Tag Archives: early childhood education

Increasing child care teacher pay doesn’t have to mean charging parents more

Originally published in Vox on October 28, 2024.
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Jacqueline Strickland was tired, but hopeful. The Washington, DC, early childhood educator had been teaching young children for nearly 40 years, and prayed that one day she would be fairly compensated for her experience and education. Strickland even went back to school, years into teaching, to upgrade her credentials, acquiring associate’s and bachelor’s degrees to better understand youth brain development. She watched as valued colleagues left for higher-paying pastures, teaching older children, driving school buses, working for the postal service.

Strickland kept with her career path though, partly out of passion for young kids, but also because she knew there was a local effort afoot to raise the wages of teachers like her. She began testifying at council hearings in support of the idea. Finally, two years ago, after years of waiting, Strickland’s salary was bumped. She’s gone from earning $57,000 a year to $75,000, and gained access to free health insurance.

“I’m a mother of two, both my daughters have gone to college and I had to pay for school, maintain my own household, I didn’t have money to put away for retirement,” she said. “That was the scary part for me. I will be 60 in November and I couldn’t save.”

Strickland’s raise came from the nation’s first program aimed at aligning the salaries of the city’s 4,000 day care teachers with their public school counterparts. Known as the Pay Equity Fund, this innovative program has paid more than $80 million over the last two years to augment the salaries of child care workers, and was funded by a new non-lapsing tax increase on DC’s wealthiest residents, approved by the local council in 2021.

In the program’s first year, lead teachers like Strickland received lump-sum payments of $14,000, assistant teachers $10,000, and part-time teachers $5,000. In its second year, the city began issuing wage increases through quarterly payments, eventually transitioning these boosts into newly established salary minimums.

While DC’s Pay Equity program stands out for its scale, its wage supplement effort reflects a broader national trend, as states try to stabilize child care sectors hit hard by the pandemic and address the chronic underpayment of the workforce. In 2022, the median hourly wage for child care workers was just $13.71, significantly less than comparable roles like preschool and kindergarten teachers. Child care is the 10th lowest-paid occupation out of roughly 750 occupations in the economy, per one industry analysis.

Out of recognition that families are already burdened by high costs and can’t afford to pay much more for child care, states like North Carolina, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Maine, and Tennessee have introduced wage supplement programs to boost child care teacher recruitment, retention, and quality. And on the federal level, several proposals aim to bolster child care workers’ salaries. One bipartisan bill introduced this summer by Sens. Katie Britt (R-AL) and Tim Kaine (D-VA) proposes new federal grants to state and local governments that supplement child care worker pay.

As politicians elevate child care on the campaign trail and polls suggest it’s a motivating concern for voters, the pressure to raise wages for one of America’s most underpaid professions has taken on new importance. DC’s Pay Equity Fund is proving the model can work — provided elected officials stay committed to funding it.

What we’ve learned from DC’s pay equity fund

Leading researchers have been analyzing the impact of DC’s wage supplement program on child care providers and the early education sector more broadly.

Data from the first two years of the program showed that the wage supplements had increased lead teachers’ pay by 37 percent and assistant teachers’ wages by 31 percent.

On a practical level, the increased pay has enabled child care teachers to pay off their debts, cover emergency expenses, and cover essentials like food, rent, and utilities. Some began looking to purchase homes, and nearly 70 percent said the fund allowed them to actually save money, some, like Strickland, for the first time in their careers.

On an emotional level, many educators reported in surveys that the extra pay made them feel genuinely appreciated and respected, and that reduced financial stress helped them focus more on the children they work with.

Researchers found that assistant teachers, in particular, reported significantly improved mental health. “Indeed, the Pay Equity Fund…appears to have contributed to educators’ beliefs that they are now being compensated fairly,” the Urban Institute concluded.

From a hiring perspective, research by the think tank Mathematica found that the first few years of the Pay Equity Fund boosted the number of early childhood educators working in DC. Mathematica estimated the program led to an increase of 100 new hires, representing a 3 percentage point increase over what would have been expected without the wage boosts. Many child-care center directors also told Urban Institute researchers that the wage supplements made it easier to attract qualified new teachers and easier to retain their best staff.

