On the last day before the start of early voting, Kristian Carranza, a 34-year-old Democratic candidate for the Texas House of Representatives, and David Hogg, the gun control activist from Parkland, Florida, were discussing lessons they’d learned about door-knocking as they went door to door in a neighborhood of big trucks and single-family homes on San Antonio’s Southside.

The yapping dogs are mostly harmless. “No soliciting” signs are not to be ignored. And the knock itself is a delicate science. (The city’s mayor, with whom Carranza had recently campaigned, swore that the optimal wait time was exactly 7 seconds between knocks.) In neighborhoods like this, people often kept their front doors open but the screen doors shut.

“On the Northside, there’s so many more Ring cameras,” Carranza said. “I’ve never had so many Ring conversations knocking doors than I have this year.” Sometimes, she’d have an entire conversation without anyone ever opening the door.

“There’s a path to holding the line against private school vouchers, and the path runs through House District 118.”

When doors do open, Carranza led with a simple pitch. 

“I’m running to put more money [into] funding our public schools,” she told a middle-aged man a few houses down from where we’d started. “So many of our schools are closing. We’ve had some schools closed in Southside [Independent School District] as well, and we have to do everything we can to keep our little ones in school.”

Carranza’s pledge to protect education funding was not an idle bit of boilerplate. Her campaign in state House District 118 is a small race with potentially enormous stakes: The fight for votes here could help make or break Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s push to create a taxpayer-funded voucher program, which would allow parents to create “education savings accounts” to fund private school tuition or homeschooling. The proposal, which has been a priority for many conservatives in the state for decades, has been defeated in two consecutive special sessions—thanks, in part, to opposition from rural Republicans who feared that it would lead to closures and consolidation in small school districts. But during the Republican primaries this past spring, Abbott and allies spent more than $10 million to oust the bill’s opponents. He believes he now has the votes—unless Democrats can knock off enough voucher supporters this fall. To do that, they must defeat Carranza’s opponent, Republican state Rep. John Lujan. Carranza expects the race to come down to just a few hundred votes.

Four years ago, Democrats talked about flipping enough seats to win control of the state House of Representatives. Instead, they picked up just one. This time around, their ambitions are more modest. Monique Alcala, executive director of the Texas Democratic Party, told me the party needed to flip three seats—the number they think they’d need to stop a voucher bill from passing. The 118th, which forms a half-eaten U along the lower edges of Bexar County and stretches into the historically Mexican American and Democratic neighborhoods of the Southside, is one of the most winnable of their targets on paper. But the precinct Carranza and Hogg canvassed, like much of the district, shifted significantly toward Republicans during the Trump era. It was the only state house district that voted for Joe Biden in 2020, Beto O’Rourke for governor in 2022, and a Republican to the legislature the same year—Lujan, a former San Antonio firefighter and sheriff’s deputy, who is finishing his first full term in office.

The high stakes have made the district a magnet for outside spending. Hogg’s group, Leaders We Deserve, which bills itself as an “EMILYs List for young people,” has poured more than $1 million into the race, hoping to both elevate a millennial progressive and in the process send a message to Abbott, who declined to support gun control legislation in the wake of the 2022 mass shooting at a school in Uvalde.

“There’s a path to holding the line against private school vouchers, and the path runs through House District 118,” Carranza told me, as she sipped a Coke in the back of an ice cream shop near her campaign office. She said she believes Abbott’s reforms are a “scam.” They “would be devastating to the public education system in Texas,” she said, and, as evidence, pointed to a similar program in Arizona—where a “school choice” law has mostly benefited wealthy families who already had abandoned the public education system, while subsidizing religious institutions and, in one infamous case, the purchase of dune buggies.

Carranza’s political platform is rooted in her experience as a community organizer. She went door to door in these same neighborhoods to encourage residents to apply for health coverage under the federal Affordable Care Act.

“This is a very low-income, working-class, middle-class neighborhood; these are not the type of communities that are going to benefit from a voucher program,” Carranza said. “The $8,000 voucher won’t be enough to get a child into private schools, to be able to afford tuition and uniforms, and travel to get to the schools—because they don’t provide travel and all the little things that I think we don’t always think about that schools provide.” 

As she sees it, Abbott’s bill would only exacerbate an existing crisis, by taking money and students out of the system. In the Harlandale Independent School District, she said, referring to the district we were sitting in and where she grew up, “we had four elementary schools closed just this past spring. The fight against private school vouchers is a lived reality for people that live in this district, and when we talk about schools closing, it’s not just schools, because for families in these communities, we don’t just look to our public schools for quality education.” Close public schools, and you close after-school activities and free lunch programs, too. It was an attack on a deeper social safety net.

Lujan, for his part, has argued that while he supports vouchers, he does not support taking funds out of public education and emphasized the need for oversight of private schools that receive public funds. Although he has voted for Abbott’s measures in the past, he said at a recent debate that he would approve a school-choice bill in the next session only if it included new standards for assessing how well private schools are performing. But Abbott, for one, doesn’t seem troubled by where the Republican stands; the governor came to the district last week to stump for him.

The voucher fight may be the most immediate challenge in the legislature, but Carranza’s campaign has been shaped by Texas Republicans’ decadeslong push to eliminate abortion rights. She traced her decision to work in politics to state Sen. Wendy Davis’ 13-hour filibuster of the state’s sonogram law in 2013, which Carranza watched on the floor at her mother’s home, glued to a YouTube stream on her laptop. Since then, Texas’ restrictions have gotten more severe. Carranza is running hard against the state’s post-Dobbs abortion ban, which makes abortion illegal except to protect the life of the mother. (In practice, the restrictions have done the opposite; NBC News reported last month that the maternal mortality rate jumped 56 percent in the state from 2019 to 2022.) Lujan has taken a far different stance.

“If it was my daughter, I don’t have any daughters, but if I had a daughter, and that would have been, you know, it would have been a rape, I think we, as a—personally—I would say, ‘No, we’re gonna have the baby,’”  Lujan said during a local radio interview in September.

That comment wasn’t just callous, Carranza said. It missed a key bit of context. “I think we have to be very clear about this: In the state of Texas, no woman is allowed an abortion if she is a victim of rape,” Carranza said. “And I think that that needs to be clear, because he’s saying that he would force his daughter—his hypothetical daughter—to birth a rapist’s child. It’s not even a choice that we get to have. And it’s very upsetting that he thinks that he can make that choice for people in his family.” In other words, the state is already forcing women to do exactly what Lujan talked about. She cited a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that estimated that 26,000 Texas women had become pregnant due to rape in the 16 months following the ban’s enactment.

