MindShift: Recent Episodes

View Details

View the full episode transcript.

In 2013, Rita Pierson, a middle school teacher from Texas, walked onto a stage, wearing a bright red jacket, to deliver an unscripted speech to TED Conference attendees. The video of that speech would become one of the most viewed TED Talks at that time.

In just under eight minutes, she made a simple, unforgettable argument: kids don’t learn from people they don’t like. The talk, titled Every Kid Needs a Champion, is often the first time people hear someone describe teaching not just as instruction, but as a relationship. The video has become a staple of teacher professional development sessions across the country in staff meetings and college classrooms.

More than a decade later, the message lands in a very different educational climate. Teachers report high levels of stress, staffing shortages are common and burnout remains a major concern. Exploring her presentation today raises important questions: What does it actually take to be the kind of teacher Pierson described? And is it sustainable?

The teacher behind the TED TalkBefore her talk went viral, Rita Pierson was already well known among educators in Texas. She came from a family of teachers and spent decades working in classrooms and advocating for students who often felt overlooked.

Her daughter, Kristin Pierson Forrest, remembers that relationships were at the center of everything her mother did.

“She helped remind teachers that it’s okay to say ‘I love you.’ It’s okay to let the kids know that they are loved,” Forrest said. “There’s so many kids out there who don’t know that.”

That idea shows up clearly in the talk. Teachers, she said, have the power to build relationships, even with students who struggle in school.

But her daughter said Pierson also understood the emotional demands of that kind of work.

“She reminded me quickly [during] my first year teaching that I’m no good to my kids if I’m exhausted,” Forrest said.

A message passed from teacher to teacherFor many educators, Pierson’s talk appears during professional development at the start of the school year. That’s how Melissa K. Stanley encountered it when she was teaching in K–12 classrooms.

“It really resonated with me,” Stanley said. “I felt like I was meeting someone who viewed education and viewed the role of a teacher the same way that I did.”

Today she trains future teachers of secondary social studies education at Central Michigan University, where Pierson’s message is still part of the curriculum. Before her students begin their pre-service teaching placements, Stanley asks them to watch the talk.

The video helps her introduce students to what educators call asset-based pedagogy, an approach that focuses on students’ strengths and experiences rather than what students lack.

Studies have found that students often show stronger engagement, greater belonging and better academic outcomes when teachers build on students’ strengths and experiences rather than focusing primarily on deficits. Instead of asking what students lack, teachers focus on what they bring to the table.

But for some future educators, Stanley said, this approach is new and they don’t know where to start. This video helps her pre-service teachers start talking about what it means to build relationships with students so they can start to apply asset-based pedagogy.

“They’re about to step into classrooms for the first time and they’re nervous,” said Stanley.

When caring becomes exhausting by designThe kind of relational teaching Pierson described requires emotional labor. For teachers already juggling large class sizes, administrative demands and behavioral challenges, that energy can run out quickly. Teacher burnout has been a major concern in recent years and fewer people are entering the profession. Surveys consistently show high levels of stress among educators and many teachers leave the profession within their first five years.

Researchers like professor Ganga Bey at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are looking more closely at the emotional dynamics of teaching and how educators can sustain themselves while still showing up for students. Bey studies how people respond to stress and why similar experiences can affect individuals differently. “Not everyone who is exposed to stress will deal with it in the same way,” Bey said. “Dealing with it has a lot of implications for how that stress will impact people’s health.”

Teaching provides plenty of opportunities for stressful encounters. Examples may include a heated argument with a student or a classroom moment that spirals unexpectedly. According to Bey, the way teachers interpret those moments can influence how stressful they become physically and emotionally. For instance, if a teacher interprets a student’s outburst as a personal attack, the body may register the encounter as a threat.

But if the teacher understands the behavior as a sign the student is struggling, the response can shift. “You wouldn’t be treating someone badly like that if you yourself weren’t suffering in some way,” Bey added. That reframing doesn’t mean ignoring harmful behavior. Instead, Bey said it can reduce the intensity of the stress response and make it easier to stay grounded.

Bey describes this mindset as part of what she calls a vitalizing identity, which is a way of understanding yourself and others that emphasizes connection, compassion and shared humanity. At its core, she said, it’s about expanding the boundaries of who we include in our circle of care.

Burnout often occurs, Bey said, when educators consistently place students’ needs above their own without receiving the support they need. “One would hope that because teachers give up so much of themselves that others would pour so much into them to sustain the work that they do. And that does not happen,” she said. Instead, many teachers are left trying to set boundaries that school systems often do not support.

“Love, to me, is the idea of opening our ego boundaries to include everyone else,” Bey said, and teachers have to include themselves in their own circles of care. In other words, caring for students cannot come at the expense of caring for yourself, which is the lesson Pierson emphasized with her daughter.

Rita Pierson’s continued legacy For Stanley’s college students, Pierson’s talk often becomes a reference point throughout their training. They return to it when they’re thinking about classroom management, lesson design or how to respond to difficult moments.

“We have a discussion about what that looks like and how do we keep our enthusiasm for teaching when things are hard—when things don’t go as well as we want them to, despite best intentions or despite support that we provide for students,” said Stanley.

Even with the fatigue that comes with repeated views of the TED Talk during professional development, Pierson’s message continues to resonate with educators. Stanley believes that’s because the talk gives them a license to teach the way they want to. That doesn’t mean the work becomes easy; building relationships with students takes time, patience and emotional effort. But Pierson’s legacy reminds educators that those relationships are not separate from learning. They are what make learning possible.

For many teachers, that idea still feels worth holding onto.

Episode TranscriptNimah Gobir: Welcome to MindShift, where we explore the future of learning and how we raise our kids. I’m Nimah Gobir.

Nimah Gobir: It’s summertime. School hasn’t started yet. The hallways are still quiet, and the kids are still sleeping in, but teachers? They’re back in school early to attend mandatory professional development sessions. Also known as PD. These might include discussing new protocols, hashing out curriculum and getting inspired for the new school year.

Nimah Gobir: If I asked teachers ‘What’s the one piece of PD you just know is coming?’ A lot of them would say the same thing: “Every kid needs a champion.” A TED Talk given by a teacher named Rita Pierson.

Rita Pierson: Every child deserves a champion, an adult who will never give up on them, who understands the power of connection and insists that they become the best they can possibly be.

Nimah Gobir: In our last episode, we talked about how teaching is harder than ever – and how schools tend to focus on supporting kids while overlooking the adults who make learning possible: teachers.

Nimah Gobir: In this episode, we take a look at Rita Pierson’s viral talk and what it tells us about how relationships shape learning. We’ll meet the people who knew Rita best, the educators who carry her philosophy forward, and the researcher studying what happens to our bodies and minds when we lead with love.

Beth Jarzabek: Every time somebody finds out I teach middle school, they’re like, ‘Oh bless you.’ Like that’s the that’s the first reaction. And I’m like, Yeah, I know, because everybody remembers middle school is such a hard transition

Nimah Gobir: Beth Jarzabek teaches English in Ludlow, Massachusetts. She works with the kids who struggle the most with reading and writing.

Beth Jarzabek: I have all three grades. So I teach sixth, seventh, and eighth.

Nimah Gobir: Since her students need more support, there’s a stigma about being placed in her class

Beth Jarzabek: Like, ‘Oh, you have to go to Mrs. J’s class.”

Nimah Gobir: These are kids who often mask academic frustration with misbehavior. They might act out. They shut down. But Beth sees through it.

Beth Jarzabek: Their other teachers may not see them the same way I do. So I try to make those connections and and try to be their champion

Nimah Gobir: The idea of being a students’ champion comes straight from Rita Pierson. Like many teachers Beth first watched her TED Talk video during professional development.

Beth Jarzabek: There were people like, you know, who were kind of rolling their eyes and whatnot. But it resonated with maybe when she talked about the kids that she had that, you know were the kids that were struggling, that the and the fact that she said to them, they put us all together to show everybody else how it’s done.

Nimah Gobir: Here’s the clip from Rita’s TED Talk

[Rita’s TED Talk: One year I came up with a bright idea. I told all my students, you were chosen to be in my class. Because I am the best teacher and you are the best students. They put us all together so we could show everybody else how to do it.]

Beth Jarzabek: And I was like, oh, I love that.

Nimah Gobir: So Beth decided to bring that same energy into her own classroom, especially for kids who rarely get encouraged by adults.

Beth Jarzabek: I started, you know, just trying to be that hype person, you know, when I go when I would go into my neighbor’s classroom, I would be like, Oh, which kids can I steal from you? You know, I’m like, oh, or if a kid got transferred in, I was like, I found out how cool you were, and I told them that I want, wanted you in my classroom. And it gave the kids like a little boost.

Beth Jarzabek: Or I’ll say to them, you know, like, hey, I’m telling all these people how awesome you are. I’m like, you gotta show them how awesome you are. And they’re like, okay, well, for you, I’ll do it.

Nimah Gobir: she’s tapping into something we know from decades of research. A positive relationship with even one caring adult is one of the strongest predictors of: better attendance, stronger academic performance, and improved social-emotional skills

Nimah Gobir: Several studies find that students with strong teacher relationships can gain the equivalent of up to an extra year of learning — especially those who struggle the most.

Nimah Gobir: And here’s something else: supportive teacher–student relationships protect teachers too. Studies show that educators who feel connected to their students report significantly lower burnout and higher job satisfaction, even in high-stress environments.

Beth Jarzabek: I don’t have to be your favorite, but I’m still gonna go to bat with you. You are still going to know that you’re safe with me. You are still going to know that you have a valued place in my classroom.

Nimah Gobir: She reminds herself of that, even on the hardest days.

Beth Jarzabek: I try to remember when everything is falling apart I’m here for them to be that person in this tumultuous time in their life is really such an honor. Sometimes it’s easier to remember that than others. And there’s definitely days that I I go home and I like I’m under a weighted blanket. But I try to bring myself back to that, you know, what an honor it is to be the safe place for these kids because some of them don’t have it otherwise.

Nimah Gobir: Up next, we’ll explore why Rita Pierson’s message still resonates — who she was, how teachers are putting her ideas into practice, and what it takes to care for students without burning out.

Nimah Gobir: Rita Pierson’s TED Talk reached millions of teachers, but behind the scenes, the story of how it even happened is almost as special as the talk itself.

Juliet Blake: I joined Ted working two days a week to try and help them figure out whether or not they could make TV.

Juliet Blake: And I said, Of course you can do TV, it’s SNL for nerds.

Nimah Gobir: Juliet Blake , was the head of television for TED in 2013. She was producing a TV special on education — it included John Legend, Bill Gates, Sir Ken Robinson… big names. But she couldn’t shake off the feeling that something was missing.

Juliet Blake: Through YouTube and I came across Rita. And the video that was that existed online wasn’t great, but I could see she had this enormous personality and that she was so authentic.

Nimah Gobir: After seeing clips of Rita giving teaching tips, she spent months trying to track her down

Juliet Blake: I was getting a bit desperate.

Nimah Gobir: Rita wasn’t a celebrity educator at the time. She was a longtime teacher and administrator in Houston who came from a family of educators.

Juliet Blake: And eventually I was calling different school districts in Houston. And I left a message for her at a school

Nimah Gobir: Then one evening Juliet’s phone rang.

Juliet Blake: I got a call one evening, and she just went, ‘Hello,’ and I went, ‘Rita, Rita Pearson?’ And she went, ‘Sure am.’ And I went, ‘I have been looking you for you for months.’ She said, ‘Why?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m producing a show for Ted.’ And she said these magical words that made me fall in love with her immediately. ‘Who’s Ted?’

Nimah Gobir: From there, they talked on the phone almost every night—once Rita got home from teaching. They were trying to figure out what she might talk about for her presentation.

Juliet Blake: She would talk to me about her mother and her father being educators and the schools that she’d worked in

Nimah Gobir: Rita could move seamlessly between heartbreaking stories about students and cracking jokes about the realities of teaching. And slowly, through those late-night phone calls, the TED Talk started to take shape.

Juliet Blake: And then she said, I need to write this, don’t I? I said, Yes, this is how it works. You not only have to write it, you have to learn it.

Nimah Gobir: But when Rita arrived in New York for rehearsal…

Juliet Blake: And she goes, ‘Honey, I didn’t learn it.’

Nimah Gobir: Juliet was panicking… Rita was not.

Juliet Blake: And she goes, You sit here and I’ll be on the stage and give me, tell me when I’ve got to wrap up, do this, and I’ll bring it to a close.

Juliet Blake: And I just thought, you know what? I just trust this woman to be brilliant. I just know that she’s going to do it and it’s gonna be great.

Juliet Blake: And it was.

Nimah Gobir: That talk given live and mostly off the cuff and it is the one millions of teachers know today. Rita, on stage, speaking straight from the heart about how relationships are important for learning

[Rita’s TED Talk: But one of the things that we never discuss or we rarely discuss is the value and importance of human connection…relationships]

Nimah Gobir: Juliet remembers her as one of the most authentic speakers she’s ever worked with. And Rita’s daughter, Kristin Pierson Forrest says this all makes sense.

Kristin Pierson Forrest: My mother’s never written down a speech in her life.

Kristin Pierson Forrest: there might be maybe some bullet points, but she always knew exactly what she wanted to say and how she wanted to get it across.

Nimah Gobir: Kristin says her mom’s taught elementary and junior high students for over 40 years. Her entire philosophy came down to one lesson:

Kristin Pierson Forrest: It’s okay to say I love you. It’s okay to let the kids know that that that they are loved, because there’s so many kids out there who don’t know that, who don’t inherently know that they are love. And so to explicitly tell kids, I care about you, you know, I’m here for you. I love you, and I’m gonna work my butt off for you.

Nimah Gobir: Kristin spent 15 years teaching in Houston herself, and she says her mother’s approach shaped her own practice.

Kristin Pierson Forrest: her work was centered around relationships. It was centered around relationship building and that was the central part of who I got to be as a teacher because I got that from her.

Nimah Gobir: But she’s also quick to point out that her mom wasn’t naïve about the realities of teaching. Rita loved her students fiercely, but she knew that caring deeply for students wasn’t enough to protect her from burnout or from a system that often asks too much with too little support.

Kristin Pierson Forrest: And she reminded me quickly, my first year teaching, that I’m no good to my kids if I’m exhausted.

Rita’s TED Talk: When Kristin had an especially hard day in the classroom. Rita would say, “You get 5 minutes.”

Kristin Pierson Forrest: It just means that you know, your sadness, there’s an end point to it. So whatever that five minutes is, it might be a day, it might be a week, it might be a month. But just know that at some point there’s going to be an end to it.

Nimah Gobir: Kristin says those lessons from her mom took on a very different meaning not long after the TED Talk was filmed.

Kristin Pierson Forrest: After you know, they shot that TED talk, she she passed about three months later.

Nimah Gobir: Kirstin isn’t in the classroom anymore, but she still works with educators. she brings her mom’s presence with her everywhere.

Kristin Pierson Forrest: I think about my mom every day, and it’s been close to 13 years since she was gone.

Kristin Pierson Forrest: And even the day she passed, I had to remind myself, okay, you get five minutes. I don’t know if my five minutes is over yet. I really I really don’t know. But I I haven’t stayed in a sad place clearly, but but it’s definitely reminded me to pick myself up, dust myself off, and and what’s the next thing?

Nimah Gobir: More than a decade later, Rita Pierson’s talk is still finding new audiences – not just among teachers, but among the people learning to become teachers. And that’s where Melissa Stanley comes in.

Melissa K. Stanley: I am Dr. Melissa K. Stanley and I am the director of secondary social studies education at Central Michigan University.

Melissa K. Stanley: I teach social studies methods courses to help prepare them to be social studies teachers.

Nimah Gobir: She first saw Rita’s talk back when she was teaching in K–12 classrooms.

Melissa K. Stanley: And it really resonated with me and resonated with the way that I taught. I felt like I was meeting someone who viewed education and viewed the role of a teacher the same way that I did.

Nimah Gobir: And once Melissa became a teacher-educator at Central Michigan University. The talk became part of how she teaches. It’s a required video during the semester that her class does their pre-student teaching.

Melissa K. Stanley: They’re pretty nervous. And that is the semester that they do their pre-student teaching. It’s is the first real experience that they’ll get with students in going into classrooms.

Nimah Gobir: Melissa uses the video to introduce students to asset-based pedagogy.

Melissa K. Stanley: It’s looking at the whole student and it’s valuing what they bring and building relationships with them when the history of education has traditionally been kind of a deficit approach.

Nimah Gobir: That means seeing students through their problems rather than their potential.

Nimah Gobir: Studies show that when teachers take an asset-based approach, valuing students’ cultural strengths, community knowledge, and lived identities, students show stronger academic engagement, better attendance, and improved well-being. And teachers themselves experience more purpose and lower burnout because relationships feel reciprocal rather than adversarial.

Melissa K. Stanley: That really helps us have conversations and then use it as a gateway into conversations with students about how we adopt an asset bit based pedagogy and how we value the whole student and we value the strengths they bring to the classroom, the diversity they bring to the classroom, and how we work with that to build relationships and then also help them grow and meet their goals and their dreams for their lives.

Nimah Gobir: for some preservice teachers, this is a brand-new idea. Their own schooling may not have included teachers who championed them. So imagining themselves as that kind of teacher can be hard.

Melissa K. Stanley: It generally generates a lot of questions about okay, how do we do this? This is great. I would love to get there. That’s kind of an end goal for me. But what are the steps along the way? What does that look like in practical application?

Nimah Gobir: They also discuss Rita’s line about joy.

[Rita’s TED Talk:Teaching and learning should bring joy.]

Melissa K. Stanley: But if you’re engaging in this type of teaching and this type of work with students, not every moment is going to be joy.

[Rita’s TED Talk: So teachers become great actors and great actresses. And we come to work when we don’t feel like it. And we listen to policy that doesn’t make sense. And we teach anyway. We teach anyway because that’s what we do. ]

Melissa K. Stanley: So we have a discussion about what that looks like and how do we keep our enthusiasm for teaching when things are hard, when things don’t go as well as we want them to, despite best intentions or despite support that we provide for students.

Nimah Gobir: Melissa is naming something important. Teachers want to show up for kids the way Rita did, but the reality is that teaching is stressful. And not just the piles of grading or the endless meetings—interpersonal stress can hit teachers particularly hard. It affects their bodies and can leave them feeling emotionally exhausted.

Nimah Gobir: Dr. Ganga Bey is a researcher at the University of North Carolina. She studies how stress affects the body and why stress hits some people harder than others. And one thing she’s interested in is how the way we think about other people changes how stress affects us.

Ganga Bey: Love to me is this idea of opening our ego boundaries to include everyone else in it.

Nimah Gobir: In simpler terms: seeing other people’s well-being as connected to your own. That can matter a lot in the classroom. Because when a student lashes out, a teacher can interpret that in different ways. They can think: This kid doesn’t respect me. Or: This kid is struggling right now.

Nimah Gobir: And Ganga says that shift matters physically—not just emotionally.

Ganga Bey: So because of that, I’m literally gonna process that in a less stressful way.

Nimah Gobir: Now to be clear—this is not the same thing as toxic positivity. This isn’t: ‘Just smile through abuse.’ And it’s not: ‘Teachers should sacrifice themselves for kids.’ In fact, Ganga says one of the biggest problems in education is that teachers are already being asked to give too much of themselves.

Ganga Bey: Teachers are a particular group of people. Who encounter a tremendous amount of stressors and some of them are avoidable stressors right and part of the way that we organize our society teachers are undervalued um overworked and and live in a largely thankless space

Nimah Gobir: Teachers are reporting record-high stress levels, elevated rates of depression, and many are leaving the profession within the first five years. Ganga says burnout often happens when teachers keep putting everyone else’s needs ahead of their own for too long.

Ganga Bey: I think burnout happens when you have pushed out, pushed through as much as possibly can because you have centered the needs of these children that you have been serving above even your own.

Nimah Gobir: So her argument isn’t “love harder.” It’s that teachers have to include themselves in that care too.

Ganga Bey: It means that when my body is signaling to me that I am tired…we give equal weight to our needs

Nimah Gobir:That balance—staying open to students without completely draining yourself—is hard. But Ganga says people like Rita Pierson matter because that care seem possible

Ganga Bey: I love to hear about Rita because I know that there are other people out there like that who embody this. And the more that we make them into real human beings and make them accessible, the more than I think we can convince others that it’s worth endeavoring to even be like that.

Ganga Bey: Regardless of what the world right now may make us think, that it is worth it for us to pursue a world and a society and hold on to the idea that being loving can be the norm.

View Details

School purchasing can seem like an administrative backwater, far removed from the heart of teaching and learning. But the way schools buy products and services like educational software or tutoring programs can influence whether students actually learn, some policymakers argue.

Instead of paying vendors simply for delivering these tools, school districts are experimenting with a new approach to purchasing, called outcomes-based contracting, in which part of a vendor’s payment depends on whether students actually use the service and meet agreed-upon academic goals. The idea is to share risk between schools and vendors — and create incentives for both sides to pay closer attention to whether an intervention is working.

Outcomes-based contracts have long been used in the healthcare industry. For example, insurers often pay drug companies less if patients don’t improve. Since the pandemic, the method has spread rapidly in education, particularly for tutoring and educational technology. A new Michigan law requires schools to use this type of contract to tap into a $50 million fund for online or virtual tutoring. School districts in Florida, Texas, California and more than 20 other states are also experimenting with the approach, according to the Center for Outcomes Based Contracting, a nonprofit organization that promotes the practice.

The first independent evaluation of outcomes-based contracts offers reasons for optimism, but also for caution. Researchers from WestEd, a San Francisco-based nonprofit research organization, studied tutoring and educational technology programs in eight early-adopter districts in California, Florida, Mississippi and Texas between August 2024 and March 2026. Three of the interventions produced measurable academic gains for students. But the study stops short of proving that the contracts themselves deserve the credit.

Researchers faced a common challenge in education: How to determine whether a particular intervention actually caused students to learn more. Student achievement depends on so many things, from classroom instruction and curriculum to family circumstances. To isolate the effect of tutoring or educational software delivered under an outcomes-based contract, WestEd compared students who had scored just below an eligibility cutoff and received the intervention with statistically similar students who had scored just above the cutoff and did not.

Of the 10 interventions the researchers hoped to evaluate, only four could be analyzed using this rigorous approach. Three showed positive academic effects. The fourth, an online tutoring program, was intended to run for most of the school year but lasted only about two months, too short to expect measurable gains.

For the other six interventions, researchers couldn’t make clean comparisons between similar students because schools did what schools often do: They filled empty tutoring seats with higher achieving students who weren’t supposed to get tutoring, or they failed to get eligible students to attend after-school tutoring programs, for example. One district allowed all its first graders to use reading software if they posted anything less than a perfect score on a kindergarten assessment.

Targeting interventions to the right studentsOne of the more intriguing results involved instructional reading software powered by artificial intelligence. Second graders who used the AI tutor were substantially more likely to reach proficiency on the state’s reading assessment than similar students who did not. The same program, however, did not produce benefits for older elementary students.

“That’s a really important finding,” said Brittany Miller, executive director of the Center for Outcomes Based Contracting, which commissioned the WestEd study. “Because that tells us what’s working for whom and under what conditions.”

Most schools, Miller said, were “paying for services, and we have no idea whether or not they were working for kids, or even if kids got the services.”

The mixed results that outcomes-based contracts can produce — good, bad or neutral — are equally important, Miller argues, so that schools can more precisely target the right interventions to the right kids.

“Because guess what? Not every kid needs 30 minutes of every ed tech product every week,” she said.

Attending to implementationWestEd researchers said they observed notable changes in day-to-day implementation. Schools and vendors met regularly to review data, monitored whether students were actually attending tutoring sessions and tracked their progress toward goals. Teachers and school leaders put more energy into making sure students showed up.

But there’s a caveat. The evaluation cannot determine whether those implementation improvements stemmed from the financial incentives built into the contracts or from the extensive support the districts received from the Center for Outcomes Based Contracting. Each participating district got roughly $80,000 worth of coaching and technical assistance from the center to help design the contracts, establish outcome measures, monitor progress and troubleshoot implementation problems.

In other words, the evaluation tested outcomes-based contracting plus intensive implementation support — not the contracts in isolation. It’s possible that the coaching and technical assistance alone could have prompted schools to monitor tutoring attendance more closely, hold regular data meetings and make mid-course corrections.

Cutting costsThe center is now experimenting with less expensive models that reduce the assistance to under $10,000 per district. Researchers hope future evaluations will help determine whether districts can achieve similar results with far less outside support — and whether the contracts themselves are driving the improvements.

Researchers also observed unexpected spillover effects. Once districts built data systems to monitor tutoring attendance and student progress for outcomes-based contracts, they began using those same systems to track other interventions that weren’t covered by the contracts.

“Certain interventions are not going to work with or without an outcomes-based contract,” said Sean Tanner, a researcher at WestEd on the evaluation team. “What’s really important for continual improvement is that the districts can learn really rigorously whether something is working. As a researcher, I find the OBC [outcomes-based contracting] model really compelling because it builds natural experiments into the process.”

Outcomes-based contracting can’t replace academic research. But it could help schools understand better which interventions are working in real time, instead of waiting for a multi-year randomized controlled trial to be conducted.

The evaluation didn’t find that outcomes-based contracting saved schools money. WestEd did not conduct a formal cost-effectiveness analysis, but its interviews with participating districts suggested that overall spending was similar to traditional contracts. Some districts absorbed costs when they failed to meet their own responsibilities, such as making sure students attended tutoring sessions. At the same time, some vendors reported losing money.

Whether outcomes-based contracting ultimately fulfills its promise remains an open question. Resource-strained districts are likely to have a much harder time doing it, the WestEd researchers observed. And while the researchers found positive academic results in three interventions, they still cannot determine whether those gains stemmed from the contracts themselves, the intensive coaching districts received or both. What the study does point to is that contracts can do more than enforce payments. They can change how districts monitor, manage and learn from the programs they buy.

This story about an evaluation of outcomes-based contracting was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

View Details

The Trump administration on Thursday proposed significant changes to Head Start, the nation’s early education program for children from low-income families. The move would diminish the program’s federal standards and give states and parents more control.

