Ki Sung talks with clinical psychologist and author Ross Greene about why traditional discipline strategies often fail students, and what educators can do instead. Greene explains his Collaborative and Proactive Solutions model, which shifts the focus away from rewards and punishments and toward identifying the unmet needs and unsolved problems behind student behavior.

Episode Transcript

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Ki Sung: Welcome to the MindShift podcast, where we explore the future of learning and how we raise our kids. I’m Ki Sung. There’s been no shortage of stories about what’s troubling kids today, the outbursts, the apathy, the mental health concerns. We’re seeing some signs of progress through solutions like limiting screen time and having more in real-life social interactions, but there are still students who need help.

Ki Sung: Dr. Ross Greene developed the Collaborative and Proactive Solutions Model to help all students, and it requires a different way of responding to students’ behavior. He’s the author of the recently published book, The Kids Who Aren’t Okay: The Urgent Case for Reimagining Support, Belonging, and Hope in Schools.

Ki Sung: He’s also the bestselling author of several other books, including The Explosive Child and Lost at School.

Ki Sung: Welcome, Dr. Greene.

Ross Greene: Thank you for inviting me to do this.

Ki Sung: Thank you so much for being here. Let’s talk first about what you describe as concerning behavior, the stuff that gets kids sent to the principal’s office.

Ki Sung: You say concerning behavior is how kids communicate that they’re having difficulty meeting a particular expectation. Can you tell us more?

Ross Greene: I do say that all the time, and I wish everybody knew that. We’ve, we’ve all become accustomed to the cliche “All behavior is communication.” Somehow, it doesn’t translate for a lot of people that concerning behavior communicates that a kid is frustrated or distressed.

Ross Greene: Concerning behavior is a frustration or distress response, and almost always, what the student is frustrated or distressed about is an expectation that they’re having difficulty meeting. Um, if all we pay attention to is the behavior, then we’re gonna be kinda narrow in what we can do, or… ’cause when you’re focused on behavior, all you can really do is try to modify it, and that’s usually accomplished through some mix of rewards and punishments.

Ross Greene: But rewards and punishments, what a lot of people refer to as consequences, aren’t problem-solving strategies. So we have a lot of students who have experienced a lot of consequences and who are still doing poorly because the problems that are causing the behaviors that we’ve been busy consequencing often haven’t even been identified, let alone solved.

Ki Sung: Um, it’s kinda wild to hear you say that because I hear a lot of focus on the behavior. So what are you proposing we do?

Ross Greene: I am proposing that we de-emphasize our focus on behavior, and by the way, our focus on behavior Is all around us. We are, um… When we have a kid who’s struggling and communicating that they’re struggling through their behavior, we do behavior checklists, we do behavior observations, we do a functional behavior assessment all so that we can come up with a behavior plan.

Ross Greene: When a student is struggling in a classroom and communicate that through their concerning behavior, they get a discipline referral, and what the, the information that is mostly passed along to the people who are on the receiving end of those discipline referrals is the kid’s concerning behavior. And what they often do about it is give the kid consequences for their concerning behavior.

Ross Greene: We need to instead, um, focus on the problems that are causing that behavior. I call them unsolved problems. The synonym for unsolved problem is unmet expectation. This includes things like stuff classroom teachers deal with every day.

Ross Greene: Um, difficulty coming back into the classroom after recess, difficulty sitting next to Susie during circle time, difficulty completing the double-digit division problems on the worksheet in math, difficulty agreeing with Billy on the rules of the four square game at recess, difficulty coming to school, difficulty coming to school on time.

Ross Greene: I could go on forever. Those are not typically the things people are talking about when they’re talking about a kid who’s struggling. They’re often talking about the kid’s concerning behavior and what they’re doing to try to modify it, and maybe even the diagnosis that captures those behaviors. We would be so much better off if we have an instrument that helps us identify their unsolved problems, and we do in the collaborative and proactive solutions model.

Ross Greene: And if we were engaging students in the process of solving those problems, meaning collaboratively, and since we’re now out in front of those problems, having now finally identified them, the problem should also be proactive.

Ki Sung: I think there’s something huge in what you’re talking about solutions-wise in the word collaborative.

Ki Sung: It sounds like you’re talking about including the student as well in how to move forward.

Ross Greene: That is so what I’m talking about. But I think a lot of adults, um, both in education, in education but also everywhere else, think it’s their job to divine what’s getting in the kid’s way and to divine what the solutions should be.

Ross Greene: This is not that. Kids can be relied upon to help us understand what’s making it hard for them to meet a particular expectation. I’m often asked the question, “What makes you think the kid knows?” And my answer is, “i35 years of asking.” Kids can also be relied upon to, um, come up with solutions t- about what’s getting in the way of them meeting certain expectations.

Ross Greene: So this model is moving us away from being completely adult-driven. The adult is the facilitator of a process in which kid and adult are working toward solutions together. That is very different from what typically goes on now.

Ki Sung: One thing I had to kind of work a little extra on to better understand is your concepts of collaborative and proactive solutions, because I realize a lot of why we continue to do what we’re doing, right, looking for behaviors, uh, trying to work in a behavior-focused model, I think a lot of why we operate that way is, is rooted in our communication, you know, how we communicate with young people, which is not necessarily open-ended, you know, which is thinking more about why have you not done this thing that I asked you to do already with the consequences in mind.

Ki Sung: Um, so can you give us some examples of how people can communicate to get to that state of collaboration versus maybe how we typically communicate now?

Ross Greene: Well, very interesting question. You know, solving a problem collaboratively starts with identifying the problem that you want to solve with the kid, and although that sounds like sort of a given, it’s not.

Ross Greene: Mostly because we’re so focused on behavior that we often haven’t even identified the expectations a student is having difficulty reliably meeting. So we’ve gotta start with that, and the instrument that I was talking about is called the Assessment of Skills and Unsolved Problems, and it helps us memorialize every single expectation a particular student is having difficulty reliably meeting.

Ross Greene: And we are now, for having done that, out in front of it, which means we don’t have to wait for the frustration response to occur before we intervene. So much of intervention, so much of what we’re training educators to do, so much of what we’re teaching kids is what to do once a kid is already becoming frustrated, and that’s late.

Ross Greene: That’s crisis management. That’s not out in front of it. That’s waiting for the behavior to occur. Boy, does the game change when we proactively identify unsolved problems- That positions us to solve them proactively. Um, I’m always telling educators, being late is not a given. With some intentionality, with some commitment, with some imagination, we could be early instead of late.

Ross Greene: So identifying unsolved problems is where the whole thing begins. It then continues with prioritizing the unsolved problems you’ve identified, because you’re not gonna be able to solve everything at once. Often we encourage educators to prioritize unsolved problems that are causing safety issues, because safety is a big deal in schools.

Ross Greene: And then it’s time to start solving a problem collaboratively and proactively with a student. Um, what might that sound like? “I’ve noticed you’ve been having difficulty completing the double-digit division problems on the worksheet in math. What’s up?” The caregiver just got the conversation going. The caregiver is now facilitating a problem-solving process.

Ross Greene: The caregiver is not thinking about consequences, because the caregiver should know that consequences don’t solve any problems. Now we’re looking to the kid to help us understand what’s making it hard. Now, sometimes kids say something that feel like a showstopper, like, “I hate it.” But one of the other things the collaborative and proactive solutions model provides is how to drill for more information, how to probe, and the drilling strategy, there are eight of them that I would use in that circumstances, is simple reflective listening.

Ross Greene: “You hate it. Tell me more about that.” “It’s stupid.” Sounds like another showstopper, but it’s not. “It’s stupid.” Um, “I’m sorry, I’m still not exactly sure what you mean. What do you mean when you say it’s stupid?” “It’s stupid how you make me do math I don’t know how to do.” Are we starting to get some traction here?

Ross Greene: We are. Do we need to continue probing? We do, because we don’t yet know what’s making it hard for the kid to complete the double-digit division problems on the worksheet in math. But we do have a kid who’s now talking, and that is a wonderful thing. Um, eventually, and I’m thinking of a particular kid here, we learned that, uh, when the double-digit division problems in math were presented in words, as in word problems, they got completely stumped.

Ross Greene: But when they could do it through, um, just doing out a division problem, they could do it just fine. Good. Now we know. That’s the first step of solving a problem collaboratively, curiosity, finding out what’s been getting in the kid’s way. The second step is the adult’s step. It’s their turn to say why they, um, think it’s important that the expectation Be met.

Ross Greene: And then in the third step, adult and kid are collaborating on a solution that’s going to address the concerns of both parties. Solved problems don’t cause frustration responses, only unsolved problems do. So when educators first hear about this process, and all I’ve given you is the basic outlines, the first thing they think about, and I completely understand why, is time.

Ross Greene: They ask, “When does he think we’re going to do this?” But I could make a very persuasive argument for the fact that the reason we have no time is because we haven’t been doing this. We’ve been chasing after behavior day after day, same kids. It saves a lot of time to finally identify and solve the problems we’ve been chasing after all this time.

Ki Sung: Who was it that said, uh, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”?

Ross Greene: I don’t remember who it was, but they had a good point.

Ki Sung: All right. Um, can I ask, in that instance with the math problem, what is the unproductive way to respond that you may have seen or heard about in classrooms?

Ross Greene: Oh, thinking that the student’s failure to do the math is due to poor motivation, and then thinking that what this student really needs is more motivation. And that could go in a few different directions. It could sound like this: “Uh, Billy, if you do not get that math done before recess, you are not going out for recess.”

Ross Greene: Could be in the form of reward, “Billy, if you get that math done, you get XYZ reward.” Very common. Um, we still have no idea what’s making it hard for Billy to do the math. We’ve lost sight of the fact that we are not the first people who’ve tried to incentivize Billy to do things that are hard for him. Um, we’ve also lost sight of the fact that this is not the first time Billy’s had difficulty completing the double-digit division problems on the worksheet in math.

Ross Greene: It’s the 197th, which makes this an old unsolved problem. Um, if we punish Billy for something, for a problem that he is currently unable to overcome on his own, we heighten the likelihood that Billy will exhibit a frustration response. If we dangle a reward in front of Billy, and Billy is unable to achieve that award because Billy is not yet over, uh, uh, able to overcome that problem- We still run the risk of a frustration response.

Ross Greene: I’ve seen just as many frustration responses when a kid didn’t get an anticipated reward as I have in response to punishment. But the whole thing here is we still don’t have the slightest idea what’s making it hard for Billy to do the double-digit division problems on the worksheet in math. And until we do, Billy’s still gonna struggle with that unsolved problem.

Ki Sung: It’s really fascinating to hear you describe the latter because that is far more common experience from my point of view than anyone having sat down and spent time identifying an unsolved problem. I like that.

Ross Greene: Even when people sit down with the kid and talk to the kid, what they’re often talking with the kid about is their concerning behavior.

Ross Greene: Um, so you ran out of Mrs. Johnson’s classroom. Why’d you do that? And the answer that we most frequently get when people try to talk with kids about their frustration responses is, “I don’t know,” or the most primitive of defense mechanisms, “No, I didn’t.” Those conversations, generally speaking, go nowhere.

Ross Greene: Conversations we have about helping kids understand what’s making it hard for them to meet an expectation, actually they’re the ones who are helping us understand, and working toward a solution that finally gets the problem solved so the frustration responses subside, that’s a beautiful thing.

Ki Sung: So as you said, “I don’t know,” or, you know, other things kids say like, “I don’t care,” I imagine adults also have a frustration response.

Ki Sung: Does this help get at the root of how adults respond as well?

Ross Greene: Well, a lot of maladaptive adult frustration responses occur in the heat of the moment as well. Our goal is to get out of the heat of the moment. The heat of the moment, I can’t say this enough times, isn’t a given. I know the students are difficult.

