An anonymous survey of 338 undergraduates at the University of Chicago shows that the answer may be hard to pin down — not just because AI use is changing quickly, but because students may not be self-reporting it accurately.

In the survey, 60 percent of students said they personally use AI tools such as ChatGPT. But 90 percent said they believed the average student on campus uses AI. 

That 30-point gap could mean that students are underreporting their own AI use, overestimating their peers’ use, or both. Without reliable information about how many students are using AI and how they are using it, college administrators risk designing policies based on assumptions rather than evidence. 

The University of Chicago researchers behind the survey suspect that college students aren’t being truthful about their actual use of AI because they’re ashamed. 

“Students don’t want to be perceived by their peers as not able to do the work,” said Alex Kale, a computer scientist at the University of Chicago and a co-author of the study, which was presented at a conference in Barcelona, Spain, in April. “They don’t want to be perceived by their peers as dishonest … And it feels deeply personal.”

Kale calls this phenomenon “social desirability bias,” the human tendency to answer questions in a way that makes us look good to others (and to ourselves), rather than being completely honest, even in an anonymous survey. In a separate online survey of 98 undergraduates conducted by the researchers, respondents said that admitting to using AI was akin to admitting that you’re “not able to complete coursework independently,” or are “lazy.” Another respondent thought that students were hiding usage for fear of getting caught and possibly expelled.

The researchers offer an alternate explanation for the gap. Students may be overestimating how many of their peers are using AI because it is such a visible part of campus life. They hear people talking about ChatGPT. They see AI tools open on laptop screens. That can start to feel like the norm. One survey respondent expressed it like this: “I think only a small portion of students actually rely on LLMs to do coursework, while most students do not. That small portion leads some students to assume most are using it.” (The current post-2022 generation of AI tools like ChatGPT are often referred to as large language models or LLMs.)

In other words, students may be using AI more than they admit, while AI hype may also be creating the impression that everyone is using it. 

This same phenomenon — a big gap between what students admit to doing and what they believe their peers are doing — is commonly found in public health research on alcohol, drugs and sex. Students often overestimate how much their peers drink heavily, use drugs or engage in casual sex. And that has had big implications for curbing unhealthy behaviors. When students believe that “everyone else is doing it,” they are more likely to engage in it too. The false perception becomes partly self-fulfilling.

More than 25 years ago, colleges began to worry that warning students about binge drinking on campus was backfiring and actually encouraging students to get drunk. Many shifted strategy, downplaying the problem of binge drinking and publicizing statistics that most students drink in moderation. The number of students who said they drink heavily declined, according to some public health officials. 

There may be some lessons here for how to encourage the responsible use of AI, even though the University of Chicago study doesn’t link the AI use to drugs or booze. But it does raise the point that perceptions matter. If students believe that nearly everyone is relying on AI to complete coursework, they may feel pressure to use it themselves just to keep up.

Kristin Fasiang is a graduate student in computer science and learning sciences at Northwestern University. Fasiang reported and wrote this story along with The Hechinger Report’s Jill Barshay.

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

“I’m a very creative writer, I love to write stories for fun,” she says.

Stories come naturally to Soraya, but reading and writing don’t. That’s because she has dyslexia. “Academically, school has always been a really big challenge for me.”

Then last school year, she started using technology that allows her to do a number of things: dictate her writing rather than type, listen to books rather than read them on a page and take photos of notes on the board.

It changed everything. Instead of getting caught up in whether a word is spelled right, Soraya finds that with speech-to-text built into her school laptop, she can simply let the words flow from her brain out of her mouth.

“I started getting really good grades,” she says. “It made me feel like … I’m not stupid, I have so much to say and it just made me like ‘I can do this, I can do school and I can be good at it.”

This, her mom, Heather Martin, says, is the kind of promise screens hold for students like her daughter — students she worries are being forgotten in the nationwide backlash against screens in schools. Screens are increasingly being blamed for getting in the way of student learning: More than 30 states have banned cellphones in school. Some states have gone further with proposals or policies to entirely remove screens like laptops and tablets from classrooms. In late May, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued a surgeon general’s advisory warning of the “harms of screen use,” citing its effects on children’s health and educational outcomes.