“What’s new about the pay equity program compared to other states is that they had a dedicated source of revenue,” said Erica Greenberg, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who has been studying the program. “And that it was not just to stabilize the sector, but was really also about fairness.”

Can the idea spread further?

Taking a page out of DC’s playbook, Maine has similarly sought a dedicated funding stream to boost child care wages.

Maine’s child care wage supplement program began in September 2021 using American Rescue Plan relief funds. “Stability grants” provided nearly 7,000 child care staff with an additional $200 per month, according to Tara Williams, the associate director of early care and education in Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services. Maine officials solicited feedback on how best to distribute the dollars, and concluded that sending the money to program owners and directors, so they could put the funding directly into staff payroll, made the most sense.

Beginning in October 2022, Maine included the program in its state budget, continuing to fund it through general state revenues at a cost of $30 million annually.

It now exists as a three-tiered program, in which the lowest eligible tier of child care workers can earn an additional $275 per month, the second tier earns an additional $415 per month, and the highest-tier providers can earn an additional $625 a month.

“So that’s an over $3,000 a year bonus for the first tier,” Williams said proudly. “I’ve just been really excited to watch the expansion and implementation of this program.” Over 7,500 child care workers were receiving the Maine supplements as of June.

Williams has been sharing Maine’s experience with compensation reform with other states, including this past summer at a conference hosted by the North Carolina-based Hunt Institute.

In Pennsylvania, advocates have been organizing for their own child care wage supplement program, arguing that such investments are necessary to address the state’s worker shortage. They pointed to Republican-led states like Alaska and Georgia that have recently made new investments to support child care wages ($7.5 million and $23.6 million, respectively) and Democratic-led ones like New York and Minnesota that have done the same ($500 million and $316 million, respectively).

Some cities are also taking their own steps. This past June, a coalition of care advocacy organizations launched an 18-month pilot in New York City to provide $1,000 per month to licensed home-based child care providers.

“We have educators deciding every month what bills to pay, they are deciding every month whether to stay open,” said Jessica Sager, the CEO of All Our Kin, a national group that trains and supports home-based child care educators and is involved with the pilot. “When educators don’t have that stress they can focus wholly on the care.”

The policy will require sustained commitment

Wage supplements are not unique to child care, and governments have long used them to augment salaries of workers in fields like health care, home care, and agriculture.

Yet as promising as these wage supplements are, advocates are learning that even passing a dedicated funding stream is not enough to insulate the salary boosts from politics and annual budget fights.

Earlier this year, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser proposed gutting the Pay Equity Fund entirely as a way to balance the city’s budget amid flat growth and declining revenue from vacant office buildings. Teachers and community allies rallied for months in protest and in the end the DC Council restored $70 million to the program, though that still represented a $17 million cut.

“We thought we were done with this kind of fighting — we had found a non-lapsing funding source for the program, there isn’t that much more security we can build in,” said Ruquiyyah Anbar-Shaheen, the director of early childhood at DC Action, a local advocacy group. “The challenge is just having the political will to keep the program in place.”

Jacqueline “Jackie” Strickland, 59, and her assistant teacher, Mone Greene, assist students on a walk.Rosem Morton for Vox

Strickland said if the city had gone forward with gutting the program, she would have had to look for an alternative job.

“I’ve been fighting this fight a long time, but this shouldn’t be a fight, it should be a given,” she told Vox. “It’s not a bonus, it’s what’s owed to early childhood educators. We put in a lot of time and we give children the foundation that supports them for future learning.”

This work was supported by a grant from the Bainum Family Foundation. Vox Media had full discretion over the content of this reporting.

Rent control for child care?

Originally published in Vox on May 21, 2024.
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Brittany Kjenaas and her husband live with their 3-year-old daughter in northern Minnesota, where they pay more for child care than they do for their mortgage. Kjenaas, a health care supply manager, and her husband, a miner on the Iron Range, cite their day care bills as the primary reason they’ve abandoned plans to have any more children.