“We have 1,600 Head Start providers across the country,” Alex Adams, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services’ assistant secretary for family support, said in a call with reporters. “And one-size-fits-all mandates from Washington cannot fully account for the realities facing these 1,600 grantees.”

Head Start not only provides preschool and childcare, but also meals and support services for qualifying families. It now serves more than 700,000 kids each year from birth to age 5.

Since its launch in 1965, the $12 billion HHS program has, for the most part, enjoyed bipartisan support. Lawmakers often cite it as a success — including Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during the call with reporters announcing these changes. But in recent years, some conservatives have criticized Head Start, saying it wastes money and fails to have a lasting impact on students.

Aiming to cut costsThe new proposal would limit the amount of money Head Start centers can spend on administrative overhead, from a 15% cap to 5%. This change should save the government $2.2 billion, Adams said, which it plans to reinvest in the program. The goal is to create 200,000 more spots for children, he said.

To get those costs down, the administration said it proposes cutting regulations and “compliance-driven activities,” according to a press release. Similarly, they are shifting decisions about several standards — such as student-teacher ratios, education requirements, background checks and transportation practices — back to states.

Childcare providers are not sold on the proposal.

“If we look at the previous actions of the administration, what they have done is not in favor of expanding the program,” said Yvette Sanchez Fuentes, senior vice president with Start Early, an Illinois-based Head Start partner.

“Is it enough to just bring kids in the door if we’re not actually giving kids and families what they need?”

Sanchez Fuentes said administrative costs are not only things like payroll and day-to-day operations, but also help fill gaps in care. “If you, for example, have children with disabilities you [can use] some of those funds to pay for additional special services or staff with specialties who could come in and support kids.”

The administration’s proposal also says parents are children’s primary teachers and seeks to bring in more parent opinions on “structure and curriculum” into the classrooms and emphasizes nutrition and exercise.

Loosening the standardsHead Start’s current standards are laid out in a detailed 133-page guide. The manual is used not only by the program’s centers, but also by many unaffiliated private childcare centers across the country.

These standards include safety guidelines, spell out who is eligible for Head Start and provide detailed rules — such as the requirement that kids in the program brush their teeth once daily with fluoride toothpaste.

Erica Phillips, the executive director for the National Association for Family Child Care, said about 10% of her members are Early Head Start childcare partners, while the rest are home-based providers around the country.

“The Head Start performance standards were a consistent … evidence-based set of standards,” she said. “It can be helpful to have a nationally recognized benchmark.”

Phillips said her organization will be on the lookout for variations across states. She said she worries “quality is now dependent on your ZIP code or on your geography.”

The Trump administration sees it differently.

“Flexibility is permission. It’s not a mandate,” Adams said. “The opportunity for these programs to make a different decision does not necessarily mean they must make a different decision.”

The changes did not come as a complete surprise: The conservative Heritage Foundation has long criticized the program, saying it “doesn’t work.” In Project 2025, the foundation’s policy blueprint that the Trump administration has taken many cues from, the message is clear — eliminate Head Start.

Advocates see what they characterize as the erosion of quality and decrease in standards as the first step in dismantling the program.

A long runwayThursday’s announcement came in the form of a notice of proposed rulemaking, or NPRM. It kicks off a lengthy, formalized process of public comment and talks with stakeholders. It could be six months to a year before any new standards take effect.

“I just really want folks to know Head Start is open,” said Tommy Sheridan, deputy director at the National Head Start Association (NHSA), a nonprofit that advocates for the program. “The quality of Head Start children and families truly comes from the people that are running Head Start programs. Those folks are going to be the same. They’re going to be able to do that.”

The administration says the NPRM will be published in the Federal Register on Friday and be open to public comment for 60 days.

Edited by: Natalie Escobar

Transcript:

AILSA CHANG, HOST:

The Trump administration wants to make significant changes to Head Start. That’s the country’s early education and childcare program for low-income families. Now, this program serves more than 700,000 kids each year from birth to age 5, in both urban centers and rural areas. Advocates and educators are worried that the proposed loosening of standards will undermine the program. NPR’s Sequoia Carrillo is following this story and joins us now at NPR West. Hi, Sequoia.

SEQUOIA CARRILLO, BYLINE: Hi, Ailsa.

CHANG: Hi. OK, so many families depend on the Head Start program. What are some of the proposed changes that were announced today?

CARRILLO: So this new proposal really focuses on two areas, deregulation and, in turn, cutting costs. So front and center, we have the Trump administration saying they want parents and states to take a larger role in the program. Standards like how many toddlers or babies can one teacher handle on their own or what kind of training teachers have to have to work with these little kids, those decisions would be up to the states.

CHANG: OK.

CARRILLO: They’re also saying parents are children’s primary teachers and want to bring more parent opinions into the classroom. All this really amounts to taking a national benchmark for early childcare and education and removing it. The new proposal wants to move away from federal mandates, and advocates are worried about it.

CHANG: But wait – you mentioned cost-cutting measures. What would that mean exactly?

CARRILLO: Yes. So right now, Head Start centers can use up to 15% of their budgets to cover administrative costs. The new proposal caps that at 5%. Currently, that money is used for typical daily operations, but it can also do things like reward teachers for getting a degree, and that would no longer be allowed. Yvette Sanchez Fuentes, with Start Early, an Illinois-based Head Start partner, says this approach could also directly impact kids.

YVETTE SANCHEZ FUENTES: If you, for example, have children with disabilities, you could use some of those funds in order to pay for additional staff with specialties who could come in and support kids.

CARRILLO: Losing that money could cut support staff and create gaps in care.

CHANG: OK. But explain this to me. What is the Trump administration ultimately trying to achieve with all of these changes to Head Start?

CARRILLO: It’s a great question. So Alex Adams, the Department of Health and Human Services’ assistant secretary who oversees the whole program, estimates that these changes could save the government $2.2 billion.

CHANG: OK.

CARRILLO: He says he plans to invest that money back in the program and, in turn, create 200,000 more spots for children. I relayed that plan to a few different advocates, and they all said similar things. An additional $2 billion for Head Start would be great, but they don’t quite see how eliminating all those regulations can get them there. One thing to note is, this is a very lengthy proposal. It’s about 200 pages, and sometimes reporters and stakeholders get these things early to comb through. This time, we did not. So there’s still a lot to sift through. And for now, I think advocates are just ready to dive in and are looking forward to the next steps.

CHANG: And what are those next steps? Like, will Head Start centers feel these changes right away?

CARRILLO: Well, first of all, Head Start centers are still very much open, and all of them are operating under the same rules. But right now, we’re heading into a 60-day period for public comment on these new rules. Anyone can submit a comment – parents, advocacy groups, concerned citizens. The groups I spoke with are really hoping for tons of comments. That would mean it would take a long time to go through them. And the final rules might look different than what we have right now, or they might not change at all. Either way, we won’t really know for a few months.

CHANG: That is NPR’s Sequoia Carrillo. Thank you so much, Sequoia.

CARRILLO: Thank you.

View Details

BOSTON — Over the course of one frantic, late-July weekend, 98 teens representing all 50 states put their busy lives on hold to try to do something remarkable.

The students, most of them high school juniors and seniors, gathered in a precise replica of the U.S. Senate chamber and attempted what the real, adult Congress has largely failed to do: draft and pass “legislation” to help the nation’s K-12 schools navigate the questions and chaos created by artificial intelligence.

Should students be allowed to use AI on assignments? What about on tests? Is it schools’ job to teach the nation’s children what AI is and how to use it? There is no national policy for AI use in schools, meaning states and school districts have had to scramble to craft their own.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for us to actually help and try to change the country for the better,” said student Gabriel Sutphin, representing South Carolina, speaking from the chamber floor at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate.

To these teens, the stakes for getting ahead of AI are clear. They pointed out how adult leaders were slow to protect students from the risks of other tech developments.

“We missed the mark with social media and phones,” said Hunter Wurzel, a high school senior representing Ohio. “That’s been a huge talking point already [this weekend], is how we failed to implement those things into education and teach the youth how to use them.“

Wurzel and his 97 colleagues were handpicked by their school leaders and hosted by a handful of education- and tech-focused groups, including the Edward M. Kennedy Institute, AASA (The School Superintendents Association), and Day of AI, a nonprofit launched out of MIT’s RAISE AI literacy initiative.

At times during the weekend, where NPR was able to watch the events unfold, the bill seemed doomed, only to be revived by a flurry of student-led negotiation, old-fashioned compromises and some spirited speeches.

“[This bill] is about who gets a seat at the table. Today, students have that seat,” Bena Mejia Romero of Connecticut told her fellow senators before the final vote.

Ultimately, their Students First Act passed overwhelmingly, 82-16.

Among the bill’s requirements: States should provide AI literacy as soon as students get access to classroom devices; AI use should be banned on all graded tests; and teachers can require an oral defense of any project from a student suspected of using AI inappropriately. (You can read the full bill at the end of this article.)

“The adults themselves haven’t been able to come to consensus on this, right? And so now it falls to the kids. Let them lead the way,” said Jeffrey Riley, the executive director of Day of AI and former education commissioner of Massachusetts.

While the Students First Act isn’t actually law, any more than the teens are actually senators, AASA plans to send the text to its members: 10,000 school leaders across the country, many of whom are right now crafting their own AI rules in the absence of regulation.

Rules for studentsWhen students arrived at the start of the weekend, they were presented with a stew of policies that they had suggested in the run-up to the event. Then they were divided into subcommittees — focused on students, educators, administrators and families — to debate the dozens of proposals and create a coherent bill they could all support.

The student-focused section of the final bill includes 15 provisions, several focused on a concern many of the senators shared: that teens are using AI to do their thinking for them.

Without guidance and guardrails, “[AI use] is just gonna go unhinged,” said Campbell McHenry, a high school junior from Mississippi. “Everyone’s gonna stop learning and start relying on AI. Instead of using it as a tool, they’re gonna use it as a brain.”

Student senators representing (from left to right) Colorado, Arkansas, North Carolina, New Mexico and Connecticut meet in their assigned subcommittee to debate the AI bill’s student-focused provisions. (Kieran Kesner for NPR)Among the bill’s student-focused proposals:

• Approved uses: Students should not be allowed to use AI for writing, “though editing, brainstorming and studying” with AI should be allowed after eighth grade.
• Prove mastery: Students permitted to use AI should have to cite how they used it and demonstrate their grasp of a subject through discussions, handwritten tests or oral defenses.
• Plagiarism review: Any student suspected of using AI inappropriately should have their work reviewed not just by AI checker software, which can be unreliable, but also two school officials.

One of the most contentious issues was deciding when students should first be exposed to AI in the classroom: High school? Middle school? Earlier?

Lucia Herrera, a Missouri high schooler, took issue with an early draft of the bill.

“There’s nothing that says students need to be proficient before using it,” Herrera told her subcommittee colleagues. “It’s basically saying they can use it whenever. Which I think is a misuse of it.“

Her subcommittee’s proposed solution: require schools to teach AI literacy as soon as devices are introduced in the classroom, including misinformation, plagiarism, bias in AI design, student privacy, appropriate academic use and AI’s environmental impact.

Sophia Fenn of Washington state took the work seriously, going line by line through the proposals and making detailed notes about what she would like to amend or strike altogether. (Kieran Kesner for NPR)When the provision came up later that day, before the full Senate, Connecticut’s Bena Mejia Romero told her fellow student lawmakers they should support the new requirement. “If we’re going to be using devices, we should know the dangers and the benefits that they have.”

But one of the senators from California, Om Lala, argued that requiring schools to begin teaching AI literacy would be a heavy lift. “Teachers already are pretty under-resourced.”

Tristan Tjetjep of Tennessee added that he worried how “underprivileged schools” would pay for this new instruction.

Suddenly, the students had run headlong into U.S. schools’ funding inequities — a problem they attempted to resolve with a requirement that the federal government chip in funding.

Rules for educators, parents and caregiversThe Students First Act not only covers students’ use of AI but also insists on rules for educators:

• Approved teacher use of AI: Allowed for tasks including lesson planning, making practice materials, providing feedback and improving instruction.
• Must have a clear AI policy: Each semester, teachers need to post “a clear, written AI usage policy,” explaining when AI is allowed and when it’s not.

What’s more, if an AI detector flags potential inappropriate AI use in a student paper, the bill says “teachers must personally investigate the issue before reporting the student to admin.”

The student senators struggled with the 10 provisions in the bill’s parents/guardians section because, as Isabella Stringer of New Hampshire said on the Senate floor, “We cannot legislate parenthood. Schools cannot tell parents what or how to teach your children.“

As such, some of the provisions here suggest rather than tell. For instance, one says simply that parents should encourage balanced technology habits and emphasize the importance of ethical academic behavior at home.

The Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate sits on the University of Massachusetts, Boston campus and is home to the world’s only full-scale replica of the U.S. Senate chamber. (Kieran Kesner for NPR)The early version of the bill also gave parents a full veto over their students’ AI access, but many of the senators argued that AI is here to stay and students must be taught how to use it.

“Giving [parents] the complete say, especially in middle to high school, in what their child can and can’t do with AI is gonna limit [students] because a lot of [adults] don’t even know what AI is themselves,” said junior Tatiyana Reaves of North Carolina.

In one of the weekend’s more passionate exchanges, senators debated what should happen if a student attempts to use a school-based AI tool, like a chatbot, “for emotional support.”

Several teens worried that if a student confided sensitive information about, say, their sexuality or a mental health crisis, they should be able to trust that it would be kept private.

But Dylan Dornack of Iowa argued on the Senate floor that, for students in crisis or experiencing suicidal thoughts, the technology must alert a human.

“This could be lifesaving,” Dornack told his colleagues, “whether or not that student is fearful that they might get outed. This is just one of those things that has to be taken to trusted adults.”

Wehiwaalani Gapero of Hawaii was one of dozens of students who chose to address their colleagues for a minute each before the final votes of the weekend were cast. (Kieran Kesner for NPR)Ultimately, the students agreed: When a school chatbot detects a student in need of emotional support, it should not fulfill the student’s request but instead alert school officials.

The rush to passageAt the end of the whirlwind weekend, the student senators gathered in the replica chamber and more than half volunteered to address their colleagues for one minute each.

Dornack was the first to speak and called the bill an important, if imperfect, foundation for schools’ AI policies. “You have to lay the blocks before you can have the building. So here I say, let’s lay the blocks and let’s pass this.”

In the final minutes before a key vote, student senators from (left to right) Minnesota and Washington state confer with their colleague. (Kieran Kesner for NPR)But Jadelynn Petitjean of Alabama called the bill an “unstable foundation” and opposed it.

Earlier in the day, West Virginia’s Ethan Liu had also opposed it, highlighting several contradictions in the bill, including amendments that both restricted students’ AI access while appearing to give teachers wide discretion over when and how AI is used.

“I thought it reflected really badly on us. I had a whole different speech planned out against this bill, actually. It was really good,” Liu told the Senate chamber before the final vote.

But at the last minute, the event’s organizers allowed the students to iron out a few of the bill’s inconsistencies, and, as a result, Liu changed his vote, saying “this bill is in much better shape.”

Student after student walked to the microphone at the front of the chamber, and most endorsed the bill, including Kendall Terao-Toma of Hawaii:

“This is for our future — not just for education but for the workforce we will join, the economy that we will build and the communities we will lead.”

Edited by: Nirvi Shah and Nicole Cohen; audio story produced by: Lauren Migaki
Visual design and development by: LA Johnson

Read the full text of the Students First Act:

View Details

View the full episode transcript.

A few years ago, Rebecca Rogers, a kindergarten teacher at Redwood Heights Elementary School in Oakland, California, wasn’t sure how much longer she could keep teaching. She was dealing with a mysterious immune reaction that doctors couldn’t explain; and she was losing weight, struggling to eat and constantly exhausted. At the same time, she was teaching a classroom full of 4 and 5-year-olds.

“I was probably crying most days coming to school,” Rogers said. “Like, how am I going to do this? I have no energy. I’m exhausted.”

However, every morning, she still showed up.

“I had to be there for these little people who were learning how to do school for the first time,” she said. “I was a hot mess in education.”

Rogers’ experience reflects a challenge facing schools across the country. National surveys have found that teachers report high rates of stress and burnout, and many districts continue to struggle with educator retention. Researchers have also found that teacher wellbeing affects more than the adults in the building. Teacher stress can influence classroom climate, student engagement and disciplinary practices. Yet while schools have increasingly invested in student mental health supports, that same level of consideration hasn’t been extended to educators. Oakland Unified School District, where Rogers teaches, is facing a $103 million deficit and is projected to experience significant cuts to the district’s central office, as well as teaching and support staff.

Despite these challenges, Redwood Heights school leaders are trying something different.

Moving Beyond BurnoutThree years ago, Redwood Heights principal Cynthia Bagby began looking for ways to better support her staff.

“I’ve always wanted to have a program that would take care of the teachers and help them have balance,” Bagby said. When she learned about The Teaching Well, an Oakland-based nonprofit focused on educator wellbeing, she felt the organization’s approach aligned with her own beliefs about leadership. “It matched my philosophy on taking care of the human that does the work,” she said.

The Teaching Well was founded around the premise that supporting educators requires more than helping individual teachers cope with stress. The organization works at three levels: individual, interpersonal and systemic. Depending on a school’s needs, The Teaching Well may provide therapy or mentoring for individual educators; facilitate professional development sessions for school staff; coach principals and district leaders on workplace conditions and school culture.

“We not only want to recruit a diverse workforce,” said Lindsey Fuller, executive director of the Teaching Well. “We actually want to retain and sustain them, because when educators are well, kids thrive.”

The organization’s staff, including the clinical therapists, is entirely made up of former teachers and administrators who understand the realities of school life firsthand. “We all have a burnout story,” Fuller said. “We’re all building the organization we needed to have stayed.”

Supporting Individual TeachersFor Rogers, who currently teaches first grade, one of the most meaningful supports came through one-on-one mentoring. “It’s a space for me to talk with someone about what’s happening in my life and in my classroom,” she said. In conversations with her mentor, Rogers found herself talking about the difficulty of leaving work at work.

“All these children I hold in my brain when I leave here,” she said. “I’m showering and trying to go to sleep and eat, and I’m like, how can I support this kid better? How can I show up in a way that supports what they need?” Researchers sometimes refer to this as emotional labor, which is the work of managing not only your own emotions but also responding to the emotional needs of others. For educators, that work often extends far beyond the school day.

Rogers also participated in therapy through The Teaching Well. Research suggests that therapy and mental health support can reduce stress and symptoms of burnout among educators, but access can be difficult because of cost, insurance barriers and long waitlists.

Fuller argues that teachers face additional challenges because their work involves absorbing students’ struggles and trauma. “A lot of why people are leaving is burnout or because there’s a tragedy or school community violence and there’s no real outlet to process it,” she said. Because the organization’s therapists are all former educators, teachers are able to move more quickly into meaningful conversations, according to Fuller. “It just cuts to the chase and gets them directly to the service that they need to be able to be retained.”

Building a Culture of SupportEarlier this year, I attended a Teaching Well session held in the school library. Teachers were seated in a circle with their snacks.

Facilitator Marc Anthony Robinson started a session with a simple question. “How are y’all feeling?” he asked. Teachers called out numbers to rate their energy levels between one and five, with one being low energy and five as high energy. Several reported twos and threes.The session began with a somatic exercise designed to help participants notice what was happening in their bodies. “We can’t silence stress,” Robinson told the group. “But we can turn down the volume.” Teachers closed their eyes and placed their hands on their chests and stomachs.

Later, educators discussed the warning signs that stress was building. Teachers colored in worksheets with car dashboards printed on them, identifying the emotional and physical signals that told them something was wrong. The goal was to help educators recognize stress before it became overwhelming.

For Rogers, the sessions helped normalize conversations about wellbeing that rarely happened in schools. “It gave me this opportunity to think about myself and my practice,” she said, “and me as a human in the context of teaching.”

Improving Schools Through SystemsThe Teaching Well’s leaders are careful not to frame burnout as an individual problem that teachers can solve through breathing exercises alone. Fuller says lasting change requires attention to the conditions teachers work within. At Redwood Heights, that meant coaching and support for principal Bagby as well, who says the work has helped create a shared language around relationships, stress and conflict. “What I appreciate about The Teaching Well is they’ve given us practices to maintain that human element—the compassionate element— of how we relate to each other,” she added.

Teaching Well partnerships typically last 3-5 years. The organization posits that quick wellness initiatives often fail because they don’t address underlying causes of burnout. “We love to invest in Band-Aids,” Fuller said. “We are reticent to invest in root-cause strategy and sustained support.” The model also depends on buy-in from school and district leaders.

At Redwood Heights Elementary, teacher retention rose from 75% in the 2022–23 school year to 91% in 2024–25, a 16-percentage-point increase during the school’s partnership with The Teaching Well. Across its partner schools nationally, the organization says it retained 85% of participating educators. While individual teachers can benefit from mentoring or therapy, broader cultural changes require administrators willing to examine policies, expectations and workplace conditions. In other words, supporting teachers is not just about helping them become more resilient. It’s also about changing the systems in which they work.

Research increasingly suggests that teacher wellbeing affects students as well. “We’re seeing a direct correlation between a dysregulated teacher and elevated rates of exclusionary discipline,” Fuller said. “When a teacher is unwell, they’re more likely to kick a kid out of class.”

For Rogers, the changes have shown up in smaller moments. When she notices herself becoming stressed, she now uses some of the same somatic practices she learned through mentoring and professional development. She has also introduced breathing exercises into her first grade classroom.

“Whenever we come in from lunch or recess, before we do anything, it’s time for breath work,” Rogers said. The experience has changed the way she interprets student behavior. “It’s allowed me to view my students in a different way [by] thinking about a trauma-informed response and what they might need,” she said.

Three years after she considered leaving teaching, Rogers is still at Redwood Heights. Recently, she found herself looking around her classroom and reflecting on how much her students have grown in a school year that seemed to fly by. “They’re doing it. It’s happening. Like their brains are growing” she said, “I’m like ‘Look at you reading.’”

Episode TranscriptBecca Rogers: I was probably crying most days coming to school like ‘How am I going to do this? I have no energy. I’m exhausted.’

Nimah Gobir: A few years ago, kindergarten teacher Becca Rogers thought she might have to leave teaching altogether. She was having serious health issues.

Becca Rogers: I was like having this immune reaction that Western medicine could not figure out. I was losing a ton of weight, I was having these really reactive experiences with food.

Nimah Gobir: And every morning, she still had to walk into a kindergarten classroom full of five-year-olds. Little kids who needed help opening snacks and learning how to stand in line. And while she was trying to care for all of them, she was barely holding herself together.

Becca Rogers: That’s what was going on. I was a hot mess in education.

Nimah Gobir: Welcome to MindShift, where we explore the future of learning and how we raise our kids. I’m Nimah Gobir

Nimah Gobir: When I was little, I thought teachers lived at school. A lot of kids think that. But I think even adults can forget that teachers are carrying entire lives and struggles into the classroom with them. Increasingly, many are burning out.

Nimah Gobir: National surveys have found that teachers report higher rates of burnout than many other professions. And in recent years, schools across the country have struggled to retain educators. That stress doesn’t just affect teachers, it can shape classroom climate, student relationships, and even disciplinary outcomes. In this episode, we look at what happens when schools start treating teacher wellbeing as essential — not extra — and what it takes to support the people who care for kids. People like Becca Rogers

Becca Rogers: It’s easier to show up with a cold and be sick than call the sub.

Nimah Gobir: Calling out sick can sometimes create its own kind of stress. Teachers might need to prepare another lesson plan or be worried about how the day will go without them. For Becca, it was just easier to push through

Becca Rogers: I’m someone who says yes, right? Like I’m a teacher, I’m a union rep. I sit on the board of my child’s preschool. I’m a runner, I am a mom. Like, I have a hard time saying no.

Nimah Gobir: At one point her colleague pulled her aside.

Becca Rogers: And was like, how are you doing? You don’t look good, you don’t sound good.

Becca Rogers: I was like yeah, I’ve been hiding that I don’t feel good.

Lindsey Fuller: We are hemorrhaging educators across this country

Nimah Gobir: This is Lindsey Fuller, executive director of The Teaching Well. The Teaching Well organization works with schools and districts to support educator wellbeing as essential to helping teachers keep teaching.

Lindsey Fuller: We not only want to recruit a diverse workforce, we actually want to retain and sustain them, because when educators are well, kids thrive

Nimah Gobir: Schools are often asked to work with outside consultants and organizations. But teachers can sometimes feel like the people trying to support them don’t fully understand what classrooms are actually like. At The Teaching Well, the staff are all former educators.

Lindsey Fuller: So we get it. That is one of the things that makes us really stand out as an organization. We all have a burnout story. We’re all building the organization we needed to have stayed and we will always fight for kids.

Nimah Gobir: Their team is made up of 13 facilitators and therapists and they approach teacher wellbeing on multiple levels.

Lindsey Fuller: The individual, interpersonal, and systemic level.

Nimah Gobir: In practice, that might mean they provide therapy for one teacher, lead professional development sessions for an entire staff, or coach district leaders trying to improve working conditions.

Nimah Gobir: For some teachers, conversations about “wellness” can feel disconnected from the realities of overcrowded classrooms, staffing shortages, and impossible workloads.

Lindsey Fuller: A lot of folks hear wellness and they think it’s all woo-woo, like yoga, Lululemon on the beach. That is not what we’re talking about. There’s rigor and strategy in workplace wellbeing initiatives.

Nimah Gobir: At Redwood Heights Elementary School in Oakland, the school where Becca works, principal Cynthia Bagby had been watching teachers struggle under increasing pressure. Around the same time Becca was burning out, Cynthia decided to bring in The Teaching Well.

Cynthia Bagby: I’ve always wanted to have a program that would kind of take care of the teachers. And like help them to have balance, but also focusing on how they can manage themselves as teachers. And so when I heard about this organization, I thought, oh it matches my philosophy on taking care of the human that does the work.

Nimah Gobir: She says many teachers enter the profession with deep care for children.

Cynthia Bagby: They really want to make a difference in the world. And then when they get in the classroom, it’s challenging.

Nimah Gobir: Teacher stress is closely tied to high turnover rates, especially in schools serving high-needs communities. Cynthia hoped The Teaching Well could help sustain teachers by giving them the tools to care for themselves and each other.

