds of New York public school students have been physically disciplined in recent years, even though the practice has been generally banned since 1985. State and local government agencies received a total of 17,819 complaints of school corporal punishment from 2016 to 2021, 1,623 of which were determined to be substantiated or founded, the news outlet reported.

“The substantiated cases documented in state Education Department records include incidents where teachers or other staff members pushed, slapped, hit, pinched, spanked, dragged, choked or forcefully grabbed students,” Times Union journalists Emilie Munson, Joshua Solomon and Matt Rocheleau write.

A May 2021 analysis from The 74, a nonprofit news outlet that focuses on education issues, shows that schools in six states where corporal punishment had been banned reported using it in 2017-18.

Miriam Rollin, a director at the National Center for Youth Law, told The 74 that national figures “are likely a significant undercount.”

“Every school district in the country self-reports its data to the federal government and they’ve long been accused of underreporting data on the use of restraint and seclusion and other forms of harsh discipline,” Rollin told The 74 investigative journalist Mark Keierleber.

6. Press state legislators to explain why they allow school corporal punishment.

Gershoff and Pratt agree journalists should ask legislators in states that allow schools to use physical discipline why they have not stopped the practice.

“Tell the legislative story — who’s legislating this?” Pratt says. “Examine the people doing the work to end [corporal punishment] and also those wanting to maintain it.”

While a handful of members of Congress have introduced bills aimed at eradicating corporal punishment in recent years, none were successful.

In February 2021, U.S. Rep. Alcee Hastings of Florida introduced the Ending Corporal Punishment in Schools Act of 2021. But Hastings died two months later, and the bill never made it out of the House Committee on Education and Labor.

U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut introduced the Protecting Our Students in Schools Act in 2020 and 2021 without success. He reintroduced the legislation again in May.

Gershoff notes that many Americans want to ban school corporal punishment. More than 65% of U.S. adults who participated in a national survey on the issue in late 2020 indicated they agree or strongly agree with a federal ban, she and other researchers write in a paper that appears in the September 2023 edition of Public Health. At the same time, only 18% of survey participants believed most other adults feel the same way.

“Americans underestimate support for a ban, which may explain why folks have not been more vocal in calling for a ban even though they agree we should have one,” Gershoff wrote in an email to The Journalist’s Resource.

7. Look for stories in corporal punishment data.

Browse around the U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection, which provides data on corporal punishment in public schools at the national, state and local levels as of the 2017-18 academic year. Notice trends, disparities and where there are unusually high numbers of corporal punishment cases.

For more recent data, reach out to schools, school districts and state education departments. Also, ask researchers for help explaining whether and how data from 2017-18 are still relevant.

Here are some data points worth looking into from the 2017-18 academic year, the most recent available at the national level:

• Mississippi led the country in corporal punishment cases as of that year. Public schools there reported using it at least once on a total of 20,309 students. In Texas, which had the second-highest number, public schools corporally punished 13,892 kids at least one time each.
• More than 30% of public school students who experienced corporal punishment in Indiana, Ohio, South Carolina and Wisconsin had mental or physical disabilities.
• North Carolina public schools didn’t administer corporal punishment often. But when they did, they used it primarily on Native American students. Of the 57 students disciplined this way, about half were categorized as American Indian or Alaska Native. Native American kids made up less than 1% of public school enrollment in North Carolina.
• Oklahoma is the only other state where a large proportion of corporally punished students were Native American. Schools there used corporal punishment on a total of 3,968 students, 24.4% of whom were categorized as American Indian or Alaska Native. Statewide, 6.6% of public school students were Native American.
• Illinois public schools reported using corporal punishment on a total of 202 students, 80.2% of whom were “English language learners,” or children enrolled in programs to learn English.

8. Familiarize yourself with academic research on corporal punishment at schools and in homes.

Gershoff points journalists toward a large and growing body of research on the short- and long-term consequences of corporal punishment at home and in schools. It’s important they know what scholars have learned to date and which questions remain unanswered.

To get started, check out these five studies:

Punitive School Discipline as a Mechanism of Structural Marginalization With Implications for Health Inequity: A Systematic Review of Quantitative Studies in the Health and Social Sciences Literature
Catherine Duarte; et al. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, January 2023.

This is one of the most recent papers examining the relationship between school discipline and student health in the U.S. The authors reviewed 19 studies published between 1990 and 2020 on punitive school discipline, which includes corporal punishment as well as suspension and expulsion. They find punitive school discipline is linked to “greater risk for numerous health outcomes, including persistent depressive symptoms, depression, drug use disorder in adulthood, borderline personality disorder, antisocial behavior, death by suicide, injuries, trichomoniasis, pregnancy in adolescence, tobacco use, and smoking, with documented implications for racial health inequity.”