“We waited until we were in our 30s to start a family and … it’s not an exaggeration to say that the decision was based on the cost of child care,” she said. “She is our only child, and unless something changes in the cost of child care, she will remain our only child.”

Kjenaas is not alone in speaking out about how the prohibitive cost of child care is shaping the reproductive decisions of middle-class families like hers, families that are ineligible for low-income child care assistance programs.

In Minnesota, state Sen. Grant Hauschild has said that he and his wife considered having a third child but decided against it due to day care costs. It’s among the top three issues he hears about from constituents on a daily basis, as well as from prospective employers considering setting up businesses in his region.

It’s what makes a bill Hauschild introduced alongside Minnesota state Rep. Carlie Kotyza-Witthuhn this year so interesting.

Their legislation — known as the Great Start Affordability Scholarship Program — targets middle- and upper-middle-class families, those earning up to 150 percent of the state median income, or $174,000 for a family of four. Think Small, a local children’s advocacy group, estimated the scholarships would reduce child care costs for 86 percent of Minnesotans with kids under 5.

The benefits would be on a sliding scale but could be as high as $600 per month per child, with the state sending payments directly to Minnesota child care providers. The effort aims to ultimately cap family child care payments at 7 percent of a household’s annual income, an affordability threshold endorsed by the federal Department of Health and Human Services, and more recently by a bipartisan Minnesota state task force.

HHS landed on this benchmark about a decade ago after determining that, between 1997 and 2011, families consistently spent about 7 percent of their income on child care.

A 7 percent cap would represent a massive change for most Minnesota families, who pay some of the steepest child care costs in the country. Infant care in Minnesota stands at an average annual cost of $1,341 per month; preschool checks in at $1,021. The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning national think tank, estimates the average Minnesota family with an infant and a preschooler pays roughly 37 percent of their household income for care.

State leaders like Hauschild have been getting fed up with federal inaction. Republicans rebuffed Democrats’ $400 billion child care proposal during the 2021 Build Back Better fight, and child care funding was excluded from Congress’s Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. While bipartisan compromise on child care seems possible, leaders right now only seem to be able to find common ground on helping low-income families, not the bigger group struggling with child care costs.

The Minnesota proposal failed to advance this year, but advocates believe their time lobbying on an off-cycle budget year has positioned them well for 2025, when the legislature embarks on more serious appropriations.

Still, whether state lawmakers will be able to ever fully fund the program’s cost (an estimated $2 billion or so annually) without the federal government is unclear.

If the proposal passes, Kjenaas said it would do even more than enable her family to grow.

“If we pay a few thousand less on child care, we’d be able to take our daughter to the zoo, go see a movie, and even plan a fun road trip because we’d finally be able to do so without the stress of how much money it would cost at the end,” Kjenaas testified before a Minnesota House subcommittee in November. “We’d be able to buy healthy food at the grocery store instead of pre-packaged stuff. We’d be able to have time to make healthy meals because my husband wouldn’t have to work overtime to pay catch-up on our bills … We’d have room to breathe.”

Building a bigger political base for child care

Not everyone in Minnesota agrees with the push to expand child care subsidies for wealthier families, especially since low-income families are still struggling. But it helps, advocates say, that the state legislature succeeded a year prior in securing new child care investments specifically for poor families.

Armed with a substantial budget surplus, Minnesota lawmakers in 2023 raised early childhood education workers’ pay with a half-billion-dollar investment and invested $300 million more into early learning, including new investments in Head Start and low-income scholarships.

“For a long time, the emphasis has been on the most vulnerable kids, and we made some really big strides in that area last session,” said Ericca Maas, director of policy and advocacy for Think Small. “We came together after that and said, well, glaring at us is middle-class families.”

The debates around equity continued this year as advocates lobbied for the Great Start Affordability Scholarships program, said Clare Sanford, the government relations chair for the Minnesota Child Care Association, a provider group. Some activists protested pushing to help wealthier families before those with the least resources were fully covered.