Cynthia Bagby: When people feel supported, of course they could show up differently. And then you’re not teaching out of fear, but you’re teaching out a love you’re teaching knowing that someone has your back.

Nimah Gobir: Partnerships with the Teaching Well are designed to last 3-5 years. In these long term relationships with schools they’ve been able to retain 85% of teachers they work with.

Nimah Gobir: Lasting change usually depends on whether school and district leaders are willing to shift the conditions teachers are working in. Cynthia was willing to work directly with teaching well staff to be more responsive to teachers

Cynthia Bagby: I also receive coaching with them too. I get to hear their perspective from the like general feedback they get, maybe from the teachers, kind of keep me to see if I’m aligned with what I believe about leading a school.

Nimah Gobir: Improving teacher wellbeing involves buy-in from administrators and a long term commitment. But there is more that can be done to help teachers thrive. We’ll get into what happens at the group and individual level after the break.

Nimah Gobir: Each month the Teaching Well comes to Redwood Heights to do professional development after school. Executive director Lindsey Fuller greets people at the door. About twenty educators come in to sink into chairs arranged in a circle. teacher Becca Rogers is there and so is principal Cynthia Bagby

Marc Anthony Robinson: How y’all feeling? One to five, as five being high, One being a low, can I get a number? I just want to see what I’m dealing with today. Okay.

Marc Anthony Robinson: I’m seeing some twos, threes.

Nimah Gobir: At the front of the room is facilitator Marc Anthony Robinson Robinson. He starts the session with a somatic practice – These are breathing and movement techniques designed to help regulate the nervous system.

Marc Anthony Robinson: We can’t silence stress, right? But we can turn down the value. So the intention today is to find the knob for the volume. How do we turn that down?

Nimah Gobir: He asks teachers to close their eyes.

Marc Anthony Robinson: Place one hand over your heart if you have your hands available and your belly

Marc Anthony Robinson: Now take a slow, steady breath in release. Take another one in through your nose this time and exhale through your mouth like a soft sigh. Now we’re going to begin to notice, starting from the top, going down. Start at your forehead, your jaw.….”

Nimah Gobir: Around the room, shoulders drop. A few teachers lean back in their chairs and exhale deeply. For a couple minutes, nobody is redirecting behavior. Nobody is answering emails or prepping lessons.They’re just paying attention to their own bodies.

Marc Anthony Robinson: See if you could turn the volume down just one more notch….

Nimah Gobir: When the exercise ends, teachers slowly blink their eyes open. A few nod quietly to themselves, almost like they’re saying: okay. I’m here now. The sessions are designed to help teachers recognize how stress shows up physically and emotionally. At one point, educators are handed worksheets with car dashboards printed on them. Lindsey explains what they’ll do with them

Lindsey Fuller: We’re gonna get to do some coloring today, um designing your own dashboard. So we’re going to do a little car metaphor play. Uh and then we’re, we’re gonna help you think about our stress management sequence.

Nimah Gobir: The idea is to think about the warning lights going off internally. She says some stress signals are temporary — like a seatbelt alarm. Others are more serious. The kind you can ignore for a little while, but not forever. She tells the group what is going on in their bodies when this happens.

Lindsey Fuller: The amygdala is a part of your brain that helps alert us when there’s a problem. It says, hey yo… something’s going off.

Lindsey Fuller: We’re gonna take about four minutes here, and then we’re gonna invite you a couple of folks to share out. Okay? So let’s get connected. Feel free to turn and talk.

Nimah Gobir: Teachers sit coloring in dashboards with colored pencils, They’re talking quietly with one another about burnout, frustration, and overload. For teachers like Becca, being asked how they’re doing — and being honest about the answer — was a major shift.

Nimah Gobir: The group sessions are one part of The Teaching Well’s model. But teachers can also receive individual support through one on one mentoring and clinical therapy. Becca has used both.

Becca Rogers: It’s a space for me to talk with someone about what’s happening in my life and in my classroom and seeing what they can provide me. We do a lot of somatic practices or just thinking out loud or touching base what’s actually happening.

Nimah Gobir: In one mentoring session, Becca tells Teaching Well’s Marc Anthony Robinson over a video call that it is hard to separate teaching from the rest of her life.

Becca Rogers: It’s just nice to just sit for a moment. And it’s good for me because after this, I’m going straight to another thing. I’m gonna the new families event for kindergarten.

Marc Anthony Robinson: So you gotta be back on in a minute.

Becca Rogers: I do. I do have to do this back on again. I know, it doesn’t stop.

Becca Rogers: All these children I hold in my brain when I leave here. And I’m like showering and trying to go to sleep and eat. And I’m, like, how can I support this kid better? How can I show up in a way that supports what they need

Becca Rogers: I have to like, it’s okay. You do not need to like hold that when you leave, you know?

Marc Anthony Robinson: I’m really just honored to be doing this process and this journey with you because I’ve seen you maneuver through a lot and I’m excited for what this new year is going to bring for you school year wise. It’s like it’s going to feel different.

Becca Rogers: Yeah, no, definitely. Yeah.

Nimah Gobir: In addition to mentoring Becca has also used the therapy services through Teaching Well. Therapy has also been shown to reduce stress and burnout in teachers, but waitlists and cost can make access difficult. Through Teaching Well, teachers can have up to 16 therapy sessions. And if a teacher needs more, Teaching Well helps them get a therapist through their insurance. Lindsey says that mental health services are becoming more available, but oftentimes they’re just for students.

Lindsey Fuller: What no one is funding comprehensively yet, and we are looking for, is who is funding the mental health grants and programs for the educators that receive those students, that work with them day in and day out.

Nimah Gobir: Educators are often absorbing students’ trauma. This is called vicarious or secondary trauma.

Lindsey Fuller: A lot of why people are leaving is burnout or because there’s a tragedy or school community violence and there’s no real outlet to process it.

Nimah Gobir: The clinical therapists at the teaching well are also former educators. Which addresses a pitfall that is common in many free therapy programs for teachers.

Lindsey Fuller: They’re spending so much time trying to explain the context of working in a school that they don’t get to get to the healing. It just cuts to the chase and gets them directly to the service that they need to be able to be retained.

Nimah Gobir: When teachers are well students fare better too.

Lindsey Fuller: We’re seeing a direct correlation between a dysregulated teacher and elevated rates of exclusionary discipline. In other words, when a teacher is unwell, they’re more likely to kick a kid out of class and refer them.

Nimah Gobir: Three years after Becca thought about leaving teaching, she’s still at Redwood Heights. And she says she no longer feels like crying before school every day. Having space to talk about teaching to her mentor and her colleagues helped her reestablish herself and her values

Becca Rogers: It gave me this like opportunity to be very meta and think about myself and my practice. And me as a human in the context of teaching

Nimah Gobir: Now, when stress rises in the classroom, she notices it earlier.

Becca Rogers: When I feel myself getting stressed in the class, I find that’s a time for somatic practice for me and I share that practice with my students

Becca Rogers: We also do a lot of breath work. Whenever we come in from lunch, recess, we know before we do anything, it’s time for breath work so we can help with that transition.

[breathing exercise]

Becca Rogers: I think it’s also allowed me to view my students in a different way, like thinking about a trauma informed response and like what I need, maybe what they need.

Nimah Gobir: Becca has more empathy now. More capacity to stay present through hard moments with her students

Becca Rogers: They’re really navigating something too, right. They’re human, I’m a human and we’re having this experience together.

View Details

Scientists rarely announce that one of their long-held ideas has failed.

But that is exactly what Ron Avi Astor, one of the nation’s leading scholars of school violence and a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said before fellow researchers at the annual meeting in April of the American Educational Research Association (AERA).

“We were wrong,” Astor told the audience.

For decades, Astor believed that improving school climate and reducing bullying would help prevent school shootings. He advised national policymakers and issued recommendations. Schools responded by investing heavily in social-emotional learning, restorative justice, trauma-informed care, counseling and other efforts to make schools safer and more welcoming.

Those initiatives have benefited students in many ways. Fewer students report bringing guns or knives to school, and schools have generally become safer.

But school shootings have not declined.

“I’ve had a complete change” in my thinking, Astor told me in an interview after the conference.

That shift came after he stepped back and looked at the evidence. During his AERA presentation, Astor showed a slide with two stark graphs. One traced a steady decline in students bringing weapons to California schools over the quarter century since the Columbine High School massacre in Colorado. The other graph showed a sharp rise in school shootings across the nation.

Diverging trendsDivergent trends in student-reported weapon-related behavior and national school shooting incidents, 2001–2024. Panel A shows the percentage of California secondary school students (grades 7, 9, and 11) reporting four weapon-related behaviors in the California Healthy Kids Survey during academic years 2001–2024. All four indicators declined substantially over the study period. Panel B shows the annual count of school shooting incidents recorded in the K-12 School Shooting Database, which captures any incident in which a gun was brandished, fired, or a bullet struck school property in the United States. Key events and the COVID-19 disruption period (shaded) are annotated.
Source: A slide from Ron Avi Astor’s presentation during an AERA session on April 11, 2026, “School Active Shooter Drills: Mitigating Risks to Mental, Emotional, and Behavioral Health – A Report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.”The graphs capture a painful realization. Astor says he and other researchers had misunderstood what was driving many school shootings.

Astor noted that many school shooters had been bullied, were bullies themselves or had experienced trauma, and he believed that shootings would decline if educators reduced bullying and strengthened relationships among students locally, one school building at a time. “We were adamant,” Astor said. “Let’s focus on prevention.”

“What was missed, I believe, was that each shooter wanted to make sure that this was national,” Astor said. “Their number one audience was the media. That’s really clear to me now.”

Astor now believes many perpetrators are driven by a desire for notoriety. Shooters study previous massacres, learn from online communities and seek the publicity that follows a mass attack.

“Most of them are suicidal, and they decided to be homicidal so that they would be remembered,” Astor said.

That new way of thinking has led him to a very different recommendation. Rather than focusing on prevention inside schools, Astor believes journalists and social media companies should adopt guidelines that reduce attention on perpetrators, delay publication of manifestos and videos, and focus more coverage on victims.

“I’m not saying don’t do social-emotional or anti-gun” efforts, Astor said. “Those things are important. But if we want to see a reduction in school shootings, we need to work with the media.”

Astor compares school shootings to suicide contagions or spates of terrorism, where extensive publicity can inspire copycats. He acknowledges that it’s a long shot to persuade social media companies or the dark web to change, and he cannot prove that changing will work to reduce school shootings. “But it’s worth a try,” he said.

What makes Astor’s argument noteworthy isn’t simply his new hypothesis. It’s his willingness to publicly abandon an old one after concluding that the evidence no longer supported it. It’s never easy to change course but Astor’s openness could save lives.

This story about preventing school shootings was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

View Details

School used to be pretty easy for Kate Jarvis when she was a little girl, back in the 1980s. She was a straight-A student, creative, and so organized that she’d even prep her toothbrush with toothpaste each night before school. She says her mother used to call her “bright-eyed and bushy tailed.”

Then puberty hit, and everything started to fall apart. She found it harder to focus in school, and her grades slipped. “It really hit my self-esteem badly. I felt pretty awful about myself,” she says.

In high school, she was diagnosed with anxiety and depression. She struggled to fit in. She says it stung when teachers would write comments like, “Kate has so much potential, if only she’d apply herself.”

“So it felt like character flaws rather than what it really was, which was undiagnosed ADHD,” says Jarvis, who didn’t get a diagnosis until her late 30s.

Kate Jarvis says that her diagnosis of ADHD in her 30s felt revolutionary. “Something I had been wrestling with for 25 years had a name, causes, symptoms and effects.” However, the diagnosis came with challenges as well. “Just because you know what something is, doesn’t mean you can immediately fix it. And that’s what I felt – like I needed to fix myself.” (Jarvis family)Researchers say Jarvis’ story is pretty common. For decades, ADHD, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, was considered a childhood disease that mostly affected boys – and boys were the focus of most research, says Julia Schechter, a clinical psychologist and co-director of the Duke Center for Girls and Women with ADHD. But ADHD often manifests differently in girls.

“They’re more likely to appear distracted, disorganized, kind of have their head in the clouds rather than show that overt, hyperactive or impulsive behavior that can disrupt a classroom,” Schechter says.

She says those symptoms in girls are easier to miss. That’s one reason why girls tend to get diagnosed years later than boys, often not until adulthood. Instead, women will spend years wondering what’s wrong with them, being treated for anxiety or depression without addressing the underlying cause.

“Sometimes those conditions are truly present,” Schechter says. “Other times they’re secondary to years of undiagnosed and untreated ADHD.”

The heavy health cost of missed treatmentThere is a cost to those years of missed treatment. ADHD is a neurodevelopmental condition that influences many aspects of a person’s life and can bring challenges with social relationships, impulse control and low self-esteem.

“For women, the risks are even more striking,” Schechter says. “So compared to girls and women without ADHD, those with ADHD have more problems with friendships. They’re more likely to experience abuse by romantic partners, more likely to have a teen pregnancy compared to boys and men with ADHD.” They’re also more likely to have feelings of worthlessness and self-harm or attempt suicide.

And there are other health risks for women, including a higher incidence of obesity, eating disorders, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease than their peers without the condition, says Dr. Patricia Quinn, a developmental pediatrician who has specialized in ADHD in women and girls for decades. She says several factors linked to ADHD can contribute to these risks. They include impulsivity, trouble sleeping, an inability to maintain healthy routines, the chronic stress of living with unmanaged symptoms and poor food choices driven by the need to seek dopamine.

Last year, a large study from the UK found women with ADHD die on average nearly nine years earlier than their peers without the disorder – and two years earlier than men with ADHD. Yet many people don’t realize just how serious ADHD can be.

“It’s not just an excuse for ‘why I’m always late for work,'” Quinn says. “It’s a significant problem in their lives.”

In recent years, growing recognition of gender differences in ADHD has helped lead to a surge in diagnoses among adult women – nearly 7 million women in the U.S. had the diagnosis as of 2023, according to federal data analyzed by the nonprofit Children and Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, or CHADD. While boys are still diagnosed at roughly 2 to 3 times the rate of girls, those disparities even out in adulthood.

A breaking point in midlifeOften, women can spend years masking their symptoms, says Ellen Littman, a clinical psychologist who specializes in women with ADHD. But when life gets more complex, their compensation systems can crumble.

“And it just reaches a critical mass point of, ‘I can’t manage all of this,'” Littman says.

For Amy Reyer, that breaking point came at age 48. She was caring for two teens and aging parents, and had a demanding job that had her constantly on call.

“I was holding it together, as I’d learned to do, but a lot was breaking down,” Reyer says.

Reyer says her whole life, she’d struggled with focus and anxiety. She felt like she always had to work three times as hard as her peers to get things done.

Amy Reyer in her sophomore year at Sidwell Friends School. “I just assumed that everything I was going to do was going to be really, really difficult – and more difficult for me,” Reyer says. “But I didn’t know why at that time until I was diagnosed.”
(Reyer family)“I spent most of my life trying to prove that I wasn’t defective,” she says.

“I just assumed that everything I was going to do was going to be really, really difficult – and more difficult for me. But I didn’t know why at that time until I was diagnosed.”

Still, she’d managed to earn a doctorate and had a successful career in media. Then perimenopause hit, and it all became too much. “I was pretty overwhelmed and I wasn’t sleeping,” Reyer says.

Emerging evidence suggests fluctuations in estrogen levels can exacerbate symptoms of ADHD, and perimenopause might be a particularly vulnerable time. Research suggests women with ADHD enter perimenopause years earlier than those without the disorder and experience more severe symptoms during this menopausal transition.

One survey of more than 3,000 women with ADHD found the vast majority had been diagnosed for the first time during the menopausal years. “The big, big shift was brain fog and executive functioning problems during the menopausal years,” says Jeanette Wasserstein, a neuropsychologist who conducted the survey. She specializes in ADHD and is on the faculty at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Amy Reyer started treatment for ADHD after being diagnosed in her late 40s. (Reyer family)Reyer says she’d first suspected she had ADHD after her son was diagnosed, because the disorder is highly genetic. She says when she was diagnosed in her late 40s, it changed her life because it led to treatment. Once she found an ADHD medication that worked for her, it was like a lightbulb came on.

“I remember just saying to myself, ‘Oh my God, this must be what normal feels like,'” she says.

Treatment beyond medicationMedication is just one part of treatment. Dr. Patricia Quinn, who recently released a guide for clinicians to treat ADHD in women, says for women in perimenopause, hormone replacement therapy can also be helpful. And because so many women have dealt with a lifetime of demoralization and shame, she says therapy – especially cognitive behavioral therapy – is also key, “because you need to rewrite all those scripts that are going on in your head.”

Psychologist Ellen Littman says in her practice, the focus is on helping women reframe their understanding of themselves “from ‘I’m a broken loser and I’m useless’ to helping them see themselves through the lens of this neurological information. And it changes their self-esteem and their ability to be effective in their lives and more confident as a parent and a partner.”

Lifestyle changes like exercise, meditation and a healthy diet can also help, says Kathleen Nadeau, a clinical psychologist in Maryland who’s been working with women and girls with ADHD for more than four decades. She says she encourages patients to find environments that play to their strengths – which can sometimes mean career changes.

“The metaphor I use is to plant yourself in the right garden, where the things that you’re good at can be nourished and expanded,” Nadeau says. “And the things that you struggle with are not what is emphasized in terms of what you’re supposed to do every day.”

Learning to thrive Ruth Danoff says getting an ADHD diagnosis at age 50 led to a process of understanding her life – her inability to focus and do well in school as a child despite being told she was bright, the years of struggling with “big emotions” and feeling overwhelmed.

It also ultimately led to a new professional path. After spending her whole career in administrative support jobs where she says she was consistently “dinged for not paying enough attention to detail,” now, at age 65, she’s become an entrepreneur and advocate for other women with ADHD. She serves on the community advisory council at the Duke Center for Girls and Women with ADHD .

Ruth Danoff, here in Carolina Beach, N.C., was diagnosed with ADHD at 50 and says it changed her life. The diagnosis put into perspective her childhood and led to a career change. (Danoff family)“My mission in life is that I don’t want any woman to go through what I went through,” Danoff says. “And if I can help just one woman, that’s the best feeling in the world.”

Kate Jarvis says seeking a diagnosis, no matter your age, is worth it. After feeling like she didn’t quite measure up for so long, getting diagnosed with ADHD as an adult led her to medication and therapy, and ultimately, self-acceptance.

“There is so much joy waiting on the other side,” she says. “There’s so much joy.”

Transcript:

A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:

ADHD, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, was once viewed as a childhood condition mostly affecting hyperactive boys. Many girls remain undiagnosed until adulthood. NPR’s Maria Godoy reports on the repercussions.

MARIA GODOY, BYLINE: School used to be pretty easy for Kate Jarvis when she was a little girl, back in the 1980s.

KATE JARVIS: I started out as a fantastic student. My mom used to refer to me as bright-eyed and bushy tailed.

GODOY: She got straight A’s, was creative and so organized, she’d even prep her toothbrush with toothpaste each night. Then puberty hit and everything started to fall apart. She found it harder to focus and her grades slipped.

JARVIS: It really hit my self-esteem badly. I felt pretty awful about myself.

GODOY: In high school, she was diagnosed with anxiety and depression. She struggled to fit in. She says it stung when teachers would write comments like, Kate has so much potential, if only she’d apply herself.

JARVIS: So it felt like character flaws, rather than what it really was, which is undiagnosed ADHD.

GODOY: Researchers say Jarvis’ story is pretty common. For decades, ADHD research was conducted mostly on boys, but ADHD often looks different in girls, says Julia Schechter, of the Duke Center for Girls and Women with ADHD.

JULIA SCHECHTER: They’re more likely to appear distracted, disorganized, kind of have their head in the clouds, rather than show that over hyperactive or impulsive behavior that can disrupt a classroom.

GODOY: She says those symptoms are easier to miss. That’s one reason why girls tend to get diagnosed years later than boys, often not until adulthood. Instead, women will spend years wondering what’s wrong with them, being treated for anxiety or depression without addressing the underlying cause.

SCHECHTER: Sometimes those conditions are truly present. Other times, they’re secondary to years of undiagnosed and untreated ADHD.

GODOY: There is a cost to those lost years. ADHD is a neurodevelopmental condition that can influence impulse control and low self-esteem.

SCHECHTER: And for women, the risks are even more striking. So compared to girls and women without ADHD, those with ADHD have more problems with friendships. They’re more likely to experience abuse by romantic partners, more likely to have a teen pregnancy.

GODOY: They’re also much more likely to self-harm. And there are other health risks, says Dr. Patricia Quinn. She’s a developmental pediatrician specializing in ADHD in women and girls.

PATRICIA QUINN: There is a higher incidence of many medical conditions in women with ADHD. And what we’re seeing is, for example, obesity, eating disorders, heart disease.

GODOY: A large study from the U.K. found women with ADHD die on average nearly nine years earlier than their peers without the disorder.

QUINN: It’s not just an excuse for why I’m always late for work. It’s a significant problem in their lives.

GODOY: In recent years, growing recognition of gender differences in ADHD has helped lead to a surge in diagnosis among adult women. Nearly 7 million women have the diagnosis as of 2023. Experts say women often spend years masking their symptoms. But when life gets more complex, their compensation systems can crumble. Amy Reyer says she’d struggled her whole life with focus.

AMY REYER: I just assumed that everything I was going to do was going to be really, really difficult and more difficult for me, but I didn’t know why at that time until I was diagnosed.

GODOY: Her breaking point came at age 48. She was caring for two teens and had a demanding job. When perimenopause hit, it all became too much.

REYER: So I was pretty overwhelmed and I wasn’t sleeping.

GODOY: In fact, research suggests estrogen fluctuations can exacerbate symptoms of ADHD in women, and perimenopause might be a particularly vulnerable time. Reyer says finally getting diagnosed was life-changing because it led to treatment. Once she found an ADHD medication that worked for her, it was like a light bulb came on.

REYER: Just saying to myself, oh, my God. This must be what normal feels like.

GODOY: Medication is just one part of treatment. Dr. Patricia Quinn says because so many women have dealt with a lifetime of demoralization and shame, cognitive behavioral therapy is also key.

QUINN: Because you need to rewrite all those scripts that are going on in your head.

GODOY: Kate Jarvis says, after feeling like she didn’t quite measure up for so long, getting diagnosed with ADHD in her late 30s led her to medication and therapy, and ultimately to self-acceptance.

JARVIS: There’s so much joy waiting on the other side. There is so much joy.

GODOY: Maria Godoy, NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

View Details

The research behind the influential “science of reading” movement was built over decades through federally supported research spanning cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, linguistics and classroom studies.

Education research organizations say a proposed 100-page sweeping overhaul of federal grant rules, which would add a new review by political appointees, could make it harder to produce similar important bodies of evidence in the future.

The federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB) says its proposed changes are intended to strengthen accountability, transparency and oversight of taxpayer-funded grants. The May 29 proposal would revise the rules for issuing and overseeing grants, including those awarded by the Department of Education and the National Science Foundation, two major sources of federal education research funding. OMB wants the final rule to take effect by Oct. 1, according to the proposal.

But in letters submitted to OMB on July 13, the deadline for public comment, education research groups argued that some provisions could have unintended and harmful consequences by narrowing the questions researchers study, giving political considerations too much influence in funding decisions and disrupting research already underway. The education groups are asking not only for changes, but for the entire overhaul proposal to be withdrawn.

Objections specific to education research were detailed in three letters from the National Academy of Education, signed by 19 other education and science organizations; the American Educational Research Association (AERA); and the Knowledge Alliance, a group representing about 20 organizations that conduct education research.

Could researchers study differences in student outcomes?One of the most significant concerns raised by education researchers involves studies that examine whether educational outcomes differ among student groups.

The proposed rule would prohibit federal funds from supporting research related to what the administration calls “unlawful diversity, equity and inclusion” activities and would restrict funding for what are known as “disparate impact studies.” These analyze whether policies that might appear neutral produce different results for different groups.

The National Academy of Education, in a letter signed by 19 other education and science organizations, warned that the rule could ban studies examining racial or ethnic achievement gaps, and whether educational interventions help some students more than others.

“Whether a reading intervention works differently for English language learners, whether a discipline policy falls more heavily on students of color, whether a gifted education program under-identifies students with disabilities — these are not fringe questions,” the organization wrote. “They are central empirical questions of education policy research.”

Researchers also pointed to possible conflicts with existing education laws and programs that require demographic analysis. For example, the roughly $17 billion federal program for high-poverty schools known as Title I requires states and districts to examine student outcomes by race, disability status, income and English learner status in order to identify and support struggling groups of students.

The proposed rule does not explicitly prohibit all such analysis. But researchers argue that the language around diversity, equity and inclusion and “disparate impact” is broad and vague enough to create uncertainty and discourage researchers from proposing important studies.

Who decides what counts as valuable research?Education researchers also object to proposed changes that would increase political involvement in grant decisions.

The proposal would require agencies to consider alignment with federal priorities, which could change from administration to administration, and the “national interest,” which is undefined. It also states that political appointees are to review all grants before they are issued. Research organizations argue that this requirement could reduce the role of independent scientific review, when subject experts evaluate proposals based on quality, rigor and feasibility.

Researchers also worry that the Trump administration’s push for “gold standard science” in the proposal is undefined and could favor some methods over others. Education research is not as straightforward as testing the effectiveness of a new drug and often uses a variety of approaches — including surveys, interviews and sophisticated data analysis that attempt to replicate an experiment without randomly assigning students to a program or a style of instruction.

Among other changes, the OMB proposal calls upon agencies to give preference to grant proposals with low overhead costs, which disadvantages large research universities. It would also cut federal funding for attending conferences and publication costs, unless specifically approved. Researchers would be required to provide written justification for each request to receive grant funds, adding to their regulatory paperwork. Education research organizations objected to all of these proposals.

The White House proposal emphasizes supporting research that can yield immediate results or breakthrough innovations. In response, the Knowledge Alliance pointed to the science of reading as an example of why real progress requires patience.

“Researchers would be less likely to pursue important long-term questions that are critical to creating the foundational knowledge needed for scientific breakthroughs,” wrote Rachel Dinkes, president of the Knowledge Alliance. The science of reading “reflects the accumulation of evidence over many years and across multiple administrations, which has been pivotal to improving student outcomes in reading.”