School Corporal Punishment in Global Perspective: Prevalence, Outcomes, and Efforts at Intervention
Elizabeth Gershoff. Psychology, Health & Medicine, 2017.

In this paper, Gershoff summarizes what was known at that point in time about the prevalence of school corporal punishment worldwide and the potential consequences for students. She also discusses the various ways schools administer corporal punishment, including forcing students to stand in painful positions, ingest noxious substances and kneel on small objects such as stones or rice. She includes a chart offering estimates for the percentage of students who receive corporal punishment in dozens of countries, including China, India, Indonesia, Jamaica and Peru.

Spanking and Child Outcomes: Old Controversies and New Meta-Analyses
Elizabeth Gershoff and Andrew Grogan-Kaylor. Journal of Family Psychology, 2016.

Gershoff and Grogan-Kaylor analyze the results of 75 peer-reviewed studies published before June 1, 2014 on parental spanking, or “hitting a child on their buttocks or extremities using an open hand.” They state that they find “no evidence that spanking does any good for children and all evidence points to the risk of it doing harm.”

Other big takeaways: “In childhood, parental use of spanking was associated with low moral internalization, aggression, antisocial behavior, externalizing behavior problems, internalizing behavior problems, mental health problems, negative parent-child relationships, impaired cognitive ability, low self-esteem, and risk of physical abuse from parents. In adulthood, prior experiences of parental use of spanking were significantly associated with adult antisocial behavior, adult mental health problems, and with positive attitudes about spanking.”

Historic Lynching and Corporal Punishment in Contemporary Southern Schools
Geoff Ward, Nick Petersen, Aaron Kupchik and James Pratt. Social Problems, February 2021.

School corporal punishment is linked to histories of racial violence in the southeastern U.S., this study finds. The authors analyzed data on school corporal punishment in 10 states in that region during the 2013-2014 academic year and matched it with data on confirmed lynchings between 1865 to 1950. “Of the counties that reported one or more incidents of corporal punishment, 88% had at least one historic lynching and the average number of lynching incidents in these counties is 7.07,” the authors write. They add that banning school corporal punishment in these states would “help dismantle systemic racism, promoting youth and community well-being in a region still haunted by histories of racial terror.”

Disproportionate Corporal Punishment of Students With Disabilities and Black and Hispanic Students
Ashley MacSuga-Gage; et al. Journal of Disability Policy Studies, 2021.

When researchers looked at student discipline in the 2,456 U.S. public schools that had used corporal punishment at least 10 times during the 2015-16 academic year, they discovered that children with disabilities were almost two times as likely to receive corporal punishment as students without disabilities. The finding is troubling, they write, considering the U.S. Individuals with Disabilities Education Act recommends schools use a behavior modification strategy known as Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports when students with disabilities misbehave.

The researchers, from the University of Florida and Clemson University, also found that Black students without disabilities were twice as likely to be physically disciplined as white students without disabilities. Meanwhile, schools were less likely to use corporal punishment on Hispanic students than white, non-Hispanic students.  

The post Corporal punishment in schools: Research and reporting tips to guide your coverage appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

Asian American students were 28% less likely to get into selective U.S. colleges than white Americans with similar test scores, grade-point averages and extracurricular activities, a new working paper suggests.

The disparity is particularly pronounced for students of South Asian descent. Their odds of admission were 49% lower than their similarly qualified white peers, researchers learned after analyzing nearly 700,000 undergraduate applications submitted to a subset of the nation’s most exclusive schools over five years.

U.S. students of East Asian or Southeast Asian ancestry were 17% less likely to be accepted than white U.S. students.

A big factor driving differences in admission rates: selective colleges’ preference for students who are the children of alumni, known as legacy students, coauthors Sharad Goel, a professor of public policy of Harvard Kennedy School, and Josh Grossman, a Ph.D. candidate studying computational social science at Stanford University, told The Journalist’s Resource in a joint interview.

Historically, legacy applicants have tended to be white. When Goel, Grossman and their colleagues looked specifically at applicants with the highest standardized test scores, they discovered almost 12% of white Americans had legacy status, as did about 7% of Hispanic Americans and just under 6% of Black Americans.

High-scoring Asian Americans were least likely to be legacies — about 3.5% were.

“High-scoring white applicants are three to six times more likely to have legacy status than high-scoring Asian American applicants, suggesting white applicants disproportionately benefit from a boost in admission rates afforded to those with legacy status,” the researchers write.