This debate was never fully resolved, but ultimately, Sanford said, leading groups decided they’d be more successful in the long term if they could expand their coalition to include more families.

“There’s a fundamental agreement that we need to help those who have the least first, and we know we haven’t finished doing that. However, part of the strategy is we need middle-class families to see themselves as part of this,” she told Vox. “We need more political will to form a greater political base.”

Megan Pulford, a single mother of two in northeastern Minnesota, is the type of parent advocates like Sanford want to bring into their coalition. As a bank loan officer, Pulford has never qualified for state child care assistance, but covering the cost of day care for her two kids comes to nearly $2,000 a month.

“Money is just so tight, our bills are just so tight,” she told Vox. “If we didn’t have to pay as much for child care, we could actually put more into our local grocers, local businesses.”

A big part of the coalition-building strategy is helping middle- and upper-middle-class parents overcome feelings of shame that they may be struggling with costs at all. Lawmakers have long treated child care assistance as a carrot to induce poor mothers to work, rather than a general investment in the healthy development of all children.

“The myth in our country is that very young children are a private responsibility, not a public one,” said Sanford. “Everyone will pay taxes to fund public K-12 schools whether or not they have kids because that’s a commitment we’ve made as a society that an educated workforce is something we all need. We do the exact opposite for ages 0-5.”

“We feel the need to help parents really understand that this is a shared experience and that it’s okay for them to share that they’re not holding up,” Maas, of Think Small, added.

The search for simple language continues

American child care advocacy is often plagued by cumbersome math and jargon, and the effort in Minnesota this year was no different.

In contrast to Canadian politicians who’ve been campaigning for child care that costs no more than $10 a day, US progressives have long stuck with more complicated language around limiting costs to thresholds of annual household income. (The specific threshold to signal affordability used to be 10 percent, though was lowered to 7 percent about 10 years ago.) The 7 percent benchmark was recently included in Senate Democrats’ Child Care for Every Community Act and was included in the Biden administration’s new rule to reduce child care costs for families already receiving subsidies.

Rep. Kotyza-Witthuhn, the Minnesota House sponsor of the Great Start Affordability Scholarships, said they felt 7 percent was a good target because Minnesota lawmakers had already pledged commitment to the goal last year and because it already exists as a federal recommendation. But advocates acknowledge it can be very confusing, particularly since many families don’t know what 7 percent of their household income is, and for some families the goal is to still have them spend less than 7 percent.

Talking about “capping” child care costs, advocates hoped, would at least provide a clear policy message they could galvanize parents around, but then child care providers started getting nervous, interpreting the cap language as a cap on their expenses or a cap on the amount of tuition they can charge.

“People freak out when you talk about a cap,” Maas told Vox. “Providers freak out about things they charge being capped, and some parents really bristle too at the idea that they couldn’t invest more in their child if they wanted to.”

To mitigate this confusion, some advocates started describing the proposed scholarship subsidy as more like a co-pay, similar to health insurance. But health insurance is among the most confusing items Americans have to budget for.

While the fight was unsuccessful this session, Democratic leaders in Minnesota say they’re keeping it as a goal for 2025.

“It is a priority for my caucus and our leadership,” said Kotyza-Witthuhn. “Everyone knows the system is broken.”

One state just became a national leader on child care. Here’s how they did it.

Originally published in Vox on May 22, 2023.
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Action in Congress to support child care has been stalled for years. But in Vermont, lawmakers have just approved an ambitious plan that would pour tens of millions of new dollars into the state’s starved child care system.

The bill authorizing $125 million in annual investment comes after nearly a decade of organizing. As in many states, thousands of Vermont kids lack access to any child care program, and among families that have been able to land competitive slots, average costs exceed $26,000 a year, more than 30 percent of many families’ household income.

Meanwhile, child care workers are some of the lowest paid employees in the state, earning about $15 per hour, and typically with no benefits. Given that their workers could make more money doing just about anything else, programs struggle to hire and retain staff — adding additional stress to parents who can’t rely on their child care programs to stay open.