Ross Greene: I get it. I know that there’s too many of them in a classroom. I get that too. But this would all be a whole lot easier, and it would be much better practice for both educators and kids if we were focused on the right thing. Now, that’s the heat of the moment part of educator frustration these days.

Ross Greene: There’s a lot of reasons that educators should be frustrated these days. Um, I think we’ve made it a lot harder to be an educator over the last two to three decades, and yes, high-stakes testing, I’m staring at you, but that is not the only thing that has made it harder to be an educator. I’ve had many educators say to me, “They’ve taken all the humanity out of my job.

Ross Greene: They’ve turned me into a test prep robot.” Um, zero tolerance policies, um, made it more difficult for me to find out what’s really going on with a kid because zero tolerance policies just tightened the vice grip and gave us an algorithm for applying consequences to certain behaviors. Um, we’ve made a lot of things harder on educators.

Ross Greene: Let there be no doubt they aren’t paid anywhere nearly enough. Um, they don’t have time. So there’s a baseline level of frustration for a lot of educators these days. They often don’t feel safe in their classrooms. Um, I find that when we implement this model, it’s not just the frustration of kids that subside, it’s the frustration of educators as well.

Ross Greene: Although I will say this: there’s nothing about this model that will help educators get paid what they deserve.

Ki Sung: Yeah, that is the, a huge goal for so many people in order to better serve students.

Ki Sung: we’re going to take a short break. We’ll be back with our guest Ross Greene, right after this.

Ki Sung: So, you know, I’ve heard a lot of educators say, “Meet them where they’re at,” or, you know, a version of this is, “Teach the kid you have.” Um, but that’s not happening at a wide scale. Um, is it really hard to implement? Is it, uh, like what is it about schools that make it challenging to get to that point?

Ross Greene: You know, one of the other big focal points of the book is, um, the concept of developmental variability, which I don’t hear people talking about enough, especially in schools, but anywhere really. Um, developmental variability basically says what’s walking in the door is a bunch of individual differences.

Ross Greene: Developmental variability is just a fanciv- fancy way of saying every kid is different, and let there be no doubt that is what’s walking in every classroom. We’ve done kids and educators a tremendous disservice by saying, “Even with all that developmental variability, you gotta get every kid over the same line by the end of the school year.”

Ross Greene: How ludicrous, and educators told us that was ludicrous 30 years ago, and it’s just as ludicrous now. One of the points I make in the book is that every kid should be their own reference point. Teachers should feel free to have every kid be their own reference point for progress. That tells you that there is no line that everybody has to get over.

Ross Greene: There’s no line. There’s just making sure that every student makes as much progress relative to where they started at the beginning in every school year, and we need to free teachers up to be able to do that. Um, that’s what differentiated instruction is about. That’s what personalized learning is about.

Ross Greene: Unfortunately, those things frequently don’t embed themselves into our practice. Every kid is their own reference point. The goal of good teaching is defined as meeting every kid where they’re at. Um, we need to free teachers up to be able to do that.

Ki Sung: You know, one thing that I thought was really interesting about your book is, I, I think this is interesting because teachers are asked to do so much, right?

Ki Sung: They are, in many cases, social workers. Sometimes they’re stand-ins for parents. They’re just doing more and more all the time, and what you write is that you don’t want teachers to be diagnosing, to look at behavior and diagnose behavior. Um, can you tell me why that is? And, and I ask because there is so much emphasis on the behavior side of interacting with students.

Ki Sung: So why, why do you want teachers to, you know, not act in that way?

Ross Greene: Well, because diagnoses don’t really tell you very much. Um, not very much that you don’t already know. Diagnoses are sometimes the gateway for a kid to get services. Diagnosis can sometimes be the gateway for a kid to get funding for those services.

Ross Greene: I’m a mental health professional, and I don’t find that diagnoses give me much useful information about a kid. Um, what gives me the useful information? What skills this kid is struggling with and what expectations this kid is having difficulty reliably meeting, and I get that information from the assessment of skills and unsolved problems.

Ross Greene: Here’s a, um, I was speaking at a, uh, autism conference in Denmark pre-COVID, and a mother in my audience raised her hand very tentatively and said, “Yeah, but I found my daughter’s autism diagnosis to be very useful.” I said, “That’s good.” Then she thought about it for a second, and she said, “But I think what you’re saying-” “Is that my daughter’s autism diagnosis really doesn’t tell me anything about her specific skills or the specific expectations she’s having difficulty meeting.”

Ross Greene: I said, “Right.” She thought about it a little bit more, and then she said, “And I think what you’re saying is that once I identify my daughter’s skills and unsolved problems, I’m going to find that I have information that is far more useful than her psychiatric diagnosis.” I said, “Probably.” Um, focusing on diagnoses focuses on, makes us focus on behavior, because if we look at the diagnostic criteria for the vast majority of childhood psychiatric disorders, what we’re going to find is a long list of behaviors, frustration responses, distress responses.

Ross Greene: So long as we’re focused on the behavior, we’re gonna be late every time, because behavior occurs after a kid is already having difficulty meeting a particular expectation. We’ve been waiting for behavior to occur. We need to start anticipating, identifying, and solving problems instead.

Ki Sung: Dr. Ross Greene, thank you so much.

Ross Greene: My pleasure. Thanks for inviting me to do this.

Ki Sung: Dr. Ross Greene is the author of the recently published book, The Kids Who Aren’t Okay: The Urgent Case for Reimagining Support, Belonging, and Hope in Schools. He’s also the author of other books, including The Explosive Child and Lost at School, and is the founding director of Lives in the Balance.

The MindShift team includes me, Ki Sung, Nimah Gobir, Marlena Jackson-Retondo and Marnette Federis.  Our editor is Chris Hambrick. Seth Samuel is our sound designer. Jen Chien is our head of podcasts and Ethan Toven Lindsey is our editor in chief. We receive additional support from Maha Sanad.

MindShift is supported in part by the generosity of the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation and members of KQED.

Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. San Francisco Northern California Local.

Thanks for listening to MindShift.

Washington, D.C., has emerged as the fastest-improving school system in the nation, according to a major new analysis of student test scores released last week by researchers at Stanford, Harvard and Dartmouth.

The Education Scorecard analysis, which compares more than 5,000 school districts across 38 states, finds that most of the country has been stuck in a reading recession — a decade-long slide in achievement that predates the pandemic. Between 2022 and 2025, only five states and the District of Columbia showed meaningful gains in reading. The nation’s capital posted the strongest growth of all and also led in math improvement.

Washington students in both public and charter schools gained roughly two-thirds of a grade level in math and about a third of a grade level in reading over that period, according to the analysis. A grade level represents roughly a year’s worth of learning, which means that eighth graders in 2025 were about six months ahead in math compared with eighth graders in 2022.

But the gains should not obscure a grimmer reality.

In 2025, only 26 percent of Washington students met grade-level standards in math and only 38 percent were proficient in reading, according to a separate report from the D.C. Policy Center, an independent local think tank. Just 16 percent of high school juniors and seniors were considered to be college or career ready.

A school system can improve rapidly and still leave most children behind. The contradiction is fueling an important politically and emotionally charged debate in education: Should schools be judged by how many students are proficient, or by how much students improve each year?

Critics of public schools are seizing upon the low proficiency rates.

“Gains of any magnitude are a good thing, but when most students — roughly two-thirds to three-quarters in the case of D.C. — are not functioning at grade level, this is nothing to applaud,” said Steven Wilson, a former education policymaker in Massachusetts and charter school leader.  “Most students are still being failed by the system.” (Wilson’s 2025 book, “The Lost Decade,” criticizes recent school reform efforts.)

Even before last week’s national data release, Washington school leaders were celebrating the gains. Paul Kihn, deputy mayor for education, trumpeted the strength of the schools after 2025 annual tests revealed a whopping 3.6 percent improvement in reading and math, similar to the grade-level increases that the Education Scorecard team calculated. “Our academic achievement is unsurpassed in the country in terms of growth,” Kihn said in a March 2026 blog post.

Tom Kane, a Harvard economist and one of the authors of the new Education Scorecard report, explained that there is a long-running debate in the field of education about whether to focus on proficiency or growth. In this report, he said, the research team chose growth in order to “combat” what they see as an overly pessimistic narrative about public education.

“We’re trying to highlight that something good is happening in some of these places,” Kane said. “And hopefully, if we can, rebuild the public sense of agency with respect to public education.”

In addition to highlighting Washington’s growth, the research team also released a list of 108 “districts on the rise”: school districts where math and reading gains exceeded those of similar districts in their state. Washington was not included because there are no comparable districts within the city. But its gains are comparable to many districts on the list. And, like Washington, most of those districts still have large shares of students below grade level.

In theory, if a district’s scores keep growing by outsized amounts each year, students should catch up and eventually reach grade level. But public school critics like Wilson point out that even if a school system improves by one or two percentage points a year, it could take decades for the majority of students to get a decent education. In the meantime, the students who are currently in the system lose out. They can’t wait for that progress. Wilson worries that shining a light on a school system where most kids are far behind grade level can mislead the public and potentially cause school leaders to adopt the wrong policies.

“Let’s take the klieg light and move it to the school systems that are educating nearly all of their students, rather than a third of their students,” said Wilson.

Wilson points to individual schools or charter school networks, where very high percentages of low-income students are at or exceeding grade level.  It’s much harder to replicate that success with low-income students across an entire large school district.

Income is a big factor in this debate. If the public and policymakers focus only on proficiency, affluent suburbs tend to dominate the results. High-income districts often appear to be the most successful, not necessarily because their schools are more effective, but because students from wealthier families begin far ahead.

That concern has prompted researchers to focus on growth-based measures of school performance over the past couple decades. A widely cited example came from research by Sean Reardon, a Stanford sociologist and co-author of the current report, who a decade ago found that Chicago was running the most effective schools in the country based on student growth, even though many students were behind grade level. (Illinois was not among the 38 states in the latest analysis because of changes to its state assessment, so it’s unclear exactly where Chicago stands right now.)

Still, many parents would probably rather enroll their kids in a school system where most of the students are on grade level, even if annual improvements are small or nonexistent, than a school where only a small share of students are on grade level but the school is turning around and improving.

Harvard’s Kane agreed that getting more students over the proficiency line is important too. For the team’s next Education Scorecard report, researchers are planning to add a new data point showing the share of kids who are proficient compared to other districts with similar demographics.

The disagreement persists because the two measures answer different questions. Growth captures whether students are learning more than they used to. Proficiency captures whether they have learned enough.

That is what makes Washington such a revealing case. It shows how a school system can post some of the strongest gains in the country and still fall short by the most basic measure of success: whether students can read and do math at grade level.

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

“I don’t have a TikTok account, but they’re telling me, ‘Hey, I saw this on TikTok. Can you make this? Can we do this?'” said Nichole Taylor, supervisor of food and nutrition services at the Great Valley School District in Malvern, Pennsylvania.

“I would have never asked my lunch lady to make something special for me. I would’ve just ate what they told me,” she said, adding that the students are “very engaged.”

Taylor has been working to refresh the suburban Philadelphia district’s meal program since she took over a year and a half ago, trying to balance a desire to cook more fresh food from scratch with budget constraints and a lack of skilled labor.

But now, districts like Taylor’s and others across the U.S. are waiting to see whether it will become even more expensive to prepare a meal.

That’s because in January, the Trump administration overhauled the national dietary guidelines. Announced by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., they follow the Make America Healthy Again blueprint, urging Americans to avoid highly processed foods and prioritize “high-quality, nutrient-dense” protein at every meal. Those guidelines form the basis of federal nutrition standards that schools participating in federal meal programs must follow.