Lujan later clarified that he would only have encouraged his hypothetical daughter to have the child and was simply articulating his personal values. He has said he would work to add exceptions for rape and incest into state law if re-elected, though the legislature took no steps to do so during his first term in office.

With school vouchers hanging in the balance and a chance to send a message on abortion rights—and reverse the recent erosion of Democratic support—the race has taken on an outsized significance both inside and outside the state. Carranza recently campaigned with Democratic US Reps. Greg Casar and Joaquin Castro. Inside the cramped campaign office, where a lone “Swifties for Kamala” sign was taped above a door frame, dozens of volunteers from the Texas Organizing Project, a PAC that mobilizes voters in predominantly Black and Hispanic communities, waited for canvassing instructions. Hogg, who interrupted his brief speech to volunteers to double check with Carranza that the Lujan quote about abortion was actually real, boasted that the district was the centerpiece of his organization’s efforts in the state. Its seven-figure investment was going, in part, toward saturating the airwaves with TV ads. Some of Carranza’s spots warned about the consequences of a statewide voucher program. One ad simply played Lujan’s comments on abortion in 15-second bursts.

Democrats’ efforts in Texas have at times suffered from a bit of a false-summit problem. The big breakthrough looks so close. But adding a few million votes in a massive and ever-evolving state is hard, and the party has been burned by high expectations more than once. While there’s cautious optimism about Democrats’ post-Biden prospects this year, no one I talked to was getting out over their skis. Hogg told me he expected their investment in time and money to pay off “even if the state is not going to flip this cycle.” 

“We’re just on the ground so one day Kristian could be on the forefront of that change,” he said. 

Carranza said the goal now is to flip the state House by the end of the current redistricting cycle—in 2030. “They’re understanding that we have to act now before it gets worse and even if it’s going to take one year, two years, three years, five years,” she said of her conversations with voters at the door. Winning back the Southside is only the first step.

In August, political science professor Ashley Moraguez started the fall semester at the University of North Carolina Asheville with “grand plans” for engaging students on electoral politics. As the director of UNC Asheville Votes, a nonpartisan student-run group, Moraguez planned for fall to be the “Semester of Civics”—including voter registration tabling events, meet-and-greets with local candidates, and a “Party at the Polls” in Reed Plaza with food and live music.

North Carolina is a crucial swing state that will likely be won by a razor-thin margin; Trump leads Harris there by about 1 percentage point.

For students, an age group with historically low turnout, these efforts weren’t an abstract exercise: North Carolina is a crucial swing state that will likely be won by a razor-thin margin. Donald Trump won the state by less than 75,000 votes in 2020 and now leads Kamala Harris there by about 1 percentage point, according to recent polls. In other words, every vote in North Carolina matters.

Then in late September, Hurricane Helene hit. The storm dumped nearly 14 inches of rain on Asheville, causing roads and neighborhoods to flood and killing nearly 100 people statewide. UNC Asheville, a campus of 2,900 undergraduates, lost electricity and running water. Students and faculty relocated. Classes were canceled and will be held virtually for the rest of the semester.

Now, after Helene, getting to the polls—or getting a hold of an absentee ballot—got even harder for college students in western North Carolina.

This has made Moraguez’s work more challenging, and also much more important. With the campus closed, the university relocated its early voting site from the student union to the edge of campus, at a health center. Moraguez and UNC Asheville Votes pivoted to providing virtual resources—a website, Instagram page, and email address where students could ask voting-related questions. “I’m really heartened by how many students, amidst everything they’re dealing with, have been reaching out with questions so that they’re making sure that their ballots do count,” she says.

Still, she says, it’s hard to know who, or how many, the group is reaching. Parts of western North Carolina still don’t have utilities, electricity, or wifi. And many students, understandably, have more pressing issues than figuring out how to vote. “They’ve lost their homes and their loved ones,” Moraguez says. “And they’re just trying to figure out how to survive right now.”

As a political science professor and voting leader in Asheville, Moraguez is uniquely positioned to explain the challenges this key demographic faces post-Helene. And she, at least in part, understands what they’re going through: When I spoke to her earlier this month, on the first day of early voting in North Carolina, she had no reliable internet or potable water at her home in Asheville and had spent the previous weeks “bouncing around” and staying with family in other parts of North Carolina and Georgia.

Here’s an edited and condensed version of our conversation:

With the university on hiatus and then switching to remote classes, there’s almost an echo to what happened when Covid broke out. Did the pandemic help prepare you for this? Does it feel familiar?

Yes and no. In the 2020 election cycle, we had to completely rethink how we did voter engagement on campus. I’ve learned a lot since 2020 about how to engage people remotely.

Students taught me how to use social media more effectively. We figured out how to communicate better about complex electoral information over email through trial and error. We had the website ready to go. We had the Instagram page ready to go. We didn’t have to start those from scratch, as we did in 2020. So in that respect, despite these really unfortunate and tragic situations, we were ready to pivot our electoral engagement efforts much more quickly than in the past.

The challenge is that I still don’t have reliable internet at my home. I don’t have potable water at home. Will I be able to teach online? Do I go stay with family? My students are going to have utility and infrastructure issues. Those issues are more severe than I remember from 2020.

What do you mean when you say students helped you learn to navigate social media better?

When I was in college, Facebook was the social media of choice. I graduated from college in 2009. I wasn’t super familiar with Instagram Stories, and I don’t think I fully recognized the extent to which young people do get some of their information and news from social media.

Students really taught me how to more effectively convey useful information on social media in a way that’s palatable to young people, and how to make things more aesthetically pleasing, more likely to get attention. I don’t primarily get my news from social media, and so it was really helpful for me to have students leading this. I’ve learned just as much from them as they have from me.

What are your biggest challenges right now in getting-out-the-vote efforts?

It’s hard to know who we’re reaching. I fear that in our campus outreach efforts— since they all have been online—that we’re missing some potential voters in western North Carolina who are most affected by these storms.

Our State Board of Elections and our state legislature have adopted a slate of emergency measures to help voters in western North Carolina have better access to the polls, but those changes are only effective in so far as voters are aware of them.