Much of the pivot away from screens in schools has come from parents who are concerned screen use is getting in the way of their children’s learning — an argument Heather Martin hears in her own community in Concord, 30 miles northeast of San Francisco. She shares some of those concerns, but says, “Never once in the conversation has there been a discussion, except for me bringing it up with the other parents, about kids with disabilities.”

Advocates worry those students are also being left out of the national conversation.

Screen-time policy proposals are often “a blunt instrument”

Students with disabilities make up a quickly growing share of students in this country — there are more than 8 million of them. Many rely on assistive technology to get through the school day, including for note-taking, reading and writing. For example, blind and low-vision students may use screen reading or magnifying software to read. Others, like Soraya, use speech-to-text and audiobooks.

States including Alabama, Tennessee and Utah already have laws limiting screens that take effect as early as July.

“My concern is that that’s a really fast period of time for this to happen,” says Lindsay Jones, CEO of the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST), an education research nonprofit that focuses on making learning environments accessible.

Jones points out that some of these laws do make exceptions to restrictions on screens for students with disabilities — often a line in the text mentions assistive technology. But she says that should be the bare minimum and worries many policy proposals are “a very blunt instrument.”

“They’ve moved so fast that we’ve really left our educators and our communities of people with disabilities this summer to figure it out,” she says. Perhaps with more time and input from disabled people, policies would better protect their rights, Jones adds.

Beyond concerns about state- and school-level bans on cellphones and screens, disability advocates point out that the shrunken U.S. Department of Education is far less equipped to enforce civil rights. Those rights include access to assistive technology for students with disabilities. The Trump administration also recently delayed a long-expected digital accessibility rule for public institutions, including schools.

“For some kids, the screen is their accessibility tool”

At Soraya’s high school in northern California, this past school year was the first that students’ phones were locked up in pouches for the entirety of the school day — as they are in many schools across the country. Heather Martin worries the phone ban could open the door to a broader ban on screens at her daughter’s school.

“A completely screen-free environment feels like it’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” she says. “It’s not looking at ‘screen free’ versus ‘accessibility free.’ And for some kids, the screen is their accessibility tool.”

As she talks about the change at her school, Soraya tenses up. “I hate them,” she says of the locked pouches. She says her phone isn’t just a distraction, it’s a safety net to call her parents if she has a panic attack, for example. And she feels singled out when she has to ask to get her phone out of its locked pouch for note-taking.

Soraya’s individualized education program (IEP), a legal document that outlines the accommodations and modifications she is supposed to receive at school, says she can use her phone for note-taking, along with other assistive technology. But because the cellphone ban is new, her teachers are still adjusting. Because she has several different classes and teachers throughout the day, she says it’s easy for some teachers to be unfamiliar with her accommodations.

This is the kind of “unintended consequence” Jones worries about as she considers a near future in which more schools move away from technology that she says has been game-changing for people with disabilities. When technology is used intentionally, she says, it can “actually allow us to create much more flexible environments, and those are really needed for people with disabilities.”

Jones’ organization, CAST, invented an educational framework called Universal Design for Learning that encourages educators to design their classrooms to account for the different ways students learn. For instance, a teacher might give a math lesson using blocks, a diagram and a video to help impress the same lesson upon diverse learners. Or perhaps class reading is provided as an e-book so students with low-vision can magnify the text, while those with dyslexia can listen.

As screen limits ripple through the nation’s schools, Jones hopes people with disabilities aren’t forgotten. “We need educators, we need people with disabilities, we need assistive technology providers,” to weigh in on how such policies are implemented in the classroom, says Jones. “That is going to be the best way forward for everyone to achieve their goals without trampling on people’s rights.”

For Soraya, using these kinds of tools has led her to embrace her learning differences. In fact, she just finished researching and writing a series of essays exploring how people with dyslexia learn. She has straight As for the first time in her life, but more importantly, she says she can express herself in a deeper, more meaningful way.