Affirmative action and the ‘Asian penalty’

The paper’s authors are not disclosing the number or names of schools they studied. They do note the institutions have low acceptance rates, meaning they reject most applicants, and high yield rates, indicating the majority of accepted students choose to enroll.

Goel and Grossman say they started studying applicants two years ago with the goal of determining whether there’s merit to longstanding allegations that the country’s most selective institutions appear to set the bar for entry higher for Asian applicants, imposing what’s commonly referred to as the “Asian penalty.”

At the time, two lawsuits challenging race-based affirmative action at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill were making their way through the U.S. court system. Students for Fair Admissions, the national organization that brought the lawsuits, alleged the practice gave Black, Hispanic and Native American applicants an edge in the admissions process but harmed Asian applicants.

On June 29, the U.S. Supreme Court prohibited colleges and universities nationwide from considering race or ethnicity when choosing students, except at military academies.

Goel and Grossman urge journalists to help audiences understand how the affirmative action ban and higher education policies that benefit white students are affecting and will affect Asian enrollment. It’s important journalists don’t conflate the two issues, they add.

In addition to raising concerns about prioritizing legacy students, the new paper also raises questions about whether colleges should continue focusing on applicants’ extracurricular activities and strive to draw students from various parts of the country.

The analysis shows Asian Americans participated less often in high school sports and other activities outside the classroom, compared with white Americans. Asian Americans also were less likely to attend high school in rural areas or in less populated states such as Montana, Wyoming and Vermont.

“It’s not affirmative action keeping Asian American students from these selective colleges — it’s things like legacy admissions and geography, sports,” Goel says. “By saying we’re going to value things like legacy status and geographic diversity, we are pretty directly giving a boost to white students. It’s a predictable boost.”

Balancing competing education goals

The new paper, released last week by the National Bureau of Economic Research, builds on earlier scholarship that spotlights ways college admissions practices reinforce racial inequities.

Institutions must balance many competing goals when deciding who to include in a new, incoming class of students, explained education scholar OiYan Poon, who did not participate in this study but has spent more than a decade researching U.S. college admission policies. She is co-director of the College Admissions Futures Co-Laborative at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Poon pointed out that institutional priorities generally include building a successful athletic program, maintaining relationships with alumni and donors, maintaining relationships with high schools, improving the geographic diversity of the student body and balancing the annual budget.

“Note that all of the competing goals I listed inherently privilege white students (e.g., student athletes are nearly 90% white),” she wrote in an email to The Journalist’s Resource.

Examining patterns among applicants

The researchers examined a total of 685,709 applications that 292,795 Asian American and white American students sent to a subset of selective schools through a national postsecondary application platform. They obtained data on applications submitted from the 2015-16 application cycle to the 2019-20 application cycle.

All 292,795 students included in the study graduated from U.S. high schools and, on average, took four Advanced Placement tests, reported completing 3,236 hours of extracurricular activities and earned standardized test scores equivalent to a 32 on the ACT college-entrance exam.

The average ACT score for all U.S. high school graduates in 2021 was 20.3, with a maximum score of 36, according to the  National Center for Education Statistics.

While the dataset does not include colleges’ admissions decisions, the national application portal tracks whether and when high schools use it to send an official transcript to a specific college. The researchers note these transcript submissions are a “highly accurate” indicator a student has enrolled at the school.

As an additional check, the researchers matched a random sample of 5,000 applicants from their study pool to the National Student Clearinghouse database. The Clearinghouse collects enrollment data from higher education institutions across the U.S.

Goel and Grossman say their intention is not to call out specific schools. Instead, they aim to call attention to problematic patterns that appear to be common among colleges and universities that are toughest to get into.

“One of our overarching goals is to improve the admissions process going forward,” Goel says. “We are trying to equip university administrators, policymakers and legislators with the information they need to make these types of choices.” 

Sabina Tomkins, a computational scientist and assistant professor of information at the University of Michigan, and Lindsay Page, the Annenberg Associate Professor of Education Policy at Brown University, also are coauthors of the paper, “The Disparate Impacts of College Admissions Policies on Asian American Applicants.”

Asian Americans and extracurricular activities

Grossman notes that besides legacy preferences, several other admissions practices seem to benefit white Americans to the detriment of Asian Americans. For example, the selective schools he and his colleagues studied appear to exhibit geographic preferences.

The institutions were less likely to admit students from states with large proportions of Asian American applicants such as California and Washington, Grossman and his colleagues write.