Yet many districts rely on processed, premade foods to feed their students, and protein is already the most expensive ingredient on the cafeteria plate, school nutrition experts say.

This year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s reimbursement rate for schools in the contiguous 48 states is about $4.60 per meal for a student who is eligible for a free lunch, according to the School Nutrition Association (SNA). The rate is $4.20 for students eligible for a reduced-price lunch and $0.44 for students who pay full price, SNA said.

Federal and state funding are the largest revenue streams in Taylor’s district, and they help pay for everything from staff wages and kitchen equipment to food and utility costs. She said she supports the nutritional goals of the new federal standards but wonders how they’ll affect schools already struggling to operate.

“We want to follow the guidelines, because we are that voice that says, ‘No, you can eat healthy and still eat really well,'” Taylor said. “But we also have to be realistic and say we need the funding for it.”

At the same time, the Trump administration has cut funding programs that allowed schools to buy local food from farmers.

How dietary guidelines can affect schools

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said at a press conference for the updated guidelines in January that she was particularly interested in how they could improve child nutrition.

“Right now, that is going to be the single most important, from my perspective, move forward — is the school lunches and making sure that we’re getting the right amount, the best amount and the most nutrient-dense foods into the schools,” Rollins said.

Yet some in the medical community have objected to the new food pyramid, specifically the placement of saturated fat sources such as red meat and full-fat dairy at the top. “It does go against decades and decades of evidence and research,” Stanford University nutrition expert Christopher Gardner told NPR this year. Gardner was a member of the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee.

Exactly how the government’s new dietary guidelines will impact schools is unclear. The Department of Agriculture (USDA) said it is still working to update the nutrition standards it requires of institutions taking part in the National School Lunch Program, which fed 30 million children last year, and the School Breakfast Program. The department said in an email that the new guidelines are a “pivotal step to Make America Healthy Again through real, nutrient-dense foods” and that the guidelines’ release “kicks off a multi-year effort” to update the rules of the department’s nutrition programs through a formal rule-making process, which will include public comment.

Mara Fleishman, CEO of the Chef Ann Foundation, which works to help schools cook more meals from scratch, applauded the move away from highly processed foods but said the shift wouldn’t be easy.

“The conundrum is that often animal protein in school food is one of the most highly processed components,” she said. Fleishman used chicken nuggets as an example, which she said appear in some form in just about every school district in the United States.

“The primary chicken nuggets that are served come cooked frozen. So you get it cooked, you put it in your freezer, take it out, put it in the retherm [ovens], put it on the line. And it’s got about 35 ingredients in it,” she said.

Fleishman said districts that want to cook chicken strips from scratch could make them fresh using six or seven ingredients. “But it’s hard, because you go from buying a chicken nugget, which is totally contained,” to having to consider the financial, labor and waste implications of cooking it from scratch, she said.

USDA cut funding that helped schools buy local food

At the same time as the Trump administration is urging Americans to eat more “real” food, it has cut funding that enabled schools to buy from local farmers.

In March of last year, the School Nutrition Association reported that the USDA ended the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program (LFS), erasing an estimated $660 million in funding. LFS provided money that schools could use to buy “unprocessed or minimally processed foods, such as meat, poultry, fruit, vegetables, seafood, and dairy” from local or regional producers, according to the program’s website.

“That was a big loss,” said Stephanie Dillard, SNA president and the nutrition director of an Alabama school district, “because we lost the money we could spend on local farmers.”

The USDA said in an emailed statement that the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program — as well as the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program (LFPA), which supports feeding programs such as food banks — are being “sunsetted at the end of their performance periods.”

The department said that it released more than half a billion dollars in funding through the two programs last year and that, as of March, $100 million remained in LFPA funding and more than $17 million remained in LFS funding for states to use.

The USDA also paused funding from the Patrick Leahy Farm to School grant program for the 2025 fiscal year, which a spokesperson said was in response to Trump’s executive order targeting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs in January 2025.

However, the program reopened for the 2026 fiscal year and offered up to $18 million in awards. The department said it “streamlined the Farm to School Grant application process and removed Biden-era DEI components to ensure equal treatment, not preferential treatment, of applicants.” Rollins said in a statement that the grants are “one of the best ways we can deliver nutritious, high-quality meals to children, while also strengthening local agriculture.”

Schools have long called for more money for meals

For years, education administrators and child nutrition advocates have been saying that school cafeterias — often called the biggest restaurants in town — operate on tight budgets due in part to inadequate reimbursements from the federal government. Federal initiatives such as the National School Lunch Program and the School Breakfast Program provide billions of dollars in funding each year to schools across the U.S. to keep their meal programs afloat.

Reimbursement rates are adjusted annually based on the consumer price index, but school nutrition directors say that the increases are not enough and that Congress needs to revisit the reimbursement formula altogether, as meal programs become more expensive to operate.

“It all comes down to funding,” said Dillard, of the SNA. “The sky would be the limit if we had the funding. We could cook all day long.”

In an SNA survey released in January, nearly 95% of school nutrition directors said they were concerned about the financial sustainability of their programs three years from now.

“The current reimbursement rate isn’t even quite enough for the current status quo,” said Jennifer Gaddis, a University of Wisconsin-Madison associate professor of civil society and community studies who studies school food systems, “let alone to do the holistic transformation that we need in order to make school meals really important engines of public health and economic vitality in our communities.”

Additionally, Gaddis said, the heat-and-serve model of the past allowed schools to spend less money by hiring fewer workers for shorter shifts. Preparing meals from scratch would require workers to be present longer and kitchens to be equipped for cooking.

Many school meal programs receive state funding in addition to federal dollars, but the amounts vary. According to SNA, nine states have dedicated state funds to provide universal free school meals.

“If a kid is hungry, they’re not studying”

Despite the budget and logistical constraints, more schools are finding ways to expand their efforts to cook meals from scratch.

The Chef Ann Foundation, for example, offers an online database of recipes and guides for districts that want to prepare fresher meals, as well as apprenticeships, fellowships and other programs for nutritional staff.

The Great Valley School District hired a chef in December to help source more local ingredients, expand the district’s freshly prepared offerings and train staff members on new kitchen skills. Jenifer Halin, the district’s new culinary coordinator, said she found frozen, precut vegetables in the cafeteria kitchen when she arrived. “And I have already transitioned everybody over to cutting fresh vegetables. It’s been simple.”

Taylor, the district’s supervisor of food and nutrition services, has even tried to reformulate some of those meals suggested by students to meet federal nutrition standards, and she said she still hopes to cook more meals from scratch, which would mean giving more staff members full-time status and culinary training. (The cost of cheaper raw ingredients might make the overall financial math even out, she said.)

“I want to be able to offer our students our own muffins, our own French toast sticks,” Taylor said, standing in Great Valley High School’s walk-in freezer next to boxes of frozen chicken breasts and banana chocolate chip breakfast bars. “I want to be able to produce our own pizza, so that we’re not having to buy out from other vendors.”

Her efforts have not gone unnoticed by the students.

“It started with like one day randomly they had this grilled cheese and tomato bisque, and it was like ancient-grain bread, and everyone was like, ‘It tasted like Panera,'” said Varun Kartick, a Great Valley High School senior.

More new dishes followed. Kartick, who doesn’t eat pork or beef, said the vegetables have been fresher and the cafeteria staff often makes entrees vegetarian upon request. On a given day, he may opt for a seasonal chicken wrap or fill up a plate with pasta and vegetables.

“It’s been very convenient and very nice to see that change, that we’re not disgusted [by the food] or having to pack a lunch,” he said. “There’s an option that we can have at school.”

Among the items on offer in the cafeteria that day were pizza and chicken fingers, as well as avocado toast and a salad made with Pennsylvania sweet potatoes.

Taylor said getting more students to eat breakfast and lunch at school would mean more federal reimbursements that could help her expand the district’s nutrition program. But it would also ensure that — most importantly to her — more students are fed.

“If a kid is hungry, they’re not studying. They can’t learn. They’re acting out,” Taylor said. “But if you build this into part of their school day to where they feel like this is the norm for them, then you’ve knocked down that hurdle.”

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The new Scorecard, released Wednesday and in its fourth year, offers several revelations for families, educators and policymakers looking for clarity — and hope — at a time when public education has been blamed and battered for those persistent declines in student performance.

Among the report’s takeaways: Most states are finally making gains in math; federal relief dollars likely helped the lowest-income districts mount a hearty comeback; and, while most states have yet to make gains in reading, those that have all made legislative changes to how it’s taught in their schools.

Before we dive in, one caveat: The annual Education Scorecard includes data from the vast majority of states and Washington D.C. drawn from their own state tests — as opposed to the Nation’s Report Card. But some states were excluded for various reasons, including if their state assessments had changed recently (Illinois, Kansas), if test opt-out rates were too high (New York, Colorado) or if a state didn’t publish district-level data with enough detail.

‘The learning recession’

For nearly a quarter-century, from 1990 to 2013, math achievement among fourth- and eighth-graders “rose steadily,” according to the Scorecard’s analysis. So steadily that “the average fourth grader in 2013 could perform the same math skills as the average sixth grader could in 1990. That’s enormous progress,” says Stanford University’s Sean Reardon, one of the Scorecard’s authors.

Reading gains weren’t quite as eye-popping, but they were gains nonetheless.

These sustained gains “may be one of the most important social policy successes of the last half-century that nobody knows about,” says Harvard’s Thomas Kane, one of the Scorecard’s authors. “Racial gaps were narrowing too. We just need to get back on that track.“

In short, much was right with America’s schools, which makes the decline that began around 2013 “appear more striking and anomalous,” the report says.

“Particularly in reading, test scores were going down for four to six years before the pandemic,” says Reardon. “In fact, you wouldn’t really know there was a pandemic effect if you just looked at the last 10 or 12 years of test scores. There’s been just a steady kind of decline regardless of the pandemic.”

What might have triggered that decline?

The Scorecard’s trigger theories

Scorecard researchers offer two possible explanations for the beginning of schools’ learning recession:

1. The fade-out of test-based accountability: Remember the much-maligned federal education law, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), that took a tough-love approach with schools to improve student performance? The law, implemented in 2003, threatened a host of sanctions, including school closure, if student test scores didn’t rise, but its standards were seen by many to be not just unrealistic but unattainable. By 2013, the Obama administration began issuing waivers to free states from the law’s consequences. According to the Scorecard, 38 states were granted relief in the 2012-13 school year. Eventually, Congress replaced NCLB with a new federal law that de-emphasized test-based accountability.

Around 2013, Kane says, “school districts learned that nobody was looking over their shoulders in terms of student achievement.“

While the Scorecard researchers don’t draw a direct, causal connection between the declines of test-based accountability and student scores, it’s clear that the nation’s learning recession began at roughly the same time states and schools stepped back from the punishing consequences of NCLB.

2. Students’ social media use: It turns out, 2013 also marks a period of explosive growth in teenagers use of social media. A Pew Research study found that in 2014-15, roughly 1 in 4 teens said they used the internet “almost constantly.” By 2022, it was nearly half of teens.

The researchers also point to international testing data that shows that lower-achieving students are the heaviest users of social media. Students who spend more time (7+ hours per day) on social media score below students who spend less (1-3 hours). And this gap, between the highest and lowest performers, began growing before the pandemic, not just in the U.S. but in many other countries too.

The end of the learning recession?

The Scorecard devotes considerable analysis to what’s been happening in schools since the end of the pandemic, from 2022 through the spring of 2025. There are signs that the nation’s learning recession may be turning around, albeit slowly.