“They’ve lost their homes and their loved ones, and they’re just trying to figure out how to survive right now.”

And there are some people who just have much more pressing issues on their plate right now than thinking about the election. They’ve lost their homes and their loved ones, and they’re just trying to figure out how to survive right now. And you know, their votes matter, their voices matter. And I think right now, especially, we want to hear from people who are having those experiences, but they might not be getting the information they need or have the capacity to vote right now.

I was in college during the 2016 election. I requested an absentee ballot from Florida, which is where I grew up and where I was hoping to vote. It never came. And I just never followed up on it and never voted. Is there a concern that, at the end of the day, these are teenagers or young adults in their early 20s and we’re asking a lot of them to stay on top of voting?

It’s undoubtedly true that young people—which I’m defining as 18 to 25, roughly—have lower voter turnout rates than other demographic groups. But I think there’s a couple reasons why that is and why it’s unfair to compare young voters to older groups.

Political science research shows us that voting is habitual. It’s a habit that you develop over time, and once you get into that habit, you are going to almost certainly be a reliable voter for the rest of your life. And so how can we expect first-time voters to have those habits when they haven’t been legally allowed to engage in those habits?

There’s also a narrative out there about young people being really apathetic and not caring about issues, and that is just not what I observe in working with young people in or outside of the classroom. Instead, I tend to see it as an issue of access. It’s just hard to get involved. There’s a lot of rules and deadlines and barriers in place, regardless of where you live. There’s just a big startup cost to getting involved. And so if there isn’t someone there to help you navigate that, it can be really disincentivizing to vote or to get engaged in politics otherwise, because you just don’t know where to start.

For students who are studying at UNC Asheville from out of state, will they be able to access the absentee ballots sent from their home states?

Overwhelmingly, our students are North Carolina residents. I think this year, about 13 percent of our student body is an out-of-state US resident. So that would equate to about 300 to 400 students. Of those students, it’s hard to know how many of them would be registered in North Carolina versus in their home state.

“There’s a narrative out there about young people being really apathetic and not caring about issues, and that is just not what I observe.”

For those students who were on campus and had requested an absentee ballot before the storm hit, it is possible [they] had to evacuate before they received their ballot. It’s hard to know how many students this is affecting, but almost certainly, it is affecting some voters.

The advice we’ve been giving those voters is to contact their local or county elections office as soon as possible and request a reissuance of their ballot.

Historically, after severe hurricanes, you often see a decline in voting. Has disaster-related voter suppression come up in your classes at all?

I teach courses on US elections. We talk about barriers to voting, not just devices or laws in place that could make it easier or more difficult for people to vote, but also socioeconomic factors that can make it harder for some groups of people to vote than others. I’ve never spoken with my students specifically about how natural disasters and recovery efforts could affect the dynamics, but rest assured that we will be once our classes pick back up.

I love looking at pictures from my daughter’s first day of preschool. Three years old, wearing a dress with pink apples on it. I had perfected getting her hair into pigtails just a few weeks before. There was something joyous and hopeful about those little hair geysers sprouting straight off her head. In the photos from that day, we look like any other family on the first day of school. My boys, ages 4 and 6, wearing new future-oriented pants that look a little too long, are smiling proudly at the thought of their sister joining them. It was raining and unseasonably cold; our raincoats seemed out of sync with our end-of-summer tans. In one picture, Mae is leaning into my lap, her yellow raincoat and pigtails buried by my scarf as I give her one last kiss.

We appeared to be a conventional family from afar, but we weren’t. Mae wasn’t like my other two children. She made repetitive noises and movements, barely slept, never spoke, and seemed plagued by a never-ending carousel of ear infections and rashes. When she started school, she was classified as PDD-NOS, or “pervasive developmental disorder-not otherwise specified.” Although she was 3 years old, developmentally, her age was estimated to be between 13 and 17 months. A month after her first day in preschool, she was officially diagnosed with autism. With the right therapies and some good luck, we were told the gap between our daughter and her peers might be narrowed—if not closed. So, for the next decade, we did everything we could to solve the puzzle that was our daughter’s brain: hours and hours of therapy, specialists, the occasional snake-oil salesperson, chat rooms, lawyers, and—yes—the public school system.

That was 14 years ago. Mae has grown into a young woman who loves music, bubble baths, and peanut butter. She can get a map of a place in her head in seconds and can quickly scan a room and identify who would be most likely to bend to her needs. In other ways, though, her developmental age is still under 2 years old. She is still in diapers; she communicates with hand gestures and noises that make perfect sense only to those of us who know her. As her older brothers’ academic and social lives have traced the predictable trajectories of adolescence, hers have been characterized far more by what hasn’t changed than what has.

This is where the current model of education for children with disabilities is a mismatch for her: Even though her developmental age is that of a preschooler, well-intentioned policies known under the blanket term of “inclusion” put her in a building of high school students with whom she has little in common.

My daughter’s school-based occupational therapist and I have often spoken wistfully of a school site with an OT space where students could learn practical life skills, where my daughter would spend her days learning to make a peanut butter sandwich or brush her teeth or make a bed or comb her hair. Or, most importantly, learn how to take herself to the toilet. The hours and hours she and I spend together in the summer on potty training are paused every time school starts. It is lovely to think that putting her in a small classroom adjacent to neurotypical students would somehow improve her experience. However, if she learned through osmosis or observation, she would be someone else altogether.

Still, I see this issue from two perspectives. I am the parent of a child with complex needs—and for the last eight years a general education middle school teacher. I believe that she has every right to a high-quality education in our public school system. I also believe, however, that what she learns is more important than where she learns it. The gap between my daughter and her neurotypical peers has grown into a galaxy. I am pretty sure she does not look at the long-legged teens twirling car keys at her school and wish she were one of them. (I think one of the gifts of her condition is that envy or insecurity aren’t part of her experiences.) But one of the liabilities of including her in classes with her chronological peers is that the important life skills that she lacks are not on the curriculum.

Students in my classroom also have a range of needs; some are neurodivergent, others aren’t, but none of them have demands as complex as Mae’s. As a parent and as an educator, I have been increasingly troubled by the gap between good intentions and lived experience in our schools, one that seems especially sharply drawn with children like my daughter. This question of where a child with disabilities learns and with whom is deeply complicated, in part because the term “disability” is applied very broadly. It now includes everyone from a child with mild dyslexia or similar processing issues to a child like mine. Is there a unified strategy that can meet these varied needs? Have we progressed from a time when children like my daughter were shut away from society to the present day when we use the myth of inclusion to mask the fact that we are still not truly creating schools to meet the needs of all children effectively?