Generally speaking, many U.S. colleges and universities seek geographic diversity, aiming to draw students from across the country and globe. Last year, some Ivy League schools started ramping up recruitment in rural America, Christopher Rim, the CEO of an education and college admissions consulting firm in New York City, wrote in Forbes magazine in December.

However, 1% of the Asian American applicants included in this new study graduated from high schools in rural communities, compared with 5% of white Americans, the analysis shows.

A significant emphasis on extracurricular activities, including student clubs and sports, also appears to benefit white Americans over Asian Americans. Asian American students reported participating much less often in extracurricular activities. The median number of hours they reported doing extracurricular activities during their four years of high school was 2,975, compared with 3,384 hours for white students.

When the researchers looked specifically at sports participation, the difference was even bigger. The median number of hours Asian Americans were involved in athletic activities was 240 over four years — less than one-third the median number of hours for white students.

Advice for journalists

Grossman says he and his colleagues aren’t implying selective schools are trying to limit or block Asian Americans. But their analysis does raise questions about equity in college admissions.

He urges journalists to ask college administrators why they continue giving legacy students special treatment.

“The defense a lot of schools provide for legacy admissions is quite vague — it encourages donations and that money is important for students who otherwise couldn’t attend the university [because] they need the financial aid,” Grossman says.

He suggests pressing officials for detailed answers, and investigating whether abandoning legacy preferences would actually hurt colleges or lower-income students.

“Really question schools,” he adds. “If legacy admissions were to be eliminated, how much would they really suffer? And ask donors: Would a donor continue donating if it was eliminated? Is there a substitute that would work?”

Poon, the education scholar, stressed the importance of journalists recognizing that the disparities revealed in this new paper were not caused by affirmative action.

“On the contrary,” she wrote, “I worry that without race-conscious admissions such disparities could widen.”

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When we surveyed our audience in 2021 to ask why journalists don’t use academic research more often, 60% of journalists who responded cited academic journal paywalls as a barrier. 

Some journalists might not realize that several of the world’s largest journal publishers will give them free online access to thousands of journals and other research-related resources. They simply have to ask, or complete a short form to register for a special account.

Other publishers and research groups, including the National Academy of Sciences and National Bureau of Economic Research, also provide complimentary access.

To help journalists find them quickly, we’ve listed a number of these organizations below, along with information on how to set up free accounts. We’ll add to this list as we learn of other publications that let news media professionals bypass their paywalls.

If you’re interested in reading articles in journals that charge journalists to read or download them, keep in mind there are other ways to get free copies, legally. We outline them in our tip sheet, “8 Ways Journalists Can Access Academic Research for Free.”

To better understand the different types of academic research, check out our tip sheet, “White Papers, Working papers, Preprints, Journal Articles: What’s the Difference?”

———-

American Economic Association

The American Economic Association gives journalists free, online access to its eight journals, including the American Economic Review, one of the country’s oldest and most respected journals in economics. To ask for press access, contact Doug Quint at 412-432-2301 or dquint@aeapubs.org.

A bonus: After setting up a press account, journalists can sign up for customized email alerts according to topic and journal.

American Educational Research Association

The American Educational Research Association offers journalists complimentary digital subscriptions to its seven journals, including its flagship publication, the American Educational Research Journal. To set up an account, send an email to communications@aera.net.

Worth noting: Journalist subscribers can choose to receive email alerts when new studies are posted to a journal’s website, even before they appear in the print edition.

American Medical Association

The JAMA Network comprises 13 journals published by the American Medical Association. The Journal of the American Medical Association, commonly known as JAMA, is “the most widely circulated general medical journal in the world,” according to its website. Journalists can create a free account to access articles across the JAMA Network.

Don’t forget: Journalists must renew their accounts every year. If they don’t, they will lose access.

Elsevier

Elsevier, one of the world’s largest science publishers, offers journalists free access to a variety of research-related tools and databases. One is ScienceDirect, which Elsevier describes as its “leading platform offering the full-text scientific, technical and medical content of over 14 million publications from nearly 3,800 journals and more than 35,000 books from Elsevier, our imprints and our society partners: a quarter of the world’s published academic content.”

Send an email to newsroom@elsevier.com to request access.

Good to know: Elsevier distributes a biweekly newsletter for journalists called the Elsevier Research Selection to update them about new research.

Massachusetts Medical Society

The NEJM Group, a division of the Massachusetts Medical Society, publishes The New England Journal of Medicine, which describes itself as the “most widely read, cited, and influential general medical journal and website in the world.” Journalists can apply for one of two levels of free access — “advance” access and “regular” access.