“I have so much more to say … It made me feel more confident in myself.”

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

Yet a new study released in May offers hope. Researchers found that some Michigan schools appear to be substantially better than others at getting students to show up, and identified one intervention — frequent home visits to families whose children are absent from class — that was used more often by schools making a difference.

Schools that were more successful in boosting attendance were much more likely to conduct these visits frequently — daily or weekly. Monthly or occasional home visits did not appear to make as much difference. Schools that visited less frequently performed about the same as those that did not conduct home visits at all.

Measuring a school’s impact on attendance is tricky. If a student attends school 95 percent of the time, it can be hard to tell whether the student was already conscientious, or whether the school itself is having a positive influence.

To isolate a school’s influence, researchers at the University of Michigan-Flint and Wayne State University focused on students who switched schools, such as those transitioning from middle to high school. The students themselves remained largely the same while their school environments changed so researchers could more credibly estimate whether particular schools made a difference. To account for the fact that more diligent students might be selected or funneled into higher-performing schools, researchers further adjusted their calculations to compare students with similar backgrounds and academic records as they switched schools.

Researchers analyzed roughly 2,700 Michigan schools between 2022 and 2025 and divided them into quarters based on how much they improved their students’ attendance rates. Students in the top quarter of schools showed up for class about seven more days per year than similar students in the bottom quarter. Seven days is substantial since missing 18 days a year is the threshold for chronic absenteeism.

Encouragingly, these attendance gains were not short-lived. The schools that made the most progress tended to show improvement across all three years of the study.

But improvement does not necessarily mean success. Some of the most effective schools in the state still had absenteeism rates above 40 or 50 percent, said Jeremy Singer, assistant professor at the University of Michigan-Flint and lead author of the study.

The schools making the most progress tend to educate many children in poverty, often clustered in the state’s poorest cities, such as Detroit, Flint and Saginaw, or in economically depressed rural areas where farms are rapidly going out of business. Across the nation, absenteeism rates are highest in poor communities where evictions, addiction, transportation problems, health issues and family responsibilities interfere with school attendance.

High-poverty schools know absenteeism is a problem and have numerous programs and staff in place to address it. Researchers wanted to see if there were common strategies used by schools that were making progress. And so they combined their analysis with a Michigan school survey where principals disclosed how they were tackling the problem.

That’s how the value of frequent home visits rose to the top, which also corroborates other research in Connecticut. An intensive home visiting program to boost attendance has also shown strong results there.

Still, these visits are not a guaranteed solution. Some Michigan schools conducting weekly home visits saw no improvement in attendance — or even worsening absenteeism. In other words, while many schools using frequent home visits were successful, others were not. “They’re certainly no silver bullet,” said Singer.

Singer says that researchers need to dig deeper into what makes home visits effective since they are expensive and time-intensive. Possible factors include who conducts them, what time of day they occur, whether they are scheduled or surprise visits, and what conversations take place.

Schools in the study are trying dozens of other interventions, but the researchers didn’t detect a strong connection between most of those efforts and improved attendance. These other interventions include early warning systems, letters home, automated text messages and phone calls. Schools that had support from district personnel, such as truancy officers or liaisons, did not do better than schools without these staffers.

Personalized and frequent text messages were modestly more common among more schools with improving attendance. Researchers also found that schools making more progress were slightly more likely to report actively helping families address outside barriers such as housing and transportation.

The correlation between interventions and schools that are effective in boosting attendance is a clue about what works, but the researchers cannot say whether the interventions are driving the attendance improvements. It could be that the most effective schools are doing other things not captured in the survey, such as hiring especially skilled teachers or building stronger relationships with students that make school feel worth attending.

The findings are a reminder that “best practices” recommendations often overstate what researchers actually know. Schools can make a meaningful difference in attendance, but identifying genuinely successful schools is hard, isolating why they succeed is even harder, and simple solutions rarely hold up under scrutiny.