What happens when research is interrupted?Education research groups also raised concerns about the consequences of suspending or terminating grants after studies have begun.

The National Academy of Education warned that interruptions could be especially damaging for longitudinal studies, which depend on consistent data collection over time. Losing a year of data collection, the group argued, could permanently damage a study’s value.

Researchers also pointed to effects beyond universities. Federal research grants often fund partnerships between researchers and schools, provide professional learning or pay for interventions for students. The consequences of abrupt terminations are fresh in education researchers’ minds. When the Department of Education terminated dozens of research studies in 2025, for example, 1,600 high schoolers with disabilities lost services.

Restrictions on international research partnerships were another concern. Researchers argued that broad limits on foreign collaborations could affect U.S. participation in international assessments such as PISA and TIMSS, which help policymakers compare U.S. student performance with that of other countries.

The Trump administration’s proposal to overhaul how the federal government awards and oversees grants is drawing fierce opposition from scientific societies and research organizations across many fields, from medicine to climate science. These comments from the education research community are just three among 496,775 that have been submitted. A July 14 article in MedPage Today explained that research organizations intentionally flooded the OMB with comments to respond to, hoping to either slow the rule-making process or create an administrative record that could be used in future lawsuits to challenge the rule.

OMB did not respond to questions about the objections raised by education researchers.

This story about education researchers’ objections to a proposed overhaul of federal grants was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

View Details

Back in 2001, Steven Spielberg released an underrated scifi movie named A.I. Artificial Intelligence (yes, the title is a bit redundant). The movie, which loosely borrows from Pinocchio, tells the story of a family who adopts a robotic boy programmed for love, and that robot’s heartbreaking quest to become a real boy.

Much of the technology in A.I. remains elusive. We’re probably not anywhere close to building androids that can convincingly pass as Haley Joel Osment — or Jude Law, for that matter. But some of the AI products imagined in the movie are starting to look surprisingly plausible. Take Teddy, an animatronic teddy bear. Teddy can walk, talk, make decisions, and respond to the needs and emotions of people around him. He’s more than just a toy. He’s an intelligent companion and protector for children.

Today, a slew of technology companies are developing AI companions that sort of resemble Teddy. The most intelligent AI chatbots still live on digital screens, but a wave of startups is giving them bodies — creating dolls, action figures, and robots that can serve as companions for kids.

What happens when kids grow up with AI?AI is already a part of childhood. Recommendation algorithms curate what many kids watch and listen to. Chatbots stand ready to answer questions like, “Are monsters real?” or “Why is the sky blue?” They can help with homework, tell bedtime stories, or even feel like a friend. And companies are racing to embed AI into toys, nurseries, classrooms, and eventually robots that live alongside families.

In a new book, Human Raised: Nurturing Connection, Curiosity & Lifelong Learning in the Age of AI, author Dana Suskind grapples with what the rising tide of artificial intelligence means for raising kids. On the one hand, she acknowledges that the technology offers promise as, for example, a productivity enhancer and time saver for parents, a monitoring and research tool that can give parents and scientists valuable data on child development, and an interactive tutor that might help some kids learn.

But Suskind worries about what happens if AI begins replacing the kinds of human interactions that young brains evolved to learn from.

In fact, Suskind says, her original, working title for the book was, “The Trojan Teddy Bear,” a warning that AI companions may seem cute and cuddly — but they carry hidden risks for child development. She ultimately went with Human Raised because she wanted to emphasize the positive — and irreplaceable — role that parents, teachers, and caregivers play in molding young ones.

“If we want children to be able to continue to connect with each other and with other human beings, to be able to think critically, to be able to navigate the human world, we’re gonna need to make sure that kids have a distinctly human-raised early childhood,” Suskind says.

Suskind is a professor of surgery and pediatrics at the University of Chicago Medical Center, where she directs a program aimed at giving kids hearing with cochlear implants. After she began doing this incredible work — literally helping children hear — she noticed that some kids who had the procedure went on to understand spoken language and talk with relative ease, while others had a much harder time. Hearing alone wasn’t enough. And that led her to dive into neuroscience and social science to understand why.

The brain development of young kids, Suskind learned, is heavily influenced by the back-and-forth interactions they have with their parents and caregivers during the first several years of their life. And she grew concerned that there is a big population of kids who aren’t getting the enriching communication their brains need. And so she founded the TMW Initiative, a research center that helps parents create the kinds of brain-enriching environments that children need to reach their full potential. (You can read more about Suskind’s biography and previous work in a Planet Money newsletter from 2022).

Why Dana Suskind is sounding the alarmWith the explosion of AI, Suskind has grown alarmed by a rush to introduce an unprecedented technology into kids’ lives without careful reflection and rigorous scientific study about its effects on young minds. She is especially concerned about AI companions and other systems that interact socially with children, which she fears many people will use to substitute for the human interactions that children need most.

Since the dawn of civilization, humans have used technology to make raising children a little easier. In Human Raised, Suskind traces that history back to prehistoric times, when mothers used woven slings to carry infants while they worked. Over the centuries, new technologies — like television and tablets — have eased the burdens of caregiving or helped keep children occupied. Many of these technologies have also been greeted with fears that they would rot kids’ brains.

But Suskind argues AI may mark a fundamental shift. Interacting with a chatbot or intelligent teddy bear is more than just a kid glued to a television or an iPad watching Sesame Street or Paw Patrol. AI systems carry on conversations that can feel strikingly human. They respond to kids’ questions, emotions, and fears. They create a kind of synthetic social relationship — one that, Suskind argues, may shape developing minds in ways that, until recently, only humans could.

Suskind cites the research of renowned University of Washington developmental psychologist Patricia K. Kuhl. Kuhl proposed what’s known as the “social gate” hypothesis — the idea that children’s brains are biologically primed to learn through social interaction. Studies have shown, for example, that babies learn language much better from a live person than from a screen. Neuroscientists and psychologists suggest that’s because social interactions engage the brain in ways passive media does not. The sing-song way adults naturally speak to babies, smiles and other facial expressions, gentle touch, eye contact, and back-and-forth exchanges all appear to help open that social gate and facilitate learning and healthy brain development.

While artificial intelligence is no match for human educators and caregivers, Suskind argues, it is capable of opening the social gate in young children in ways that previous technologies could not. That makes AI a potentially extraordinary educational tool — but also a potentially dangerous one.

(Getty Images)Companies design AI systems with their own goals, which could include maximizing your kids’ engagement, keeping their attention, collecting data, and making money. They don’t have the same priorities as parents. And while those systems may imitate human interaction, Suskind argues they cannot recreate everything that makes human relationships developmentally valuable.

“Eye contact, shared laughter, patient answers to ‘why’ questions activate ancient neural circuits designed for connection,” Suskind writes. “These exchanges provide a form of nourishment no algorithm, however sophisticated, can match.”

Human relationships are also messy and filled with emotions. Parents misunderstand their children. Kids get frustrated. Families argue, reconnect, and then smooth things over. Suskind argues that those imperfect interactions — and “the productive struggle” they create — are how children learn resilience, emotional regulation, flexibility, and how to navigate real relationships.

Unlike most humans, AI systems can be endlessly engaging, infinitely patient, and relentlessly affirming. Interactions with them often feel frictionless. Suskind worries giving young kids considerable exposure to them may make them less prepared for the messy, unpredictable nature of real human relationships.

AI as junk food for the young mindSuskind compares AI relationships to ultra-processed food. “ If all you eat is fruit snacks, which is a synthetic version of fruit, when you actually eat the real fruit, you’re gonna be like, “Hmm, it’s not quite as sweet,” she says.

AI could eventually be programmed to try and mimic real parents and caregivers even more closely. But Suskind argues that the problem isn’t simply that today’s AI falls short of human relationships. It’s that AI represents a fundamentally new kind of social experience for children — one that already raises concerns based on what we know about child development and whose long-term effects remain deeply uncertain.

Suskind uses an analogy from the 19th century, when a German chemist named Justus von Liebig created one of the first infant formulas, hoping to replicate the nourishment of human milk. But when a French physician tested the formula on four newborns, all of them died within days, and the episode sparked a fierce controversy.

The lesson, Suskind suggests, is that we should be cautious about engineering substitutes for something as biologically, emotionally, and socially complex as human caregiving before we understand how those substitutes shape children’s development.

Given so much uncertainty about this rapidly evolving technology and its potential effects on kids, Suskind spends a lot of the book offering parents a practical guide for safely navigating child-rearing in the age of AI. She emphasizes that it’s especially important to shield kids from AI during their first years of life.

“Older children and adults encounter AI with already-built neural scaffolding, but young children are still wiring the very circuits that shape future learning and relationships,” she writes. “Introducing AI during this sensitive period presents a fundamentally different challenge with greater potential for harm.”

Suskind is open to the idea of using AI to enhance education for some kids — but only as a tool that enhances, rather than replaces, humans. She argues that human caregivers are the best way to cultivate what she calls “the Human Edge,” a set of social, emotional, and cognitive skills like “critical thinking, interpersonal connection, genuine creativity, empathy, and resilience.”

But, like time-crunched parents who rely on screens to buy themselves some time today, there may be growing temptations to outsource parts of child-rearing to AI, especially considering the fact that childcare is incredibly expensive. Suskind worries that, over time, a fully human-raised childhood could become a kind of luxury good — much the way fresh, healthy food often is today. Families with the time and resources would provide rich human interaction to their kids. Everyone else might increasingly rely on cheaper, more convenient AI substitutes.

And children raised largely by AI might not only lag socially, emotionally, and cognitively, but, ironically, they could also be less prepared for an AI-driven economy.

Suskind points to a recent essay by the University of Chicago economist Alex Imas. Imas argues that as AI automates more cognitive work, human jobs may be increasingly concentrated in what he calls “the relational sector” — occupations where humans are valued for qualities that make them distinctly human, from education to health care to hospitality, the arts, and therapy.

If that’s true, then the traits children develop through a human-raised childhood won’t just matter for their social lives. They may also become an economic advantage. In a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, the most valuable skills may be the ones that are the most deeply human.

View Details

Artificial intelligence is often promoted as a way to make teachers more effective by helping them write lesson plans, generate classroom materials and provide feedback to students in seconds. But one of the first randomized trials testing AI in real classrooms found that it can also undermine learning. Students whose teachers were given access to an AI teaching assistant felt less motivated to learn.

The damage was especially pronounced among students whose teachers were already weaker instructors, as measured by their performance before the experiment began. Their students also scored lower on standardized final exams, the researchers found.

“Teachers, just like students or coders, might be using AI as a crutch,” said Alp Sungu, lead author of the study and an assistant professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. “Instead of doing the actual work, they’re using AI to delegate the task, and that lowers the quality of their teaching.”

A draft of the study, “Generative AI Can Harm Teaching,” was released online in June and has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. It echoes Sungu’s widely discussed 2024 research on how students’ use of AI is harming learning.

“Students use AI as an answer machine, not as a tool for learning, and therefore it harms learning,” said Sungu. “Here, I think teachers are potentially using AI as a material generating machine for homework, lecture notes, lesson plans, syllabus. Instead of improving their own output, they’re using AI as a replacement with very minimal interaction, and therefore the quality of output is not good enough.”

Sungu’s experiment, conducted with fellow University of Pennsylvania researchers, including educational psychologist Angela Duckworth, followed 193 teachers and more than 2,800 middle and high school students in a private school chain in Turkey during the spring of 2025.

Teachers were randomly assigned either to receive access to a ChatGPT-based teaching assistant customized to Turkey’s national curriculum or to continue teaching as usual. Over 10 weeks, teachers primarily used the tool to generate lecture notes, assignments and exams.

Students whose teachers had access to the AI tool rated their classes as less enjoyable, less interesting and less important than students in the control group. The decline in intrinsic motivation was modest, but larger among students of those teachers who had already been heavier AI users before the experiment began.

Average academic achievement did not change overall. But among teachers whose students had lower marks before the experiment — a proxy for lower-performing teachers — student achievement and confidence both declined. Academic achievement was measured through externally administered standardized exams, ruling out the possibility that these teachers had different grading standards.

The study cannot explain exactly why teaching quality deteriorated. Researchers did not observe classrooms or analyze the AI-generated materials teachers used. But Sungu suspects that teachers may have been giving up one of their most effective tools.

“When you start using AI-generated material, you’re losing your personal voice,” said Sungu. “It might be technically good enough, but it doesn’t really carry your own style. If everything is very uniform, it just becomes a bit more boring.”

One possible explanation for the weaker academic performance among students of low-performing teachers, Sungu said, is that stronger teachers treat AI output as a first draft, revising and adapting it to their classrooms. Weaker teachers, he suspects, may be more likely to use AI-generated material as is.

This study is not a clean comparison between teaching with and without AI. Teachers in the control group were free to use other AI tools, making this a comparison between access to a customized AI assistant and whatever teachers chose to do on their own. If anything, Sungu said, these findings might be understating the risks of teachers relying heavily on AI-generated materials.

Still, Sungu cautions that it would be a mistake to conclude that “AI is terrible and will ruin education.” He sees a different lesson: Access to AI technology alone does not improve teaching.

The challenge is to help teachers use AI in ways that preserve human judgment and creativity. That will require teacher training programs, guardrails and better interfaces.

“As of right now, how teachers are using it organically, there is something to be worried about,” he said.

Sungu says he personally uses AI in his university teaching to create interactive games and polls that would otherwise take too long to build. “When I first get the output, it just looks great,” he said. “And then, if I don’t immerse myself in it, the examples, the numbers don’t make sense. I end up spending an equal amount of time to improve the output or calibrate it to my class.”

“It’s not a time saver,” he said.

This story about AI in teaching was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

View Details

A program that helps connect schools and libraries to the internet at discounted rates is under review by the Federal Communications Commission. Educators and advocates are bracing for the funding to shrink or be eliminated.

The so-called E-Rate program, created in the 1990s, has considerable bipartisan support. The agency’s recent focus on the program has left educators, including David Thurston, on edge.

Thurston oversees technology for the 33 school districts nested inside California’s San Bernardino County. The area covers more than 20,000 square miles of Southern California: “We have mountain regions, far-flung desert regions, and then our urban and suburban areas. We’re a really diverse county,” Thurston says.

The county already built the infrastructure to get internet access from the edge of Los Angeles all the way to the state’s eastern border, but the spending doesn’t end once the fiber-optic cables are installed. Internet access bills come monthly.

“There’s no doing without,” he says. School districts “are gonna have to pick up the costs.”

For San Bernardino districts, that’s tens of thousands of dollars every month.

“Those are ongoing, essentially, utility costs,” he says. “That’s what E-Rate pays for.”

A “healthy” program E-Rate has had a notable impact since its founding. It was created by Congress in 1996, when only 14% of schools and libraries could access the internet. That number is now near 100%. The FCC has overseen the program through both Democratic and Republican administrations, so when the agency announced a full review of the program in late June, some were confused.

“By its own data and its own measurement, the program is healthy,” Thurston says. “The program is doing what it needs to and is important.”

Others saw this coming. The Project 2025 blueprint singled out federal broadband policy as a target for cutting agency spending.

Current FCC Chairman Brendan Carr helped write that chapter of the document, compiled by the conservative Heritage Foundation, which was meant to guide the second Trump administration.

Less predictable was the chairman’s reasoning for reviewing the program: kids getting too much screen time. In the now-approved notice of proposed rulemaking, the FCC calls for a review “to better protect children when using E-Rate-funded networks, including to limit screen time.”

His prepared statement at the commission’s June hearing focused heavily on the dangers of screen time for kids and the growing body of research around it.

Since January, states including Alabama, Tennessee, Utah and Virginia have passed some form of legislation that calls for reevaluating technology’s role in teaching and testing, and more than 10 other states are considering similar restrictions. The Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest in the country, recently approved a policy to limit screen time for its students.

Some advocates for limiting screen time at school say gutting E-Rate funding isn’t the way to reduce how much time kids are spending on devices.

“We believe there are ways of strengthening school policies to promote more limited and privacy-protecting use of EdTech without taking away critical E-Rate funding,” said Josh Golin, executive director at Fairplay, a nonprofit focused on digital safety for kids, in a statement to NPR.

Although states and districts are searching for ways to limit screen time, few — if any — are looking to operate without the internet altogether. Many schools rely on internet-based systems to track attendance, monitor school bus routes and give tests required by their state. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 48 states now have some kind of online component with exams.

Bob Bocher, a senior fellow with the American Library Association (ALA), says that because the program is written into the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the FCC likely cannot fully eliminate it. And last year, the Supreme Court ruled that the Universal Service Fund, which collects the money that schools and libraries in turn use to lower internet costs, is constitutional.

But the FCC could change the way the E-Rate program is run to make it more complicated, so the ALA is still worried.

Bocher, who helped work on the original law back in the ’90s, worries the program could become so onerous it drives schools and libraries away by design.

“It’s like death by a thousand cuts,” he says, “death by a thousand rules and regulations.”

Keeping up with the rest of the worldWhile internet access has expanded significantly since 1996, internet pricing and options haven’t changed the way Bocher or his contemporaries expected.

“A common assumption that a lot of people had [was] … competition will evolve,” he says. “And then drive down the price.”

In cities, this may be true, but for many rural and remote areas, competition for internet service providers, or ISPs, is nonexistent.

“In rural Alaska, we don’t have numerous options,” says Patrick Mayer, superintendent for the remote Alaska Gateway School District. “We have one provider.”

His district, where some students rely on planes to get to school in the winter months, has just under 400 students. Still, the district spends more than half a million dollars per year to ensure it has internet access at its six schools. The price tag is high, but the connection is what allows them to keep up with the rest of the world.

“It means the difference between having a school in the 21st century,” Mayer says, “or a school in the 20th century.”

The expansion of connectivity in his district allows students to take dual-enrollment courses online with a local college and access virtual speech and occupational therapy.

“To backfill that funding,” he says, “would be very, very difficult.”

He imagines there would be no way around cutting down on staff and student services to find money to pay the district’s entire internet bill. For now, he’s focused on making some noise.

Once the FCC officially publishes notice of its planned review, the public can comment for 60 days. After that, there will be a reply comment period of 30 days, followed by a full review of all of that input by the agency. The process can take a long time, but Mayer and other advocates are already working to draw attention to the issue.

He spent a few days this month in Washington, D.C., to meet with legislators about the importance of keeping Alaska’s students connected.

Edited by: Nirvi Shah
Visual design and development by: LA Johnson

View Details

This month, the U.S. Department of Education began rolling out a new accountability test that most colleges and universities will soon have to pass.

The test itself is simple: If an undergraduate program’s graduates don’t earn more than workers who never went to college, that program could be cut off from federal student loans. The same goes for any graduate program whose graduates earn less than someone with only a bachelor’s degree.

“If a program cannot show that it leaves its graduates financially better off than if they had never enrolled, it should not be underwritten by federal taxpayers,” said Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent in a recent statement.

But this new test, known as “do no harm,” raises some thorny questions about the purpose of college. Like: Is it just about making more money?

Some advocates for postsecondary arts education think not.

“Earnings is only a small piece of that puzzle,” said Lee Ann Scotto Adams, executive director of the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP), a nonprofit that studies the careers of arts graduates.

She and Doug Dempster, the president of SNAAP, worry the new test might lead colleges and universities to preemptively slash low-earning creative arts programs in music, theater, studio art and design. Dempster says that could lead to a further devaluing of jobs that are critical to a well-functioning society.

“We know we need nurses. We know we need journalists. We know we need early childhood educators,” he said. “We don’t know how many artists we need, but I can guarantee that if you eliminate access, we will impoverish our cultural life nationally.”

How the new standard will workThe new earnings test comes courtesy of last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which included a slew of big higher education policy changes meant to address rising concerns over the cost and value of college.

Higher education experts across the political spectrum told NPR the test sets a pretty reasonable expectation: In many states, federal data shows, graduates of bachelor programs will have to earn a minimum of about $30,000 to $41,000 a year for their program to pass.

“This is really a very low floor,” said Christopher Madaio, a senior adviser at the nonprofit The Institute for College Access & Success. “I mean, high school earnings is not an exceedingly high metric for a program to meet.”

Programs fail the test when they don’t meet the earnings requirement for two out of three consecutive years.

The current test does not take student loan debt into account, which means there’s no way to distinguish between a graduate who is struggling with low pay while being debt-free and a graduate who is struggling with low pay while also paying off tens of thousands of dollars in loans.

The Education Department says it will begin calculating the first year of graduate earnings in early 2027, and “some programs could be designated as low-earning outcome programs beginning in the 2028-2029 [financial aid] award year.”

The kinds of programs that are likely to failAccording to Education Department estimates, the vast majority of undergraduate and graduate programs should easily pass the new earnings test.

But more than 800,000 students attend a program that would likely fail the measure, according to department data. Roughly half of those students are enrolled in for-profit schools, which already have a reputation for shortchanging students.

Other takeaways from the department’s data:

• About 18% of undergraduate certificate programs, which often bill themselves as career-focused fast tracks, would fail the earnings test. Specifically, certificate programs in cosmetology and somatic body work have the highest predicted failure rates.
• Two-year associate degree programs have the next highest failure rate, at 6%. Associate programs that train specialized educators, including early childhood educators, are the most likely to fail.
• Most traditional, four-year bachelor programs fare well, with roughly 1% failing the earnings test. When these programs do fail, it’s often in areas like theater, music and studio art.
• About 4% of master’s degree programs would fail, with the highest failure rates for programs teaching mental and social health services.

For one music teacher, it was “never about the money”Some of the United States’ most prestigious music programs — known for training the country’s most talented young musicians — are among the 14% of bachelor music programs predicted to fail the new earnings test, according to Education Department data. That includes The Juilliard School in New York City, the New England Conservatory in Boston and Indiana University Bloomington’s Jacobs School of Music.

The undergraduate music program that Cindy Flores attended at Portland State University (PSU) also wouldn’t pass. Flores teaches mariachi music to middle and high school students at Salem-Keizer Public Schools in Oregon’s Willamette Valley.

Cindy Flores smiles as she teaches mariachi to students at McKay High School in Salem, Oregon. “If it wasn’t for PSU and the loans I could get … I wouldn’t be a Mexican American mariachi teacher for my Mexican American students,” she said. (Eli Imadali | OPB)Her path to becoming a full-time music teacher started with studying music education at PSU; then she got an educators license from Western Oregon University — and she used federal student loans to help pay for all of it.

She now holds close to $55,000 in federal student loan debt.

Flores said she wouldn’t be where she is now without that access to federal aid.

“If it wasn’t for PSU and the loans I could get … I wouldn’t be a Mexican American mariachi teacher for my Mexican American students,” she said.

But given the new federal test, future PSU music students might not have the same access to federal student loans that Flores did.

She said she feels lucky to have found a job that she’s passionate about and that pays a living wage. But, for her, a career in music was about much more than a paycheck.

“It is never about the money,” she said. “I realized I wanted to have a career in music when I was in the eighth grade, because every music teacher I had were such good role models in my life and I wanted to be part of that community.”

Defining success in the artsSNAAP’s Lee Ann Scotto Adams said the federal government’s one-size-fits-all accountability approach doesn’t make sense for students graduating from creative arts programs because wages aren’t the only measure of success for studio artists, musicians and designers.

“Yes, you need to earn money to make a living, but we see our creative workers want the ability to have independence in their work. They want jobs that are socially conscious. They want to make an impact culturally,” Scotto Adams said. “These are all metrics that fall outside of just straightforward earnings metrics.”

She also takes issue with looking at earnings in the first few years after graduation. Scotto Adams points to SNAAP survey data that shows arts graduates often have unpredictable incomes at the beginning of their careers, but their pay tends to stabilize and increase over time.

“Looking at earnings as the sole metric of success is very limited, and that’s because artists have nonlinear careers,” Scotto Adams said. “For the most part, people who graduate from these programs move into careers that they’re personally satisfied with.”

Students considering any of the at-risk programs won’t immediately lose access to federal aid. While the accountability test is being rolled out this month, its implementation will be phased in over the next couple of years.

Transcript:

JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:

The U.S. Department of Education is rolling out a new federal test, one that most colleges and universities will eventually have to pass. The test is known as Do No Harm, and it’s pretty simple. If a program’s graduates don’t earn more than someone who never went to college, that program and its students could lose access to federal student loans. To better explain how this will all work and the impact it might have, I’m joined by NPR education correspondent Cory Turner. Hi there.

CORY TURNER, BYLINE: Hey, Juana.

SUMMERS: So, Cory, losing access to federal student loans sounds like a really big deal. So tell us how exactly this Do No Harm test is going to work.

TURNER: Yeah. So this new test, it comes courtesy of Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act from last year. And, I mean, really, as you said in the intro, it’s pretty straightforward. For undergraduate programs, their students four years after they graduate are going to need to earn more than working high school grads who did not go to college. And it’s a pretty similar test for graduate schools, right? So a program’s graduates need to earn more on average than those who finished college but did not go on to grad school. If a program dips below this earnings threshold for 2 years out of 3, then students will no longer be able to take out federal loans to attend that program.

Earlier this week, the Under Secretary of Education, Nicholas Kent, said of this change, quote, “if a program can’t show that it leaves its graduates financially better off than if they had never enrolled, it should not be underwritten by federal taxpayers.”

I have also heard, though, Juana, from lots of folks – really a bipartisan collection of folks across higher ed – who say, look, this is a pretty reasonable expectation. Here’s Chris Madaio with the nonprofit Institute for College Access & Success.

CHRIS MADAIO: I mean, this is really a very low floor, right? I mean, high school earnings is not a exceedingly high metric for a program to meet.

SUMMERS: And, Cory, what can you tell us about the types of programs that might not be able to pass this new test?

TURNER: Well, fortunately, earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Education released a trove of data that give us a pretty good idea of where the hammer’s going to be dropping. Broadly speaking, the data show that more than 800,000 students attend a program that would likely fail this Do No Harm test. We also know roughly half of them attend private for-profit schools, which already have a reputation for shortchanging students.

SUMMERS: Right.

TURNER: One more really big red flag in the department’s data – undergraduate certificate programs. You know, the kind that bill themselves as a – like a short term, fast track into a specific career. Well, a quarter of all of those students in those programs are in one that would likely fail. And the program with the highest predicted failure rate is an undergrad certificate in cosmetology, with more than 90% of all of those programs leaving their students worse off.

