Year in Review: Leaders battle over what’s best for children

As students and teachers take a break from the classroom during the holidays, we wrap up a year that saw continued argument over how schools should best respond to pandemic “learning loss” and what role parents can play in educational decisions for their children. Some state lawmakers took steps to strengthen school choice in 2023, while other states continued to push LGBTQ ideology on students, teachers, and families.

Here are the most notable stories from the education beat in 2023:

School choice

Opponents of a 2019 Tennessee law that instituted an education savings account program dropped their appeal against it in August. In November, Republican Gov. Bill Lee proposed a plan that would quadruple the number of spots in the program.

Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott pushed for his state to decide on its own education savings account program, calling for multiple back-to-back special legislative sessions as lawmakers worked on an education funding bill. After weeks of wrangling, the state passed a bill in November that did not include the school choice measure. Abbott later endorsed legislators running for reelection who supported the voucher plan and endorsed a primary challenger for one incumbent Republican who voted to remove the school choice language from the bill.

In September, North Carolina lawmakers expanded an existing school choice law for students from low-income families to include all students, making it the ninth state with a universal program.

In June, the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board approved the nation’s first religious charter school, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School. Two Roman Catholic dioceses had applied. Oklahoma Republican Attorney General Gentner Drummond sued to block the school’s approval in October after withdrawing his predecessor’s written advisory opinion that said the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 opinion in Carson v. Makin opened the door for religious charter schools. In mid-December, the Oklahoma Supreme Court rejected a request from the state superintendent and state Department of Education to intervene in favor of the school in the lawsuit.

Pushing back

In January, Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis said his state’s public schools would not offer a pilot Advanced Placement course on African American studies because the curriculum pushed LGBTQ ideology and critical theory. The College Board, a national organization that designs and administers the course, released an updated syllabus in February that largely moved the offending content to optional sections. After LGBTQ activists protested, the College Board said it would reconsider its changes. The latest version, released earlier this month, included references to intersectionality and black feminist lesbians, though some of the objectionable content remains optional. The Arkansas Department of Education told schools in August not to offer the AP class.

In September, TikTok and Reddit users began accusing Scholastic Book Fairs of censorship for allowing schools to opt out of offering LGBTQ titles and books that appear to promote critical race theory. Despite initially defending its decision while pointing to state laws protecting students from LGBTQ content, the company said in October that it would reverse its policy because separating its books “caused confusion and feelings of exhaustion.”

“Learning loss”

While some educators and experts initially downplayed fears of “learning loss” during the COVID-19 pandemic, test scores have continued to drop since in-person learning resumed. The National Center for Education Statistics said in February that 49 percent of K–12 students in the United States started the 2022-2023 school year below grade level. A year earlier, that number was 50 percent, while pre-pandemic reports showed 36 percent of students lagged behind. The center administers the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often referred to as the nation’s report card. In June, the center released math and reading scores for 13-year-olds, reporting 9- and 4-point drops respectively since the 2019-2020 school year. In October, the nonprofit organization that administers the ACT college admissions test said that student scores had fallen to a 30-year low.

Race-based admissions 

On June 29, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that affirmative action college admissions policies are unconstitutional. In 2014, Students for Fair Admissions, a nonprofit advocacy group, sued Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill over policies that it said favored some students over others based on race. In August, the Biden administration released guidance on how schools could foster racial diversity without affirmative action policies, including suggestions for recruiting in minority areas and offering campus clubs for students of certain races.

Student loan debt forgiveness 

The Supreme Court in June stopped the Biden administration’s plan to forgive up to $10,000 in student loan debt for individuals earning less than $125,000 or households earning less than $250,000. After multiple payment pauses by former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden during the pandemic, student loan repayments resumed in October. According to the U.S. Department of Education, 40 percent of borrowers missed that first payment.