Inspired by the desegregation of schools and the civil rights movement, in the late ’60s and early ’70s, disability rights advocates started pressuring Congress to address education for children with disabilities. Leading disability rights activist Judy Heumann, who worked with a congressional team to draft legislation, recalled in her book Being Heumann: “The country was so inaccessible, disabled people had a hard time getting out and doing things—which made us invisible.”

Disability rights activism changed this. Back then, many children with disabilities never went to school at all. There was no expectation that a local public school could or would meet their needs. In 1975, the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, known as IDEA, passed. The New York Times around that time quoted Dr. Philip R. Jones, president of the Council of Exceptional Children, describing the measure as “a landmark for education of the handicapped in our country,” adding, “It is overcoming 200 years of sin.” After describing the bill’s emphasis on individualized curricula, the Times also reported: “Another sensitive portion of the legislation deals with what has come to be known in education as the issue of mainstreaming. That is the extent to which the handicapped should be isolated in classes of their own or mixed in the so-called mainstream with the nonhandicapped.”

Today, nearly 50 years later, across the United States, there are 7.3 million children with disabilities currently receiving services in the public school system, according to the Pew Research Center. They represent about 15 percent of all public school students. IDEA seeks to help them by mandating “free and appropriate education” for all children and requiring that students be educated in the “least restrictive environment,” or LRE. The law states that “to the maximum extent appropriate, children with disabilities, including children in public or private institutions or other care facilities, are educated with children who are not disabled.” LRE is descended from another legal standard—the least restrictive means test, which is used any time a law or government may impede on a person’s civil liberties. These days, it’s often the rationale for placing children with disabilities in schools with their chronological peers—often referred to as “inclusion or mainstreaming.”

Broadly speaking, authentic inclusion of disabled children is necessary and important because, just as with any child, these children are as deserving of a high-quality education that meets them where they are. But for my daughter, and for children with similar profiles, the practical effect is that, rather than spend her days on skills she needs—brushing her hair and teeth, going to the bathroom—she spends them in a large public high school, sitting in a classroom located beside a loud, distracting cafeteria, working on some pseudo-academic curriculum that is based on videos of current events. The thought of her sitting and watching videos on the marvels of weather and then being asked to fill out a worksheet on what she just watched is absurd. Her worksheets about tornadoes or growing potatoes appear to have been scribbled on by a toddler.

The thought of her sitting and watching videos on the marvels of weather and then being asked to fill out a worksheet on what she just watched is absurd. Her worksheets about tornadoes or growing potatoes appear to have been scribbled on by a toddler.

As we have seen, in practice, the whole concept of LRE is often reduced to the setting where a child learns. But Dr. Mitchell Yell, a professor at the University of South Carolina and an expert on legal issues in special education, explains: “It is actually much more than that. It’s the facilities, personnel, and location. It’s a web of services.” When I asked Yell about how the concept of LRE had come to represent a physical place, he said he wished they had instead called it “LRAE—least restrictive appropriate environment.” He added, “Perhaps then the emphasis would have remained on what is appropriate for that individual child, rather than simply what was available.”

As a teacher of social studies, I see 86 middle school students a day; at any given time, I can have as many as 35 in a class. In order to succeed, one of them may need to sit in the front row away from his peers, while another may need to be in the same seat every day flanked by his best friends. One may never remember to bring his backpack, so may need to keep a folder in the room and a steady supply of pencils and other reminders; another may complete every assignment the day that it is given and ask for additional reading. Teachers are like short-order cooks serving up our subjects. At best, we can tailor every lesson, assignment, fact, and expectation to the child in front of us. It is why the job is both so hard and so rewarding. When you crack the code of how a kid learns, you open up some small but important part of the world to them.

About two-thirds of children with disabilities are included in the same classrooms as their general education peers. Some, with dyslexia, for instance, or ADHD, have modified assignments, tests without time limits, or support for note taking; others are pulled out for speech or OT services. In some cases, students are accompanied by one-to-one aides. For the most part, these students are able to operate in a general education classroom and still get the support they need.

Children like my daughter, whose needs are more complex, tend to be in “special day classes” (SDCs), usually in the same building as their typically developing peers but in a dedicated classroom. Part of the intention of LRE was to avoid the segregation of people with disabilities, so they could attend their neighborhood schools and build relationships in their community. Plus, these schools already exist, equipped with cafeterias, art rooms, and athletic facilities. It is far less expensive for districts and counties to tuck disabled children on the edges of existing facilities than to really address their needs.

I live in Northern California, and the SDCs are managed by the county, not the local school. In functional terms, the county-run SDC is a guest at the high school, but local school or general education teachers have no authority or responsibility to monitor what is happening in that classroom. I have often worried about Mae’s safety in these siloed little classrooms an hour from our home with no daily on-site administration. Her program manager visits her class twice a week, and that is the only oversight or accountability for the teachers and staff who work with her.

Midway through the last school year, we got word that our daughter was struggling in class—huge tantrums every day, screaming, crying, hitting herself. We learned about this because the school nurse reached out to ask whether we were seeing the same behaviors at home (we were not). Only then did I learn that her dedicated one-to-one aide had been away from the school for a month. (My daughter, of course, was not able to tell us.) Then we learned that some complex medical issues would keep the head teacher out of the classroom for the rest of the year. Plus, the program lacked a consistent occupational therapist. The replacement teacher had no teaching credentials at all, let alone experience with children with disabilities. I was told by a county administrator that the replacement teacher’s wife had taught disabled children, so I needn’t worry. The result was that Mae spent most of the school year in a classroom without a credentialed teacher and with a rotating cast of occupational therapists. Had it not been for the consistency of her one-to-one aide (who returned after the first month of school), my nonspeaking child would have found herself surrounded by under- or unqualified strangers.

When parents believe that schools are failing to provide an appropriate education for their child, they can sue for a better placement or services, such as a special school or home-based care or what is classified as “most restrictive,” which means a hospital or residential facility. Unsurprisingly, parents with resources tend to be able to hire lawyers and advocates so their children will have access to specialized private schools or obtain additional services and support. In some cases, these parents can get public funds to cover the cost of a private school that best meets the needs of a student, though this puts heavy financial burdens on school districts and creates serious equity issues.

