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 Talk

Before 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 teacher

For 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 design

The 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 Transcript

Nimah 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.

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 students

One 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 implementation

WestEd 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 costs

The 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.

“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 costs

The 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 standards

Head 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 runway

Thursday’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

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 students

When 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.”

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.

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 caregivers

The 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 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.”

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 passage

At 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.”

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:

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 Burnout

Three 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 Teachers

For 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 Support

Earlier 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 Systems

The 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 Transcript

Becca 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.

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 trends

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.

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.

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 treatment

There 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 midlife

Often, 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.

“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.

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 medication

Medication 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 .

“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.”

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.

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 alarm

With 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.

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 mind

Suskind 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.

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.

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 world

While 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

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 work

The 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 fail

According 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.

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 arts

SNAAP’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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.