The newly approved child care bill would expand state subsidies for families earning up to 575 percent of the federal poverty level (or $172,000 for a family of four) and families earning up to 175 percent of the poverty line (or $52,000 for a family of four) would now pay nothing out of pocket.

The new payments will mean an infusion of funds for child care, allowing providers to be reimbursed at a 35 percent higher rate than they currently are. The legislation also tasks lawmakers with studying how to create an affordable full-day pre-K system.

The investments would be paid for in part by a new payroll tax, of which employers would cover at least 75 percent. It’s not law yet — it’s headed to Republican Gov. Phil Scott’s desk, who has previously said he would reject any new taxes. His office did not return request for comment, but Democrats have a supermajority in the Vermont legislature and have made clear they would override any veto in June.

Vermont’s legislative victory comes nearly a year after the Inflation Reduction Act passed the US Senate without any child care provisions, a gutting blow after the House had approved a $390 billion investment in November 2021. The Vermont victory also comes as federal pandemic child care subsidies are expiring, and President Joe Biden looks to make child care a top priority heading into his reelection campaign. Last month, Biden signed new executive orders to boost child care programs and their workers.

The path to victory in Vermont offers a roadmap for activists in other states who want to see increased public investment into their child care systems, and insight into the policy trade-offs leaders had to make for their measure to get through the legislative process.

“Vermont showed that you can have a bold vision, cultivate a broad base of support, persevere though budget battles and pandemics, and make the state a better place for those who don’t have a voice in politics,” said Helene Stebbins, the executive director of the Alliance for Early Success, a national nonprofit that supports early childhood advocacy. “The hard part is not the policy — it’s the strategy, and the patience.”

How Vermont built its winning coalition

The origins of Vermont’s child care campaign trace back to 2000, when a Burlington real estate developer named Rick Davis and his friend in private equity, Carl Ferenbach, launched a foundation dedicated to supporting Vermont children.

For its first decade, the foundation focused on a range of initiatives, including youth centers, programs for kids with incarcerated parents, and supporting new community pre-K programs. This work helped prompt Vermont legislators to pass a bill in 2014 requiring all school districts to offer at least 10 hours per week of publicly funded pre-K.

Yet huge gaps remained, and the philanthropists grew more interested in the emerging research demonstrating the cognitive importance of a child’s earliest years. Teaming up and pooling money with other foundations interested in children’s issues, the two men launched Let’s Grow Kids in 2014 to boost child care access, an area they thought would carry the most bang for their charitable buck. They pointed to economic studies that found every dollar spent on high-quality early childhood programs yielded a return of $4-$9.

“Everybody knows we should invest early to save money down the road,” explained Davis, who often framed his work in terms of economic development. “We’ve got to find ways to get young families to come to Vermont and stay.”

In 2015, Bob and Christine Stiller, the founders of Vermont-based Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, gave Let’s Grow Kids a massive $20 million gift, and the group pledged to achieve their mission by 2025. This so-called venture philanthropy idea was to essentially use foundations as a catalyst for legislative change.

Let’s Grow Kids assembled a powerful team of lobbyists and organizers to lead the campaign. In 2015, Davis recruited Aly Richards, a top aide to Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin, to serve as CEO. While working for Shumlin, Richards led the push to establish Vermont’s universal pre-K program. Other Let’s Grow Kids leaders included a former lobbyist for victims’ rights and a campaigner for legalizing same-sex marriage.

The philanthropic investments helped support statewide organizing, ultimately bringing more than 35,000 Vermonters into the campaign. Volunteers wrote op-eds, signed petitions and pledges, turned out for rallies, and testified before state lawmakers. Let’s Grow Kids also funded television ads and digital marketing, and organized 1:1 meetings with politicians. They helped mobilize child care workers to share their stories, and during the 2016 election, they asked all state candidates how they would address Vermont’s child care problem, and posted their responses online.

Let’s Grow Kids conceived of their strategy from scratch but studied lessons from other winning campaigns like Freedom to Marry. “We’re very small, very nimble, and we had an opportunity and responsibility to be a pioneer,” Richards said.