SUMMERS: Oh, interesting. I’m really curious, though, about more traditional bachelor’s and master’s programs. How might they fare?

TURNER: Really well. According to the department’s data, only about 1% of bachelor’s degree programs would fail the test. And it’s a bit higher for master’s degrees, about 4%, but still not bad. There are, though, some interesting patterns in the kinds of programs that fail more often. At the master’s level, we’re talking about mental and social health services. And then at the four-year bachelor’s degree level, it’s programs focused on theater, fine arts, music.

SUMMERS: I mean, I could imagine that some people might stop studying subjects like the ones you just mentioned because of this rule as well as a lack of access to student loans, which, I mean, that kind of calls into question what higher education’s supposed to be all about.

TURNER: Totally. I – this is what I find so fascinating about this whole idea, Juana. Like, do these numbers mean that these programs are bad? In some cases, yes. But in some cases, I think it also means that the U.S. economy just doesn’t value the arts. So we’re actually going to poke at this for a few more minutes with a colleague of mine. Her name is Tiffany Camhi. She’s an education reporter with Oregon Public Broadcasting, and she has the story of a young teacher who graduated from a music program that would likely fail the government’s new earnings test. Let’s take a listen.

CINDY FLORES: Oh, one, two, three. One…

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

TIFFANY CAMHI, BYLINE: Cindy Flores loves teaching mariachi music to middle and high school students in Oregon’s Salem-Keizer School District.

FLORES: Their part goes like this…

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

FLORES: …Two, three, beat.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

FLORES: Two, three.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

CAMHI: To get this dream job, she first had to study music at Portland State University and then get a teaching license. She took out federal student loans to pay for it all.

FLORES: I don’t know. I feel like there’s good side to it, really bad side to it. The good side is I was able to complete my degree. Like, that was the whole reason why I wanted to go to college was so I can get a music degree.

CAMHI: The bad side was that by the time she got her license, she was $55,000 in debt. Still, she says it was worth it.

FLORES: You know, it’s – if it wasn’t for PSU and the loans I could get, I wouldn’t a Mexican-American mariachi teacher for my Mexican-American students.

CAMHI: But future music students at PSU might not have the same access to federal financial aid. That’s because the school’s undergraduate music students often don’t earn as much as high school grads. Education department data shows the university’s program would likely fail the new federal earnings test. But do students really go to music school to make money?

LEE ANN SCOTTO ADAMS: And earnings is only a small piece of that puzzle.

CAMHI: Lee Ann Scotto Adams heads the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project. The nonprofit studies what happens to arts graduates. And Adams has a problem with this new federal earnings test. She says it’s a one-size-fits-all measure of student success.

SCOTTO ADAMS: Yes, you need to make money and earn money to make a living to survive, but we see our creative workers, they want to make an impact culturally. They want to make an impact on their community. And these are all metrics that fall outside of just straightforward earnings metrics.

CAMHI: Adams also takes issue with measuring earnings four years after graduation. She points to survey data that shows arts graduates often have unpredictable incomes at first, but their pay tends to stabilize and increase over time.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

CAMHI: Back in Oregon, Cindy Flores feels lucky to have full-time work teaching music.

FLORES: You get it?

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT: I get it.

FLORES: It’s easy. We’re going to play it this time…

CAMHI: That’s in spite of all her student loan debt.

FLORES: It is never about the money. I realized I wanted to have a career in music when I was in the eighth grade because every music teacher I’ve had in the past was such good role models in my life, and I want to be part of that community.

CAMHI: And to be that kind of role model for her own students.

For NPR News, I’m Tiffany Camhi in Salem, Oregon.

FLORES: Oh, one, two, three. One…

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

SUMMERS: And NPR’s Cory Turner is still with me here in the studio. And, Cory, as we just heard in that reporting, there’s not a simple formula to calculate a career’s worth. And as you pointed out earlier, this Do No Harm provision, it’s not a particularly high bar, but it doesn’t take into account what we heard from Cindy Flores, that she’s wanted to do this since she was in eighth grade, that she’s passionate about teaching kids music. Is there anything else that you think this new rule misses?

TURNER: Yeah. I think there’s one big wildcard that’s not in the formula, and that is student loan debt. There was a lot of debate about whether debt should be included in this new test. They decided against it. But, you know, there’s a huge difference, using music as an example, between a graduate struggling with low pay and being debt free and a graduate struggling with low pay and also paying off 50- or $60,000 in debt. And I wonder if they had included this in the formula, you know, how many more programs out there – especially at more prestigious, expensive schools – would start to look like a bad deal?

SUMMERS: NPR education correspondent Cory Turner. Thanks.

TURNER: You’re welcome.

(SOUNDBITE OF KAYTRANADA SONG, “SNAP MY FINGER (FEAT. PINKPANTHERESS)”)

View Details

This story about screen time was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

When Jodi Carreon’s son returned to school full time after the pandemic, she expected teachers would roll back the use of the laptops they had relied on while students were home. But soon after her son started second grade, Carreon realized he was still using a Chromebook throughout the day.

Then the teacher sent a note home: Her son was playing Minecraft and watching YouTube instead of doing his work. Could Carreon urge him to focus?

“In my mind, I was like, ‘What do you expect? He’s 7 years old. Of course he’s going to want to play games,’” said Carreon, whose experience prompted her to later create the California-based advocacy group San Marcos Unified School District Parents for Intentional Tech.

“Adults have a hard time and struggle to pay attention on devices. It’s unrealistic to expect a child to do so,” she said.

For years, districts have promoted one-to-one devices as a way to boost learning, provide tailored lessons for differing academic needs and offer enrichment.

But parents and teachers say even the youngest students are finding ways past any blocks adults try to put on school devices to play games, watch videos and message friends on school-issued devices.

Interviews with more than 45 parents, educators and experts across the country, as well as recent surveys with parents and educators, describe the many ways elementary students are using devices in class: watching YouTube videos of soccer matches or playing games featuring Jeffrey Epstein or a “corpse-like grandmother” who chases players with a bloody baseball bat. Third graders have used Google Docs to compile inappropriate memes and images and message each other throughout the school day, and a second grader searched for a sexually explicit term and was shown a Wikipedia page — with pictures.

Parents across the country have reported their students playing a game called “Five Nights At Epstein Island” online, in which players try to survive several nights on Jeffrey Epstein’s island.All of this occurred in districts that had filters, safeguards and systems in place meant to block such content.

Related: Young children have unique needs and providing the right care can be a challenge. Our free early childhood education newsletter tracks the issues.

Bryn Prusky, a second grader in Pennsylvania’s Lower Merion Township, said her friends “just drift off into a video game and start doing something else that they’re not supposed to be doing” instead of classwork. It isn’t hard to find the games — they’re usually “just there,” she said, already downloaded on the computers.

Some parents and teachers are now asking if the benefits of classroom tech are worth the costs in distraction and energy spent policing its use.

“The problem is in the way the machine works. As soon as you give me unfettered access to programs and the internet, … I’m going to go right down that path, and learning goes away,” said Jared Cooney Horvath, a neuroscientist and author of “The Digital Delusion,” which argues that educational technology harms learning. “It doesn’t matter the size of the screen or the fact that the school bought it and stamped ‘educational’ on it.”

In the New York City borough of Brooklyn, fourth grade teacher Martina Meijer only gives her students Chromebook time during small group reading rotations. But within minutes of sitting down with a computer, some of her students are navigating to video sites. Some wear headphones to listen to audiobooks, which also blocks Meijer from knowing exactly what they’re doing when she’s working with another group.

“I always try to monitor what they’re looking at,” Meijer said, “but my eyes can’t be everywhere.”

Kids have been off task and distracted in school long before Chromebooks or iPads existed. But some parents and experts say devices only make it easier to engage in non-academic, inappropriate and even dangerous content.

This is especially challenging for young children whose brains, self-regulation skills and self-control are still developing.

“Let’s say you hand a child a pen and you’re like, ‘This pen can write, it can turn into a magic wand, it can turn into a knife, it can fly, it can change colors. But only use it as a pen, OK?” said Deanie Eichenstein, a California-based clinical psychologist who is one of the leaders of the advocacy group Schools Beyond Screens. “It’s silly.”

John Bellis, the parent of a preschooler and a third grader in Lower Merion Township, said his son got in trouble earlier this year after he successfully guessed a classmate’s password, logged into one of the student’s online accounts and changed the profile picture to a poop emoji.

“It’s not like they’re doing crime, but they’re goofing around and they’re not learning,” Bellis said.

Many teachers say devices have added challenges to their classrooms. Fifty-six percent of more than 1,200 educators surveyed by Education Week last year reported that off-task behavior on computers is a “major source of distraction that cuts into students’ learning time.” Teachers said computers and tablets are more distracting than cellphones, which more than 20 states have banned in schools. And 70 percent of 350 educators surveyed by The New York Times last year said school-issued devices distract from learning and engagement in class.

One North Carolina district found in an audit of student screen use, screen time spent on distraction added up to 31 lost instructional days each year, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Teaching in an era of devices has been frustrating, said Meijer. “It’s reducing the children’s stamina, the children’s attention span and creating this dopamine hit need.”

Related: IPads in kindergarten, YouTube videos at snack time: Parents are pushing back on screens in the early grades

In classrooms across the country, it’s largely up to teachers to monitor devices. Many say it’s become all-consuming.

“The onus is always put on the shoulders of the teachers,” said Molly Esquivel, who teaches sixth grade in California. “You need to monitor the kids, you better be watching them, you better be surveilling them,” she added. “You introduced this problem, and the problem is now the teachers’ problem.”

Teachers don’t always have a choice, however: Some are required to prepare their students to take state tests on computers, and other districts are locked into contracts with ed tech vendors that mandate a certain level of use.

Districts vary in the degree they lock down student computers. Some districts, for example, have fully blocked access to sites like YouTube, while others allow it.

Some districts have adopted monitoring programs that allow teachers to see student screens and get notified when a student is off task. Parents say even when it’s available, however, not all teachers use it. In Westchester County, New York, parent Lucy Collins said her oldest child, who is 11, knows which of his teachers use monitoring software and which don’t. Her son regularly tells her how tempted he is to e-mail friends, play games and watch YouTube while at school.

“Even if my kid was more focused, if you look up and see someone else on a laptop on something fun or distracting, that’s a distraction to him as well,” Collins said.

Even the creators of blocking programs are constantly needing to evolve in response to determined children. Brian Larkin, the director of product management for the blocking program GoGuardian, said students are using proxy servers to bypass filters and blocks, and are hiding games inside of school-appropriate websites.

“That’s how bad it’s gotten,” Larkin said. The company recently started using artificial intelligence to proactively block those workarounds for districts and give educators more ways to limit content.

Related: PROOF POINTS: 10,000-student study points to kindergartners who may become heavy screen users

In recent months, motivated by concerns over device use, wasted time and these effects of screen time, some districts have moved away almost entirely from technology, especially in the earliest grades. Los Angeles Unified was the largest to do so in April, but others have taken similar steps to completely remove or cut back on devices in class, including districts in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Oklahoma.

Sixteen states have introduced legislation focused on evaluating ed tech products and setting limits for students’ screen time, including Alabama, which created screen time rules for early childhood classrooms, and Missouri, which sought to require districts to set limits for screen time in elementary school. And in May, the U.S. surgeon general issued a warning about screen time and encouraged schools to limit screen use to “enable distraction-free teaching.”

But such moves are not universal.

Members of the Lower Merion Board of School Directors speak with a student at a school board meeting on Monday, May 11, 2026, in Ardmore, Pa. (AP Photo/Joe Lamberti)In Lower Merion Township — despite widespread parent advocacy and a petition signed by more than 600 parents in a district of 8,600 students — school leaders recently rescinded a policy that allows parents to opt out of the system’s one-to-one device program. “Our curriculum is delivered the way it’s delivered, and part of that curriculum is done with electronic devices,” said Frank Ranelli, the district superintendent, at an April school board policy meeting.

(Ranelli later told parents the district would review the one-to-one policy in elementary school, strengthen web filters and provide teachers with “real-time control and oversight of student technology use.” One proposal under consideration would remove devices in grades K-2)

The district already has a shaky history with technology: More than 10 years ago, the school board was sued for spying on students at home through cameras on district-issued laptops.

A spokesperson declined to answer questions about the district’s approach to technology or its decision to revisit its opt-out policy.

To be sure, teachers say there are some benefits of devices in class. Assigning work on laptops and tablets is a way to guarantee kids will be quiet and kept busy while they attend to the needs of other students, especially when classes are large.

Erica Boyce, an elementary special education teacher in New York, said her students were especially excited to use a reading app provided by her district.

“They really wanted to read, they were enjoying reading,” Boyce said. She said having students take assessments on devices saves her time on grading, allows her to see what she needs to reteach and helps her group students for mini lessons and extra help.

Related: Biting, kicking, wandering the classroom: Teachers say there’s a rise in misbehavior among even the littlest kids

Michelle Rogers, an elementary reading intervention teacher in California who has taught kindergarten, first and fifth grades, has found devices are helpful with tracking data and giving children work at their level. But she thinks schools need a healthier balance and should bring back computer labs so device use is more intentional. “I have seen when it is not in a structured environment, it’s abused,” said Rogers.

What could help, Rogers added, is more education for teachers. “We need better training, better guidelines and better knowledge of how to use all the apps in a way that’s going to be beneficial,” she said.

Some proponents of devices in schools caution that states and districts shouldn’t move too fast and establish blanket policy changes that completely remove devices from schools.

“I just want to sort of help us all take a deep breath and not throw the baby out with the bathwater,” said Tracy Weeks, who leads education policy and strategy at the education technology company Instructure. “We want all children to be safe,” she added. “We want to put them in the best situation to learn,” but that doesn’t necessarily mean “arbitrary” time limits or bans on screens, she said. Instead, districts should prioritize ed tech that supports learning and show how they are keeping children safe, she added.

In California, Kelly May-Vollmar, superintendent of Desert Sands Unified School District and the board chair-elect for the Consortium for School Networking, a group for school ed tech leaders, said that more “structured, intentional” usage of tech in school can help cut down on distractions. “Inside the classroom, if there’s a problem, it’s not a screen problem, it’s a design problem,” she said.

If districts are going to keep devices, many parents want changes — less time on screens, increased protections, clear policies about screen time and a better sense of how their children are using the tools.

Amy Swers, a Maryland parent of three, only found out her son was spending time gaming at his Montgomery County school when she reached out to his teachers for feedback near the end of sixth grade. (The district did not respond to multiple requests for comment).

When Swers asked if she could be notified when her son was distracted in class, the teacher responded that “contacting parents about gaming would mean we’d be sending emails all day every day.”

Swers was floored. “Our school district, they’ve thrown their hands up and it’s like a hydra, it’s a three-headed monster that they don’t have any control over.”

Contact staff writer Jackie Mader at 212-678-3562 or mader@hechingerreport.org.

This story about screen time was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

View Details

When ChatGPT arrived in late 2022, educators quickly asked whether students would use artificial intelligence to cheat, learn or simply get through homework more efficiently. Evidence is beginning to point toward a troubling answer: Many students appear to be completing assignments faster while learning less from them.

This conclusion comes from one of the largest studies of how generative AI is changing student behavior and academic skills. Sina Rismanchian, a doctoral student at the University of California, Irvine, partnered with researchers at McGraw Hill to analyze millions of student interactions with ALEKS, an online math platform used by more than four million students a year, from fifth grade through college. Because ALEKS includes both low-stakes practice problems and college placement tests, the researchers were able to compare how students behaved and performed before and after ChatGPT’s arrival.

To isolate AI’s effects, the researchers compared two kinds of math problems that differ in how easily students can outsource them to AI: word problems and graphing problems.

Word problems can be copied and pasted directly into AI chatbots for instant answers. Graphing problems are far more cumbersome. A student would need to upload a screenshot and still recreate the graph inside ALEKS using its tools.

After ChatGPT’s launch, student behavior and performance on the two types of problems began to diverge.

Beginning in early 2023, students started spending less time on word problems while continuing to spend about the same amount of time on graphing problems. The gap widened every quarter. By the end of the study period, near the end of 2025, average time spent on word problems had fallen 31 percent among high school students and 27 percent among college students — from about four minutes per word problem to less than three. (Middle school students showed only a modest decline of 9 percent, and fifth graders showed essentially none.)

The researchers believe those averages are being pulled downward by some students who spend only seconds on word problems because they’re using AI to answer them.

The same pattern appeared in college placement tests. When the exams were taken without supervision, students spent much less time on word problems after ChatGPT’s release. During proctored exams, the time spent on word problems returned to historical norms.

But time is only half the story. The more troubling finding is what happened to learning.

Many colleges allow incoming students to retake placement tests after practicing more math in ALEKS, giving them a chance to qualify for a higher-level course. Before ChatGPT, that practice generally paid off. After ChatGPT, students answered more word problems correctly during unsupervised practice sessions but performed substantially worse on those same kinds of problems when they later took a proctored placement test.

Historically, students answered about 80 percent of these word problems correctly on supervised placement tests. After ChatGPT’s introduction, that fell to about 60 percent — a roughly 25 percent reduction in the odds of answering a word problem correctly.

Performance on graphing problems, by contrast, did not decline.

After ChatGPT’s release, students performed worse on word problems (AI-susceptible) during proctored exams, but answer more word problems correctly in nonproctored settings

The dotted line marks the public release of ChatGPT. Source: Figure 4, Rismanchian et al “Faster Completion, Less Learning: Generative AI Reduced Study Time on Math Problems and the Knowledge They Build,” June 2026 preprint.If students’ math skills had generally deteriorated because of pandemic learning loss, weaker high school preparation or digital distraction, graphing performance should have deteriorated too. It didn’t.

The study cannot definitively prove that students were using AI. The researchers couldn’t see what else was happening on students’ screens outside of ALEKS. But it’s difficult to think of another explanation. The changes appeared only in problems that are easy to outsource to AI, disappeared under supervision and grew steadily over nearly three years.

“What makes me nervous is that it’s not only about the word problems,” Rismanchian told me. “This cognitive surrender might be going on in writing, science, everything.”

The paper, “Faster Completion, Less Learning,” was released in June 2026 as a working paper and has not yet been peer reviewed. Like any single study, it doesn’t settle the questions of how much students are using AI in their schoolwork, whether it’s harming learning and by how much. But it joins a growing body of evidence that generative AI is causing students to skip the brain work that leads to learning, and that this “cognitive surrender” is becoming commonplace.

A randomized experiment in Turkey found that high school students who used AI to help them study math ultimately learned less than students who practiced without it. Anthropic, the maker of Claude, has separately reported that many college students appear to use AI to obtain answers and offload cognitive work. Rismanchian’s earlier research, released in March 2026, documented troubling patterns of AI usage in short response essays among undergraduate students at a large California research university.

That doesn’t mean AI always undermines learning. Carefully designed AI tutors have improved student achievement in controlled experiments by asking questions, personalizing instruction and withholding answers until students reason their way through a problem. But using AI this way should increase the time students spend on a problem, Rismanchian said. The ALEKS data show the opposite.

Rismanchian doesn’t believe the answer is simply banning AI. Instead, he argues, students need to value learning enough to resist the temptation to outsource it.

A recent RAND survey suggests many already recognize the threat to their brains. Students report worrying that AI is weakening their critical-thinking skills while more of them admit using it for schoolwork.

Students are not entirely to blame. Even as many professors have warned students not to use AI to complete classwork, universities themselves have embraced the technology, often giving students free access to premium chatbots.

“I think we need to communicate to students that you should value your learning,” Rismanchian said. “If ChatGPT does it for you, then you haven’t learned it.”

Rismanchian understands the temptation.

An international student, Rismanchian began using ChatGPT to help polish the English in his papers. The ideas were still his own. But after several months, he said, he noticed something unsettling.

“I realized that I cannot write anymore,” he said. “I was losing my writing abilities.”

So he stopped using AI to write.

He still uses it to code.

This story about AI use eroding math skills was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

View Details

This story about the gender gap was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

OAKLAND, Calif. — It’s a Friday morning at Oakland Unity Middle School, a public charter school nestled between residential buildings in East Oakland, and Austin Razavi is announcing the morning advisory prompt.

“I’ll give you 10, 15 seconds to think about it,” Razavi said to the group of 15 mixed-grade middle school boys who had arranged desks into a messy circle. “Then each of you share something most people don’t know about you.”

There was some shuffling and silence. Several boys asked for more time, then one piped up.

“I like to play videos,” he said.

Then another: “I like to play with my little siblings.”

And then: “A little-known fact about me is that half of my lung is missing.”

In other classrooms on campus, girls-only and all-gender advisories are meeting too; students choose which type they are assigned to. During these trust circles, students can’t opt out of sharing, because this first period sets the tone for the day. Students will rely on each other for support to complete missing assignments by the end of the day, and teachers and administrators like Razavi want students to feel safe being vulnerable with each other.

Immediately after sharing time, each boy tells the group about class assignments he needs to finish. Their classmates offer advice, encouragement or just acknowledgement.

“That’s where growth happens,” said Razavi, a humanities teacher and assistant principal of the school. “Growth happens through risk. That’s where kids feel like they’re in community and an indicator of kids feeling a sense of belonging.”

Experts agree that a sense of belonging — meaning that students feel accepted, respected and supported in school — is crucial for academic success. This is perhaps even more true for boys, who are more likely than girls to repeat kindergarten and lag in reading and writing skills and less likely to graduate from high school.

But this safety eludes many boys who get the message early in life that they’re not good students.

“Something happens over time so by the time they get to high school, boys don’t feel like they belong in academic settings,” said Ioakim Boutakidis, a professor of child and adolescent studies at California State University, Fullerton, and a research fellow at the American Institute for Boys and Men, a nonprofit research and policy group. “And then that hurts academic belonging, the sense that you’re good enough to be successful in these academic spaces.” (Rise Together, a fund established by American Institute for Boys and Men founder Richard Reeves, is one of The Hechinger Report’s many donors.)

At Oakland Unity Middle School, teachers are trying to break that cycle through the relationship-building program, which is designed to normalize male vulnerability and support boys to be themselves, instead of what they feel is expected of them. Just over 140 sixth, seventh and eighth graders attend the school, nearly all of them from East Oakland — one of the most ethnically diverse and socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods in the Bay Area.

The program, Ever Forward, was founded in 2004 by Ashanti Branch, then a first-year teacher in nearby San Lorenzo, to embrace a philosophy of “radical positivity.” Since 2021, according to Branch, it has led more than 300 workshops, mostly in Northern California, reaching upwards of 30,000 teachers and educators.

“I feel like this school is kind of my second home,” said Unity eighth grader Adrian Polanco, who wants to study business in college. “We always have someone we can look up to, who has our back, which I think is really good and really important for school to have.”

No one claims that social-emotional support for boys alone will help them do better academically, but experts say that programming to boost belonging may be key to closing the academic gender gap.

Warmth and connection matter a lot to boys, even if they don’t always demonstrate these needs by being responsive to questions and expectations the way girls often do, Boutakidis said. Boys may appear not to care about what adults think of them, but that doesn’t mean they don’t crave connection.

This can make it hard for some teachers to connect with boys in the classroom and even read boys’ behavior as so disengaged as to be antagonistic, said Matt Englar-Carlson, a professor of counseling and the co-director of the Center for Boys and Men at Cal State Fullerton. This may be particularly true with adolescent boys.

“When you think what’s happening is disrespect in the classroom, the reality is that it typically isn’t, because they’re not performing for you,” Englar-Carlson said. “They’re performing for their peers around them. He can ridicule you and save face in front of his friends and act like he doesn’t care.”

Once teachers begin to realize when this is happening, they can make adaptations to their teaching, he said, like asking boys questions in a different way. Instead of calling out a male student in front of the class, teachers might come up next to him while walking around the classroom and talk to him softly, at his level.

“So now it’s actually a private conversation between the two of you,” he said, “and you don’t actually have to call out bad behavior.”

Ashanti Branch learned early the challenges faced by male students. A wrestler and football player while attending East Oakland public schools, he now wears his hair in long braids and has an easy, warm smile and laugh. After graduating from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Branch worked as a civil engineer before going into teaching.

As one of just a few male teachers at San Lorenzo High School about 20 miles south of Oakland, Branch soon discovered that male students vented their anger and frustration at him.

“I saw young men who were brilliant, but the way they were acting in front of class was really difficult,” he said. “I would tell them, ‘Young man, you want to fight with me because it looks good with your peers? I’m not here to fight you. I’m not your enemy. You’re a high schooler. I’m an adult with a job. What are we arguing about? I want you to succeed.’”

He invited some male students to have lunch with him once a week and asked them how he could be a better teacher. What they told him was that their lives were too difficult for school to be a priority. Students described “crashing out” — sudden outbursts of rage and emotion — after dealing with one emotional “land mine” after another.

“A kid getting pushed down the hall, he ignores it, ignores it, and then all of a sudden he turns around and boom,” Branch said, making an explosion gesture with both hands. “And then he gets in trouble, right?”

Branch recalled that as a teacher he was encouraged to leave his own problems “in the glove compartment” before coming to work.

“I tried to do that, but I realized I was so fake,” he said. Instead, he was honest with his students about how he was doing. “I would tell them, ‘I had a rough weekend. A lot of drama happened in my life. Today’s not a good day.” He calls this approach “normalizing vulnerability” — an essential step for young men to be themselves as people and as students.

Branch turned the weekly lunches with students into a club, the Ever Forward Club, where young men could gather to process emotions. He spent a decade developing the program and expanding to more schools, eventually leaving his job to build the program and provide professional development for educators.

At the heart of the Ever Forward Club is a project-based tool Branch calls Masks, Emotions and Math. During workshops, Branch guides young men to explore the ways they present themselves to the world while hiding their difficult emotions from view.

Since the club started in 2004, every participating student has graduated from high school and 93 percent have transitioned to college, the military or a trade school, Branch said. He expanded the work to include professional development for educators, calling it the Million Mask Movement.

Tony Farrell, head of Stuart Hall High School — the boys’ segment of a school in San Francisco affiliated with Schools of the Sacred Heart* — recalls an event Branch led at his school ten years ago. Two hundred male high school students sat in a big circle in the school’s gymnasium, Farrell said, and Branch handed out pens and paper. He instructed students to write on one side of the paper how they appear to the world. On the other side, he said, write the stuff the world doesn’t know about them.