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

But the first wave of rigorous research on those policies — including two major U.S. studies — do not point neatly in one direction. Some studies have found modest academic gains from cellphone restrictions. Others have found little to no effect on test scores, even when student phone use dropped sharply. Some studies suggest benefits for low-achieving students, others for girls, and still others for boys. In some places, attendance or student well-being improved. In others, they didn’t.

The scientific process can be messy. Cultural differences may explain why the bans are more effective in some places than others. But almost any education reform will get different results in different places, even within a single country. And the current confusion may also stem from how difficult it is to study cellphone bans in the real world.

Ideally, researchers would randomly assign some students to surrender their phones while others kept them, and then measure the effect on academic performance — the equivalent of a clinical trial for an education policy. But those experiments are difficult to enforce in schools, and so far only one study, conducted among college students in India, has attempted a randomized controlled trial. It produced a notably strong improvement in course grades for lower achieving students.

Instead, most studies rely on rougher real world comparisons that capture only partial effects of cellphone restrictions.

A national study released this month by researchers at Stanford, Duke, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan analyzed more than 40,000 schools across the country using data from Yondr, a company that makes magnetic locking pouches for student cellphones.

The researchers found that cellphone activity at schools dropped sharply after schools adopted the pouches. Cellphone “pings” from school grounds fell by 30 percent, and teachers reported far less nonacademic phone use in class.

But the study found “close to zero” effects on test scores, attendance and online bullying, even three years after schools adopted the pouches. The researchers compared the Yondr schools to schools that had similar demographics and academic performance.

At first glance, those findings appeared to conflict with a study of schools in Florida released last year, which found small academic gains a year after statewide cellphone restrictions took effect in 2023.

The researchers behind that study, from the University of Rochester and RAND, compared schools where student cellphone use had historically been high with schools where phone use had already been relatively low before the statewide restrictions began. Their logic was that schools with heavier pre-ban cellphone use should experience a larger effect from the policy change.

The national Yondr study, by contrast, largely compared schools using one particularly strict form of enforcement against schools that often already had softer cellphone restrictions in place. Some schools in the comparison group still required students to keep phones tucked away in backpacks or out of sight during class.

In other words, the national study was largely comparing stricter restrictions against weaker ones while the Florida study was comparing schools with high versus low cellphone use before the ban.

Even with the different methodologies and research questions, the researchers of both U.S. studies emphasized in interviews how similar their results actually were. The Florida study calculated that the academic gains, which materialized in the second year after the ban, were less than a percentile point, the equivalent of moving a student from the 50th percentile, dead in the middle, to the 51st percentile. In practical terms, the difference between a tiny gain and near-zero effects may not matter.

Both studies also documented an initial increase in disciplinary incidents before behavior stabilized, and both found signs of nonacademic benefits, including improvements in school climate or student well-being.

The broader international research, however, remains genuinely mixed.

The first quantitative study of cellphone bans, published in England in 2016, found that cellphone restrictions improved exam scores primarily for low-achieving students. But a Swedish study in 2020 found no academic or behavioral benefits.

The Swedish researchers speculated that their results might reflect the country’s long history of integrating computers into classrooms. In the 1970s, Sweden was an early European adopter of school technology, so students already relied heavily on laptops and other digital devices during lessons before the ubiquity of cellphones. A separate Swedish case study also found that students were often using phones between assignments rather than during instructional time.

Since then, studies in Spain, Norway, Brazil and India have all found academic benefits from cellphone restrictions, though the gains varied widely. The randomized trial in India produced some of the largest academic gains in the literature. Researchers there randomly assigned college students by field of study to store their phones in wooden cubbies before class while others kept them. Unlike in many American universities, there weren’t many laptops or tablets in these Indian classrooms. Removing phones, in effect, may have removed all digital distractions from the classroom.

One possible explanation for the disappointing U.S. results is that students are still surrounded by digital distractions even when phones are gone. David Figlio, the lead author of the Florida study, said students often shift to texting, gaming or social media on laptops and tablets that remain permitted in school.