In 2021, with just four years left until their organization planned to shut down, Let’s Grow Kids established a sister 501(c)4 organization to exert more power in the 2022 midterms. Their goal was to support candidates who not only committed to prioritizing child care, but who also would commit to increasing public investment. Let’s Grow Kids ultimately endorsed 130 candidates last cycle, of which 117 won in November. This led to the first-ever coalition of self-described child care champions headed to Montpelier.

The political compromises lawmakers had to make

Partly spurred by the Let’s Grow Kids campaign, Vermont lawmakers passed a law in 2021 setting goals to expand child care slots, to limit family child care spending to no more than 10 percent of their annual income, and to pay early childhood educators comparable wages as kindergarten teachers in public schools.

Policymakers then commissioned a study to figure out how much that would all cost. To meet all those objectives, state officials would need to raise between $179 million and $279 million in new public funding, according to a report led by the Rand Corporation published this past January. The consultants suggested instituting a new payroll tax, a new sales tax, or a new services tax to get it done.

Even coming in this year with a Democratic supermajority, new committed legislative champions, and a well-funded lobbying effort, the last few months in Montpelier demonstrated the tough political compromises inherent to passing any new program.

Lawmakers said they weren’t ready to commit to spending as much as the Rand report recommended. When the legislative session began, Vermont Senate lawmakers proposed instead expanding child care subsidies for families earning up to 600 percent of the federal poverty level, (or $180,000 for a family of four), paid for by a new payroll tax funded primarily by employers. They thought this was fair, as child care largely provides a benefit to employers. To help fund those new subsidies, Senate lawmakers also proposed repealing a $1,000-per-child tax credit Vermont authorized last year.

In the House, lawmakers favored keeping the child tax credit in place and instead wanted to fund child care investments via a new progressive corporate and personal income tax. In this scenario, wealthier individuals and businesses would finance the bulk of the new revenue, but all taxpayers would still help contribute to a social program that benefits the greater good. The chair of the Senate finance committee said she didn’t like taxing people who might not ultimately need child care services.

Lawmakers were gridlocked for weeks, and it was not clear the two chambers would be able to compromise. In the end, House lawmakers agreed to the payroll tax, but funding families only up to 575 percent of the poverty level, not 600 percent, so that the child credit would stay in place.

The final legislation garnered approval from Democrats, progressives, independents, even some Republicans and a Libertarian. “It is not easy to ask Vermonters — any Vermonter — to pay just a little more, which seems to be a theme of this session,” said Republican Rep. Ashley Bartley of Fairfax. “However, the price of inaction is far greater.”

While Let’s Grow Kids didn’t achieve their goal of capping child care costs at 10 percent for all families, advocates have hailed this as a “quantum leap” forward and note they still have two more years left to push for additional investment, as well as to formalize a compensation scale for workers. Higher-income families that won’t receive direct financial assistance will still benefit from new subsidies flowing into the system, which can stabilize the workforce and boost program quality.

Vermont’s child care political blueprint

Not every state has the kind of philanthropic infrastructure Vermont enjoys. Experts say, though, their political roadmap could be replicated elsewhere, including the assemblage of a diverse coalition of parents, grandparents, business leaders, and child care workers.

“I really think that no matter the demographics of a state, no matter the political landscape, there is something that cuts through anything and that’s grassroots mobilization,” Richards told Vox.

The only other state to take comparable leadership in state child care investments is New Mexico, which successfully organized a ballot measure this past fall that authorizes new money from a state sovereign wealth fund to provide dedicated funding for universal preschool and child care. Like Vermont, the victory came after a decade-long organizing campaign, where early childhood educators helped lead the fight.

While Vermont’s win is yet another example of the child care movement gaining momentum, Jennifer Wells, the director of economic justice at Community Change Action, said the “real lesson” from states like Vermont and New Mexico is that the system is broken, and federal investment is needed to fund the true cost of child care, to pay early educators what they deserve, and to make care affordable for families.