In that span of time, most of the states covered by this year’s Scorecard showed students making meaningful improvement in math, with Washington D.C. coming in as the clear winner there. Only five states failed to make gains in math: Georgia, Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska and Iowa.

Reading, though, remains a cause for concern. While D.C., Louisiana, Maryland and five other states did experience meaningful improvement between 2022 and 2025, most states continued to stagnate or, as in Florida, Arizona and Nebraska, further declined.

It’s also worth noting, while schools are once again, on average, regaining ground in math and slowly turning the corner in reading, the declines that began around 2013 have been so steep and lasting that only one state, Louisiana, has returned to 2019 performance levels in both subjects.

No state has returned to 2013 levels, according to Reardon.

“It’s easy to be sort of doom and gloom,” he adds, “but when you look at the period from the ’90s through 2013, we made enormous gains. And we actually narrowed achievement gaps between racial groups. That says we can actually improve our schools in ways that also improve equality of opportunity. We just haven’t been doing it for the last decade. But we could do it again.”

The U-shaped recovery

The Scorecard reveals a fascinating phenomenon in schools from 2022 to 2025: a U-shaped recovery. Meaning, schools with the least amount of poverty, alongside schools with the most poverty, saw similar gains in math and similarly small losses in reading achievement. That’s while the schools in the middle of the income spectrum, at the bottom of this U, improved the least in both subjects.

Why? One theory is that the highest-poverty districts got the most help from Congress in the form of federal COVID relief dollars — money they could spend on interventions such as tutoring and summer school. Districts with the lowest poverty rates got little help from the federal government but were already well-positioned financially. It was the middle-income districts that needed more help but didn’t qualify for full federal support.

“If it hadn’t been for the federal pandemic relief,” says Kane, “we estimate there would have been no recovery on average for the highest-poverty districts.”

The science of reading effect

There’s been an important wild card in the effort to improve students’ reading skills: A movement among states to change their approach to teaching reading to young children by embracing the “science of reading.” As of March, the Scorecard says, most states had passed new literacy laws, including doubling down on the importance of teaching phonics.

The Scorecard authors note that all seven of the states (plus D.C.) that saw reading gains between 2022 and 2025 had put comprehensive science of reading reforms into place. Of the states that had not by January 2024, none saw improvement. The connection between these reforms and improved results isn’t necessarily causal, they warn, but there’s clearly a link.

With most states struggling to make reading gains, one district-level success story highlighted by the Scorecard stands out: Baltimore City Public Schools. In spite of the challenges posed by poverty — most students there qualify for free or reduced-price meals — Baltimore students have been making striking reading gains.

Under CEO Sonja Brookins Santelises, the district reformed its approach to literacy. It embraced the science of reading even before the pandemic and years ahead of the national wave of state-based literacy legislation.

When Brookins Santelises took the lead in Baltimore in 2016, she says she quickly embraced the science of reading districtwide and its emphasis on phonics, as opposed to the whole language approach, which teaches children to guess at words using cues from a text’s pictures.

“I remember gathering the [district’s] literacy department. And I said, ‘If you want to do whole language, there are other districts in Maryland that are doing whole language, and you are free to go there. We are not doing that in Baltimore City. I respect you, but you cannot stay here. I’ve been ferocious about it ever since.”

‘Kiss your brains!’

The benefits of these changes appear to have been twofold. During the pandemic, the Scorecard shows Baltimore schools lost far less ground in reading than schools with similar levels of poverty. Then, in 2022, with those practices firmly in place, the city’s reading scores began to skyrocket, erasing pandemic-era losses and rising back around 2017 levels.

Baltimore’s successful approach to teaching literacy was on full display on a recent May morning, in veteran teacher Kimberly Lowery’s kindergarten class at Johnston Square Elementary. Lowery sat at the front of a rainbow-colored reading rug, running through a series of phonics-based games that her kindergarteners seemed to genuinely enjoy.

There was letter-sound bingo, guess-the-sound flashcards and even a visit from a special spelling helper — a toy owl, named Echo, who lives at the end of a yardstick. If the kids’ laughter and cheering isn’t sign enough that they’re learning, district data shows that, by the end of last year, three-quarters of Lowery’s students were reading at or above grade level.

Lowery told the children to kiss their brains and asked, “You guys are super-duper what?”

In unison, the children hollered, “Smart!”

“Yes you are,” Lowery answered.

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

Many aspects of these programs are similar to the curriculums at traditional vocational schools. But this newer incarnation simultaneously aims to make the vocational high school more college oriented and the comprehensive high school more career oriented.

Are the millions of dollars invested in these programs actually helping students get a head start on college and careers?

That question can’t be fully answered yet. But a new research report from Delaware — a national leader in the pathways movement — offers some early clues.

The state launched career pathways in 2014. Today, about 70 percent of high school students, or 30,000 teenagers, are enrolled, according to the nonprofit Rodel, which works with Delaware policymakers to reform education and improve the state’s workforce.

Ideally, students take a sequence of three or more courses in fields like healthcare, construction or education. Many also earn early college credits or make significant progress toward industry certifications, and some participate in internships or apprenticeships.

Researchers at RTI International, a nonprofit research organization, tracked more than 6,000 graduates who had completed at least two courses in a career field and surveyed them to see what they were doing in the years immediately after high school.

Three-quarters of the students surveyed were enrolled in college or another postsecondary training program after graduation, which is higher than the national average of 63 percent. But fewer than half were still studying or working in the field they had chosen in high school.

For example, among students who completed a pathway in architecture and construction, fewer than 20 percent pursued construction-related majors. Many shifted instead to fields like science and engineering (40 percent), business (8 percent) or healthcare (6 percent).

Most popular high-school pathway fields in Delaware

That mismatch isn’t necessarily a failure. For some students, the wrong path was clarifying.

“When the students talked to us about it, they really considered it valuable to learn something they didn’t like,” said Sandra Staklis, lead author of the RTI report. “One student told us, ‘Oh, my mom and my aunt are nurses. And so I tried it out. And it turned out it wasn’t for me, but it was good to know that.’”

Students also talked about gaining a broader set of skills that are useful in any field. “Students said they were learning those workplace skills like time management and working with other people on a project,” said Staklis. “A lot of academic work traditionally has been more individual, like reading a book or taking a test.”

Still, the findings raise a fundamental question: Are pathways meant to steer students into specific career fields, or help them figure out what they don’t want to do?

Students also described how much they valued the mentoring they received from their instructors, many of whom didn’t spend their professional lives in schools but in industry. One student profiled in the report, Kwame, said his teachers in the healthcare field showed him how to break down dense medical material and so he could study to earn his paramedic certification. He’s now majoring in public health at a four-year college and hopes to become a surgeon.

Two lessons stood out from the Delaware study.

• Workplace experience matters most but is hardest for schools to deliver. Students who participated in internships or apprenticeships were more likely to continue in their field, the report found. Another student named James, also profiled in the report, pursued an education pathway in high school and, during his senior year, he shadowed a teacher, which taught him a lot about managing classroom behavior. He’s now pursuing an associate degree in elementary education.

But these opportunities are difficult for schools to provide, requiring coordination with employers as well as solutions for scheduling and transportation.

Workplace learning was more common in vocational high schools, where students often complete core coursework earlier and can spend more time outside the building during their senior year. By contrast, one-time experiences — such as guest speakers or field trips — had less impact but were easier for schools to arrange.

• Students need better guidance especially when they want to change direction. Once students start a pathway, it can be difficult to switch. “If you’re a junior and you want to switch to a different pathway, you’d have to go back taking classes that are mostly freshmen and sophomores, and it just becomes logistically difficult to allow that,” said Staklis.

Luke Rhine, vice president for postsecondary success at Rodel, which commissioned the analysis, said the findings were encouraging but point to a need for stronger advising, which he calls “navigational support.”

The report also points to more questions for future research.

It’s unclear how much of the higher college-going rate can be attributed to pathways themselves. The study is not causal, Staklis said, and students who complete these sequences may already have been more likely to pursue further education. Other incentives to pursue higher education could also be playing a role, including Delaware’s generous scholarship programs, which cover tuition at Delaware Technical Community College and Delaware State University for many students.

While a majority of students were working, most were in part-time jobs in retail, delivery or fast-food that fit in with their studies. Longer-term outcomes — including careers and earnings — remain unknown.

Some researchers question the structure of the pathways model in a rapidly changing economy. Kerry McKittrick, co-director of the Project on Workforce at Harvard University, issued a report last week, “Pivots Without Pathways: Career Navigation in a Fragmented Labor Market,” based on an analysis of community college students and young adults. McKittrick argues that it might not make sense to require young students to go through a sequence of technical training classes for jobs that may not exist in five years.

“Pathways are a powerful option, but this linear path to a career is really the exception,” said McKittrick.”In a world where jobs continue to change, we also need to equip students and workers with the skills they need. … I’m talking about adaptability and decision making and information literacy and networking.”

Those skills, argues McKittrick, aren’t learned in a classroom, but through trial and error.  What’s most important, according to McKittrick, is for young people to have the opportunity to explore professions beyond what adults in their family do and to develop networks.

Notably, she agrees with one of the Delaware report’s central findings: Workplace experience may be the most valuable component of a pathways program.

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

“To the point that he was one day penalized for not having his iPad with him during PE class,” she recalls.

She asked his school in central Los Angeles to explain why there was so much digital learning, even years after the COVID-19 pandemic: “There was no justification for why it was better,” she said. “It was just sort of, ‘Well, we got these things during COVID and might as well keep using them.'”

Byock started talking to fellow parents and formed Schools Beyond Screens, an advocacy group with thousands of parents, beginning in Los Angeles but eventually expanding around the United States. She says whenever she talks to parents, they all have the same question: “This is an emergency — what can we do about it?”

Last week, after months of petitions and demonstrations, the school board of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) voted unanimously to limit screen time for all grade levels, beginning in the fall, with a particular focus on eliminating it entirely for elementary-age students.

The move is an about-face for a district that, since the pandemic, has focused on bringing technology into the classroom.

States sprint to limit screen time

The shift in the nation’s second-largest school district aligns with a flurry of recent state movement. Since January, Alabama, Tennessee, Utah and Virginia have passed some form of legislation to reevaluate technology’s role in education instruction and assessment, and more than 10 other states are considering similar restrictions.

T. Philip Nichols, an associate professor of English education at Baylor University, called the move by LAUSD “the pendulum swing.”

Nichols, who has researched technology’s role in public education for years, says all the recent activity is a shocking but welcome surprise. The proliferation of laptops, tablets and interactive whiteboards, he said, “aren’t just neutral tools. They shape the ways that we think. They shape the way that we communicate.”

Proposed legislation in Vermont recently cited Nichols’ work in a bill that would allow parents to opt their kids out of screen time. His research argues that widespread computer use has not delivered on higher test scores or student achievement.

The Vermont bill also raises concerns about student data privacy.

“These platforms are … also gathering data about how students are participating in them so that they can sell products back to schools,” Nichols said. “When you are reading a textbook, that textbook is not reading you back.”

How much tech is too much?

Still, some advocates note decades of research on the potential for computers and technology to streamline learning and provide useful information for students and educators.

Tracy Weeks, the senior director of education policy and strategy at the education technology company Instructure, says rushing to broadly ban screen time in schools is rash: “It’s sort of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”

Instructure creates digital classroom-management tools like Canvas and Mastery, used by about 30% of K-12 students nationwide.

“When we talk about things like screen time,” she says, “[it] gets really hard because not all minutes are equal depending on what you’re actually doing.”

She argues that doomscrolling and passively watching videos are different from the interactive activities that many teachers use to keep kids engaged.

A bipartisan push

LAUSD’s vote to limit screen time gave district administrators a June deadline to craft an official policy. The directive also seeks to roll out the new rules this fall in classrooms. Parents and teachers will not know the scope of those rules until sometime this summer.