Another possibility is that the academic harms of modern technology aren’t primarily caused by classroom distraction itself. Smartphones may influence sleep, study habits, sustained attention and reading stamina outside school hours in ways that a seven-hour school day ban cannot easily reverse.

“Cell phones still could be having a large effect on the diminishment of student achievement, even if cell phone bans are not turning this around by a tremendous amount,” Figlio said. “Students could be cutting corners on their studying, or staying up very late and getting less sleep.”

Tom Dee, a Stanford education researcher who led the national study, said the “sobering” findings in this country should not discourage schools from continuing to experiment with cellphone policies.

“We should just continue to iterate, which is something we do too infrequently in education policy,” Dee said. “Let’s not move on to the next fad or the next flavor of the day. This issue is too important for us not to stay in the fight to try to figure out how to manage our children’s use of digital devices responsibly.”

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

BAY POINT, Calif. — The sun would just be rising when teacher Mary Acebu began her days. She’d blast music on the way to work to get energized and get to her classroom by 6:30 to prepare for her students’ arrival at 8. Often, it’d be dark by the time she headed home, sometimes with paperwork in tow.

Like so many special education teachers around the country, this was Acebu’s life for much of the 10 years she’s been teaching at Riverview Middle School, in this small, unincorporated northern California town.

“I don’t do that anymore,” she says with a laugh.

That’s because Acebu has been experimenting with artificial intelligence for the last two years to get through paperwork more quickly and says it’s helped her instead use precious time for student interaction. “I have time to talk to the kiddos and really build those relationships,” she says, “instead of sitting here in front of my computer.”

For years, schools nationwide have struggled with hiring and retaining special educators. In the 2024-25 school year, 45 states reported special education teacher shortages, and staff turnover is worse in schools that largely serve low-income students, like Riverview.

Some special educators say part of what makes them feel overworked is legally required paperwork layered on top of regular teaching duties. Acebu is one of a growing number of those teachers around the nation using AI to help speed up that paperwork — including for writing individualized education programs (IEPs). Educators and families maintain these detailed documents that outline goals and services students need to meet those goals at school.

According to a recent survey by the nonpartisan Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), 57% of special education teachers polled nationwide said they used AI to help develop individualized plans for their students in the 2024-25 school year. That’s up from 39% the previous school year.

Along with the survey results, the CDT warned of privacy, legal and ethical risks around using AI. Other research, however, including from the University of Virginia (UVA) and the University of Central Florida (UCF), has shown that when used appropriately, AI can help special education teachers craft IEPs of equal or higher quality than when teachers produce them alone.

And the time saved can benefit students, too. “The more face time a student with a disability has with a teacher, that often yields better outcomes for them, both educationally, functionally — just across the board,” says Olivia Coleman, a researcher and professor at UCF who has been studying the role of AI in special education.

Acebu says that rings true in her classroom. She points out King, one of her eighth graders, as an example. “He was a non-reader, beginning of seventh grade. He’s reading now.” That, for Acebu, is the point of IEPs — to put what’s on paper into practice for her students. She says that is only possible with intentional, hands-on work in the classroom.

What IEPs are and why they matter

Every seventh and eighth grader in Mary Acebu’s class learns differently — some work independently, some in pairs, others with headphones on and yet others with speech-to-text technology. Those differences are captured in each child’s IEP, a document required by federal law for each of the over 8 million students with disabilities in this country.

Every IEP includes annual goals tailored to each student’s present needs, but importantly, “also where you want them to go within the next year,” says Danielle Waterfield, Coleman’s research partner at UVA.

Both Coleman and Waterfield say while many teachers report feeling bogged down by the work that goes into developing IEPs, teachers also recognize they are a necessary tool for students with disabilities to get a quality education.

Acebu says that to develop those goals, teachers must know each student’s learning style intimately. “The key term is ‘individualized.’ No two kids are the same,” she says. For special educators, the process involves hours of meetings and a deep knowledge of complex education law and policy.