Miriam Calderon, the chief policy officer with Zero To Three, a national advocacy group focused on infants and toddlers, agreed with Wells that states can’t fix this problem alone.

“In the short term this looks like not letting tens of billions of dollars in federal child care funding expire in September and protecting child care funds from deep cuts proposed as part of the default debates,” she said. “Long term, we need to pass the Child Care for Working Families Act, which ensures a strong federal and state partnership in funding the early care and education our babies and toddlers and families deserve.”

Obama’s Mixed Record on School Integration

Originally published in The American Prospect on August 31, 2015.
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As Congress debates competing revisions of the No Child Left Behind Act over the next several weeks, lawmakers are unlikely to spend much time looking at the growing problem of segregated schools. Despite strong academic and civic benefits associated with integrated schooling, and a unanimous Supreme Court decision which ruled that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal”—American public schools have resegregated quickly by race and class over the past two-and-a-half decades.

Many advocates had hoped to see the Obama administration take steps to address rising school segregation, but so far its record has not been great. While the Department of Education has paid lip service to the need to promote integrated schools, and has included modest diversity incentives within a handful of federal grants, it refused to use larger education initiatives like Race to the Top to encourage states and districts to prioritize school diversity. In some cases, the department actually pushed policies that made segregation worse.

The Obama administration came to power at an interesting time for the integration movement. With the help of Reagan-appointed judges and justices, court decisions in the 1990s absolved many local districts from their legal obligations to desegregate schools. Between 1988 and 2006, the number of black students attending majority-white schools dropped by 16 percentage points. Between 2000 and 2008, the number of schools where at least 75 percent of students qualified for free or reduced-meals—a proxy for poverty—jumped from 12 percent to 17 percent.

But many districts were also interested in racial and economic diversity, even if they weren’t legally required to promote it. And so various voluntary integration experiments began cropping up around the country. These new efforts seemed promising but quickly faced legal challenge. In a pivotal 2007 decision, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, the Supreme Court rejected voluntarily desegregation plans in Seattle and Louisville, on the basis that their particular student assignment strategies relied too explicitly on race. But the Court did clarify that, under certain conditions, districts can use race-conscious measures to promote diversity. Justice Kennedy even endorsed specific strategies to do so, including magnet schools and interdistrict plans.

The years immediately following the Parents Involved decision sparked confusion, largely thanks to the Bush administration. While the majority of Supreme Court justices said districts could consider race in school assignments, the Bush administration posted a federal guidance that suggested only race-neutral means of pursuing integration would be legal.

In 2009, shortly after President Obama took office, a group of educators, policy advocates, and civil rights leaders came together under the banner of the National Coalition on School Diversity (NCSD) to try and push the new administration to take action.

“Our very first goal was to get the Department of Education to take down the guidance from the Bush administration, which told schools they could not promote racial and economic diversity,” said Phil Tegeler, executive director of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council and NCSD coalition member. Their efforts were ultimately successful. By December 2011, the department posted a new guidance, which affirmed the Supreme Court’s decision and listed various ways school districts could pursue voluntary integration.

Other NCSD efforts met less success. One of their primary objectives has been to get the Obama administration to prioritize school integration within their competitive federal grant programs. While Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has repeatedly said that he supports school diversity and wants to reduce racial isolation, his department has not, for the most part, translated such support into its competitive programs.

Despite NCSD’s urging, the department declined to use its largest grant, the $4 billion Race to the Top initiative, to promote racial diversity. Duncan argued that including incentives for voluntary integration would have been too difficult to get through Congress. He also said that when it comes to successful integration efforts, we can’t “force these kinds of things.”

In 2013, Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute,responded strongly to Duncan’s arguments, pointing out that “no education secretary has been as deft as Arne Duncan in creating incentives—both carrots and sticks—to get states to follow his favored policies that are technically voluntary.” Duncan used incentives to get states to adopt Common Core standards, to promote after-school programs and early childhood education, and even within Race to the Top, incentives were used to encourage states to adopt teacher evaluation systems tied to student test scores. But in the case of school integration, Rothstein noted, suddenly Duncan sings a different tune.