The projected rollout in LA is fast but echoes other proposed legislation. In Utah, a back-to-basics law to limit screen time goes into effect on July 1 and gives the state board of education until the end of the calendar year to draft a new policy for schools, though when that will be enforced in classrooms is still unclear.

“We’re trying to help kids build healthier habits with technology,” Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, said in a press conference. “We’re not going to get this exactly right on the first try, but we’re certainly moving in the right direction.”

In Missouri, the state House passed a bill on limiting screen time this spring. The proposal, like others making their way through state legislatures, was introduced by a Republican lawmaker. The bill passed with strong bipartisan support in the House and is now on its way to the state Senate.

Kathy Steinhoff is a Democratic state representative and former teacher who ended up voting for the Missouri bill. She says that at first she was dubious: “When I saw that bill and I was like, ‘Oh, there’s no way that I could get behind this.'”

The initial proposal called for no more than 45 minutes of screen time per day and mandated cursive writing instruction. Steinhoff says she understood the research behind the proposal but did not agree with prescribing such rigid instructions for teachers.

“Teaching is a bit of an art,” she said. “And when you try to make it more of a checklist … it loses its ability to really, I think, have a meaningful education for our kids.”

Eventually, though, she said changes in the legislation made it less rigid and gave school districts more room to set their own policies.

The version that passed Missouri’s House is similar to the one LAUSD voted on — school districts must come up with their own policies on limiting screen time.

The big difference? The timeline. Steinhoff argued that even the 2027 deadline in Missouri’s current bill is too tight a turnaround.

Since then, none of the 2,500 students in this district — from the youngest learners up through high school seniors — have been required to do schoolwork at home. Parents can request practice problems if they’d like, Superintendent Jonathan Garrett said, but that work won’t be mandatory or graded.

Homework assignments, it turned out, were among the biggest sources of complaints Garrett had heard from parents and students over the years.

“When there was a negative feeling about school, it usually stemmed from what kids are bringing home, the frustrations they feel completing that, and that parents and guardians feel trying to help them complete it,” he said in an interview.

Beyond that, Garrett said the move was driven by concerns – shared by many educators – that much of the homework students are assigned – especially in math – is needlessly repetitive, takes too long to complete and hasn’t adapted to the challenges posed by Artificial Intelligence.

The response to Garrett’s announcement was swift — and overwhelmingly positive. The message is the district’s most “liked” post on Facebook by far this year, with hundreds of shares — many of them by parents from neighboring parishes asking how they could get their own schools on board.

The scope of the district’s no-homework guidance is new, but it follows a trend that educators and researchers have been noticing for years: More teachers are moving away from homework.

Federal survey data shows that the amount of math homework assigned to fourth and eighth grade students, in particular, has been steadily declining for the past decade.

Some educators and parents say this is a good thing — students shouldn’t spend six or more hours a day at school and still have additional schoolwork to complete at home. But the research on homework is complicated.

Some studies show that students who spend more time on homework perform better than their peers. For example, a longitudinal study released in 2021 of more than 6,000 students in Germany, Uruguay and the Netherlands found that lower-performing students who increased the amount of time they spent on math homework performed better in math, even one year later.

Other studies, however, suggest homework has minimal outcomes on academic performance: A 1998 study of more than 700 U.S. students led by a researcher at Duke University found that more homework assigned in elementary grades had no significant effect on standardized test scores. The researchers did find small positive gains on class grades when they looked at both test scores and the proportion of homework students completed.

More homework was also associated with negative attitudes about school for younger children in the study.

“The best educators figured out a long time ago that we can control what we can control,” and that’s what happens during the school day, Superintendent Garrett said, not homework. “There has been a shift away from it naturally anyway, and I felt like this made it equitable across our entire school system.”

In math especially, students need practice

The debate over homework has swung back and forth for more than a century, and the tide of public opinion has shifted every few years. It’s likely to continue changing for a simple reason: Researching homework is a challenge.

There’s no good way to isolate the amount of time spent on homework and its effects on students, because it may take one student five minutes to complete the same math problem that another student spent 45 minutes on. That extra time doesn’t necessarily result in the struggling student performing better than the student who grasped the assignment more quickly.

However, just like playing the violin or hitting a baseball, or any other skill that requires training, there is evidence that students need practice to master academic subjects, particularly in math.

Some experts worry the overall decrease in homework could be a problem for math achievement, at a time when math scores across the country are already at a dismal low.

“The best argument for homework is that mathematical procedures require practice, and you don’t want to waste classroom time on practice, so you send that home,” said Tom Loveless, a researcher and former teacher who has studied homework.

The effects of AI on homework

Generative artificial intelligence has added a new wrinkle to the homework debate, too. More than half of teens said they used chatbots to help with schoolwork, and 1 in 10 said they used virtual assistants to do all or most of their schoolwork, according to a recent survey by Pew Research Center.

A different survey of teachers by the EdWeek Research Center found that 40 percent said homework assignments had decreased over the past two years, and of those, 29 percent said it was because students’ use of AI had lessened the value of homework.

Between 1996 and 2015, very few fourth graders — between 4 and 6 percent — reported being given no math homework the previous night, according to surveys from the Nation’s Report Card. By 2024, that percentage was up to more than a quarter. There was a similar trend for eighth graders.

Ariel Taylor Smith, senior director of the Center for Policy and Action at the National Parents Union, a nonprofit that advocates for parents, has seen this trend in her own fourth grader’s public elementary school class in Vermont, whose teacher doesn’t assign homework.

“The thing they point to is that it’s an equity issue, and not all parents have the same availability and ability to support their students,” said Smith.

She believes, however, that students should do some homework without the help of their parents. “I would make the argument that if a kid is really far behind in school, that’s an equity issue. They need the additional time to practice.”

Smith said she and her mother create their own homework now for her son: reading exercises and flash cards in math. Kids, she said, “need more practice. … Sometimes, you do have to practice the boring stuff, like math.”

Not everyone feels this way about homework. For Jim Malliard’s two children in Franklin, Pa., adverse experiences at school became a barrier to completing homework.

“It became a fight because the kids had so much school-based anxiety from trauma and bullying at school that they didn’t want to deal with school when they got home,” said Malliard, whose kids attended a public high school.

Malliard, who writes about education issues and is a full-time caregiver to his wife, doesn’t think his children were overburdened with homework at their school, but he also doesn’t believe they were benefiting from it.

“The teachers would tell us homework only takes 15 minutes a night — sure, if a kid sits there and does it right away and is attentive and wants to do it,” Malliard said. “It was getting to be an hour for us.”

He eventually enrolled his children in a virtual charter school, which they attended for the rest of their K-12 schooling.

How much is enough?

Over the years, research has attempted to answer the thorny question of how much homework is appropriate, with varying degrees of success.

Education groups and researchers generally recommend 10 minutes of homework each night per grade level. But it’s almost impossible to assign work that will take every student the same amount of time to complete, and research has shown there are harmful effects from too much time spent on homework.

A survey published in 2014 out of Stanford University that looked at more than 4,300 students in high-performing California high school schools found that the benefit of homework for high school students plateaus after two hours a night. Beyond that, the researchers found, it can lead to more stress and poor sleep.

Research on homework tends to focus on the amount of time students spend on it rather than the quality or purpose of the assignments, said Joyce Epstein, who has studied homework and is the co-director of the Center on School, Family, and Community Partnerships at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education.

One option worth considering, Epstein said, is to design homework that has a specific purpose but is perhaps shorter than traditional homework assignments. Giving students the opportunity to practice is important, she said, particularly in math, where concepts build on each other and move relentlessly forward throughout the year.

“The interesting issue for folks to consider is not should there be more homework, but should there be better homework,” Epstein said. “Better homework in math might be knowing the fact that kids don’t have to be practicing for hours, 10 to 20 examples,” when they could establish mastery in less time.

When students are completing math homework on their own but doing the problems incorrectly, some educators say it takes longer to reteach them the right way in class the next day.

Wendy Birhanzel, superintendent of Harrison School District 2 in Colorado, said her district has taken the approach recommended by Epstein, of focusing on the quality of homework while assigning less of it.

Rather than long “drill and kill” worksheets she remembers from her time as a student, Birhanzel said elementary students in the district might have a reading assignment, a few math problems and a small writing sample. “It’s more purposeful and less intensive,” Birhanzel said.

In Louisiana’s LaSalle Parish, Superintendent Garrett said that to account for the lost practice time, he has given math teachers permission to slow down their instruction and give students time in class to practice concepts, even if that means they don’t cover as much content during the school year.

“We felt like doing that would actually be more beneficial than racing through and covering every single thing that was listed. We’ll see,” he said. “This might be something that helps us in the long run.”

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Contact writer Ariel Gilreath on Signal at arielgilreath.46 or at gilreath@hechingerreport.org.

The annual release includes the latest data — collected directly from state departments of education — on teacher and support staff salaries, student enrollment and even how much money schools are getting from federal, state and local sources.

Here are some of the most interesting findings:

• $74,495 — The national average public school teacher salary

According to this new data, roughly 3.2 million teachers worked in U.S. public schools during the last school year, and, on average, they earned around $74,500 — not including benefits.

The report breaks down teacher salaries by state and region, too. At the top of the rankings for 2024-25 are California ($103,552), New York ($98,655) and Washington ($96,589) while Mississippi ($54,975), Florida ($56,663) and Louisiana ($56,785) round out the low end.

These data come with an important caveat, though: They have not been adjusted for differences in the cost of living, which can vary greatly from ZIP code to ZIP code and could reasonably account for at least some of the gap in salaries.

• Inflation’s effect on teacher pay

NEA researchers used state department of education projections — or, when necessary, arrived at their own projections — to estimate teacher salary averages for 2026, then compared those estimates to salaries from 2017. At first glance, pay appears to have risen across the decade (in current dollars). But after adjusting for inflation, the researchers estimate that teachers’ real earnings have actually declined by nearly 5%.

“Dedicated educators show up every day in classrooms across this country to inspire, support, and lift up their students, but too many are struggling to stay in the profession they love,” NEA President Becky Pringle said in a press release. “They deserve pay that reflects their expertise, the strong support they need to succeed, and the respect that honors the essential role they play in shaping the future of this nation.”

Of the 11 states that have seen an inflation-adjusted increase in teacher pay since 2017, one stands out, eclipsing the others. In Washington, teacher pay increased 36%. Why? Because the state’s supreme court put the state on notice, including imposing a $100,000-a-day fine, that it needed to do more to fund and support its public schools.

• $48,112 — The average salary for new teachers 

In 2024-25, the average salary nationally for new teachers jumped 3.4%, according to NEA’s report, but “after accounting for inflation, real salary growth was below 1%.”

The states with the highest average starting salaries: District of Columbia ($64,640), Washington ($60,658), California ($59,424), New Jersey ($58,727) and Utah ($57,849).

The states with the lowest starting salaries: Montana ($36,682), Nebraska ($39,561), Missouri ($40,682), Oklahoma ($41,294) and Kentucky ($41,901).

Though again, this data has not been adjusted for regional differences in cost of living.

• $36,360 — Average salary for K-12 public school support staff 

These are the folks who keep the nation’s public schools running without being directly involved in instruction — custodians, cafeteria workers, paraeducators, bus drivers and security staff.

That $36,360 average salary for support staff in 2024-25 is a $1,400 increase over the previous year, though, again, the inflation-adjusted long view tells a different story. Compared to 2016 salaries, researchers estimate public school support staff have seen a drop in pay of $2,344.

• The collective bargaining effect

According to the new report, “states with collective bargaining laws have higher average starting and top salaries than states without them.” How much higher? Starting salaries are $366 higher, on average, while top salaries are $15,105 higher.

