Weekend To-Do List

9/14 - 9/15

1. Continued Unrest Puts Columbia Workers in Crossfire

READ: Emma Green spoke with janitors, public safety officers, and other staff members at Columbia University as students returned to campus last month. With campus protests anticipated to resume and likely intensify, many workers report feeling unsafe and unsupported by the university’s administration. While the administration says its priority is to balance free speech with maintaining order, union leaders have voiced frustration and warned that tensions are likely to escalate further:

After Hamilton Hall was occupied this spring, John Samuelsen, the international president of the Transport Workers Union, which represents Columbia’s staff, along with tens of thousands of workers for New York City’s subways and buses and commuter trains, made a plan for what to do if something like that were to happen again. “We’re not going to let a bunch of freaking trust-fund babies hold our members against their will at Columbia,” he told me. “We’re going to go get track workers with sledgehammers and track wrenches and we’re going to go get them. That’s our plan.”

Read more here. I talked with Emma about her reporting earlier this week. Make sure you’re subscribed to Lost Debate wherever you listen to podcasts so you can hear that episode when it comes out later this weekend.

2. Boarding Schools Tackle Affordability

READ: Deerfield Academy announced a significant expansion to its financial aid program earlier this week. The prestigious boarding school, which charges $74,500 annually in tuition and fees, will now offer free tuition to U.S. students from families earning less than $150,000 per year. For families earning more, tuition will be capped at 10% of their income. The initiative, part of a broader trend at elite schools like Phillips Exeter, is central to Deerfield’s strategy to diversify its student body and attract a wider range of applicants:

For Deerfield and other schools, recruiting diverse students—along racial, ethnic, geographic and socioeconomic lines—helps expand access to academic and athletic programs that routinely land students at elite colleges. It also gently punctures the rarefied bubble of boarding and private schools, benefiting wealthier students who may have had little exposure to peers from other backgrounds.

Deerfield’s endowment is valued at $920 million and the school says it aims to raise another $90 million to help pay for aid. Read more from Sara Randazzo at the Wall Street Journal here.

3. Admissions Data Puzzles Experts

READ: Anemona Hartocollis and Stephanie Saul of The New York Times reported on surprising demographic trends emerging from universities like Yale and Duke following the Supreme Court’s decision to end race-conscious admissions. Both institutions either maintained or increased their share of Black students, in contrast to the declines seen at most schools nationwide. A deeper analysis of the data, however, revealed discrepancies in reporting and compliance:

And there are other wild cards in the mix. One is that more students declined to state their race on their applications. At Tufts, non-responders rose to 6.7 percent from 3.3 percent. At Harvard, they rose to 8 percent from 4 percent. At Duke, they rose to 11 from 5 percent, and at Brown to 7 from 4 percent.

Universities have also been quite opaque, offering little to no analysis of what their admissions offices think the numbers mean. The University of Pennsylvania released a percentage of students of color, but did not break it down by more precise categories of race and ethnicity.

Harvard recalculated its 2023 percentages to reflect only those students who had chosen to disclose their racial or ethnic identity, rather than all students, and compared those numbers to the same metric in 2024. As a result, the percentage of Black students in last year’s first-year class appeared higher, rising to 18 percent from about 14 percent.

Read more here.

4. The Return of the Child Tax Credit

READ: Kalyn Belsha at Chalkbeat examined the proposed plans from Kmala Harris and Donald Trump to revive the child tax credit, delivering into the policy’s history and the reasons why efforts to renew it have repeatedly stalled in the Senate since its expiration in 2021. Notably, the 2021 version of the policy nearly halved the child poverty rate:

Nick Bates, who directs the Hunger Network in Ohio, a faith-based nonprofit that advocates for anti-poverty programs, remembers how the extra cash helped his family of four cover the rising cost of food. Other parents used it to pay for things benefiting their children’s physical health and social connections after the pandemic’s disruption, like the swim team or the local YMCA.

“People were like: ‘Oh, thank God we got that this month, because I didn’t know how we were going to afford groceries next week, or be able to pay off the credit card,’” Bates said. “This kept a lot of families from spiraling out.”

Read more here.

5. Post-Affirmative Action Fallout

READ: Nirvi Shah, executive editor of The Hechinger Report, joined Javeria Salman to discuss her experience at last week’s Moms for Liberty summit. What she found was a group unfazed by recent electoral setbacks and increasingly concentrated on advancing anti-trans activism:

This laser-like focus on transgender issues at schools. It came up often and was at the center of many speeches and breakout sessions. In the past, the group has had a more expansive message but this year, they seem to have one specific target. “There’s no such thing as a transgender child. Please quote me on that,” Justice told us. “There are children who are experiencing mental distress and they need kindness and compassion and help to feel comfortable in their own bodies, because no child is born in the wrong body. There is no right way to be a boy or a girl.”

Read more here.

6. School Lunches: It’s Not (Just) About the Food

READ: Tim Daly took to the pages of his substack to reflect on the history of school lunches, why policy conversations should shift from the importance of providing a meal to the importance of providing better, healthier meals, and how school lunches can strengthen both education and socialization:

Nothing fosters connection like food. Kids love to eat. They talk, they joke, they let down their guard. If we want to combat chronic absenteeism, for instance, lunchtime should be something that no student wants to miss. Make the meal delicious. Give kids a little more time to eat it. Don’t allow screen devices at the tables. Encourage teachers and other staff to sit with kids occasionally to build relationships.

Read more here.