With advance access, journalists can read the newest issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, published weekly, in advance. They also can read past issues online. To qualify, journalists must produce news content on a daily or weekly basis and agree to the publication’s embargo policy in writing. Use this link to apply.

With regular access, journalists can read the journal’s current and past issues. To qualify, journalists must produce content regularly for a bi-monthly, monthly or quarterly publication. Use this link to apply.

National Academy of Sciences

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, often referred to as PNAS, is one of the most prestigious general-science journals. To request a free online subscription, contact the PNAS News Office.

Worth mentioning: Journalists can apply for access to embargoed PNAS materials through the EurekAlert! website.

National Bureau of Economic Research

Everyone gets to read and download up to three working papers a year from the National Bureau of Economic Research’s website. Journalists must register to qualify for unlimited downloads. Fill out this form to request access.

Remember: NBER studies have not been peer reviewed. The organization circulates working papers for comments and discussion, and many are eventually published in academic journals.

Sage Journals

Another of the world’s largest journal publishers, Sage Journals publishes more than 1,100 academic journals focusing on disciplines such as gender studies, media studies, urban planning, social work and engineering. Ask about free access to journal articles by contacting Sage’s communications team at pr@sagepub.co.uk.

Keep in mind: Sage publishes Sage Open, which is an open access “mega-journal” — a journal that publishes hundreds to thousands of studies per year and makes them available for free to anyone.

Springer Nature Group

The Springer Nature Group provides journalists with free online access to more than 3,000 journals published on Springer Link and nature.com, which cover research disciplines such as science, technology, medicine and the social sciences. To register for a free account, complete this form.

Important to know: Journalists need to submit documents as part of the registration process, including an email from an editor confirming their status as a journalist. Once registered, they do not have to re-register, provided their work email address remains in the same.

Taylor & Francis

Taylor & Francis, another world leader in academic publishing, publishes more than 2,700 journals featuring research on public health, education, the environment, technology and other fields. Journalists can apply for a digital Press Pass, which lets them access 50 online articles for free. Sign up for a Press Pass.

Note: Besides academic articles, journalists can apply for free access to other types of research content: books and embargoed books, press releases and academic articles.

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This collection of research on alternatives to race-based affirmative action in college admissions, originally published in May 2023, has been updated to include the Supreme Court’s June 29 ruling on the practice.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday struck down race-based affirmative action in admissions at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, effectively banning a longstanding, nationwide practice aimed at improving student diversity at top-ranking colleges and universities.

The ruling will require higher education institutions that give underrepresented minorities an edge in the application process to find new ways to bolster their enrollment of Black, Hispanic and Native American students. Military academies, however, are exempt.

The organization that brought the lawsuits, Virginia-based Students for Fair Admissions, accused Harvard and UNC of discriminating against white and Asian applicants. It sought to eradicate affirmative action in admissions, introduced in the 1960s and 1970s to help historically disadvantaged groups gain access to the most competitive and influential schools.

Although the practice has been challenged in court several times since 1978, the Supreme Court previously upheld the constitutionality of affirmative action policies, so long as student race and ethnicity were among a range of factors considered when evaluating applicants. Admissions officials generally do not consider Asians to be underrepresented minorities because young adults who are Asian are more likely to go to college than young adults from other racial groups.

As the two lawsuits made their way through the court system, higher education administrators investigated race-neutral strategies for recruiting and admitting more minorities. They have looked for insights from the nine states that have banned affirmative action at their public universities, beginning in 1996.

Race-neutral alternatives

Several alternate strategies have shown promise, although researchers estimate their impacts are relatively small. Academic studies have found none are as effective as race-based affirmative action, Zachary Bleemer, an assistant professor of economics at Yale University who studies college admission policies, told The Journalist’s Resource.

“States that have seen affirmative action bans do not offer a silver bullet for universities seeking to maintain racial diversity without race-based affirmative action,” Bleemer wrote in an email.

It’s unknown how many colleges and universities practice affirmative action in admissions because no person or organization tracks that information. Likewise, there are no formal counts of the number and types of race-neutral strategies schools use in place of affirmative action.

However, the most common race-neutral approaches include:

• Giving preference to students with a lower socioeconomic status, typically determined by family income and the occupations and education levels of members of students’ households.
  