Then they crumpled the papers up and threw them at each other.

“It was a snowball fight,” Farrell said. “We had a perfectly, wonderfully randomized pile of crumpled paper.”

Then each boy picked a paper ball, smoothed it out and, one at a time, read what another boy had written.

Farrell recalled boys reading, “You wouldn’t know from looking at me that my parents are getting a divorce’’ and “You wouldn’t know from looking at me that my grandma’s really sick.”

“Not to get woo-woo, but it was like an electric field,” he said. “It was really powerful.”

Two years ago, Branch led a Masks, Emotions and Math event at Oakland Unity Middle School. Since then, teachers at the school have integrated elements of Branch’s work into routine practices, including how the school manages disciplinary issues. That’s also where Razavi got the idea to offer single-sex advisory periods.

Some boys need a space where they can open up to other boys, he said, without the social dynamics that can come with all-gender groups.

“If you know that belonging matters, and you know that there’s this very evident drop in sense of belonging over time for boys, then we need to work on making boys feel like they belong,” he said. “And we need to work on that earlier.”

Eighth grader Fierre Hill transferred to Oakland Unity after his old middle school closed. He wants to go to college and study something health-related. He describes the support he gets from his teachers at the school as “warming.”

“You’re able to tell them stuff that you couldn’t tell other people,” he said, “and they just have this different energy that makes you comfortable.”

“I get with that,” seventh grader Jubran Sulaiman agreed. “We can all, what’s the word? Express ourselves.”

On Wednesdays, Hill and other students go to the school’s Learning Lab, where they get help completing any work they haven’t turned in. Chris Bibbens Williams is the teacher in charge of the Learning Lab. He said that the Masks, Emotions and Math event that Branch led at the school helped otherwise shy students engage more deeply with their peers.

“You’re gonna have some kids who are more confident in talking in front of everyone, but even the kids who weren’t confident, it just seemed like because the space was positive, it was a chance for them to say how they felt in the moment,” he said. “That’s one thing that I love about this school is that we really allow kids to be themselves, and we build those deep relationships.”

When he isn’t in the Learning Lab, Williams can be found all over campus — playing basketball with students and hanging out with them in the cafeteria.

​​”When you build those relationships, kids come to you,” he said.

Recently, Williams approached an eighth grader who hadn’t been completing his language arts assignments. Was he not doing the work because it was too hard, or because he lacked confidence?

“I had him come over and read the passage to me,” Williams said, “and I discovered it was truly just him not being confident in his reading.”

With Williams sitting with him, the student made his way through the passage and read words he wasn’t familiar with. Since then, Williams has noticed a change in the boy’s confidence level.

“He’s attempting more,” he said, “and that’s all I could ask for.”

Contact editor Christina Samuels at (212) 678-3635 or samuels@hechingerreport.org.

This story about the gender gap was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

View Details

For the past two decades, graduate students have been able to take out an unlimited amount of federal student loans to cover the full cost of their education.

If they needed $60,000 a year, they could borrow $60,000 a year, year after year.

The Trump administration has a plan to change that by capping graduate school loans for many students at $20,500 a year, and $100,000 overall — effective July 1. (A federal court temporarily blocked a small piece of that plan, but the U.S. Education Department confirmed to NPR that loan limits will indeed begin July 1.)

In a year packed with changes to higher education policy, this new loan limit is one of the biggest, and one of the most controversial.

U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon says the endgame is to force colleges to slash their tuition prices.

“College costs are just exorbitant. Students are burdened with debt…” McMahon told the House education committee in May. “We really have to do something to bring down the cost of college.”

With that goal in mind, Republicans used last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act to scuttle the program known as Grad PLUS and limit graduate loans. The thinking goes: Borrowers will choose cheaper programs, and expensive schools will have to cut prices to compete.

But many economists aren’t so sure it will do what Republicans say it will.

A decades-old ideaThe idea that there’s a connection between federal student loans and what colleges charge dates back almost four decades, to Feb. 18, 1987.

That’s the day then-Education Secretary William Bennett, under President Ronald Reagan, penned a scathing opinion piece for The New York Times, titled “Our Greedy Colleges.”

In it, Bennett excoriated schools for tuition increases that outpaced inflation, and he argued that increases in federal student aid “have enabled colleges and universities blithely to raise their tuitions, confident that Federal loan subsidies would help cushion the increase.”

His idea took hold, and economists have dubbed it “The Bennett Hypothesis.”

“The Bennett Hypothesis essentially says that, if you provide greater federal aid to schools, they will respond by increasing the price,” says Phillip Levine, a professor of economics at Wellesley College.

Almost 40 years later, Republicans are dusting off the Bennett Hypothesis to justify severe limits to student borrowing.

Graduate school is fueling the explosive growth of student debtTo be clear, current limits on undergraduate loans aren’t budging – and haven’t budged in years. One reason: According to Levine, the net price for undergraduate programs – what families actually pay – has been pretty stagnant lately.

“We’ve seen at the undergraduate level for at least the last five years or so that college costs have actually been fairly flat,” says Preston Cooper, who studies higher education policy at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

But the cost of graduate school has increased considerably.

“We’re at a point where almost half of the borrowing right now is among graduate students, despite them being a much smaller share of the overall population,” says Robert Kelchen, a professor of higher education at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Which brings us to Grad PLUS, which the Trump administration plans to shut down on July 1.

For two decades, Grad PLUS has worked as an add-on to the traditional loan program, allowing graduate students to effectively borrow as much as they needed – no limits or guardrails.

Cooper says it’s not a stretch to think Grad PLUS helped fuel a rise in graduate school costs.

“Up to this time, it has been a very easy answer [for schools] to basically increase revenues a little bit every year by just raising the cost of graduate school tuition because they know that the federal government is going to have to give their students a loan for those extra costs.”

What the research shows“Having essentially uncapped loans, I think, is not a great policy,” says Jeff Denning, an economist and professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

Denning was part of a team of researchers who studied the Grad PLUS program – to put the Bennett Hypothesis to the test. They wanted to know if, in Texas, the suddenly limitless font of Grad PLUS loans that began in 2006 contributed to graduate programs hiking their prices.

The short answer: Yes.

The researchers wrote that, for every additional dollar students received in loans, graduate schools increased their prices by $0.64 (after accounting for grants they gave out).

Republicans often cite Denning’s work as justification for ending Grad PLUS, arguing: If schools increased their prices nearly as much as federal aid increased, why wouldn’t the opposite be true? Less aid should lead to lower prices.

But it’s not that simple, says the University of Tennessee’s Kelchen, who has also researched the impact of Grad PLUS, specifically on business, medical and law schools.

“I did not find evidence” of a direct connection between federal aid and prices, Kelchen says.

Even Denning, when asked if the Bennett Hypothesis is true, says “it depends. I think there’s some evidence that this happens in certain circumstances, and there’s evidence that it doesn’t.”

The Bennett Hypothesis is “a logical conclusion,” according to Kelchen, “if you think that these graduate programs are massive profit centers.” Some are, he says. Some aren’t.

Medical school, for example, “is wildly unprofitable” for schools, Kelchen says. “It can take a million dollars of resources to produce one medical degree. So limiting borrowing is not going to reduce that cost.”

Overall, he adds, evidence backing the Bennett Hypothesis “is largely mixed.”

Levine says much of the increase in the cost of higher education over the years is attributable to a phenomenon known as “cost disease.” What’s that?

Well, over time, most businesses tend to become more efficient, Levine says, which helps them contain costs while boosting wages. But higher education doesn’t work that way.

“Since wages rise elsewhere, colleges need to keep pace to attract workers who could work elsewhere. In the end, costs rise to produce exactly the same product.”

The half-dozen economists and higher education experts NPR spoke with did agree on one thing: Whatever its impact on prices, the Grad PLUS program, as a policy, was flawed.

“I think there was broad consensus that the idea of letting graduate students borrow basically infinite amounts of money was not a good idea,” says Sandy Baum, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.

But, of the Bennett Hypothesis, Baum is skeptical: “There’s been lots of study of what causes increases in college prices and of the effects of increases in student aid. And most of them find that in some cases… in particular for-profit institutions, it’s true. But mostly it’s not true.”

Instead, Baum argues, price hikes have been driven by a host of factors, from “cost disease” and student loans, to the rising costs of insurance, technology – even the cost of living.

Will ending Grad PLUS force colleges to cut prices?So what should we make of Republicans’ current contention, that cutting student loans for graduate students will lead to lower prices?

AEI’s Cooper agrees with ending Grad PLUS, but doesn’t expect an immediate drop in prices.

“I don’t want to promise that, in the first year, everybody’s going to slash their costs, and, you know, it’s gonna be great,” Cooper says. “But I do think that this is going to create some pressure [on prices] over time.”

Kelchen at the University of Tennessee is keeping his expectations low.

“I expect to see, at most, a small decrease in tuition as students may become a bit more price-sensitive and shop institutions a little bit more,” Kelchen says.

Levine, at Wellesley, says dramatic price cuts are unlikely: “Is it conceivable that it could contribute to some small change in graduate student pricing? Maybe. … Colleges don’t just make up their prices. Colleges have costs, and it has to be the case that the revenue that they generate covers their costs.”

Even Denning, whose research found the clearest evidence of a connection between federal loans and college prices, says of these new loan limits potentially driving price cuts: “It certainly is possible. I’m not sure if it will happen. I do not have a crystal ball. I wish I did.”

Denning points out that it’s hard to predict student behavior. The dramatic cut in federal loans could shift students to cheaper programs. It could also send them scrambling into the private loan market. After all, he says, while the new loan limits are roughly the same as they were in 2006, before Grad PLUS, they’re actually “much lower” because they don’t account for two decades of inflation.

“We needed loan limits,” says Baum at the Urban Institute, “but these limits are extreme.”

As for the effect they could have on college prices, Baum predicts, “It’s not like prices are gonna plummet. They might rise more slowly.”

And she worries the limits are going into effect so suddenly that they could put graduate school out of reach for some low-income students – a concern shared by Dominique Baker, an associate professor of education and public policy at the University of Delaware.

“We have really robust evidence on what happens when we reduce access to financial aid,” Baker says, “and that is that students stop enrolling.” Especially lower-income students who may not have the kind of credit history to qualify for a private student loan.

Recent analyses suggest these new limits will affect roughly 30% of graduate borrowers.

In her testimony before lawmakers, Education Secretary McMahon repeatedly said that some graduate schools have already lowered their prices ahead of the big change.

NPR followed-up with the Education Department to get a list of those programs, some of which are offering discounts through new scholarships. They include:

• Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School
• Lewis & Clark Graduate School of Education and Counseling
• Neumann University
• Purdue University‘s online Master of Science in Global Supply Chain Management
• The University of California, Irvine‘s MBA program
• Santa Clara University School of Law

Borrowers likely hope this short list gets longer – and fast.

Digital story edited by: Nicole Cohen
Audio story edited by: Alex Goldmark and Nicole Cohen

View Details

Social emotional learning — lessons in soft skills like listening to people you disagree with or calming yourself down before a test — has become a flashpoint in the culture wars.

The conservative political group Moms for Liberty opposes SEL, as it is often abbreviated, telling parents that its “goal is to psychologically manipulate students to accept the progressive ideology that supports gender fluidity, sexual preference exploration, and systemic oppression.” Critics say that parents should discuss social and emotional matters at home and that schools should stick to academics. Meanwhile, some advocates on the left say standard SEL classes don’t go far enough and should include such topics as social justice and anti-racism training.

While the political battle rages on, academic researchers are marshalling evidence for what high-quality SEL programs actually deliver for students. The latest study, by researchers at Yale University, summarizes 12 years of evidence, from 2008 to 2020, and it finds that 30 different SEL programs, which put themselves through 40 rigorous evaluations involving almost 34,000 students, tended to produce “moderate” academic benefits.

The meta-analysis, published online Oct. 8 in the peer-reviewed journal Review of Educational Research, calculated that the grades and test scores of students in SEL classes improved by about 4 percentile points, on average, compared with students who didn’t receive soft-skill instruction. That’s the equivalent of moving from the 50th percentile (in the middle) to the 54th percentile (slightly above average). Reading gains were larger (more than 6 percentile points) than math gains (fewer than 4 percentile points). Longer-duration SEL programs, extending more than four months, produced double the academic gains — more than 8 percentile points.

“Social emotional learning interventions are not designed, most of the time, to explicitly improve academic achievement,” said Christina Cipriano, one of the study’s four authors and an associate professor at Yale Medical School’s Child Study Center. “And yet we demonstrated, through our meta-analytic report, that explicit social emotional learning improved academic achievement and it improved both GPA and test scores.”

Cipriano also directs the Education Collaboratory at Yale, whose mission is to “advance the science of learning and social and emotional development.”

The academic boost from SEL in this 2025 paper is much smaller than the 11 percentile points documented in an earlier 2011 meta-analysis that summarized research through 2007, when SEL had not yet gained widespread popularity in schools. That has since changed. More than 80 percent of principals of K-12 schools said their schools used an SEL curriculum during the 2023-24 school year, according to a survey by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) and the RAND Corporation.

The Yale researchers only studied a small subset of the SEL market, programs that subjected themselves to a rigorous evaluation and included academic outcomes. Three-quarters of the 40 studies were randomized-controlled trials, similar to pharmaceutical trials, where schools or teachers were randomly assigned to teach an SEL curriculum. The remaining studies, in which schools or teachers volunteered to participate, still had control groups of students so that researchers could compare the academic gains of students who did not receive SEL instruction.

The SEL programs in the Yale study taught a wide range of soft skills, from mindfulness and anger management to resolving conflicts and setting goals. It is unclear which soft skills are driving the academic gains. That’s an area for future research.

“Developmentally, when we think about what we know about how kids learn, emotional regulation is really the driver,” said Cipriano. “No matter how good that curriculum or that math program or reading curriculum is, if a child is feeling unsafe or anxious or stressed out or frustrated or embarrassed, they’re not available to receive the instruction, however great that teacher might be.”

Cipriano said that effective programs give students tools to cope with stressful situations. She offered the example of a pop quiz, from the perspective of a student. “You can recognize, I’m feeling nervous, my blood is rushing to my hands or my face, and I can use my strategies of counting to 10, thinking about what I know, and use positive self talk to be able to regulate, to be able to take my test,” she said.

The strongest evidence for SEL is in elementary school, where the majority of evaluations have been conducted (two-thirds of the 40 studies). For young students, SEL lessons tend to be short but frequent, for example, 10 minutes a day. There’s less evidence for middle and high school SEL programs because they haven’t been studied as much. Typically, preteens and teens have less frequent but longer sessions, a half hour or even 90 minutes, weekly or monthly.

Cipriano said that schools don’t need to spend “hours and hours” on social and emotional instruction in order to see academic benefits. A current trend is to incorporate or embed social and emotional learning within academic instruction, as part of math class, for example. But none of the underlying studies in this paper evaluated whether this was a more effective way to deliver SEL. All of the programs in this study were separate stand-alone SEL lessons.

Advice to schoolsSchools are inundated by sales pitches from SEL vendors. Estimates of the market size range wildly, but a half dozen market research firms put it above $2 billion annually. Not all SEL programs are necessarily effective or can be expected to produce the academic gains that the Yale team calculated.

Cipriano advises schools not to be taken in by slick marketing. Many of the effective programs have no marketing at all and some are free. Unfortunately, some of these programs have been discontinued or have transformed through ownership changes. But she says school leaders can ask questions about which specific skills the SEL program claims to foster, whether those skills will help the district achieve its goals, such as improving school climate, and whether the program has been externally evaluated.

“Districts invest in things all the time that are flashy and pretty, across content areas, not just SEL,” said Cipriano. “It may never have had an external evaluation, but has a really great social media presence and really great marketing.”

Cipriano has also built a new website, improvingstudentoutcomes.org, to track the latest research on SEL effectiveness and to help schools identify proven programs.

Cipriano says parents should be asking questions too. “Parents should be partners in learning,” said Cipriano. “I have four kids, and I want to know what they’re learning about in school.”

This meta-analysis probably won’t stop the SEL critics who say that these programs force educators to be therapists. Groups like Moms for Liberty, which holds its national summit this week, say teachers should stick to academics. This paper rejects that dichotomy because it suggests that emotions, social interaction and academics are all interlinked.

Before criticizing all SEL programs, educators and parents need to consider the evidence.

This story about SEL benefits was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

View Details

New survey data finds that nearly 1 in 5 high schoolers say they or someone they know has had a romantic relationship with artificial intelligence. And 42% of students surveyed say they or someone they know have used AI for companionship.

That’s according to new research from the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), a nonprofit that advocates for civil rights, civil liberties and responsible use of data and technology.

CDT conducted national surveys of roughly 800 sixth through 12th grade public school teachers, 1,000 ninth through 12th grade students and 1,000 parents. The vast majority — 86% of students, 85% of educators and 75% of parents — say they used AI during the last school year.

CDT’s Elizabeth Laird, one of the authors of the report, says the surveys showed some strong correlations.

Among them: “The more ways that a student reports that their school uses AI, the more likely they are to report things like ‘I know someone who considers AI to be a friend,’ ‘I know someone who considers AI to be a romantic partner.'”

Data breaches, deepfakes and damaged trustLaird says the surveys found higher levels of AI use in schools — defined as seven to 10 school-related uses for teachers, and four to six for students — correlates with increased exposure to data breaches, troubling interactions between students and AI and AI-generated deepfakes, or manipulated videos or photos that can be used to sexually harass and bully students.

“This technology is a new vector for sexual harassment and bullying, which were long-standing issues [before widespread use of AI],” Laird says, “and this has become a new way to exacerbate that.”

According to the report, 28% of teachers who use AI for many school-related tasks say their school experienced a large-scale data breach, compared to 18% of teachers who don’t use AI or use it for only a few tasks.

Laird, who previously worked as a data privacy officer for D.C.’s state education agency, says she believes the more data schools share with AI systems, the more they risk a data breach.

“AI systems take a lot of data, they also spit out a lot of information too,” she says. “That is contributing to that connection.”

Teachers with higher levels of school-related AI use were also more likely to report that an AI system they were using in class failed to work as intended.

These teachers were also more likely to report that the use of AI damaged community trust in schools. For example, Laird says schools frequently use AI-powered software to monitor activity on school-issued devices, in some cases leading to false alarms and even student arrests. She says this is especially concerning for students who can’t afford their own personal computers.

“So if you are someone who has a personal device and doesn’t have to use a school-issued device, you can essentially afford to keep your documents and messages private,” Laird says.

Risks to student wellbeingStudents who attend schools that use AI a lot were also more likely to report that they or a friend had used AI for mental health support, as a companion, as a way to escape reality and to have a romantic relationship.

When students reported having conversations with AI systems for personal reasons, and not for school work, 31% said they used a device or software provided by their school.

“I think students should know that they are not actually talking to a person. They are talking to a tool, and those tools have known limitations,” Laird says. “Our research suggests that the AI literacy and the training that students are getting are very basic.”

Laird says students and educators often aren’t getting training or guidance to help them navigate the more complex challenges associated with the technology.

For example, only 11% of surveyed teachers said they received training on how to respond if they suspect a student’s use of AI is detrimental to their wellbeing.

Educators who frequently use AI were more likely to say the technology improves their teaching, saves them time and provides individualized learning for students – but students in schools where AI use is prevalent reported higher levels of concern about the technology, including that it makes them feel less connected to their teachers.

“What we hear from students is that while there may be value in this, there’s also some negative consequences that are coming with it, too,” Laird says. “And if we’re going to realize the benefits of AI, you know, we really need to pay attention to what students are telling us.”

View Details

When Georgia State University professor G. Sue Kasun taught a new course this summer, she used generative artificial intelligence to help her brainstorm.

Kasun, a professor of language, culture and education, teaches current and future language educators. And she used Gemini — Google’s generative AI chatbot — to come up with ideas for readings and activities for a course on integrating identity and culture in language education.

“There were suggestions of offering different choices like having students generate an image, having students write a poem. And these are things that I could maybe think of but we have limits on our time, which is probably our most valuable resource as faculty.”

Kasun also uses Gemini to create grading rubrics. She says she always checks to make sure that what it generates is accurate “and importantly representative of what my learning objectives are.”

It’s a massive time-saver, she says.

Kasun is one of an increasing number of higher education faculty using generative AI models in their work.

One national survey of more than 1,800 higher education staff members conducted by consulting firm Tyton Partners earlier this year found that about 40% of administrators and 30% of instructions use generative AI daily or weekly — that’s up from just 2% and 4%, respectively, in the spring of 2023.

New research from Anthropic — the company behind the AI chatbot Claude — suggests professors around the world are using AI for curriculum development, designing lessons, conducting research, writing grant proposals, managing budgets, grading student work and designing their own interactive learning tools, among other uses.

“When we looked into the data late last year, we saw that of all the ways people were using Claude, education made up two out of the top four use cases,” says Drew Bent, education lead at Anthropic and one of the researchers who led the study.

That includes both students and professors. Bent says those findings inspired a report on how university students use the AI chatbot and the most recent research on professor use of Claude.

How professors are using AI Anthropic’s report is based on roughly 74,000 conversations that users with higher education email addresses had with Claude over an 11-day period in late May and early June of this year. The company used an automated tool to analyze the conversations.

The majority — or 57% of the conversations analyzed — related to curriculum development, like designing lesson plans and assignments. Bent says one of the more surprising findings was professors using Claude to develop interactive simulations for students, like web-based games.

“It’s helping write the code so that you can have an interactive simulation that you as an educator can share with students in your class for them to help understand a concept,” Bent says.

The second most common way professors used Claude was for academic research — this comprised 13% of conversations. Educators also used the AI chatbot to complete administrative tasks, including budget plans, drafting letters of recommendation and creating meeting agendas.

Their analysis suggests professors tend to automate more tedious and routine work, including financial and administrative tasks.

“But for other areas like teaching and lesson design, it was much more of a collaborative process, where the educators and the AI assistant are going back and forth and collaborating on it together,” Bent says.

The data comes with caveats – Anthropic published its findings but did not release the full data behind them – including how many professors were in the analysis.

And the research captured a snapshot in time; the period studied encompassed the tail end of the academic year. Had they analyzed an 11-day period in October, Bent says, for example, the results could have been different.

Grading student work with AIAbout 7% of the conversations Anthropic analyzed were about grading student work.

“When educators use AI for grading, they often automate a lot of it away, and they have AI do significant parts of the grading,” Bent says.

The company partnered with Northeastern University on this research – surveying 22 faculty members about how and why they use Claude. In their survey responses, university faculty said grading student work was the task the chatbot was least effective at.

It’s not clear whether any of the assessments Claude produced actually factored into the grades and feedback students received.

Nevertheless, Marc Watkins, a lecturer and researcher at the University of Mississippi, fears that Anthropic’s findings signal a disturbing trend. Watkins studies the impact of AI on higher education.

“This sort of nightmare scenario that we might be running into is students using AI to write papers and teachers using AI to grade the same papers. If that’s the case, then what’s the purpose of education?”

Watkins says he’s also alarmed by the use of AI in ways that he says, devalue professor-student relationships.

“If you’re just using this to automate some portion of your life, whether that’s writing emails to students, letters of recommendation, grading or providing feedback, I’m really against that,” he says.

Professors and faculty need guidance Kasun — the professor from Georgia State — also doesn’t believe professors should use AI for grading.

She wishes colleges and universities had more support and guidance on how best to use this new technology.

“We are here, sort of alone in the forest, fending for ourselves,” Kasun says.

Drew Bent, with Anthropic, says companies like his should partner with higher education institutions. He cautions: “Us as a tech company, telling educators what to do or what not to do is not the right way.”

But educators and those working in AI, like Bent, agree that the decisions made now over how to incorporate AI in college and university courses will impact students for years to come.

View Details

PEN America released its list of the most-banned books of the 2024-2025 school year on Wednesday – and warned that the number of books challenged or banned in public school districts across the country has risen exponentially in the past two years.

The group dedicated to free expression counted 6,870 bans during the past academic year. While that’s down from a total of 10,046 bans imposed during the 2023-24 school year, it’s still a sharp rise from the period of 2021-2023, which averaged just under 3,000 incidents of book banning each year, in what it calls a “disturbing normalization of censorship” in public schools.

PEN America defines a school book ban as “any action taken against a book based on its content and as a result of parent or community challenges, administrative decisions, or in response to direct or threatened action by governmental officials, that leads to a book being either completely removed from availability to students, or where access to a book is restricted or diminished.”

According to the new report, the most-banned book in the country in the 2023-24 school year was Anthony Burgess’ 1962 dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange, followed by Patricia McCormick’s 2006 young adult title Sold, a fictional account of a girl sold into sexual slavery in India that was named one of the American Library Association’s best YA books. The third book on the list is Jennifer Niven’s YA coming-of-age novel Breathless.

Horror writer Stephen King ( 206 instances), young adult novelist Ellen Hopkins (167 instances) and fantasy author Sarah J. Maas (162 instances) are the authors listed as most-challenged overall in the 2024-25 academic year.

Other frequently banned and challenged authors include novelist Jodi Picoult, manga author Yusei Matsui and children’s and young adult author Elana K. Arnold.

The report lists the states with the highest rates of book banning in 2024-25 as Florida, with 2,304 instances; Texas (1,781); and Tennessee (1,622).

“Never before in the life of any living American have so many books been systematically removed from school libraries across the country. Never before have so many states passed laws or regulations to facilitate the banning of books, including bans on specific titles statewide,” the PEN report says.

The PEN America report’s authors added that although many bans have been enacted at the local and state levels, the federal government has been using new executive orders signed by President Trump to remove certain titles from Department of Defense schools on military bases; in July, nearly 600 titles were removed for lack of allignment with executive orders related to diversity, discussions of race and “gender ideology extremism.”

In January, the Department of Education issued a memo in which it called book bans a “hoax,” and rescinded all federal guidance that indicated that removals of “age-inappropriate” books could be violations of civil rights laws.

PEN America also argues that representations of LGBTQ+ identity in books are frequently deemed “sexually explicit,” including in the picture books And Tango Makes Three, the true-life tale of two male Emperor Penguins hatching and raising a baby chick together at New York’s Central Park Zoo, and The Purim Superhero, whose main character debates what costume he should wear for the joyous Jewish holiday – and who has two fathers.