The data also suggest a wage bump for school support staff, who earn 13% more in states that allow collective bargaining. According to NEA, the vast majority of school districts – over 80% – sit in states with some kind of collective-bargaining law, and only seven states expressly prohibit bargaining for teachers.

While there is clearly a correlation, or a connection, between salary and collective bargaining, there is not enough fine-grain data to draw a direct, causal link between the two.

It’s also worth noting an exception: While South Carolina does not have a collective-bargaining law, state lawmakers agreed to an 11% increase in pay for starting teachers last year.

• Student enrollment is slowly declining

Much has been made in recent years of a nationwide “enrollment cliff” stemming from fewer Americans choosing to have children around the time of the Great Recession. The new reports offer additional evidence of the cliff.

At the beginning of the 2024-25 school year, public schools enrolled nearly 49 million students. That’s a 0.3% drop from the previous fall. But, when viewed through a longer lens, enrollment has fallen by roughly 3.6% since 2016.

What’s more, as part of NEA’s new release, researchers estimate that enrollment dipped another 1% just between last year and the current school year.

• Schools enrolled an average of 15.1 students per teacher. 

This student-to-teacher ratio held steady between the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years, though state-by-state averages revealed considerable variation. Arizona, Nevada and Utah, for example, averaged roughly 22 students per teacher, while Vermont, New York, and the District of Columbia all averaged between 10 and 11 students per teacher.

• How school funding really works

President Donald Trump continues his efforts to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education in the name of “returning education to the states,” yet this new tranche of data shows just how small the federal footprint is already. Federal dollars — largely focused on helping schools mitigate the effects of student poverty and paying for special education services — accounted for 7.8% of schools’ total revenue during the last school year.

Where do schools actually get their money?

The data shows that, for 2025, 47% of public schools’ funding came from state governments and roughly 45% from local governments, including local property taxes. NEA researchers also estimate the federal share of school funding dipped to 7.3% this year.

That federal share has diminished in part because of the winding down of federal COVID-19 relief to public schools. Some states spent those dollars more quickly than others.

Of the states where federal support is still estimated to make up 10% or more of schools’ funding, most are Republican-controlled: Kentucky (17.5%), Alaska (16.5), New Mexico (14.1), Louisiana (14.1), Arkansas (13), South Dakota (12.4), West Virginia (11.9), Mississippi (11.8), Montana (11.4), South Carolina (10.8), Tennessee (10.6), Alabama (10.3), Arizona (10.3) and Florida (10.2).

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

Researchers from Stanford University fed 600 middle school essays into four different AI models and asked the models to give writing feedback. The argumentative essays were about whether schools should require community service and whether aliens created a hill on Mars. (They came from a collection of student writing assembled for research purposes.)

Then the researchers did something simple but revealing: They submitted each essay to the AI models 12 more times, giving different descriptions of the student who wrote it — identifying the writer, for example, as Black or white, male or female, highly motivated or unmotivated, or as having a learning disability.

The feedback shifted.

The researchers found consistent patterns across all the AI models. Essays attributed to Black students received more praise and encouragement, sometimes emphasizing leadership or power. (“Your personal story is powerful! Adding more about how your experiences can connect with others could make this even stronger.”) Essays labeled as written by Hispanic students or English learners were more likely to trigger corrections about grammar and “proper” English. When the student was identified as white, the feedback more often focused on argument structure, evidence and clarity — the kinds of comments that can push writers to strengthen their ideas.

The AI models addressed female students more affectionately and used more first-person pronouns. (“I love your confidence in expressing your opinion!”) Students labeled as unmotivated were met with upbeat encouragement. In contrast, students described as high-achieving or motivated were more likely to receive direct, critical suggestions aimed at refining their work.

Different words for different students

In other words, the AI feedback was both different in tone and in the expectations it had for the student. The paper, “Marked Pedagogies: Examining Linguistic Biases in Personalized Automated Writing Feedback,” hasn’t yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, but it was nominated for the best paper at the 16th International Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference in Norway, where it is slated to be presented April 30. (Update: A final version of this paper was published on April 26 in a collection of research to be presented at the conference.)

The researchers describe the feedback results as showing “positive feedback bias” and “feedback withholding bias” — offering more praise and less criticism to some groups of students. While the differences in any single piece of writing feedback might be difficult to notice, the patterns were evident across hundreds of essays.

The researchers believe that AI is changing its feedback on identical essays because the models are trained on vast amounts of human language. Human teachers can also soften criticism when responding to students from certain backgrounds, sometimes because they don’t want to appear unfair or discouraging. “They are picking up on the biases that humans exhibit,” said Mei Tan, lead author of the study and a doctoral student at the Stanford Graduate School of Education.

At first glance, the differences in feedback might not seem harmful. More encouragement could boost a student’s confidence. Many educators argue that culturally responsive teaching — acknowledging students’ identities and experiences — can increase student engagement at school.

But there is a trade-off.

If some students are consistently shielded from criticism while others are pushed to sharpen their arguments, the result may be unequal opportunities to improve. Praise can motivate, but it does not replace the kind of specific, direct feedback that helps students grow as writers. Tanya Baker, executive director of the National Writing Project, a nonprofit organization, recently heard a presentation of this study and said she was worried Black and Hispanic students might not be “pushed to learn” to write better.

That raises a difficult question for schools as they adopt AI tools: When does helpful personalization cross the line into harmful stereotyping?

Of course, teachers are unlikely to explicitly tell AI systems a student’s race or background in the way the researchers did in this experiment. But that doesn’t solve the problem, the Stanford researchers said. Many educational databases and learning platforms already collect detailed information about students, from prior achievement to language status. As AI becomes embedded in these systems, it may have access to far more context than a teacher would consciously provide. And even without explicit labels, AI can sometimes infer aspects of identity from writing itself.

The larger issue is that AI systems are not neutral tutors. Even the regular feedback response — when researchers didn’t describe the personal characteristics of the student — takes a particular approach to writing instruction. Tan described it as rather discouraging and focused on corrections. “Maybe a takeaway is that we shouldn’t leave the pedagogy to the large language model,” said Tan. “Humans should be in control.”

Tan recommends that teachers review the writing feedback before forwarding it to students. But one of the selling points of AI feedback is that it’s instantaneous. If the teacher needs to review it first, that slows it down and potentially undermines its effectiveness.

AI also offers the potential of personalization. The risk is that, without careful attention, that personalization could lower the bar for some students while raising it for others.

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

“They would tell me about how a lot of their peers are using AI for relationship advice, to draft breakup texts, to navigate these kinds of social relationships with your friend or your partner or someone else in your real life,” she says.

Some students said that in those interactions, the AI quickly appeared to take their side.

“And I think more broadly,” says Cheng, “if you use AI for writing some sort of code or even editing any sort of writing, it’ll be like, ‘Wow, your code or your writing is amazing.’ ”

To Cheng, this excessive flattery and unconditional validation from many AI models seemed different from how a human being might respond. She was curious about those discrepancies, their prevalence, and the possible repercussions.

“We haven’t really had this kind of technology for very long,” she says, “and so no one really knows what the consequences of it are.”

In a recent study published in the journal Science, Cheng and her colleagues report that AI models offer affirmations more often than people do, even for morally dubious or troubling scenarios. And they found that this sycophancy was something that people trusted and preferred in an AI — even as it made them less inclined to apologize or take responsibility for their behavior.

The findings, experts say, highlight how this common AI feature may keep people returning to the technology, despite the harm it causes them.

It’s not unlike social media in that both “drive engagement by creating addictive, personalized feedback loops that learn exactly what makes you tick,” says Ishtiaque Ahmed, a computer scientist at the University of Toronto who wasn’t involved in the research.

AI can affirm worrisome human behavior

To do this analysis, Cheng turned to a few datasets. One involved the Reddit community A.I.T.A., which stands for “Am I The A**hole?”

“That’s where people will post these situations from their lives and they’ll get a crowdsourced judgment of — are they right or are they wrong?” says Cheng.

For instance, is someone wrong for leaving their trash in a park that had no trash bins in it? The crowdsourced consensus: Yes, definitely wrong. City officials expect people to take their trash with them.

But 11 AI models often took a different approach.

“They give responses like, ‘No, you’re not in the wrong, it’s perfectly reasonable that you left the trash on the branches of a tree because there was no trash bins available. You did the best you could,'” explains Cheng.

In threads where the human community had decided someone was in the wrong, the AI affirmed that user’s behavior 51% of the time.

This trend also held for more problematic scenarios culled from a different advice subreddit where users described behaviors of theirs that were harmful, illegal or deceptive.

“One example we have is like, ‘I was making someone else wait on a video call for 30 minutes just for fun because, like, I wanted to see them suffer,'” says Cheng.

The AI models were split in their responses, with some arguing this behavior was hurtful, while others suggested that the user was merely setting a boundary.

Overall, the chatbots endorsed a user’s problematic behavior 47% of the time.

“You can see that there’s a big difference between how people might respond to these situations versus AI,” says Cheng.

Encouraging you to feel you’re right

Cheng then wanted to examine the impact these affirmations might be having. The research team invited 800 people to interact with either an affirming AI or a non-affirming AI about an actual conflict from their lives where they may have been in the wrong.

“Something where you were talking to your ex or your friend and that led to mixed feelings or misunderstandings,” says Cheng, by way of example.

She and her colleagues then asked the participants to reflect on how they felt and write a letter to the other person involved in the conflict. Those who had interacted with the affirming AI “became more self-centered,” she says. And they became 25% more convinced that they were right compared to those who had interacted with the non-affirming AI.

They were also 10% less willing to apologize, do something to repair the situation, or change their behavior. “They’re less likely to consider other people’s perspectives when they have an AI that can just affirm their perspectives,” says Cheng.

She argues that such relentless affirmation can negatively impact someone’s attitudes and judgments. “People might be worse at handling their interpersonal relationships,” she suggests. “They might be less willing to navigate conflict.”

And it had taken only the briefest of interactions with an AI to reach that point. Cheng also found that people had more confidence in and preference for an AI that affirmed them, compared to one that told them they might be wrong.

As the authors explain in their paper, “This creates perverse incentives for sycophancy to persist” for the companies designing these AI tools and models. “The very feature that causes harm also drives engagement,” they add.

AI’s dark side

“This is a slow and invisible dark side of AI,” says Ahmed of the University of Toronto. “When you constantly validate whatever someone is saying, they do not question their own decisions.”

Ahmed calls the work important and says that when a person’s self-criticism becomes eroded, it can lead to bad choices — and even emotional or physical harm.

“On the surface, it looks nice,” he says. “AI is being nice to you. But they’re getting addicted to AI because it keeps validating them.”

Ahmed explains that AI systems aren’t necessarily created to be sycophantic. “But they are often fine-tuned to be helpful and harmless,” he says, “which can accidentally turn into ‘people-pleasing.’ Developers are now realizing that to keep users engaged, they might be sacrificing the objective truth that makes AI actually useful.”

As for what might be done to address the problem, Cheng believes that companies and policymakers should work together to fix the issue, as these AIs are built deliberately by people, and can and should be modified to be less affirming.

But there’s an inevitable lag between the technology and possible regulation. “Many companies admit their AI adoption is still outpacing their ability to control it,” says Ahmed. “It’s a bit of a cat-and-mouse game where the tech evolves in weeks, while the laws to govern it can take years to pass.”

Cheng has reached an additional conclusion.

“I think maybe the biggest recommendation,” she says, “is to not use AI to substitute conversations that you would be having with other people,” especially the tough conversations.

Cheng herself hasn’t yet used an AI chatbot for advice.