  In the U.S., a person’s race and ethnicity is closely linked to their socioeconomic status, with Black, Hispanic and Native American students more likely to have a lower socioeconomic status than white and Asian students. For example, in 2021, 19% of Hispanic children under age 18 lived in households in which at least one parent had not finished high school, compared with 3% of white and Asian children, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
  
  However, policies aimed at aiding students based on income or socioeconomic status do not just benefit underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities. Nearly half of undergraduate students who are the first in their families to go to college are white and not Hispanic, according to the Center for First-Generation Student Success, part of the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators.

• Expanding recruitment efforts. Higher education officials often target high school students who are the first in their families to go to college and high schools located in lower-income areas.

• Increasing the number and dollar amount of scholarships offered to students from low-income households or low socioeconomic backgrounds.

• Introducing a “holistic” application review process, which takes into account students’ extracurricular activities, accomplishments outside school and lived experiences as well as traditional measures of academic ability such as test scores, academic awards and grade-point averages.
  
  Stanford University, which practices holistic admissions, tells applicants on its website that the approach helps admissions officers “understand how you, as a whole person, would grow, contribute and thrive at Stanford, and how Stanford would, in turn, be changed by you.”

• Dropping the requirement that applicants take and submit their scores on college-entrance exams such as the SAT and ACT. The change benefits underrepresented minorities and lower-income students because they often earn lower scores than white and Asian students and students from higher-income backgrounds.

• Adopting a “top percent” program. Florida, California and Texas have adopted programs that guarantee youth who graduate within a top percentage of their high school class a seat at one of their public universities. Such policies aim to diversify college enrollment by capitalizing on high levels of racial and ethnic segregation among high schools in those states.
  
  “Black and Hispanic students who rank at the top of their class disproportionately hail from minority-dominant schools,” Princeton University scholars Marta Tienda and Sunny Xinchun Niu write in a 2006 paper examining Texas’ Top Ten Percent rule, which guarantees Texas high school students who graduate in the top 10% percent of their class and complete other requirements admission to most public universities in the state.

Benefits, consequences of race-neutral alternatives

Michigan is one of nine states that prohibit affirmative action at public universities. In November 2006, voters there approved a state constitutional amendment known as Proposal 2, which prohibits all public institutions and agencies from discriminating against or giving preferential treatment to anyone based on race, gender, ethnicity and other factors.

The University of Michigan, a top-ranked public university, introduced a wide range of programs to replace affirmative action. Attorneys for the school argue race-neutral strategies have been expensive, time consuming and labor intensive.

After the law took effect in December 2006, the University of Michigan “was forced to radically alter its admissions process in order to even approach the diversity levels achieved prior to Proposal 2,” the attorneys write in a 36-page amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court late last year in support of Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill.

“That change was so disruptive that the response not only took time — over 15 years and counting — but vast resources and efforts extending far beyond University campuses, as U-M developed extensive new race-neutral initiatives that reached into school districts around the state,” the attorneys write.

Those combined efforts helped the university raise its underrepresented minority enrollment to 13.5% in 2021 — slightly above where it had been the year before the state banned affirmative action. While an influx of Hispanic students helped U-M rebuild its enrollment of underrepresented minorities, the university has not been able to regain its footing with regards to Black and Native American students.

Neither has the California public university system, which has spent more than a half-billion dollars implementing alternate policies over the last 25 years, its attorneys note in another amicus brief filed last year with the Supreme Court.

The University of California system has adopted various race-neutral policies since voters there approved Proposition 209, a state constitutional amendment similar to Michigan’s, in 1996. That ban began with the freshman class of fall 1998.

The state’s most selective public universities — the University of California, Berkeley and University of California, Los Angeles — lost the most ground. Prior to the ban, 6.32% of freshmen at UC Berkeley were Black. In 2019, that figure dropped to 2.76%. The proportion of Native American freshman fell from 1.82% to 0.37%.

Hispanic enrollment, however, has grown across California’s public universities. But the state also has seen its Hispanic population swell in recent decades. This academic year, 56% of all children attending public elementary, middle and high schools there are Hispanic.

“UC has established a number of outreach programs aimed at students from low-income families, students whose families have little or no previous experience with higher education, and students who attend an educationally disadvantaged school,” attorneys for the university system write in their amicus brief, which also was submitted in support of Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill.

“Because these outreach programs primarily target economically and educationally disadvantaged students, the extent to which they are able to reach underrepresented minority students depends on changing demographic patterns. By 2020, it had become more difficult for these outreach programs to reach African American and Native American students, even as more Latinx, Asian American, and White students benefited from them.”