“Only in this area, apparently, does Secretary Duncan believe that progress must be entirely voluntary, unforced by carrots and sticks,” Rothstein wrote. There have been plenty of opportunities to incentivize racial integration, such as rewarding states that prohibit all-white suburbs from excluding poor people through zoning ordinances, or withholding No Child Left Behind waivers from states that allow landlords to discriminate against families using federal housing vouchers. “Adoption of such ‘voluntary’ policies could make a contribution to narrowing the academic achievement gap that is so much a focus of Secretary Duncan’s rhetoric,” Rothstein said.

Despite a frustrating first term, desegregation advocates have seen some progress in the last couple years. The Department of Education recently began to include diversity as a funding priority in several of its smaller grant programs like the preschool development grants and its charter school grants; it also announced that magnet-type integration approaches are eligible for the school improvement grants (SIG) program.

While modest, these changes have led to some important new integration experiments. At the end of 2014, New York’s education commissioner, John King, helped launch a socioeconomic integration pilot program to increase student achievement using newly available federal SIG funds. King has since moved to the Department of Education, where he now serves as Arne Duncan’s senior advisor.

Other advocates have capitalized on the Department of Education’s 2011 guidance. David Tipson, executive director of New York Appleseed, says it was an absolute game-changer for his work in New York City. “Getting that correct interpretation, with some real practical guidance for school districts, I can’t even emphasize how important that was,” Tipson said. “There was a very deliberate effort to misconstrue the 2007 [Supreme Court] decision and put fear into many school officials across the country. Everything we’ve been able to do to promote school integration has come in the wake of getting that new federal guidance in place.” New York Appleseed, along with community stakeholders, sought to design a zoning plan that would help keep a school located within a gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood integrated. Officials resisted at first, but they eventually relented after advocates presented them with the federal guidance. Thus at the beginning of the 2013-2014 school year, Brooklyn’s P.S. 133 became the first school in Bloomberg’s administration to foster a specific mix of students based on socioeconomic status and English proficiency. At the school’s ribbon-cutting ceremony, the city’s school chancellor said he believed their innovative admissions model could be replicated elsewhere.

While advocates of desegregation are happy to see the administration beginning to prioritize diversity within its grant programs, some feel these gestures are too little, too late.

In a letter sent to Secretary Duncan last July, NCSD noted that while the Department of Education has included preferences for diversity within some grant programs, in practice, the department has “consistently underemphasized” these incentives. Many grants still make no mention of diversity at all, and in cases where they do, officials tend to weigh other competitive priorities far more heavily, rendering the modest diversity incentives ineffective. For example, in one grant, applicants could earn an additional five points if their school was diverse, but applicants could earn twice as many bonus points if their school would serve a high-poverty student population

The only federal education initiative to significantly emphasize integration is the Magnet School Assistance Program (MSAP), a program first launched in 1976. However MSAP has limited impact today due to the small amount of federal funding it receives. Even though charters are far more likely than magnets to exacerbate segregation, the department gave MSAP $91.6 million in 2014, compared to the $248.2 million it gave the Charter Schools Program.

Advocates have not given up. Next month in D.C., the NCSD will be hosting a national two-day conference, bringing together scholars, educators, parents, students, and policymakers to continue, “building the movement for diversity, equity, and inclusion.” John King will be speaking on a panel there about the progress they’ve made, and further challenges they face on the federal level. NCSD hopes that King’s new role at the Department of Education will motivate the government to take integration efforts more seriously. The department’s press secretary, Dorie Nolt, told The American Prospect that “we’ve taken meaningful steps, and we want to do more.”

Yet this administration has fewer than 18 months left. And the next secretary of education could quite easily end even the modest progress that NCSD has fought for. “Promoting voluntary school integration is an area where the department has a lot of leeway to act on its own, in terms of trying to encourage state and local governments to prioritize diversity,” said Tegeler. “But that also means the next department has a lot of leeway to not act.”