“Especially now, given the consequences that we’ve seen,” she says, “I think that I’m even less likely to do so in the future.”

Many institutions had been racing, for at least two years, toward a deadline that was originally set for this Friday to comply with new federal accessibility guidelines updating the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). It was a day disability rights advocates had been eagerly awaiting.

But just four days ahead of the deadline, the Justice Department overrode the original rule and said public entities serving 50,000 or more people will now have until April 26, 2027. Smaller public institutions will have until that date in 2028.

The Justice Department “overestimated the capabilities (whether staffing or technology) of covered entities to comply with the rule in the time frames provided,” the DOJ said in its interim final rule.

“We are outraged,” said Corbb O’Connor, president of the National Federation of the Blind of Minnesota. The national organization, along with other disability rights organizations, has condemned the delay.

“Yet again, the blind have been told to wait to live on terms of equality,” O’Connor said. He pointed out that despite the rule being recent, international standards for web accessibility have existed since 1999.

The Association on Higher Education And Disability (AHEAD) has joined the chorus in pushing back on the last-minute change. “AHEAD and its members have long anticipated clear and timely guidance that reflects current technologies, instructional models, and student needs,” said Katy Washington, president of AHEAD.

The organization represents disability resource staff, including ADA coordinators, at colleges and universities. “Postponing these updates slows critical momentum and leaves institutions without the clarity needed to fully realize equitable access,” Washington said.

Addressing a need for clear guidelines

Corbb O’Connor, who is blind, said the delay isn’t just about waiting one extra year for accessibility. “We’ve been waiting nearly 36 years since the law that guaranteed these rights, the one that heralded a new era of access, was signed into law.”

He is referring to Title II of the ADA, the 1990 law which has long promised accessibility to people with disabilities, including in the digital realm. But before this rule, the ADA didn’t clearly lay out what accessibility had to look or sound like.

The new regulation, announced in 2024, aimed to change that by pointing institutions to a set of technical guidelines known as WCAG 2.1. It provided a clear checklist of accessibility requirements their web and mobile content had to meet.

That includes transcripts for audio clips, captioning for videos and making sure PDFs and other webpages are friendly with screen readers, an assistive technology blind people use to interpret visual content into audible speech.

“The certainty, clarity and timelines within these regulations have a powerful, local impact,” said O’Connor, who is also the parent of a child who is blind. “Within minutes of meeting my son’s elementary school principal for the first time, he knew the April 24, 2026 deadline.”

Jennifer Mathis was at the Justice Department when the original rule was announced and helped craft it. She noted that there had been many previous attempts for the federal government to formalize web accessibility guidelines. And Mathis said that while the need for digital accessibility was loud and clear from people with disabilities, calls for clear guidelines also came from public institutions themselves.

“The whole point of this particular rule was to create certainty and clarity for everyone,” Mathis said. “To delay the standards now, after 16 years and an incredibly thorough rulemaking process, is just mindless and cruel.”

In postponing the new requirements, the DOJ cited concerns from higher education, elementary and secondary education advocacy groups around cost and staff resources required to meet them.

“Many districts are already financially stretched and operating in an environment where schools are asked to do more with less,” said Sasha Pudelski of AASA, the School Superintendents Association, which primarily represents K-12 school superintendents.

AASA was one of the organizations that met with federal government officials to ask for a delay. The organization conducted a survey of its members and found that most districts said they would struggle to pay for the costs of compliance.

“The scope, pace, and unfunded nature of this requirement reflect a significant disconnect between federal expectations and the fiscal and human capital realities of local school systems,” Pudelski said.

While a federal rule on digital accessibility may not be effective for at least another year, there have been a number of successful legal actions holding colleges and other institutions accountable for equal access to learning materials.

Edited by: Steve Drummond
Visual design and development by: LA Johnson

For 30 years, Bellevue Elementary in Santa Rosa has relied on AmeriCorps services to support their students that need extra help. But when federal funding was cut, and later reinstated, that programming stalled, leaving some students behind.

In this episode, principal Nina Craig explains how the loss of tutors affected instruction and student relationships, while new AmeriCorps members, Maya Nurse and Elena Zeoli, describe stepping into classrooms with limited time and resources. We learn how even a few missed months of literacy support reduces how many students can be served.

Episode Transcript

Marlena Jackson-Retondo: Welcome to Mind Shift, where we explore the future of learning and how we raise our kids. I’m Marlena Jackson Rotondo. It’s almost Winter break at Bellevue Elementary in Santa Rosa, California, and tutoring sessions for the school year have just begun. The schools to AmeriCorps tutors have gone through a crash course of training to prepare for the reading and writing support they’ll provide for the rest of the year.

Jackson-Retondo: AmeriCorps is an independent government agency whose volunteer members provide educational support and services to schools across the country.

Jackson-Retondo: On this morning, a small group of fourth graders reluctantly file into the room.

Jackson-Retondo: They’ve been pulled out of their classroom to spend 30 minutes with the tutors, Maya Nurse and Elena Zeoli.

Maya has the students get straight to work reading a story out loud from a workbook In unison.

Mya Nurse: We’re gonna start with our choral style of reading today.

Mya Nurse: Ready? Go!

All reading: My mother says to me,  I choose a pretty paper fan with a picture of leaves and fireflies. I will keep my fan forever. When I grow up I will look at it and remember this night.

Jackson-Retondo: The tutors stop the students every couple of sentences to ask about vocabulary in the text.

Elena Zeoli: So what happened?

Elena Zeoli: What unexpectedly happened? The wet… they were warned about the weather. They thought the waves were only gonna get to how tall? Do you remember from the first page?

Student: mmmm….

Jackson-Retondo: The students seem timid, and when they do speak up, it’s very quiet. And sometimes the students don’t answer the questions at all, but Maya and Elena, unfazed by the silence, move on.

Jackson-Retondo: This is normal student behavior for the first week of tutoring at Bellevue Elementary, but what isn’t normal is that the first week of tutoring has been delayed this year by more than two months. Tutoring was supposed to start in early fall. Last April, all AmeriCorps funding was terminated by the Trump administration.

Jackson-Retondo:  This ended an almost three decade long collaboration between Bellevue Elementary and AmeriCorps.

These cuts happened immediately and without explanation.

Nina Craig: It was shocking how quickly it happened. Um, uh, literally felt like overnight.

Nina Craig: so it kind of felt like the rug was pulled out from us.

Jackson-Retondo: That’s Nina Craig Bellevue, elementary’s principal of 10 years. Before that, she was a fifth grade teacher and she recalls working with AmeriCorps members then.

Nina Craig: As a classroom teacher I remember them coming into my room and working with some of my students and having that partnership as a teacher

Jackson-Retondo: And because the AmeriCorps members were such an integral part of the school community, the cuts were difficult for Bellevue students too.

Nina Craig: The relationship with the kids that was established and for the kids to all of a sudden have these people gone that are such a vital part of our school.

Nina Craig: was really sad and really hard to explain, because they really do become a part of our school culture.

Jackson-Retondo:  Through lawsuits. AmeriCorps funding cuts were reversed in June of last year, but by that time, schools like Bellevue Elementary were already behind for the next school year’s cycle of tutoring. Some schools across the district opted not to continue with tutoring and mentoring support from AmeriCorps members for the next school year.

Jackson-Retondo: This is because they had to make decisions about their funding and without the certainty of AmeriCorps services, they had to go without. And because programming was delayed, Bellevue students didn’t start tutoring until December instead of October.

Nina Craig: there hasn’t been any tutoring offered for our third through sixth grade students until now.

Nina Craig: So without AmeriCorps, those students aren’t receiving any type of tutoring or intervention. And unless the teacher’s able to carve out time within their day to provide that,

Jackson-Retondo: AmeriCorps members provide one of Bellevue elementary’s only forms of tier two support. That’s targeted support in a small group setting. In this case, it helps students who are struggling with reading.

Nina Craig: In years past, we’ve had literacy paraprofessionals that could support our tier two. Um, however, with budget cuts, this is our first year without having them.

Nina Craig: And so, um, we have one instructional aide. For the entire school

Nina Craig: But yeah, we’re very limited.

Jackson-Retondo: The two AmeriCorps tutors contribute greatly to Bellevue’s tier two manpower, but it’s still not enough. The school reduced the kindergarten day by one and a half hours so that kindergarten teachers could provide extra support for Bellevue’s first and second grade classrooms. On short notice, and with no wiggle room in their budget.

Jackson-Retondo: Bellevue Elementary had to make some hard choices. We’ll find out how they’re doing right after this break.

***Midroll Break***

Jackson-Retondo: When I visited Bellevue Elementary back in December, I spoke with Fonzi, a fourth grader, receiving small group literacy tutoring for 30 minutes per day, four days per week.

 Fonzi: Dog Man and then I Survived.

Fonzi’s telling me about the books he likes to read at home.,

Jackson-Retondo: What was that one?

Fonzi: I Survived.

Jackson-Retondo: What’s that one about?

Fonzi: It’s um, there’s like different books.

 Fonzi: There’s, um, a Titanic book that, um, sunk in the ocean.

Jackson-Retondo: So you read about different survival stories? Whoa, that’s pretty cool.

Jackson-Retondo: He feels like there’s less reading time when he’s in his classroom.

Fonzi: The things that are different is, um, we don’t like read a lot of books,

Jackson-Retondo: But when he’s in his tutoring sessions, reading time, one of his favorite things to do, is extended

Fonzi: At AR time, we um, read, we read books for 15 minutes.

Jackson-Retondo: Fonzi is part of a small group of fourth grade students who have been identified as needing extra support with reading. During a normal year, there’s enough time for two groups of students to cycle through tutoring support from AmeriCorps members. But this year, since tutoring at Bellevue started late, AmeriCorps members only have time to help half of the students that they normally would.

Jackson-Retondo: At sites like Bellevue, the AmeriCorps tutors have become a staple in the school community.

Nina Craig: There’s so many ways AmeriCorps impacts because of the tutoring, the recess playtime, the mentoring. It’s so much connection. You guys probably know more of the kids’ names than I do, um, at this point. And you just started

Jackson-Retondo: And for Maya and Elena who are just starting their careers, the program offers them a glimpse into their professional future

Maya Nurse: I know I want to do a job where I’m helping people and so I thought this was a great opportunity to, yeah, like, get some real life experience where I’m like serving others and I’m thinking of maybe doing something with social work.

Jackson-Retondo: The opportunity to work with students in a school setting also offered Maya something new.

Maya Nurse: I’ve never worked with kids, and so I was kind of like, I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing. Like, I don’t know if I..

Maya Nurse: …If I can do this, at first, you know, I was a little timid, but then you kind of just jump in and, um, you start connecting with the kids.

Jackson-Retondo: When I spoke with the tutoring pair back in December, Elena was already feeling optimistic about her future.

Elena Zeoli: So far this job I feel extremely passionate about, which is, it’s just really nice waking up in the morning and I, I wake up early, like I wake up before my alarm clock ’cause I’m just excited to come to the school.

Jackson-Retondo: A couple months later, Maya and Elena felt comfortable in their roles,

Maya Nurse: I just like know what I’m doing a little more. I kinda have a sense of like, we have a daily routine. I have really like good relationships with students now, so I’m like so excited to see them every day and they’re excited to see me and yeah, it’s great. It’s really good.

Jackson-Retondo: And the AmeriCorps tutors have also noticed improvements in their students as well.

Maya Nurse: One of my students in sixth grade, in one of his tests, he was and like the 26th percentile for reading in like November. And now he is like in the 42nd percentile and I’m like, whoa, that’s so like rewarding and exciting that he’s like doing so much better and able to do that on his own now, like do it more on his own.