Uncertainty ahead

It’s difficult to predict how race-neutral alternatives would affect all institutions that currently consider race and ethnicity when choosing students. That’s because much of the research on the topic focuses on public universities in a single state. Often, it is California, the most populous state and home to the two public universities ranked highest in the country in the U.S. News & World Report’s 2022-2023 Best Colleges rankings.

When scholars publish a paper that examines race-neutral strategies at one school or a group of schools in one state, the results  typically apply only to the institutions studied. It is erroneous to assume other colleges and universities will have exactly the same experiences.

Even so, researcher’s findings can provide insights into how enrollments might change if private and public colleges and universities must stop practicing race-based affirmative action.

“They’re helpful in thinking about what would happen in other states even if differences in states’ student bodies or university landscapes might lead to different outcomes in different places,” Bleemer wrote to The Journalist’s Resource.

A narrow segment of affirmative action-related research looks at how well race-neutral alternatives work. It’s hard to evaluate individual policies, however, because college administrators often use several strategies at once, Mark Long, the dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of California, Riverside, wrote to The Journalist’s Resource.

Also, it is not always clear what exactly institutions are doing differently to boost minority enrollment. Some changes “might be subtle and not advertised by the schools — for example, changes in the inputs used to make admissions decisions,” Long added.

Demographic shifts have made it tougher for scholars to estimate the impact of race-neutral alternatives. Scholars have seen Hispanic enrollment climb at some public universities after they stopped using affirmative action. In many cases, they believe those improvements are the result of changes within the Hispanic population, not university interventions.

Nationwide, the number of Hispanic youth attending public elementary, middle and high schools jumped from 7.7 million in fall 2000 to 14.3 million in fall 2022, the U.S. Department of Education reports. The student population, as a whole, grew less than 6% over that period.

More Hispanic students are going to college. In 2021, 59% of Hispanics aged 16 to 24 years were enrolled in college, up from 53% in 2000, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show.

Long and Nicole Bateman, a former senior research analyst at the Brookings Institution, investigated changes among students who applied to and enrolled at public universities in states that prohibit affirmative action.

The researchers studied data from 19 public universities across all nine states spanning from the early 1990s to the mid-2010s — before and after bans were put in place. Their conclusion: Race-neutral strategies were an “insufficient” replacement for affirmative action at those 19 schools.

“We find a sizable decrease in [underrepresented minorities’] share of admittees immediately following the affirmative action bans,” Long and Bateman write in their analysis, published in 2020. “Of more concern, the trends in nearly all of these universities are negative in the following years.”

State flagship universities and selective institutions, including the University of Florida, University of Georgia, University of Nebraska-Lincoln and UC Berkeley, were most affected.

The researchers argue that raising underrepresented minority enrollment is too large a job for colleges and universities to do alone, especially considering many of the factors that influence enrollment are outside education officials’ control.

State policymakers need to do more to reduce economic disparities among racial groups and bolster Black, Hispanic and Native American children’s academic achievement, Long and Bateman write.

“To help university administrators, public administrators and policymakers should particularly note the large racial gaps in kindergarten readiness and note that these gaps are maintained as students progress through the education system,” the researchers add. “Thus, without sustained, focused attention on mitigating gaps that emerge in the first years of life, we should expect persistent racial inequality in higher education.”

A roundup of research

Journalists covering college admissions need to familiarize themselves with the research on race-neutral strategies for boosting student diversity. Below are summaries of academic papers that examine three of the most common approaches: test-optional policies, holistic review and “top percent” plans. The featured studies focus primarily on undergraduate student enrollment.

To better understand how student diversity changes at institutions that give preference to applicants based on socioeconomic status, read our piece explaining the 2018 analysis, “What Levels of Racial Diversity Can Be Achieved with Socioeconomic-Based Affirmative Action? Evidence from a Simulation Model.”

Also, check out the reporting tips several prominent researchers offer journalists who are preparing to cover the upcoming Supreme Court decisions.

Test-optional policies

Untested Admissions: Examining Changes in Application Behaviors and Student Demographics Under Test-Optional Policies
Christopher T. Bennett. American Educational Research Journal, February 2022.

The study: The author looks at how undergraduate student diversity changed at private colleges and universities in the U.S. after they started letting students apply without submitting SAT and ACT scores. Bennett examines 99 private institutions that enacted test-optional admissions policies between the academic years 2005-2006 and 2015-2016 and compares them with a group of 118 private institutions that enacted or announced test-optional policies for the 2016-2017 academic year or later.

The findings: At the schools studied, test-optional policies were associated with small increases in underrepresented minorities, lower-income students and women. Bennett estimates the number of underrepresented minorities who enrolled in schools that had implemented test-optional policies rose 10.3% to 11.9%. He adds that although the increase was “fairly substantial in relative terms, such effects correspond to a modest 1 percentage point increase in absolute terms in the share of [underrepresented minority] students among the entering class.”