It used to take Acebu around 45 minutes to develop three or four IEP goals per student. She points to a big, blue binder at least 5 inches thick on her bookshelf that contains California’s education standards. “It used to be flipping through all those pages,” to find the right standard to match unique student goals, she says.

Then came AI.

Using AI — with a ‘human touch’ 

A couple of years ago, Acebu began taking courses on how to safely and effectively use AI. Around the same time, her district, Mt. Diablo Unified, entered agreements with companies that offer education-focused AI tools including MagicSchool AI and Google. They promise to protect sensitive student data, a primary concern for those who warn against the risks of using AI in schools. A growing number of districts are adopting such products, though only a few states have official AI education policies.

Recently, using a district-vetted tool, Acebu customized chatbots for her school and trained them on state standards, assessments and other special education data. She now uses her “little assistants” for a wide range of tasks, from creating personalized worksheets to developing IEP goals.

And then, she says, “you’re double-checking everything. Like you have to put that human touch, that’s the final step.”

In their research, Coleman and Waterfield found special education teachers nationwide are using AI to help write IEP goals, track student progress, synthesize data and create differentiated learning materials, among other things.

Acebu is uniquely equipped to use tech-tools: She just earned her doctorate in instructional technology and is on her district’s AI task force, which is developing an official AI policy.

Some of Acebu’s less tech-savvy colleagues, however, were skeptical, including Paul Stone, who has been a special educator at Riverview for 22 years.

Then the number of students he serves shot up.

“I don’t want to say it’s killing me, but it has put a huge stressor on my mental health and my life,” Stone says of his work this year. “It would be kind of nice if there were two jobs, like one paperwork job and one working with the kids.”

So, a few weeks ago, after a tutorial from Acebu, he gave her chatbot a shot. He was surprised by the results.

“It’s an amazing time-saver so far,” he says. Stone has used AI for a number of things including producing simple summaries of complicated data to present to parents at IEP meetings. “I mean, it’s not like ‘that’s it, I’m done.’ I still have to go through and check it all.”

He and Acebu both say it could help them, and other educators, avoid burnout. Yet, Ariana Aboulafia, who was the lead author of CDT’s report, calls AI tools “a Band-Aid” for special education teachers who feel overworked.

Using AI in special education — with guardrails

Band-Aid or not, more teachers are using AI around the country. There are a litany of concerns about its use, especially in special education, which is highly regulated. “Student privacy is number one,” says Acebu. “Don’t put information there that’s gonna identify your students.” CDT’s Aboulafia adds that while the risks around privacy may be reduced if a school is using a vetted vendor, data breaches could still make that information vulnerable.

But not all teachers are using district-approved tools. Coleman, Waterfield and CDT’s research all found that educators around the country are using AI both formally and informally — from free consumer platforms like ChatGPT and Claude to district-approved tools like MagicSchool AI, Google Gemini and Playground IEP, among others. To help teachers navigate this complicated landscape, Waterfield and Coleman developed a “decision tree” for ethical AI use.

Another consideration is the fact that AI models can be biased, including against people with disabilities, says Aboulafia, who leads the Disability Rights in Technology Policy Project at CDT. In addition, she worries AI models built on pattern recognition are, “to a certain extent, inherently incompatible with a process that legally requires individualization.”

Aboulafia is most concerned about the 15% of teachers CDT’s survey found have been relying entirely on AI to develop IEPs. There must always be a “human in the loop,” she says.

Acebu, who happens to be her district’s teacher of the year, says these days, she comes to class just 30 minutes before her students, and leaves just after the last bell. This has improved her work-life balance and the quality of her teaching.

King, the eighth grader in her class who has evolved into a confident reader, also goes to math class now without any additional support.

“That’s the dream of every special educator,” she says, beaming. “But guess what? That takes a lot of hard work.”

AI tools, Acebu says, have given her more time for that kind of hard work.

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

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

This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

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.”

Grocery prices got you down? Learn how to cut your food bill with NPR’s 4-part newsletter. Sign up here for budgeting tips, meal planning and more.

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.