Jackson-Retondo: But the reality of having to work within the school’s limited resources has also sunk in for Maya.

Maya Nurse: Sometimes also it’s like really hard to see like how some students struggle so much in school or like, you know, and I can only do so much and help them so much in that 30 minutes.

Maya Nurse: yeah, just doing the best you can every day with what you have.

ambi: Cat was going to wait the cat, and then this could change to hundreds of bugs in one.

ambi: He called his keys and…

Jackson-Retondo: I walked into the tutoring classroom in February.

Jackson-Retondo: It felt like a transformed space with students who were relaxed and eager to learn.

Jackson-Retondo: Elena had also noticed a difference in her students too.

Elena Zeoli: I feel like they’re a lot more confident in answering questions and what to write down. So I feel like that’s. That’s like the biggest difference I’ve seen is like their confidence in what they’re writing.

ambi: So the door, what’s the door? Who does he know? What’s the door? It’s D, the OOR. Yeah. I thought it was E-D-O-O-O-R-H. What? All right.

Jackson-Retondo: Fonzi has also gained confidence in his reading abilities since December. He told me he’s reading three to four books a day and even tackling some chapter books.

Fonzi: When I first came in and reading groups, um, we started reading books and stuff and I kind of got into it and I started reading books every day.

Jackson-Retondo: The benefits of extra reading support provided by the AmeriCorps tutors at school has extended into Fonzie’s home life as well. He and his siblings made up a reading game that they like to play at home.

Fonzi: We guess, like, the book that they have. They don’t show the covers. And we, guess, and then if we get it right, the people that have the book that the people say, they’re eliminated.

Jackson-Retondo: Even though there won’t be enough time to bring in another group of fourth graders for tutoring this school year, Elena and Maya look forward to the rest of their time with the students that they are able to help.

Jackson-Retondo: Thank you to Bellevue Elementary’s faculty and staff who contributed their time to make this episode possible.

Jackson-Retondo: The MindShift team includes me, Marlena Jackson-Retondo, Nimah Gobir, and Ki Sung. Our editor is Chris Hambrick. Seth Samuel is our sound designer. Jen Chien is head of podcasts and Ethan Toven-Lindsey is KQED’s, editor-in-chief. We receive additional support from Maha Sanad.

Jackson-Retondo: Mindshift is supported in part by the generosity of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and members of KQED, some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio artists. San Francisco, Northern California Local.

Jackson-Retondo: Thanks for listening.

How do you lighten your mental load — those seemingly never-ending tasks you’re constantly keeping track of in your brain?

It’s a question that sociologist Leah Ruppanner explores in her new book, Drained: Reduce Your Mental Load to Do Less and Be More, which comes out today. It offers evidence-based tools to reduce what she calls “emotional thinking work,” so we can use that energy in a more meaningful way.

Ruppanner, a professor at The University of Melbourne in Australia who has spent decades studying gender, work and family, has found that just being able to acknowledge and measure the mental load can slim it down. “Once we see it, we can’t unsee it. We can start to address it,” she says.

While everyone has a mental load to some extent — women carry the greatest burden, she says. In one study of survey data with over 3,000 parents in the United States, she and other researchers found that women were responsible for over 70% of the domestic mental load, including keeping track of everyone’s schedules or remembering to delegate tasks.

In a conversation with Life Kit, Ruppanner unpacks some of the assumptions that keep a woman’s mental load heavy, and what it takes to reclaim your headspace. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Let’s start with mental load and gender. What are some of the pervasive cultural myths that you wish would go away? 

One of the biggest lies we sell each other is that women are better multitaskers than men, that their brains are just more efficient at keeping track of all these competing things.

The research doesn’t show that. What it shows is that none of us can multitask.  What multitaskers are good at doing is task switching, which burns through some of your cognitive capacity and drains some of your energy.

Another myth we tell each other is that women are really good household managers and men are terrible at this. But [research has shown] that men who engage in the primary care of children and take care of the household, they’re healthier, they’re happier, they’re more balanced.

Some of these social norms just position [women] to take on the work.  Then we set each other up to reinforce these gender roles.

You ran a study testing the stereotype that “men can’t see the mess.” 

With colleagues at University of California, Santa Barbara, and New York University, we showed [male and female participants] a messy room and a clean room. And we asked them: Can you rate the messiness of this room?

We found that men and women rate it as equally clean and equally messy. So this idea that “men can’t see the mess or dirt” is nonsense. Let’s stop saying that to each other and believing it. Men can see the socks on the floor.

You say that one of the most effective ways to lighten the mental load is to figure out what’s exactly on the list. How do you do that? 

I have this new website where if you want to actually measure your mental load, you can take a free assessment and see what you’re carrying.

Your book also offers a tool called the Mental Load Audit. The idea is to sort the tasks in your head into eight categories so you can see where your energy is going. Can you tell us about some of those buckets? 

The first one is life organization. This is staying on top of the planning and the tasks. The second one is emotional support. This is checking in on family, friends and coworkers to make sure they’re doing OK. Another is individual upkeep, like, did I make that doctor’s appointment? Do I need to get my hair cut?

You can find all eight categories in your book, and also online. Once you’ve categorized your mental load, what do you do next? 

Start thinking about whether these things are drains [to your energy] or credits.

Every day you wake up with a certain amount of capacity, and every day you spend it. You cannot, every day, pull your mental load into deficit. You need to have some energy.

Now, for some that will be about reducing some of the mental load. But for others, that will be about figuring out the things that bring you joy, that are replenishing. Then start thinking about how you align your mental spending that way.

How do we prioritize the tasks that matter most? 

Get clear on who’s on your starting lineup. One of the mothers [I interviewed] said, “I’m weighing the requests from my book club, the Parent-Teacher Association and my parents. I can’t say no to any of them.”

But if you have a moment to go, “Who’s really critical right now?” It becomes easier to say no. Then you can filter what decisions are worth the investment.

You share another way to lighten your mental load: outsource some of your responsibilities. This tends to cost money — for example, hiring a house cleaner or child care. Are there other ways to offload our tasks without breaking the bank? 

Can technology do it? Maybe artificial intelligence can do the meal planning. Or there are apps that can read your emails and put [events] into a shared calendar.

One of the other things I talk about in the book is getting a “good is good enough” mentality, and starting to think about when our standards are too high.

Like, if you are worried about the way the forks go in the dishwasher, part of your mental load is being spent monitoring that. Sometimes it’s worth it, sometimes it’s not.

So what is the ultimate goal here, once you’ve succeeded in lightening the load? 

To say: I have enough mental load energy to figure out where I’m going, and I can create new, interesting worlds, or lives that I love to live, where I’m thriving, where I’m happy, where I’m passionate, where I’m excited, and not waking up depleted or burnt.

Take the Mental Load Measurement, a short quiz developed by Ruppanner, to measure where your mental load is heaviest  — and get suggestions on how to lighten it. 

The digital story was edited by Malaka Gharib. The visual editor is CJ Riculan. We’d love to hear from you. Leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823, or email us at LifeKit@npr.org.

Listen to Life Kit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and sign up for our newsletter. Follow us on Instagram: @nprlifekit.

These features create a kind of superglue on the apps, says cultural anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll at New York University, who has pioneered research in this field. “They keep us spending more time on these apps and spending more money. They drain us of our energy and ourselves.” Understanding these features offers parents a rubric for evaluating how harmful an app or device may be for kids, Schüll says.

During the trial in California, the attorney bringing the case accused Meta and Google of designing their apps to behave like “digital casinos.” That’s an apt comparison, according to Schüll’s research, because major design elements of social media have surprising roots in the gambling industry.

Pulled into the “machine zone”

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, the casino industry gradually and purposely created what many scientists consider to be the most addictive form of gambling: video slot machines. They are something like a giant app, played on a huge video screen with an ergonomic chair attached to it.

People struggling with gambling addiction often cite video slots as their game of choice, studies have found. Some people gamble on these machines for extraordinary periods of time, Schüll found in her ethnographic fieldwork. They can play for 24 hours, even 48 hours straight. Some people even told Schüll that they wear adult diapers to the casino so they don’t have to stop gambling to use the restroom.

Thirty years ago, Schüll set out on a bold mission: to figure out how these games exert this magnetic effect. What features might literally prevent flourishing?

She spent 15 years dissecting the inner workings of video slot machines. She also interviewed everyone up and down the industry, from the marketers and mathematicians to software engineers and executives, as well as people who used these devices daily.

Through her research, she uncovered four key features that, when combined together, help hold people on the gambling devices. These features trigger a trancelike or dissociative state, known as a “machine zone” or “dark flow,” in which people lose track of their sense of time and place.

To Schüll’s surprise, around the early 2010s, the same features began to appear on phone and tablet apps, including social media, games and video-streaming platforms. “These are not normal products for kids like a pair of shoes or a toy,” she says. “They create a relationship with kids.”

Here are four features that create that superglue:

Feature 1: solitude

“When the relationship is just between you and the machine, it removes social cues needed for stopping,” Schüll says. It’s harder to notice when the activity no longer serves the person playing or scrolling.

Studies have found that children who regularly use screens alone in their bedrooms have a higher risk of developing what psychologists call problematic usage. That is, they continue to use an app or play a game even when it damages their health. For example, the app may interfere with their sleep or friendships, but the child still feels compelled to stay on the app.

Feature 2: bottomlessness

Videos keep appearing on TikTok and YouTube. Photos, comments and likes keep popping up on Instagram. Apps have seemingly endless content for you to see, and it all shows or plays automatically.

“There’s no natural stopping point,” Schüll says. So you never feel finished or satisfied.

You want one more of something, endlessly. And that feeling grows even stronger with the third ingredient added into the mix.

Feature 3: speed

The faster people play video slots, the longer people gamble, Schüll found in her review of research performed by the gambling industry. Speed has a similar effect on social media and video-streaming apps, she says. The faster people can scroll, watch and then watch again, the harder it is for many to pull away from an app.

“The speed of the feedback can cause this sense that you merge with the screen. You don’t know where you begin and the machine ends,” Schüll says. “The speed really just pulls you into this flow.”

For social media, the speed at which we can find “new” material has jumped with several technological advancements, including the invention of higher-speed internet and infinite scroll.

Feature 4: teasing, or giving you almost what you want

The final ingredient is perhaps the most important, says Jonathan D. Morrow, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist at the University of Michigan. It’s all about how apps select content for you.

Here’s how it typically works. First, the software uses AI to determine what you’re hoping to find or see. “Even if you don’t know what you want, the app knows. It’s very good at figuring that out,” Morrow says.

But then, he says, the app withholds that reward: “Apps don’t give it to you. They give you something close to that, and then a few clicks later, the algorithm gives you something even closer.”

They rarely — if ever — give you what you’re looking for. “They give just enough to keep you engaged, keep you looking at the app and interacting with it as long as possible,” he adds.

This teasing gives you the feeling that you’re going to get what you’re seeking soon. “So you’ll be there all day trying to get that next big thing. There’s always a possibility you’ll finally get what you want,” Morrow says.

A recipe for overuse

When an app combines these four features — solitude, bottomlessness, speed and teasing — it creates a kind of recipe for overuse for nearly everyone, Schüll says. Sometimes Schüll gives her students at New York University this list of design features. “I say, ‘Pick a website or app. Then, using these criteria, rate how harmful it is.'”

But the recipe is especially harmful for children, she adds: “It’s a cruel setup, especially when kids are concerned. Kids are obviously more vulnerable.” Therefore, she and Morrow agree: Children need help regulating their use of these apps, but they also need protection from harmful design.

Michaeleen Doucleff has a Ph.D. in chemistry and is a longtime science journalist (including previously for NPR). She is the author of the parenting book Dopamine Kids.