In the author’s words: “For institutions seeking dramatic shifts in the student populations they serve, test-optional policies would likely need to represent one facet of a more comprehensive plan.”

Holistic review

Affirmative Action and Its Race-Neutral Alternatives
Zachary Bleemer. Journal of Public Economics, April 2023.

The study: Bleemer examines three admissions policies — race-based affirmative action, holistic review and top-percent policies – to find out which did the best job raising underrepresented minority enrollment across California’s public university system. To investigate these policies, Bleemer built a database representing 2.2 million freshmen at nine undergraduate campuses between 1994 and 2021. Six campuses, including UCLA and UC Berkeley, implemented holistic review between 2002 and 2012.

He explains that holistic review “eliminates universities’ use of fixed weights over the wide variety of admission criteria used to judge applicants, providing evaluative flexibility designed to benefit applicants whose academic preparation was hindered by limited pre-college opportunity.”

The findings: Race-based affirmative action had the largest impact, increasing underrepresented minority enrollment by about 850 freshmen per year, or 20%, during the years of the study period it was allowed. Holistic review had the second-largest impact. It boosted Black, Hispanic and Native American enrollment about 7%, on average, across the six campuses using that policy. Bleemer writes that about 45 underrepresented minorities enrolled as a result of holistic review in 2002, but the figure swelled to about 600 in 2017. Meanwhile, top percent policies resulted in an enrollment bump of less than 4%.

In the author’s words: “These findings suggest that the most common policies adopted to replace affirmative action in states where race-conscious university admission preferences have been prohibited have had non-trivial but comparatively small [underrepresented minority] enrollment effects in California, suggesting that preserving racial and socioeconomic diversity using race-neutral admission policies will require policy innovation.”

Top percent plans

Texas Top Ten Percent Plan: How It Works, What Are Its Limits, and Recommendations to Consider
Stella M. Flores and Catherine L. Horn. Report for the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, December 2016.

The study: Flores and Horn compare top percent plans in Florida, California and Texas, pointing out their value, strengths and shortcomings. The report focuses heavily on Texas’ Top Ten Percent Plan, the most frequently studied. The authors also synthesize what is known about percent plans and offer recommendations for education leaders considering adopting race-neutral alternatives.

The findings: Data collected on Texas’ percent plan provide a mixed view of its effectiveness in building underrepresented minority enrollment at Texas public universities. Assessments of the program that take into account the state’s changing demographics indicate Hispanics have been less likely to go to college since the initiative started, Flores and Horn write. The report raises questions about whether Black students gaining automatic admission through Texas’ percent plan are more likely to attend the state’s lower-tier public universities than its most selective ones.

In the authors’ words: “In sum, percent plans vary both in their guarantees and in the ways in which demographic context nuances understanding of their effectiveness.”

Academic Undermatching of High-Achieving Minority Students: Evidence from Race-Neutral and Holistic Admissions Policies
Sandra E. Black, Kalena E. Cortes and Jane Arnold Lincove. American Economic Review, May 2015.

The study: Black, Cortes and Lincove examine the application choices of minority students in Texas who graduated in the top 25% of their high school class. They look specifically at whether two admissions policies — Texas’ Top Ten Percent Plan and holistic review — contribute to academic undermatching, or the tendency for high-achieving minority students to attend lower-tier public universities even though their academic abilities would allow them to go to the state’s two highly selective flagship schools, the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University.

The researchers analyzed data for about 35,000 students who graduated in the top 10% of their high school class in 2008 and 2009 and about 31,000 students who graduated in the top 11% to 25% of their senior class the same two years.

The findings: Only 29% of Black students and 32% of Hispanic students who graduated in the top 10% of their class enrolled at selective flagship universities in Texas despite being guaranteed admission. Meanwhile, 48% of their white counterparts and 51% of their Asian counterparts did. Academic undermatching was even more common among Black and Hispanic students who graduated in the top 11% to 25% of their class and whose applications underwent holistic review. Of the Black and Hispanic students in this group, 5% enrolled at flagship campuses.

In the authors’ words: “Both Black and Hispanic top 10% and top 11-25% students are more likely to enroll at less selective public universities or two-year colleges, and less likely to enroll in private or out-of-state four-year universities than their white student counterparts, which suggests highly-qualified minority students are choosing lower quality Texas universities, rather than leaving the state for higher quality institutions.”

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