Inclusion works well for some children with significant disabilities. Not long ago, I spoke with Janee Adams, whose daughter Ruby has Down syndrome and recently graduated from high school. Ruby went to a large public high school in her district, where her mother said she “got to be one of one, everyone knew her.” However, Adams had to fight every step of the way. She hired an advocate and created alliances within the school community so other parents supported Ruby’s presence in the classroom. With Adams’ daughters so close in age, they often were in the same class—one of the reasons Ruby loved school. Some of the more challenging social elements of inclusion were easier because the girls could have friends sleep over at their house together. Now that Ruby has finished high school, Adams told me that she is in a day program that has helped her find employment and holds her accountable in ways that often didn’t happen in school. “Ruby loves it,” Adams says. “She has never been in a place where she completely belonged before, and she is just so happy.”

Our family also has had experiences when inclusion was truly remarkable. Two years ago, my daughter’s teacher collaborated with the theater teacher to create a performance that was written and performed by both general education students and the students in Mae’s class. When the play began, Mae was sitting on a couch while Nirvana blasted through the speakers. She loves music and the students working with her had realized that Nirvana was a special favorite. The student actors would weave it into their story when occasionally Mae would jump up off the couch or laugh loudly. It was a wonderful experience to be at my daughter’s school for something other than a meeting, where the typical kids described how much they learned from working with their disabled peers. In our home, my sons have gained so much from having a sister with complex needs. Their friends who have grown up with Mae also display a level of understanding and empathy that only comes from authentic relationships.

“I feel like I’m stuck in a cage with only special needs students that can see me and interact with me. And the mainstream girls think I’m invisible.”

Some school districts offer a partial inclusion model for students who fall in between inclusion and SDC, where students with disabilities share some low-intensity classes—such as PE or art— with their typically developing peers but are sequestered in other classes for academic programs. I spoke to a neurodivergent student who attends one such program at the large public high school from which my sons graduated. She also holds a job at a local smoothie shop. “I met these mainstream girls last year in PE who I wanted to be good friends with because we had a good conversation,” she told me. “I don’t think they knew how to interact with the neurodivergent kids.” She continued: “I feel like I’m stuck in a cage with only special needs students that can see me and interact with me. And the mainstream girls think I’m invisible.”

She may take PE or electives with her neurotypical peers, but when she wanted to take the genetics section of a science class or manage the swim team, she was told she could not. When her parents pushed back, they were told that the coach of the team did not have the capacity to have her on as a swimmer or manager. They were told that the science class was “not a good fit” even though their daughter had independently done hours of research about her own chromosomal deletion. She longs to be included in the daily goings-on at the school, but without the concerted efforts of both students and staff, she and her peers will operate as though they are of a different caste—functional enough to be adjacent to their typically developing peers, but never admitted into what seems to be an exclusive club.

Without standards to define or measure “inclusion” or its benefits, it becomes one of those educational policies that sound good on paper but are rarely as beneficial to the students they are designed to help. When we make inclusion the goal over excellence, we are “putting the where before the how,” says Douglas Fuchs, a leading researcher on human development and education for children with disabilities at Vanderbilt University.

Fuchs told me his research team created a national database of reading data from 1998 through 2015 for students grades K-12. After analyzing the data using “multilevel growth models,” they found “that mainstreaming, or general classroom placements, did not strengthen the academic achievement of most students with disabilities.” In 2022, the Campbell Collaboration, an international research organization, published a report saying inclusion did not seem to show any positive academic or social-emotional benefit to students. In fact, students who were taught separately in settings designed for them experienced better outcomes.

The longitudinal studies are clear about how blanket policies of inclusion can actually inhibit student progress. In summarizing what we know about inclusion, Fuchs says, “Fifty years of research indicates that placing students with disabilities in general classrooms fails to provide the necessary intensive and expert instruction these children and youth need to succeed in school and in life afterwards.” This means that for some students, the general classroom is an appropriate placement, but for many, there need to be other school-based options that are better suited to meet their specific needs.

“Fifty years of research indicates that placing students with disabilities in general classrooms fails to provide the necessary intensive and expert instruction these children and youth need to succeed in school and in life afterwards.”

In my classroom, there were students with various diagnoses who spent most of their days in general education and were able to follow much of the curriculum. I have seen moments of enormous grace: when students connect over a beloved video game or when a child with autism will blurt out a question that their peers are too shy to ask. For a moment, they are a hero. I have also cringed as the same child picks their nose, not noticing that their peers are recoiling, or doesn’t realize that the clothes they refuse to change may smell. The parent in me dies a little every time I catch the flicker of irritation on a student’s face at the thought of having to work with a peer with disabilities. Or when I look out at lunch and see clusters of students all over campus and then one or two lone kids not really excluded, but not fluent in the language of adolescence. I have often wondered whom our well-intentioned efforts benefit. Do the kids really learn to be tolerant of people who are different than they are? Do kids with disabilities learn to live more easily in the world simply because they are surrounded by it?

I know they sometimes feel left out, aware that there are sleepovers they don’t attend and jokes they will never get. Are those painful feelings worth the experience of being in their local public school classroom? I’ve seen how students with complex needs can often confirm the biases of their peers by behaving strangely or having inappropriate outbursts in the classroom. It is one thing to be polite to a kid with disabilities in the context of your eighth-grade classroom; it is another to invite them to your birthday party.

So what would the best option be? I asked Bill Koski, the founder of Stanford’s Youth and Education Law Project, about which country might have the most advanced models for raising children with disabilities. Finland, he said, thrives at addressing the needs of very different learners by focusing more on integration than inclusion. He explains that there is no “labeling and classification” of students, but “three tiers of intervention” for those who are struggling: general support, intensified support, and specialized support. “As a result,” he says, “a fairly high percentage of Finnish students receive interventions for children with disabilities.” No matter where or who they teach, good teachers do this instinctively, but what sets Finland apart is that it has normalized the concept that every learner has an individual style and those needs should be met by a highly qualified staff of teachers.