View Details

Sports were always central to Rob Minnick’s life. While growing up, children’s birthday parties were celebrated on Sundays so that the adults could watch the Eagles game while the kids ate cake.

“Sports were consistently present throughout my life,” Minnick, now 26, told me.

When online sports gambling became legal, and television ads encouraging the practice aired regularly during games, Minnick got the idea that he could profit from his vast sports knowledge by making smart bets. At 18, he started gambling daily on fantasy sports sites that allow players to create fantasy teams made up of professional athletes; players make wagers on the athletes’ performances for a single game at a time.

Later he started gambling on FanDuel and DraftKings, the two largest online sports gambling sites, but by then he’d already fallen into debt three times. On a trip to Paris funded by his gambling wins, Minnick began to confront his compulsion when he found himself playing slots on his phone while perched on the toilet, contemplating the giant losses he’d just incurred.

“For the first time, I asked myself, ‘Why did I do that?’” he said.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court removed the legal barriers that had prohibited states from allowing gambling, some 31 now permit sports betting over phones or websites, and seven states have authorized online casino gambling. The result of this legal shift “is a crisis, an epidemic of gambling disorder and financial disruption, especially for young men,” writes Jonathan Cohen, author of “Losing Big: America’s Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling.”

Nearly half of men from 18 to 49 — or 22 percent of all Americans — have an active sports betting account, according to the Siena Research Institute. A national poll conducted by Farleigh Dickinson University found that ten percent of men between 18 and 30 may be problem gamblers, a function of the availability of online betting on sports and slot machines. Underage gambling also is on the rise. The largest demographic group calling gambling hotlines are teenagers and young adults in their twenties, and Yale Medicine reports that many troubles begin when players are adolescents. Gamblers who start young are more apt to develop a problem in adulthood. While betting can be another form of entertainment for many, those with a problem have a higher rate of suicide than alcoholics or drug addicts. Further, the Journal of Pediatrics reported that underage gambling is linked to substance abuse.

“If you think your kid isn’t gambling, either he’s an exception or you’re deluding yourself,” Cohen told me. “Your son, if he plays video games or likes sports, is almost certainly gambling in some way,” he added.

Like Minnick, some teenagers play games on sites that their parents might not realize involve wagering: Underdog Fantasy, PrizePicks and Sleeper Picks, for example, fall under the category of fantasy sports, and most states permit 18-year-olds to take part. (All but a handful of states require that players be at least 21 to place bets on the large online sites like DraftKings and BetMGM.) Tech savvy and more determined teenagers might also find ways to get around the prominent sites’ age requirements by sneaking their parents’ Social Security numbers and using Apple Pay to fund the habit. The cool high school kid, Minnick said, is the one who has access to his parents’ FanDuel account and is allowed to wager there.

“Most parents have no idea how much their kids are being targeted by predatory gambling,” said Les Bernal, who runs the advocacy group Stop Predatory Gambling.

Experts on the gambling industry encourage parents to act.

Talk about gambling“The messages kids are getting about gambling is coming from commercials and advertising,” Cohen said. Some of the most prominent promoters are the biggest stars in sports: football legends Eli and Peyton Manning, golfing standout Jordan Spieth, basketball greats LeBron James and Shaquille O’Neal, Red Sox hitter David Ortiz.

“These athletes create a level of trust in gambling,” said Samantha Thomas, a professor of public health at Deakin University in Australia. “They think, ‘if Shaq is doing it, it can’t be a bad thing’,” she added.

As daunting as it may be to challenge the wisdom of the stars, caring grown-ups need to counteract that messaging. Many already talk to their children about pornography, drugs and alcohol abuse. The same should be said of gambling. “This will not change unless parents talk about it,” Bernal said.

Messages for kids about gamblingDraftKings and FanDuel sell the idea that gambling is fun, there’s money to be made, and that those with expertise in athletics might have an advantage, playing to some boys’ overconfidence in their sports’ knowledge.

Thomas advises parents to press the message about the industry’s motives: it promotes gambling not to help others make money, but to take it themselves. Remind them that the gambling industry does not have the players’ best interest at heart. They need to realize what most adults already do — that the house always wins.

Kids need to learn that no matter their knowledge of athletes and teams, there’s no career in sports betting, and that gambling addiction is real. They need to understand that “chasing your losses” — doubling down on bets after losing a lot — is a symptom of addiction. If they fall into trouble, kids need reassurance that they can ask for help.

How to talk about gambling with kidsThreats and scare tactics can backfire.

“If my parents had said, ‘Never gamble again!’ I’d have done it faster,” Rob Minnick told me. Bernal said that kids respond better to information. He advised telling kids that gambling is highly addictive and informing them that the whole scene is a rip-off — the companies see you as an easy mark.

Minnick encouraged parents to keep talking about it and making it easy for your child to reveal his problem. And if the teenager discloses a gambling problem at any level, like betting or losing more than intended, treat it as seriously as you would drugs or alcohol addiction.

Practice what you preach about gambling“Don’t take your kids to casinos,” Bernal said. “That would be like taking drugs in front of your kids,” he added. Parents who gamble should model safe habits and bet responsibly.

On November 12, 2022, Minnick took his last wager. It followed a 12-hour gambling binge, in which he lost all his money and accumulated debts that would take six months to repay. For the second time in his life, he went to a rehab facility and “detoxed” from the habit. He’s free of the urge to wager, Minnick said, because he found meaning in helping other problem gamblers give it up. He started an organization called ODAAT (One Day At A Time) that offers resources to gamblers and their families, including information on rehab, financial counseling and educational videos.

“I found my purpose,” Minnick said.

View Details

In his first two months in office, President Donald Trump ordered the closing of the Education Department and fired half of its staff. The department’s research and statistics division, called the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), was particularly hard hit. About 90 percent of its staff lost their jobs and more than 100 federal contracts to conduct its primary activities were canceled.

But now there are signs that the Trump administration is partially reversing course and wants the federal government to retain a role in generating education statistics and evidence for what works in classrooms — at least to some extent. On Sept. 25, the department posted a notice in the Federal Register asking the public to submit feedback by Oct. 15 on reforming IES to make research more relevant to student learning. The department also asked for suggestions on how to collect data more efficiently.

The timeline for revamping IES remains unclear, as is whether the administration will invest money into modernizing the agency. For example, it would take time and money to pilot new statistical techniques; in the meantime, statisticians would have to continue using current protocols.

Still, the signs of rebuilding are adding up.

At the end of May, the department announced that it had temporarily hired a researcher from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank, to recommend ways to reform education research and development. The researcher, Amber Northern, has been “listening” to suggestions from think tanks and research organizations, according to department spokeswoman Madi Biedermann, and now wants more public feedback.

Biedermann said that the Trump administration “absolutely” intends to retain a role in education research, even as it seeks to close the department. Closure will require congressional approval, which hasn’t happened yet. In the meantime, Biedermann said the department is looking across the government to find where its research and statistics activities “best fit.”

Other IES activities also appear to be resuming. In June, the department disclosed in a legal filing that it had or has plans to reinstate 20 of the 101 terminated contracts. Among the activities slated to be restarted are 10 Regional Education Laboratories that partner with school districts and states to generate and apply evidence. It remains unclear how all 20 contracts can be restarted without federal employees to hold competitive bidding processes and oversee them.

Earlier in September, the department posted eight new jobs to help administer the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also called the Nation’s Report Card. These positions would be part of IES’s statistics division, the National Center for Education Statistics. Most of the work in developing and administering tests is handled by outside vendors, but federal employees are needed to award and oversee these contracts. After mass firings in March, employees at the board that oversees NAEP have been on loan to the Education Department to make sure the 2026 NAEP test is on schedule.

Only a small staff remains at IES. Some education statistics have trickled out since Trump took office, including its first release of higher education data on Sept. 23. But the data releases have been late and incomplete.

It is believed that no new grants have been issued for education studies since March, according to researchers who are familiar with the federal grant making process but asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation. A big obstacle is that a contract to conduct peer review of research proposals was canceled so new ideas cannot be properly vetted. The staff that remains is trying to make annual disbursements for older multi-year studies that haven’t been canceled.

With all these changes, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to figure out the status of federally funded education research. One potential source of clarity is a new project launched by two researchers from George Washington University and Johns Hopkins University. Rob Olsen and Betsy Wolf, who was an IES researcher until March, are tracking cancellations and keeping a record of research results for policymakers.

If it’s successful, it will be a much-needed light through the chaos.

Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or barshay@hechingerreport.org.

This story about reforming IES was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

View Details

The battle over next year’s federal education budget has begun.

Congress and the White House have released not one, not two, but three competing funding visions for the nation’s K-12 schools in fiscal year 2026. And education researchers warn that two of those three proposals — from the White House and House Republicans — would impose steep cuts on some of the United States’ most vulnerable students and disadvantaged school communities.

The three proposals on the tableFirst up, President Trump’s proposed budget would cut U.S. Department of Education funding by 15%. It would eliminate all funding ($1.3 billion) for English language learners and migrant students. It would also combine 18 funding streams — including help for rural schools, civics education, at-risk youth and students experiencing homelessness — and cut them from roughly $6.5 billion down to $2 billion.

The White House has defended this consolidation, saying it “requires fewer Federal staff and empowers States and districts to make spending decisions based on their needs.”

The second proposal, from House Republicans, would push for even deeper K-12 cuts, notably a $4.7 billion reduction in funding that supports schools in low-income communities. This funding stream, known as Title I, has enjoyed bipartisan support for decades and currently sends roughly $18 billion to schools in disadvantaged communities all over the United States.

In a news release heralding the legislation, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Republican Tom Cole of Oklahoma, said, “Change doesn’t come from keeping the status quo—it comes from making bold, disciplined choices.”

And the third proposal, from the Senate, would make minor cuts but largely maintain funding.

A quick reminder: Federal funding makes up a relatively small share of school budgets, roughly 11%, though cuts in low-income districts can still be painful and disruptive.

Schools in blue congressional districts could lose more moneyResearchers at the liberal-leaning think tank New America wanted to know how the impact of these proposals might vary depending on the politics of the congressional district receiving the money. They found that the Trump budget would subtract an average of about $35 million from each district’s K-12 schools, with those led by Democrats losing slightly more than those led by Republicans.

The House proposal would make deeper, more partisan cuts, with districts represented by Democrats losing an average of about $46 million and Republican-led districts losing about $36 million.

Republican leadership of the House Appropriations Committee, which is responsible for this budget proposal, did not respond to an NPR request for comment on this partisan divide.

“In several cases, we’ve had to make some very hard choices,” Rep. Robert Aderholt, R-Ala., a top Republican on the appropriations committee, said during the full-committee markup of the bill. “Americans must make priorities as they sit around their kitchen tables about the resources they have within their family. And we should be doing the same thing.”

The Senate proposal is more moderate and would leave the status quo largely intact.

In addition to the work of New America, the liberal-leaning Learning Policy Institute created this tool to compare the potential impact of the Senate bill with the president’s proposal.

High-poverty schools could lose more than low-poverty schoolsThe Trump and House proposals would disproportionately hurt high-poverty school districts, according to an analysis by the liberal-leaning EdTrust.

In Kentucky, for example, EdTrust estimates that the president’s budget could cost the state’s highest-poverty school districts $359 per student, nearly three times what it would cost its wealthiest districts.

The cuts are even steeper in the House proposal: Kentucky’s highest-poverty schools could lose $372 per student, while its lowest-poverty schools could lose $143 per child.

The Senate bill would cut far less: $37 per child in the state’s highest-poverty school districts versus $12 per student in its lowest-poverty districts.

New America researchers arrived at similar conclusions when studying congressional districts.

“The lowest-income congressional districts would lose one and a half times as much funding as the richest congressional districts under the Trump budget,” says New America’s Zahava Stadler.

The House proposal, Stadler says, would go further, imposing a cut the Trump budget does not on Title I.

“The House budget does something new and scary,” Stadler says, “which is it openly targets funding for students in poverty. This is not something that we see ever.”

Republican leaders of the House Appropriations Committee did not respond to NPR requests for comment on their proposal’s outsize impact on low-income communities.

The Senate has proposed a modest increase to Title I for next year.

Majority-minority schools could lose more than mostly white schoolsJust as the president’s budget would hit high-poverty schools hard, New America found that it would also have an outsize impact on congressional districts where schools serve predominantly children of color. These districts would lose nearly twice as much funding as predominantly white districts, in what Stadler calls “a huge, huge disparity.”

One of several drivers of that disparity is the White House’s decision to end all funding for English language learners and migrant students. In one budget document, the White House justified cutting the former by arguing the program “deemphasizes English primacy. … The historically low reading scores for all students mean States and communities need to unite—not divide—classrooms.”

Under the House proposal, according to New America, congressional districts that serve predominantly white students would lose roughly $27 million on average, while districts with schools that serve mostly children of color would lose more than twice as much: nearly $58 million.

EdTrust’s data tool tells a similar story, state by state. For example, under the president’s budget, Pennsylvania school districts that serve the most students of color would lose $413 per student. Districts that serve the fewest students of color would lose just $101 per child.

The findings were similar for the House proposal: a $499-per-student cut in Pennsylvania districts that serve the most students of color versus a $128 cut per child in predominantly white districts.

“That was most surprising to me,” says EdTrust’s Ivy Morgan. “Overall, the House proposal really is worse [than the Trump budget] for high-poverty districts, districts with high percentages of students of color, city and rural districts. And we were not expecting to see that.”

The Trump and House proposals do share one common denominator: the belief that the federal government should be spending less on the nation’s schools.

When Trump pledged, “We’re going to be returning education very simply back to the states where it belongs,” that apparently included scaling back some of the federal role in funding schools, too.

The challenge for states, communities and families, if one of these budgets becomes a reality, will be filling that funding void, especially since the federal government has always focused its dollars on helping students and schools that need it the most.

View Details

Thirteen-year-old Levent goes to an Indianapolis middle school that’s been celebrated for its test scores – but he’s behind academically. His mother, Shania, believes that’s because of how often he’s been disciplined and suspended.

Levent has ADHD, or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, which his school, Paramount Englewood, has documented as a disability. School records show he has been disciplined for misbehavior like repeatedly disrespecting teachers and for leaving campus during the school day, raising safety concerns; he’s been suspended for fighting, for “not following school rules” when he was already in trouble and for “horseplaying (fighting) in the restroom.”

NPR is referring to both Levent and Shania, as well as the other student and parent in this story, by their middle names because the article describes the students’ disabilities and how they have been disciplined at school.

It often feels to Levent, who is in eighth grade, like he’s being unfairly punished. Take an incident last school year, when he was suspended for wrestling with a classmate.

“It felt like I was getting suspended for just playing around with my friend,” Levent says.

To his mom, when her son gets suspended from school and sent home, it feels like the school is ignoring his disability. Shania says ADHD makes Levent impulsive – and contributes to many of the incidents that get him suspended.

“Why is he getting in trouble for what ADHD looks like?” she asks.

In records, school staff have said they don’t believe all of Levent’s misbehavior is related to his disability.

Nationwide, students with disabilities are suspended at far higher rates than their non-disabled peers.

Levent’s school is part of a charter network that stands out in Indiana: An NPR analysis of 2024-25 state data found that the system, Paramount Schools of Excellence, suspended students with disabilities about three times as often as the state average.

Paramount’s supporters, including many parents, have praised the network for calm classrooms and strong academic performance, especially among students from low-income families and students of color.

But several current and former Paramount parents told NPR that some students – especially those with disabilities – struggle to follow the rules that foster those quiet classrooms.

“It’s either you fit this mold or you don’t,” Shania says. “And if you don’t, then we’re going to suspend, suspend, suspend.”

“Calm” hallways and very high suspension ratesParamount Schools of Excellence is a growing charter network in Indiana. As a K-8 charter system, its campuses are privately managed but publicly funded and free to attend.

When Paramount CEO Tommy Reddicks describes his schools, one of the first words he uses is calm. The halls are quiet. In classrooms, students are focused on school work. “We’re very much a calm, collected school environment rather than a kind of really jazz you up cheerleading type of environment,” he says.

Federal data shows Indiana schools rely on exclusionary discipline like out-of-school suspension more than schools in most other states. And Paramount’s suspension rates surpass Indiana’s state averages among students with and without disabilities.

For every 100 students in general education in the Paramount system, there were about 45 suspensions, according to an NPR analysis of state data from the 2024-25 school year. The statewide average was 10.

For every 100 children receiving special education services, there were about 73 suspensions. The statewide average was 22.

This data reflects the total number of suspensions, not the number of students suspended.

Reddicks attributes the network’s high suspension rates in part to its structured approach, which he believes protects the learning environment and ultimately benefits students, including those with disabilities.

“You know, a lot of our special education incidents typically involve safety of others or safety of the students in question,” Reddicks explains.

Reddicks says, and state data confirms, that Paramount schools reduced suspensions among students with disabilities during the 2024-25 school year.

He says the decline reflects both the maturing of campuses that opened in recent years and that enrolled first-time Paramount students, as well as the network’s focus on training staff to reduce suspensions.

When suspensions do happen, Reddicks says he doesn’t believe they hold students back.

“We know that, in our more structured system, students with suspensions still perform very well and typically outperform state averages,” he says.

Reddicks shared data from two Paramount schools. It showed students who have been suspended do outperform state averages on standardized tests, but only in some grades. He did not provide data for the network’s other campuses, including Paramount Englewood.

Why some families of students with disabilities are drawn to ParamountFor some parents, the discipline policies that help foster Paramount’s quiet classrooms are a selling point. It’s one reason Nicol, who has sent five children to a Paramount school, kept driving her family there even after she moved across town.

“I like that they’re strict,” Nicol says. “You walk into Paramount, their kids are sitting at the desk. Their kids are doing what needs to be done.”

Even when her own children have been suspended, Nicol has seen some benefit.

Her 12-year-old son, Leon, has autism and other disabilities. Last year, Leon’s behavior spiraled after his grandfather died, Nicol says. He began cussing and throwing objects in class. Nicol says that not every suspension he received was necessary but that he should be suspended when he pushes or fights with other students.

“He does need to be held accountable,” she says. “Because I don’t want to say, ‘Oh, well, let’s let [Leon] get by with this because he has autism.'”

Overall, Nicol says educators at Paramount have worked hard to meet Leon’s needs. She trusts Paramount in part because she believes her two oldest children’s experience there set them up to succeed in high school.

The costs of missing schoolSome experts say that when schools suspend students with disabilities, it’s little more than a Band-Aid that gives educators a break from misbehavior and a chance to think through how to respond.

“I would say suspension doesn’t fix much,” says Federico Waitoller, a professor of special education at the University of Illinois Chicago. Waitoller says suspensions don’t help students with disabilities learn and grow.

“You’re not teaching anything, right?” says Waitoller, a former special educator. “You’re saying, ‘Don’t do this.’ But you’re not telling the student what to do, how to do it — and give them the supports to do it.”

Levent’s mother, Shania, says that she’s seen some of his difficult behavior at home and that she would like him to learn to control his impulses — to stop horseplaying and arguing when adults ask him to do something.

But Shania says suspensions do little to teach her son how to behave. And the missed days of school add up. Records show Levent’s school suspended him for at least 10 days last school year. Then, after Levent walked off campus a few weeks before the end of the year, he had to spend most of the final days of school at home, where he received about an hour of remote instruction a day, according to school records.

All that missed school has taken a toll, Shania says.

“I don’t want him to get even further behind,” she says. “Because again, this is a kid that’s behind.”

Levent started his final year of middle school in August – and already Shania is frustrated by how the school is handling his behavior. She says she’s considering pulling him out.

View Details

So much of parenting takes place in the doldrums of everyday life — planning meals, blowing noses, soothing yet another tantrum and tackling the endless mountain of laundry. Yet, every so often, a magical moment occurs that makes parenting feel like the miracle it truly is.

Maybe your child utters a new word, the siblings who usually bicker are suddenly snuggled up together on the couch, or an impromptu kitchen dance party erupts out of nowhere. Researchers call the feeling sparked by these moments “awe.”

Experiencing awe with your child might bring tears to your eyes, make your heart feel like it’s bursting, or leave you with a profound sense of connection to something greater than yourself. These awe-inspiring moments might arise when your child does something unexpectedly kind, reaches a new developmental milestone, says something hilariously wise, or simply shares a quiet, beautiful moment with you in nature.

The Magic of AweAwe is more than just a powerful emotion — it has real benefits. Research shows that parents who experience more moments of awe report greater life satisfaction, fewer negative emotions, and a deeper sense of meaning and emotional richness in their lives. While both awe and pride are positive experiences, they are distinctly different. Pride comes from feeling pleased with something your child has accomplished, whereas awe is a more transcendent, almost spiritual experience of wonder.

Interestingly, research suggests that awe may be an even more rewarding experience than pride.

Researchers have even generated feelings of awe in the laboratory by asking parent to remember an experience with their child in which they experienced awe. Simply remembering these experiences caused parents to report that their lives were more full, interesting, and meaningful!

How to Experience this Magic in Your Own LifeSo research finds that experiencing awe may really enrich your life but how do you generate these experiences in your own life?

1. Be present in the moment. Awe can only be experienced if you are noticing what is going on around you. Pay attention to your senses. Really look at your child’s face, smell their hair, really listen to their voice, or feel their soft skin.
2. Make an effort to notice the good in your child. You are more likely to experience awe when you are paying attention to the positive aspects of your child. Because our brains are wired to notice and solve problems, it can often take conscious effort to focus on the good.
3. Reflect on the miracles of parenting and raising a child, such as your child intuitively trusting and loving you, how amazing it is that a collection of cells formed to create your unique child, the profound beauty of being their safe place, and the joy of seeing the world through their eyes.
4. Think back on awe-inducing experiences. Research finds simply thinking back on times when you felt awe may improve your life. Keep a journal of these moments or simply jot them down in the Notes app on your phone and read through this list when you need a boost.

How to Teach Your Children to Experience AweThere are so many benefits of teaching your children to share in the experience of awe with you. Research finds that experiencing awe may make children more hard-working, more generous, and more motivated. So how can you encourage your child to experience awe?

1. Engage in activities with your child that are likely to inspire awe (nature, music, or art are great options). Take a long walk in the woods, visit an art museum together, or attend a concert.
2. Seek out new and interesting experiences with your child. Research finds that novelty is likely to inspire awe. You can make a habit of trying new sports, new foods, or a new craft project together or exploring a new area together. Ask questions during these experiences such as “What surprised you?” or “What did you learn from this experience?”
3. Go on an “awe walk” with your child in which you pay attention to everything around you. Be fully present and ask your child what they are seeing, hearing, and smelling. Collect items like rocks and leaves and feel their texture. Turn off your phone and try to be fully present in the moment. When kids see your delight hen you hear a bird or catch a snowflake on your tongue, it can inspire them to look for small wonders, too.
4. Encourage your child’s curiosity and wonder. You can do this by asking them open-ended questions about the world around them and paying attention to and responding thoughtfully to their question. I See You Wonder is a book that you can read with your child to teach you both ways to encourage curiosity and wonder in everyday life.
5. Watch TV shows or movies that inspire awe such as Planet Earth or nature documentaries like March of the Penguins, or if you are limited on time, the short video clip below I use often used in research to elicit feelings of awe:

Overall TranslationParenting is one of the most difficult jobs in the world, and it’s easy to focus solely on the daily challenges we face. But there’s also a surprising amount of magic woven into everyday life with children—and paying attention to that magic can help both you and your child experience something researchers call awe. These awe-filled moments aren’t just feel-good; they actually make life feel richer, more meaningful, and emotionally rewarding. In fact, simply remembering a moment of awe with your child can give your brain a boost. So next time you’re elbow-deep in diaper duty or playing referee in a sibling showdown, keep an eye out for those little miracles. They’re doing more for you than you think.

Expert ReviewThis post was reviewed by Deborah Farmer Kris. Deborah is a child development expert and the author of “Raising Awe-Seekers: How the Science of Wonder Helps Our Kids Thrive,” the I See You board book series, and the All the Time picture book series. Her bylines include CNN, PBS KIDS, NPR’s Mindshift, The Washington Post, the Boston Globe Magazine, and Oprah Daily. Deborah is currently an expert advisor for the PBS KIDS show, “Carl the Collector,” and spent 20+ years as a K-12 educator. You can purchase her books here.

Cara Goodwin, PhD, is a licensed psychologist, a mother of four and the founder of Parenting Translator, a nonprofit newsletter that turns scientific research into information that is accurate, relevant and useful for parents.

View Details

Student Shane Solis plays a record at The Mix, the teen-only section of the San Francisco Public Library main branch. (Ki Sung/KQED)View the full episode transcript.

Public libraries have made significant transformations over the past decade to better serve community needs in the wake of technological and social change. Now, as public school funding faces an uncertain future, how will libraries step in? We’ll talk to some library kids who go to teen-only spaces after school and hear about how librarians are working hard to meet their needs.

Episode TranscriptKi Sung: Welcome to the MindShift Podcast where we explore the future of learning and how we raise our kids. I’m Ki Sung.

In San Francisco, there is a really cool place where teens love to hang out; no parents are allowed. There is no fee for admission but you gotta be checked in. What is this place?
It’s The Mix, the teen only space inside the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library.

Student Maelynn likes the hands-on activities

Maelynn: I just paint a canvas or I make, like, some bracelets, which is really cool to me. And then also, they have, like, video games, which is cool because I love playing Mario Kart.

Ki Sung: 14-year-old Adam likes to make online content, after he finishes his homework, of course.

Adam: I just record gameplay sometimes with my voice and it’s really fun because I’m pretty good at it, but and the games I like to play just makes me happy.

Maelynn: Like I don’t ever hear nobody say like oh We’re gonna hang out at library. It’s just be like, oh, I’m gonna hang out at The Mix but also not many people know about The Mix.

Ki Sung: The Mix has its own entrance on the second floor of the library. Inside there’s everything you can imagine to foster creativity. There’s a room with 3-d printers, sewing machines, mannequins and cabinets full of art supplies.

There are two soundproof rooms with instruments where teens can make studio quality music recordings, podcasts or make green screen videos. There are tables for playing games like dungeons and dragons, a “carpet garden” lounge area for chilling or scrolling on phones; nooks with seating for large and small groups; a row of computers for playing video games; and of course bookshelves full of manga.