Only students with the most complex needs aren’t in classrooms with their peers. A child like Mae would probably stay with her peers through early childhood and then move to a school or classroom where she could be taught life or vocation skills appropriate to her developmental level. One reason this system works is because it’s well funded; the idea that every student needs to learn life skills and independence is seen as fundamental for all students—and a long-term benefit to society at large.

When the focus of education is the integration of all learners, the idea that everyone is worthy of an education is reinforced for both students and families. Even without a national initiative, there are models for children like mine that could work in any school district. One of them is a school within a school. The current model in my county puts one teacher for children with disabilities at a school with their own classroom—an island of “special” in a world of general. What if there were three or four classrooms for children with disabilities on the site of a general education school? The focus could be on providing authentic inclusive experiences when it was appropriate and on fostering independent living skills. Perhaps the general education students could even work with their disabled peers on building those life skills, like, for instance, figuring out how to manage a small business or practice some simple cooking techniques.

Paul Owens is the principal of Cedar Lane School in Fulton, Maryland. Sharing a campus with a middle school and located down the road from a high school, Cedar Lane offers a kind of school-within-a-school model. Owens described “buses going back and forth all day” and said all three school sites share a music and art teacher, allowing for the kind of authentic inclusion that my daughter experienced in last year’s theater program. By having a disabilities school within a general education school, districts would be able to provide better oversight, consistency of staffing, sharing of institutional resources and knowledge, and authentic, thoughtful experiences of inclusion as opposed to just proximity.

When I asked Owens what he would wish for Cedar Lane School, I expected his answers to be predictable: probably more money and more staff. Instead, he said, “I wish my staff had more time for connection instead of compliance,” which is to say spending more time building relationships with students and families and less time on the cumbersome paperwork that defines education for children with disabilities. He added that he wished they could be more effective in helping students transition out of Cedar Lane at the end of high school. For many students with disabilities, graduation from high school is the end of a clear path of state-run services. “Once students graduate and leave Cedar Lane,” he said, “the availability and quality of services is inconsistent and support for students and families is very limited.”

“Once students graduate and leave [school], the availability and quality of services is inconsistent and support for students and families is very limited.”

As Congress is winding down this session, Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) and Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) have sponsored a measure to fully fund IDEA. I asked Huffman what this measure could mean for students with disabilities in this county. For him, the question is personal. He is also a “special needs parent,” he said. In the unlikely event that this bill were to pass, the burden on school districts and counties would be eased considerably, with the federal government funding up to 40 percent of the cost of educating students with disabilities, in contrast to the approximately 14.7 percent of costs that are covered today. This means that in the 2022–2023 school year, counties, states, and districts had to make up a $23.92 billion gap between what the federal government funded and what it would be funding if it committed to the originally intended 40 percent.

As Huffman said: “Every student deserves a quality educational experience, regardless of their physical or developmental disabilities. What’s been missing is the money to make that happen.” Fully funding IDEA would signal to schools and families that the federal government is invested in students with disabilities. However, without high standards for training teachers, precise definitions of concepts like inclusion, and nationwide standards for services that children with disabilities receive, the system may still perpetuate inequity by offering the minimum to those who need it most.

When we insist on the pseudo-inclusion of proximity, my daughter’s humanity gets lost. Mae is not her age, nor should she become some symbol of vulnerability used to teach empathy to those fortunate enough to drive cars and spend hours on TikTok. She is a person who deserves an education that meets and acknowledges her specific needs, that focuses on best practices and authentic, inclusive experiences that help her develop the skills she will need to be as independent as possible. When parents fight for full inclusion, what they really are fighting for is the recognition that their child is as valuable as anyone else’s. When the focus is compliance over consistency, when chronological age overshadows developmental needs, and when we say we want to foster empathy but instead confirm second-class citizenship on those for whom appropriate is all we are willing to concede, we send a clear message to children and families like mine about their value.

If you want a glimpse into what Project 2025’s education agenda might look like if implemented nationwide, look no further than Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis has already been leading book-banning, inflaming culture wars over LGBTQ rights, and dismantling comprehensive sex education.

Recent reporting by the Orlando Sentinel revealed that Florida state officials are pressuring some districts to adopt an abstinence-only approach, stripping students of basic knowledge about contraception, anatomy, and human development. Students are being taught abstinence as the sole method of avoiding pregnancy and STDs, and terms like “abuse,” “fluids,” and “LGBTQ” are absent from classrooms. “Under recent changes to state law,” reports the Associated Press, “it’s now up to the Florida Department of Education to sign off on school districts’ curriculum on reproductive health and disease education if they use teaching materials other than the state’s designated textbook.”

This week, Mother Jones Creator Kat Abughazaleh analyzes one of these state-approved plans, “Real Essentials,” which encourages “spiritual intimacy” and traditional marriage. The plan’s author has a history of citing pro-abstinence education research from the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025.

Florida’s approach is a test for a much broader movement, Kat argues. Just pages into Project 2025, you’ll find a promise to register “educators and public librarians” who purvey “pornography”—a term so vaguely defined as to potentially include any term currently being weaponized in the culture war—as registered “sex offenders.” Another section calls for provisions to prevent types of sex education that might “promote prostitution, or provide a funnel effect for abortion facilities and school field trips to clinics.”

For more details, watch Kat’s full breakdown of Florida’s new sex education laws.

In June, Oklahoma’s Trump-supporting top school official, Ryan Walters, ordered the state’s schools to teach the Bible in class—and this week, his department put in a $3 million proposal to buy 55,000 Bibles for Oklahoma schools. But out of the thousands of versions available for purchase, it seems only two holy books fit the state Department of Education’s strict criteria: one sold by Donald J. Trump, and one sold by his son Don Junior.

Surprise, surprise.

On Friday, the nonprofit news outlet Oklahoma Watch reported that the superintendent’s bid documents included specific standards for the Bibles set to be used in Oklahoma classrooms, standards only met by two editions.

According to the documents, the books must:

• Be bound in leather or a leather-like material
• Include the Pledge of Allegiance, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights
• Be either the old or new version of the King James Bible

Supplier Mardel Christian & Education reportedly searched through the 2,900 versions of the Bible it carries and found that none fit the bill—but Trump’s “God Bless the USA Bible” does.

As we reported earlier this year, Trump began hawking the “God Bless the USA” Bible—about $60 a pop—in March, a month after he started selling his $400 sneakers and other ungodly expensive pieces of merch.

The only other book to fit the bill? The “We The People Bible,” endorsed by Donald Trump Jr., at a price of $90.

Superintendent Ryan Walters’ office stands by the criteria, telling the Hill in a statement, “There are hundreds of Bible publishers, and we expect a robust competition for this proposal.”

The move is unsurprising from Walters’ administration. Last November, the Oklahoma superintendent endorsed Trump, promising that under the ex-president, “This cancer that is the teachers union will be driven out of our schools.” Walters also plans to join the GOP candidate’s reelection team, claiming he’s “excited to see [Trump] dismantle the Department of Education.”

Update, October 4: This story has been updated to credit Oklahoma Watch, which reported the Oklahoman article previously cited.

In June, Oklahoma’s Trump-supporting top school official, Ryan Walters, ordered the state’s schools to teach the Bible in class—and this week, his department put in a $3 million proposal to buy 55,000 Bibles for Oklahoma schools. But out of the thousands of versions available for purchase, it seems only two holy books fit the state Department of Education’s strict criteria: one sold by Donald J. Trump, and one sold by his son Don Junior.

Surprise, surprise.

On Friday, the nonprofit news outlet Oklahoma Watch reported that the superintendent’s bid documents included specific standards for the Bibles set to be used in Oklahoma classrooms, standards only met by two editions.

According to the documents, the books must:

• Be bound in leather or a leather-like material
• Include the Pledge of Allegiance, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights
• Be either the old or new version of the King James Bible

Supplier Mardel Christian & Education reportedly searched through the 2,900 versions of the Bible it carries and found that none fit the bill—but Trump’s “God Bless the USA Bible” does.

As we reported earlier this year, Trump began hawking the “God Bless the USA” Bible—about $60 a pop—in March, a month after he started selling his $400 sneakers and other ungodly expensive pieces of merch.

The only other book to fit the bill? The “We The People Bible,” endorsed by Donald Trump Jr., at a price of $90.

Superintendent Ryan Walters’ office stands by the criteria, telling the Hill in a statement, “There are hundreds of Bible publishers, and we expect a robust competition for this proposal.”

The move is unsurprising from Walters’ administration. Last November, the Oklahoma superintendent endorsed Trump, promising that under the ex-president, “This cancer that is the teachers union will be driven out of our schools.” Walters also plans to join the GOP candidate’s reelection team, claiming he’s “excited to see [Trump] dismantle the Department of Education.”

Update, October 4: This story has been updated to credit Oklahoma Watch, which reported the Oklahoman article previously cited.

Read 29 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Last school year’s historic protests over the war in Gaza roiled campuses and dominated headlines, with more than 3,100 students arrested nationwide. Over the summer, the protests cooled off and students returned home. But college administrators spent the summer crafting new free speech policies designed to discourage students from continuing what they started last spring. Between May and August, at least 20 colleges and university systems—representing more than 50 campuses—tightened the rules governing protest on their property.

The protest encampments that appeared on more than 130 campuses last spring served as a visual reminder of the 2 million displaced people in Gaza. Students held teach-ins, slept in tents, created art together, ate, and prayed in these makeshift societies—some for hours or days, others for entire weeks or months. The free speech organization FIRE estimated last week that 1 in 10 students has personally participated in a protest regarding Israel’s war in Gaza. The protesters demanded that their schools disclose any investments in (variously) the Israeli military, the state of Israel, or the military-industrial complex in general—and disentangle their endowments from war-makers. 

Some student groups won meetings with administrators, disclosure of the terms of their college’s endowment, or representation for Palestine studies in their school’s curriculum. A few schools agreed to work towards divestment or implement new investment screening procedures. Students elsewhere, though, saw no concessions on their goals from college administrators—and were left, instead, to spend months doing court-ordered community service or working through a lengthy school-ordered disciplinary process.  

Prior to last year’s protests, “time, space, and manner” restrictions on campus protest were considered standard practice, said Risa Lieberwitz, a Cornell University professor of labor and employment law who serves as general counsel for the American Association of University Professors. Many universities had pre-existing policies prohibiting, for example, obstructing a walkway or occupying an administrative office. Those policies were usually enforced via threats of suspension or expulsion. This year’s restrictions are different, said Lieberwitz, who previously described the new rules as “a resurgence of repression on campuses that we haven’t seen since the late 1960s.”

Lieberwitz is particularly concerned with policies requiring protest organizers to register their protest, under their own names, with the university they are protesting. “There’s a real contradiction between registering to protest and being able to actually go out and protest just operationally,” she said. “Then there’s also the issue of the chilling effect that comes from that, which comes from knowing that this is a mechanism that allows for surveillance.” Students who are required to register themselves as protest organizers may prefer to avoid expressing themselves at all. 

MIT has lots of rules about ethical funding, about the duty to do no harm with one’s research. And yet, they refuse to apply any of those rules to their own behavior.

“The point of having a rally is to be disruptive, anyway,” said MIT PhD student Richard Solomon, who participated in last year’s campus protests. For Solomon, divestment is personal. Last month, Mohammed Masbah, a Gazan student he refers to as his brother and who spent several months living with his family, was killed in an Israeli airstrike. As Solomon pointed out in a column for the student newspaper, Masbah was likely killed with the help of technology developed at American universities like MIT. 

“MIT has lots of rules about ethical funding, about the duty to do no harm with one’s research,” he told Mother Jones. “And yet they refuse to apply any of those rules to their own behavior, their own research, their own institutional collaborations.” It’s hard, he said, for students to respect protest rules when their school doesn’t respect its own rules, either. (When asked to comment, a MIT representative pointed me to a speech by the school’s president last spring, in which she stated that MIT “relies on rigorous processes to ensure all funded research complies with MIT policies and US law.”)

Beyond demanding that protests be registered, many schools have banned camping on their grounds. Some have required that anyone wearing a mask on campus—whether for health reasons or otherwise—be ready to present identification when asked. Others have banned all unregistered student “expressive activity” (a euphemistic phrase that generally covers a range of public demonstrations including protests, rallies, flyering, or picketing) gatherings over a certain size. Still others have banned all use of speakers or amplified sound during the school week (including, in one case, the use of some acoustic instruments). 

At Carnegie Mellon University, students and faculty were informed during the last week of August that any “expressive activity” involving more than 25 students must be registered—under the organizers’ names—at least three business days prior to the event, and be signed off on by a “Chief Risk Officer.” 