While I’m there, I see teens occupying every section of The Mix doing activities or just happily hanging out

On today’s episode of the MindShift Podcast, you’ll hear about how three libraries have transformed their services to create third spaces, that are neither home nor school, where teens can flourish. Stay with us.

Ki Sung: In order to understand The Mix in San Francisco, you have to go back in time to 2009 in Chicago.

Ki Sung: That was when Chicago Public Libraries embarked on a bold plan through a program called YOUMedia. It was part of a broader initiative called Digital Media and Learning. YOUMedia was designed to give students access to tech and digital media while in a safe environment with trusted adult mentors. Remember, this was in an era when there were fewer computers with WiFi at home for kids, so having these services at libraries made a lot of sense.

The idea was to lean into tech and build a bridge between letting teens do what they want, and making sure teens are in a positive environment. And it was a really new idea at the time.

In order to teach digital media skills, educators tried a structured curriculum similar to school but found that that wasn’t widely popular with youth.
So they rolled out workshop models that teens could explore at their own pace.

Eric Brown who helped conduct research about YOUmedia’s impact, explained how staff gets teens to engage with technology, during a 2013 seminar:

Eric Brown: they’re not forcing it down your throat. It’s a good place that gives you the option. You can pursue it or you can just chill. And you pursue it when you’re ready. And that’s very much the ethos of teens who go to YOU media.

Ki Sung:The YOUmedia model was so successful that the Chicago Public Library system expanded it to 29 branch locations.

Other library systems around the country soon followed their example.

But teens will always keep you on your toes. So being on the look out for what they need is something librarians are always focused on. And in New York, they saw one of those needs emerge recently. Here’s Siva Ramakrishnan, director of young adult services at the New York Public Library.

Siva Ramakrishnan: The pandemic really like brought into sharp relief the need for spaces where teens can build community again.

Siva Ramakrishnan: After all of that isolation, you know, it was such a difficult and weird and for many teens like traumatic time, right? And so at NYPL, we have done a number of things.
Siva Ramakrishnan: So one is that we have really invested in our spaces. This is kind of a, you know, historically a trend in libraries nationwide is that often there isn’t a space that is actually reserved for teenagers, right? Just historically there might be a general children’s area and that tends to skew, fairly young and adorable, right? But then there’s an adult area, right? And that tends to be very quiet with adults who are like in deep focus, right?

Siva Ramakrishnan: So we have really engaged in work over the past few years in carving out spaces in our libraries that are for teens.

Ki Sung: What’s important is that the library isn’t just a space, but offers programming. And in the new york public library’s teen centers, that are in several branches all over the city, they focus on programs that teach civic engagement, college and career readiness along with cool things like how to run a 3d printer or facilitate a banned book club, or how to organize fashion design boot camps.

Siva Ramakrishnan: We actually see a ton of teens across our libraries. NYPL has like over 90 neighborhood libraries. And like last school year in summer, we saw almost 120,000 teens who chose after a super long day at school to come to the library to their local branch and to participate in an after school program.

Ki Sung: Critics of teen spaces that focus on things other than literacy can take heart because there’s one really fascinating upside about the teens in New York. According to Ramakrishnan, they’re not only coming to the library more, these teens actually read more.

Doreen: Hmm, There are so many types of different media that we consume now.

Ki Sung: That’s Doreen, a New York Public Library student ambassador whose job is to tutor kids.

Doreen: I think that people perceive reading only as books or physical books. I know a lot of people who read on their Kindles or me personally, I have a heavy book bag. I take my iPad and I download a PDF of my book or my textbook and I read through there.

MUSIC

Ki Sung: It turns out, being IN a library can help facilitate reading even if your original reason for showing up is totally unrelated.

Ki Sung: Back in San Francisco at The Mix, student library ambassador Shane Macias considers his current relationship with reading.

Shane: Like I’ve checked out books and taken books that were there, they get for free. I read them at home.

Ki Sung: The Mix really reinvented what a library could be to its community. But when it started about a decade ago, the concept behind a teen space also ran counter to a traditional understanding of libraries as a place that houses books.

Eric Hannan: Some people were against this project in the community and voiced concern, like this sounds like a rec center and a daycare center for teenagers.

Ki Sung: That’s Eric Hannan, a librarian who helped start The Mix.

Eric Hannan: And I’ve worked in libraries 35 years, that isn’t what libraries are supposed to do, but often it ends up being part of your job that you have what we used to call latchkey kids in the library after school, they have nowhere to go, both parents working or single parent working, they go chill in the libraries. So they’re gonna be there anyway, so we might as well kind of cater to that.

Ki Sung: In order to cater to teens, the library got input from them. a board of advising youth (bay) weighed in and designed the San Francisco space around the idea of HoMaGo (ho-mah-go), an acronum for hang out, mess around, geek out. This board got final say on specific aspects of the space like furniture preferences, programming and they even advocated for a dedicated bathroom in the mix. For Shane, a teen-designed space fits the bill.
Shane: I’d say to have space like this is very important because for me, in school and other libraries I’ve went to, I was either stuck with adults or little kids, which wasn’t uncomfortable, but it’s like, I wasn’t around people my age, so it felt really awkward and I guess did feel uncomfortable. It just kind of bothered me why the teens don’t have many places to go. Like, obviously we can go chill at the park or go back home but sometimes maybe we want more, I’d say.

Ki Sung: It turns out, as more libraries act as community centers for teens, they are meeting needs that schools, among other institutions, are unable to serve.

Eric Hannan: The Library has a big role to play in helping teens in particular adapt to stress, stressors in life, be they political or, you know, biological COVID or just developmental. They’re just going through a unique time that is very short in their life, six or seven-ish years. And there’s a lot libraries can do to help ease some of the pain.

Ki Sung: The MindShift team includes me, Ki Sung, Nimah Gobir, Marlena Jackson-Retondo and Marnette Federis. Our editor is Chris Hambrick. Seth Samuel is our sound designer. Jen Chien is our head of podcasts. Katie Sprenger is podcast operations manager and Ethan Toven Lindsey is our editor in chief. We receive additional support from Maha Sanad.

MindShift is supported in part by the generosity of the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation and members of KQED.”

Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. San Francisco Northern California Local.

Thanks for listening to MindShift.

View Details

For many Americans, the specter of missing children evokes forlorn images on milk cartons or Amber alerts on cell phones. But a new report from the Brookings Institution suggests that the pandemic may have created a new generation of lost kids — this time, from classrooms.

Lost but not foundThe number of students who are not in school exploded in 2020 after the Covid outbreak, and many still aren’t back. The missing kids are not in private schools or being homeschooled. Many children are simply not enrolled anywhere, according to the Brookings’ analysis of federal data. Some are older teens, nearly at the end of their high school years, but many are younger. And no one knows whether these kids are getting an education.

During the 2021–22 school year, roughly 2 million additional students, ages 5 through 17, disappeared from both public and private school rolls, a 450 percent increase from 2019-20 in missing kids, according to the report. I would have guessed that families had relocated during the pandemic, temporarily or permanently, and administrative records were in too much disarray to track down everyone. But even by 2023–24, a normal school year, the share of children unaccounted for (not in public or private school) still totaled 2.1 million or almost 4 percent of the nation’s 54 million kids, ages 5 to 17, nearly five times the number before the pandemic.

To calculate the number of missing children, the Brookings researchers subtracted school enrollment figures from U.S. population data. It’s possible that there’s some statistical discrepancy between data from the U.S. Census Department and the National Center for Education Statistics that will be sorted out in the future. But it’s also possible that these missing children are not learning to read and do math, and that doesn’t portend well for the nation’s future. Analysis of state data by Stanford University professor Thomas Dee in 2023 first revealed the pandemic increase in missing children, and was publicized by the Associated Press. This Brookings report confirms that it is an enduring mystery.

Percentage of school-aged children who are not enrolled in traditional public schools, 2016-17 to 2023-24Source: Brookings, “Declining public school enrollment,” August 2025

Private school enrollment flatBefore the pandemic, the share of students in traditional public schools held steady, hovering near 85 percent between 2016 and 2020. After the pandemic, traditional public school enrollment plummeted to below 80 percent and hasn’t rebounded.

The mysterious missing children account for a big chunk of the decline. But families also switched to charter and virtual schools. Charter school enrollment rose from 5 percent of students in 2016-17 to 6 percent in 2023-24. The number of children attending virtual schools almost doubled from 0.7 percent before the pandemic in 2019-20 to 1.2 percent in 2020-21 and has remained elevated.

Surprisingly, private school enrollment has stayed steady at almost 9 percent of school-age children between 2016-17 and 2023-24, according to this Brookings estimate.

I had expected private school enrollment to skyrocket, as families soured on public school disruptions during the pandemic, and as 11 states, including Arizona and Florida, launched their own educational savings account or new voucher programs to help pay the tuition. But another analysis, released this month by researchers at Tulane University, echoed the Brookings numbers. It found that private school enrollments had increased by only 3 to 4 percent between 2021 and 2024, compared to states without vouchers. A new federal tax credit to fund private school scholarships is still more than a year away from going into effect on Jan. 1, 2027, and perhaps a greater shift into private education is still ahead.

Defections from traditional public schools are largest in Black and high-poverty districtsI would have guessed that wealthier families who can afford private school tuition would be more likely to seek alternatives. But high-poverty districts had the largest share of students outside the traditional public-school sector. In addition to private school, they were enrolled in charters, virtual schools, specialized schools for students with disabilities or other alternative schools, or were homeschooling.

More than 1 in 4 students in high-poverty districts aren’t enrolled in a traditional public school, compared with 1 in 6 students in low-poverty school districts. The steepest public school enrollment losses are concentrated in predominantly Black school districts. A third of students in predominantly Black districts are not in traditional public schools, double the share of white and Hispanic students.

Share of student enrollment outside of traditional public schools, by district povertySource: Brookings, “Declining public school enrollment,” August 2025

Share of students not enrolled in traditional public schools by race and ethnicitySource: Brookings, “Declining public school enrollment,” August 2025

These discrepancies matter for the students who remain in traditional public schools. Schools in low-income and Black neighborhoods are now losing the most students, forcing even steeper budget cuts.

The demographic timebombBefore the pandemic, U.S. schools were already headed for a big contraction. The average American woman is now giving birth to only 1.7 children over her lifetime, well below the 2.1 fertility rate needed to replace the population. Fertility rates are projected to fall further still. The Brookings analysts assume more immigrants will continue to enter the country, despite current immigration restrictions, but not enough to offset the decline in births.

Even if families return to their pre-pandemic enrollment patterns, the population decline would mean 2.2 million fewer public school students by 2050. But if parents keep choosing other kinds of schools at the pace observed since 2020, traditional public schools could lose as many as 8.5 million students, shrinking from 43.06 million in 2023-24 to as few as 34.57 million by mid-century.

Between students gone missing, the choices some Black families and families in high-poverty districts are making and how many kids are being born, the public school landscape is shifting. Buckle up and get ready for mass public school closures.

This story about school enrollment declines was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

View Details

In a new court filing, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) is asking a federal judge to force the U.S. Department of Education to follow the law and cancel the debts of borrowers who have met longstanding requirements for loan forgiveness.

The AFT argues the department is delaying cancellation for many borrowers in a way that is “unwarranted and unlawful” and will have “real and significant consequences.”

That’s because the clock is ticking. With the American Rescue Plan, Congress temporarily stopped treating loan cancellation as taxable income until Jan. 1, 2026. Soon, many borrowers will again be expected to pay taxes on those cancelled debts.

The AFT is seeking an injunction to force the department to do a few things, including:

• Cancel the debts of borrowers on income-dependent repayment plans like IBR, ICR and PAYE when those borrowers have met the requirement that they be in repayment for 20 or 25 years.
• Process thousands of outstanding requests for Public Service Loan Forgiveness from borrowers who “buy back” time that did not previously count.

The trouble started with the SAVE PlanThe Education Department largely blames these delays in debt cancellation on the Biden administration and the federal courts.

“Congress designed these [plans] to ensure that borrowers repay their loans, yet the Biden Administration tried to illegally force taxpayers to foot the bill,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a July statement.

McMahon is referring to the income-driven SAVE repayment plan, which was created by the Biden administration and was so generous in its terms that the courts forced the department to put the plan on ice, throwing much of the loan program into confusion.

The Education Department has used the legal uncertainty around SAVE to justify halting cancellation under ICR, PAYE and IBR.

IBR was created by Congress and is not being challenged legally. But the department told NPR in July that questions about SAVE’s legality had made it difficult to determine eligibility for cancellation under IBR. As a result, many borrowers who are likely eligible for cancellation are still having to make payments.

“For any borrower that makes a payment after they became eligible for forgiveness, the Department will refund overpayments when the discharges resume,” the department told NPR in a statement this week. As for when that might be?

The department would not commit to a timetable: “IBR discharges will resume as soon as the Department is able to establish the correct payment count.”

PSLF troublesBorrowers enrolled in Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) have also encountered delays. According to court records, by the end of last month, the department had a backlog of nearly 75,000 applications for cancellation under the PSLF “Buyback” program. That allows borrowers with 10 years of verified public service to make qualifying payments for months they spent in forbearance or deferment.

In its amended suit, the AFT says, from May to August, the department received far more buyback applications than it processed. Each month, “the Department received an average of 9,902 new applications, but only processed an average of 3,604.”

In a statement, Education Department Deputy Press Secretary Ellen Keast says, with the PSLF “Buyback” program, the Biden administration was guilty of “weaponizing a legal discharge plan for political purposes. The Department is working its way through this backlog while ensuring that borrowers have submitted the required 120 payments of qualifying employment.”

Processing these buyback applications can be time-consuming, and the Trump administration’s move to cut the Office of Federal Student Aid’s staff by half may have slowed its efforts.

The Jan. 1, 2026, tax changes will not apply to Public Service Loan Forgiveness.

Many borrowers are at risk of defaultMore than 7 million borrowers are enrolled in SAVE and have not been required to make payments, but the Trump administration recently resumed interest accrual on these loans, looking to nudge borrowers into alternative plans.

But court records show enrolling in an alternative has been slow-going for months. In February, the department temporarily stopped accepting applications for all income-dependent repayment plans, and though it has resumed, more than a million were still pending as of the end of August.

The Education Department’s Keast tells NPR this backlog began during the previous administration, and that the department “is actively working with federal student loan servicers and hopes to clear the Biden backlog over the next few months.”

Amidst all this confusion and uncertainty, data suggest many federal student loan borrowers are failing to repay their loans.

“One in three federal student loan borrowers that are in repayment right now are in some stage of delinquency,” says Daniel Mangrum, a research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Meaning millions of borrowers are now at serious risk of default.

View Details

What if improving children’s mental health — and life outcomes — could be done by teaching kids how their brains work?

That’s a key idea behind the approach of teachers at Momentous School in Dallas, a private elementary school that serves 225 students, most of whom come from low-income families. Each day, educators present lessons on neuroscience and mindfulness, from the youngest learners all the way up to fifth graders.

Preschoolers in the school’s 3-year-old classroom learn about the brain by singing “The Brain Song” to the tune of “Bingo” (“I have a brain in my head/And it’s for thinking”). They practice mindfulness by lying down with stuffed animals on their stomachs and watching them move up and down as they breathe.

Older students learn calming strategies like slowly counting each finger on their hands while breathing in and out. Classrooms offer tactile models of the brain to help students learn about different parts such as the prefrontal cortex, which controls such processes as executive function and problem solving, and the brain stem, which regulates breathing and blood pressure.

This focus on mindfulness is happening in schools across the country, according to the Child Mind Institute, a nonprofit focused on children’s mental health. Experts say the goal is teaching self-awareness and regulation.

“Once the kids feel they can calm themselves, even just through breathing it’s like the ‘wow’ moment,” said Rick Kinder, creator of a mindfulness program called “Wellness Works in Schools,” in an article by the Child Mind Institute.

Research shows teaching children about their brains can help with learning and motivation. (Momentous School)At Momentous School, conversations about the brain continue throughout the day, as teachers can be heard encouraging students to identify their emotions or asking, “What’s your amygdala saying to you in this moment?” according to Jessica Gomez, a psychologist and executive director of Momentous Institute, the Dallas-based mental health nonprofit that operates the school. (The amygdala processes emotions in the brain.)

Through these frequent discussions and additional lessons on mental health and healthy relationships, teachers are “trying to normalize these things as part of the human condition versus something that is stigmatizing,” Gomez said. The school also holds regular parent nights to educate families on how the brain works and teach emotional regulation strategies that families can practice together at home.

Momentous School, which launched in 1997 and is funded by philanthropic donations, was developed to put into practice mental health and brain science research from Momentous Institute. A recent study by Momentous Institute and the Center for BrainHealth at the University of Texas at Dallas found this approach may be contributing to positive outcomes for graduates of the school.

These findings come at a time when lessons on emotions, relationships and social awareness, often referred to as social and emotional learning, have become a flashpoint in education and culture wars. Studies show such lessons can improve academic performance: Other researchers unaffiliated with Momentous School have also found that teaching about the brain can provide motivation for students and improve academic and social development.

As teachers and students head back to school and face new routines and social situations, now is a good time to build relationships and introduce even young students to ideas about how their brain works, Gomez said. Although many students at Momentous deal with challenges such as poverty, she believes that the school’s emphasis on mental health and brain science has helped families to better cope with those pressures.

“The point isn’t to never have stress in your life, it’s to know what to do with it,” Gomez said. “Children and parents having agency and tools helps them know how to navigate life stressors, which has a buffering effect on their brain.”

*Clarification: This story has been updated to clarify that Momentous School was developed based on research by Momentous Institute.

Contact staff writer Jackie Mader at 212-678-3562 or mader@hechingerreport.org.

This story about neuroscience in education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

View Details

New test scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the Nation’s Report Card, show eighth-graders’ science scores have fallen 4 points since 2019 and 12th-graders’ math and reading scores have fallen 3 points in the same time period.

The tests were administered between January and March 2024.

This is the first NAEP score release since the Trump administration began making cuts to the U.S. Education Department. Those cuts, included laying off more than half the workers at the Institute of Education Sciences, IES, the arm of the department charged with measuring student achievement and overseeing and processing the data that comes from the tests students take.

After those cuts, the department also canceled about a dozen national and state assessments of student progress through 2032 — about half those tests were planned for 12th-graders.

NAEP, which provides data for the Nation’s Report Card, is mandated by Congress and is the largest nationally representative test of student learning. NAEP tests were first administered in 1969.

Today, the assessments in math and reading are given every two years to a broad sample of students in fourth and eighth grades; 12th-graders receive them every four years. NAEP also administers voluntary assessments in other subjects outside the congressional mandate.

What to make of the test scoresReading scores dipped for 12th-graders, except among the highest-achieving students, compared with 2019, the last time this test was administered. Compared with NAEP’s first 12th-grade reading assessment, in 1992, today’s average score is 10 points lower.

“Scores for our lowest-performing students are at historic lows — continued declines that began more than a decade ago,” Matthew Soldner, acting director of IES, told reporters. “My predecessor warned of this trend, and her predecessor warned of this trend as well. And now I am warning you of this trend.”

The 2024 assessment tested students for reading comprehension skills and surveyed them about opportunities to learn and engage with reading in and outside school.

Twelfth-grade math scores dropped the same amount as reading scores and were 3 points lower than in 2005, the first time this version of the math test was administered.

“These results should galvanize all of us to take concerted, focused action to accelerate student learning,” Soldner said.

Among eighth-graders, the average science score dropped 4 points compared with 2019. Student scores decreased across the board, for low- and high-performing students alike.

In addition to measuring students’ academic achievement, NAEP also surveys things like students’ comfort level with certain subjects and their attendance. In those surveys, a smaller share of eighth-graders indicated high levels of confidence in their science skills compared with their counterparts in 2019.

And nearly one-third of 12th-graders reported missing three or more days of school in the month prior to taking the assessment in 2024, an increase from 2019.

How changes at the Education Department are impacting student assessmentsLegally, the federal government has no power over what is taught in schools. So while Tuesday’s release measured student achievement under President Biden, experts avoid linking NAEP scores to any particular administration.

“The federal government is in a unique position with these test scores to be the scoreboard of American education, to tell us what’s happening and for whom,” says Nat Malkus, deputy director of education policy at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. “[That] doesn’t mean that it has the capacity to fix these issues. That’s a job for the states.”

But behind the scenes, federal changes have had an impact on how the Nation’s Report Card is administered, according to a senior official at the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which administers NAEP.

The official, who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that the cuts to the U.S. Education Department left only two senior staffers assigned to NAEP and said that NCES relied on additional support from colleagues in other departments to get the new release out.

NCES confirmed that, in order to meet congressional testing mandates in 2026 and 2028, U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon has approved a waiver to add at least eight staff positions before the end of the year.

Marty West is on the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education and is vice chair of the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB), which sets NAEP policy. He says he’s confident in the department’s ability to meet NAEP deadlines moving forward: “The preparation for the tests that will be administered in early 2026, for example, really began as much as five years ago and were pretty far down the road by the spring of 2025.”

There will also be fewer deadlines to meet. This spring, the NAGB slashed about a dozen planned assessments — for fourth-grade science, 12th-grade U.S. history and writing across fourth-, eighth- and 12th-graders — that were scheduled to be administered over the next seven years.

“It was not too unusual in terms of the history of the program,” West says of restructuring the assessment schedule. “We felt [it] was an important step so that we could allow our colleagues at NCES to focus their energies on the tests that we felt were most important.” Among them are the tests for math and reading.

The NAGB is an independent, nonpartisan organization made up of state and local representatives.

“There are no federal officials on the National Assessment Governing Board, and that’s by design,” West says. “Although it is a federal assessment … it is designed and administered in a way that meets the needs of state and local governments and the broader public.”

Transcript:

A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:

New national test scores are out today, measuring eighth-grader science skills, and for 12th-graders, it was math and reading. The scores are part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress – also known as the Nation’s Report Card – and they come after massive cuts to the U.S. Education Department. It oversees the national assessment, which is required by Congress. NPR education reporter Sequoia Carrillo has been following this. So, Sequoia, what do the new test scores show us?

SEQUOIA CARRILLO, BYLINE: So these tests were taken in spring of 2024. So this is the first report for these students since the pandemic. And a few things stood out. In 12th-grade math, scores dropped about 3 points from pre-pandemic levels, while eighth-graders followed a similar pattern with a 4-point average drop in science. These might not sound like huge drops, but I want to note something. In both science and math, drops happened across all achievement levels. So both low and high-performing students dropped this cycle.

Reading scores also dipped for nearly all 12th-graders compared to the last test in 2019. But one important thing to note here is when you compare today’s scores to the first Nation’s Report Card for 12th-grade reading more than 30 years ago, today’s average score is 10 points lower. I talked to some of the folks who oversee these tests, and they said this report follows a pattern, one we’ve known about for a while. Scores from the lowest-performing students are at a historic low, and they’re continuing on a decline that started more than a decade ago.

MARTÍNEZ: I’ve been hearing some Republicans say that Biden policies are to blame for the low scores because the students took these tests during the Biden administration. So how much does federal policy influence what happens in the classroom?

CARRILLO: The federal government is not allowed to dictate what is taught in the classrooms at all. So experts avoid linking NAEP scores to any particular administration. Also these are trends. Like I said, they go back several presidential administrations, well before the pandemic. The tests are drawn up by a bipartisan group of local and state education leaders. They include teachers and principals. The assessment is supposed to show people what is happening to students in classrooms, not why it’s happening. Nat Malkus is deputy director of education policy at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. He explains the role of the U.S. government as somewhat of a scoreboard for the country’s education.

NAT MALKUS: The federal government is in a unique position to tell us what’s happening and for whom. Just because the federal government is good at being that scoreboard doesn’t mean that it has the capacity to fix these issues. That’s a job for the states.

MARTÍNEZ: You know, back in March, the Education Department cut almost half of its staff. Do we know how all of that impacted the release?

CARRILLO: So a senior official at the National Center for Education Statistics, who oversee this test, briefed reporters on condition of anonymity that there are currently only two senior staffers left working on the Nation’s Report Card. In order to get today’s results out, they had to rely on workers from other teams within the department. But that is about to change. The same senior officials said they recently received a waiver from the education secretary to hire for eight more positions being added before the end of the year, so that the department can meet its goals in 2026 and 2028 under Congressional mandate.

MARTÍNEZ: That’s NPR’s Sequoia Carrillo. Thank you for educating us on this report.

CARRILLO: (Laughter).

(SOUNDBITE OF DO MAKE SAY THINK’S “GOODBYE ENEMY AIRSHIP”)

View Details

Teachers are seeing more stress and short tempers among students as they readjust to being in school buildings again with one another.

View Details

For teachers and school leaders looking to promote more equity in their schools, Glenn Singleton’s Courageous Conversations framework guides educators through tough discussions about race.

View Details

When a child's emotions get hot, it's hard for anyone to remain calm. That's where practicing calming strategies before the emotions boil over can help, according to Katie Hurley.

View Details

From relationship-building to interacting with caregivers, Liz Kleinrock’s book “Start Here, Start Now” provides practical activities and practices to help teachers incorporate ABAR work into their classrooms.

View Details

Experts say taking care of your own wellbeing first will allow you to help your kids and students. You should also listen to their concerns and teach them tools to manage their anxieties.

View Details

In her book, "How We Read Now," author Naomi Baron provides parents and caregivers research-based insights on the purpose of reading and whether it can be achieved through print or digital books.

View Details

'Genius' is a rare title often reserved for adults who have accomplished something extraordinary. But we have more to gain by seeing genius as the brilliance that can be developed in each child, according to professor Gholdy Muhammad.

View Details

As a child goes through changes in adolescence, parents must also change how they communicate with their kids.

View Details

Students today have no memory of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, so this year's anniversary poses unique challenges for educators and caregivers trying to explain what happened and why.

View Details

In a time of profound disruption, innovative online content like ‘The Dream SMP’ helped millions of kids stay connected to the social world.

View Details

There's a lot to readjust to as students go back to school buildings.

View Details

Research shows increasingly that layering one strategy on top of another can help minimize the spread of the coronavirus in classrooms.

View Details

Starting in January, students will be allowed to use their five mental health days without needing to provide a doctor's note for their absence.

View Details

D.C. has long struggled with one of the highest rates of gun violence in the country. Three local students talked to their community about losing their loved ones and living with the grief.