In response, a group of Carnegie Mellon students, faculty members, and alumni lined up on a grassy campus quadrangle holding up signs labeled “1” through “29.” This act, now prohibited on Carnegie Mellon’s campus, drove home the policy’s absurdity—on a campus of 13,000 students, half of whom live on campus, a gathering of 25+ people may be harder to avoid than to initiate.

David Widder, who earned his PhD at Carnegie Mellon last year, called the new policy “authoritarian,” and unlike anything he’d seen during his six years at the institution. “We hoped to playfully but visibly violate the policy—and show that the sky does not fall when students and faculty speak out about issues that matter to them,” he told Mother Jones. “We can’t credibly claim to be a university with these gross restrictions on free expression.” 

According to a statement by the university’s provost, the new policy was intended to “ensure coordination with the university and support the conditions for civil and safe exchange.”

Linguistics Professor Uju Anya, who spoke at the rally, pointed out that at least $2.8 billion of Carnegie Mellon’s research funding has come from the Department of Defense since 2008. “We know that our universities have skin in the game now, in the weapons and in the money,” Anya said. “So, ultimately, Carnegie Mellon is in bed with baby bombers, and they don’t want us—the members of this community, who also have a stake in what the university does—to openly question them.” 

At some schools, the conflict over newly instituted protest policies has already made its way to the courts. The ACLU of Indiana announced August 29 that it would be suing Indiana University over an “expressive activity” policy which, like CMU’s, was implemented in late summer. The policy under debate defines “expressive activity” in part as  “Communicating by any lawful verbal, written, audio visual, or electronic means,” as well as “Protesting” and “Distributing literature” and “circulating petitions.” 

The policy limits “expressive activity” to the hours between 6 a.m. and 11 p.m. “This is written so broadly, if any one of us was to wear a T-shirt supporting a cause at 11:15 p.m. while walking through IU, we would be violating the policy,” Ken Falk, legal director of the ACLU of Indiana, said. “The protections of the First Amendment do not end at 11:00 p.m., only to begin again at 6 a.m.” Since Indiana University is a public school, it is bound by the First Amendment and can’t limit speech as strictly as a private college. 

Lieberwitz, the AAUP lawyer, said she expects more legal challenges like the ACLU’s this coming year. According to the Crowd Counting Consortium at Harvard University, protests on college campuses are spiking again, though not at the levels seen last year. On at least two campuses, protesters have already been arrested. And between August 15 and September 3, there wasn’t a single day without some sort of Palestine solidarity action on a college campus somewhere in the United States.

---

The following is an incomplete list of US university protest policies changed between May and August of 2024. 

Massachusetts Institute of Technology: As of August 30, unauthorized tent encampments are prohibited. Authorized demonstrations on campus may only be organized by “Departments, Labs, or Centers, recognized student organizations, and employee unions.”

University of Virginia: Updated “Rules on Demonstrations and Access to Shared Spaces” as of August 26. Non-permitted tents are now forbidden, no tent can stay up for over 18 hours, unless “in use for official University or school events,” and anyone wearing a mask on University property must present identification if asked. No outdoor events are permitted between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. 

University of Wisconsin, Madison: Updated its policy on “expressive activity” August 28. “Expressive activity,” defined as activities protected by the First Amendment including “speech, lawful assembly, protesting, distributing literature and chalking,” is now prohibited within 25 feet of university building entrances.

University of California (1o campuses): Camping or erecting tents is forbidden as of August 19. Masking “to conceal identity” is banned. 

California State University (23 campuses): “Camping, overnight demonstrations, or overnight loitering” is banned, as are “disguises or concealment of identity,” as of August 19. 

Virginia Commonwealth University: As of August 9, anyone on University property covering their face must show identification. Encampments are explicitly prohibited, “unless approved in advance by the University.” 

University of Pennsylvania: As of June 7, encampments are banned, as are any overnight demonstrations, and “non-news” livestreaming. “Unauthorized overnight activities” are to be considered trespassing. 

James Madison University: As of August, no “tents or other items” may be used to create a shelter on campus unless approved by the university. Chalking on walkways is prohibited. “Camping” is defined as “the use of any item to create a shelter.”

Indiana University (nine campuses): As of July 29, “expressive activity” is limited to the hours between 6 a.m. and 11 p.m., and any “signs or temporary structures” are now required to be approved at least 10 days in advance of “expressive activity” by the university. 

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: As of August 21, camping is prohibited except in designated areas. 

University of South Florida system (three campuses): As of August 26, “activities in public spaces” after 5 p.m. are prohibited unless students request a reservation. 

Harvard University: Plans to ban “outdoor chalking” and “unapproved signage” are in process as of July 30, according to a draft obtained by the Harvard Crimson. Indoor protests have already been banned as of January 2024. 

University of Connecticut (five campuses): As of August 21, students cannot make amplified sound through speakers or megaphones, or use certain acoustic instruments like “trumpets, trombones, or violins” in public spaces at any point during the day Monday through Friday, with official university events excepted. 

Carnegie Mellon University: As of August 23, an “event involving expressive activity” occurring on campus “must be registered with the University if more than 25 participants are expected to attend” at least three business days in advance.  

Pomona College: As of August 2024, encampments are prohibited, and noncompliance may result in “detention and arrest by law enforcement.” Additional police officers have been hired to patrol campus.

Emory University: As of August 27, camping is prohibited on campus, and protests are prohibited between midnight and 7 a.m. 

Emerson College: As of August 23, protests may only occur between 8 a.m. and 7 p.m., and must be pre-registered with the college. 

Rutgers University: As of August 20, Demonstrations must be held between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. and only in “designated public forum areas.” 

University of Minnesota (five campuses): On August 27, university administrators unveiled new  “guidelines for spontaneous expressive activity,” which state that all protests must end by 10 p.m., must use no more than one megaphone, and that groups of over 100 people must register their spontaneous expressive activity at least two weeks in advance.

Syracuse University: As of August, “unauthorized use or assembly of tents or other temporary shelter structures” is prohibited.

Did your school implement a new protest policy this year? Email shurwitz@motherjones.com.

---

Correction, September 13: An earlier version of this story mischaracterized the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s protest policy as prohibiting protests within 25 feet of university buildings, rather than prohibiting protest within 25 feet of university building entrances.