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

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

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 The education groups are asking not only for changes, but for the entire overhaul proposal to be withdrawn. 

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

Could researchers study differences in student outcomes?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who decides what counts as valuable research?

Education researchers also object to proposed changes that would increase political involvement in grant decisions.

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

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

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

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

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

What happens when research is interrupted?

Education research groups also raised concerns about the consequences of suspending or terminating grants after studies have begun.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What happens when kids grow up with AI?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Dana Suskind is sounding the alarm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AI as junk food for the young mind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s not a time saver,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A “healthy” program 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keeping up with the rest of the world

While internet access has expanded significantly since 1996, internet pricing and options haven’t changed the way Bocher or his contemporaries expected.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some advocates for postsecondary arts education think not.

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

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

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

How the new standard will work

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

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

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

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

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

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

The kinds of programs that are likely to fail

According to Education Department estimates, the vast majority of undergraduate and graduate programs should easily pass the new earnings test.

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

Other takeaways from the department’s data:

• About 18% of undergraduate certificate programs, which often bill themselves as career-focused fast tracks, would fail the earnings test. Specifically, certificate programs in cosmetology and somatic body work have the highest predicted failure rates.
• Two-year associate degree programs have the next highest failure rate, at 6%. Associate programs that train specialized educators, including early childhood educators, are the most likely to fail.

• Most traditional, four-year bachelor programs fare well, with roughly 1% failing the earnings test. When these programs do fail, it’s often in areas like theater, music and studio art.
• About 4% of master’s degree programs would fail, with the highest failure rates for programs teaching mental and social health services.

For one music teacher, it was “never about the money”

Some of the United States’ most prestigious music programs — known for training the country’s most talented young musicians — are among the 14% of bachelor music programs predicted to fail the new earnings test, according to Education Department data. That includes The Juilliard School in New York City, the New England Conservatory in Boston and Indiana University Bloomington’s Jacobs School of Music.

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

Her path to becoming a full-time music teacher started with studying music education at PSU; then she got an educators license from Western Oregon University — and she used federal student loans to help pay for all of it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Defining success in the arts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All of this occurred in districts that had filters, safeguards and systems in place meant to block such content.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But such moves are not universal.

In Lower Merion Township — despite widespread parent advocacy and a petition signed by more than 600 parents in a district of 8,600 students — school leaders recently rescinded a policy that allows parents to opt out of the system’s one-to-one device program. “Our curriculum is delivered the way it’s delivered, and part of that curriculum is done with electronic devices,” said Frank Ranelli, the district superintendent, at an April school board policy meeting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If students’ math skills had generally deteriorated because of pandemic learning loss, weaker high school preparation or digital distraction, graphing performance should have deteriorated too. It didn’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rismanchian understands the temptation.

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

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

So he stopped using AI to write.

He still uses it to code.

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

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

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

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

“I like to play videos,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A decades-old idea

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

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

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

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

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

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

Graduate school is fueling the explosive growth of student debt

To be clear, current limits on undergraduate loans aren’t budging – and haven’t budged in years. One reason: According to Levine, the net price for undergraduate programs – what families actually pay – has been pretty stagnant lately.

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

But the cost of graduate school has increased considerably.

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

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

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

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

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

What the research shows

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

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

The short answer: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will ending Grad PLUS force colleges to cut prices?

So what should we make of Republicans’ current contention, that cutting student loans for graduate students will lead to lower prices?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The summer slide is measured by comparing test scores at the end of the school year with those at the beginning of the school year. Drops are often recorded in both reading and math, with the larger decrease showing up in math scores.​

“The brain is a muscle. If you’re continually working out or training your muscle during the school year, you would expect that there would be growth, and then if you just kind of let it atrophy for two to three months, it’s not really surprising that we would see kids start to lose things,” said Megan Kuhfeld, director of growth modeling and data analytics with NWEA, an education assessment and research organization.

Researchers and educators emphasize that some seasonal loss is normal for all learners, but that for most students, this knowledge can be easily regained through basic, everyday interactions between children and parents, provided educators leave room for content review at the beginning of the school year.​

“It’s always good to make sure your kids have access to books and engaging activities during the summer,” Kuhfeld said.

“But unless you’re already worried about the academic performance of your kid and looking to make sure that you use the summer really well for building those additional supports and additional learning, summer slide isn’t this big boogeyman that we need to all be kind of running scared from,” she said.

For kids who may already be struggling with academics as school ends, summer is a great time to catch up and help them become better prepared for the coming year. Schools sometimes run summer school for a few weeks or offer programs that combine learning, fun activities, and a review of the previous year.​

“For parents, [these district programs] are usually cheap or free, so it’s kind of the best of all worlds, where kids get to be part of activities during the day, often with their peers,” said Kuhfeld.

What are some great summer learning activities for kids?

For younger kids, Dr. M.H. Raza, an associate professor in the College of Education at Missouri State University, suggests parents keep learning activities simple during summer.

“Parents can make it natural; they don’t need to make learning a burden on their children,” said Raza.​

He adds that 20 minutes a day of pressure-free learning activity is usually all that it takes to help children grow intellectually during the summer.​

Raza listed the following as activities that parents can potentially utilize:

• Have your kids create a shopping list and take it with you to the grocery store. The children can look at the products, compare prices, and help with decisions on which product to buy.
• While driving, parents can point out road signs and ask their children to read them. Or they can ask their children to spell out the words they see.
• Parents can talk to their children about their life stories and experiences.
• Kids can be more involved with baking or cooking and helping measure ingredients.
• Parents can get children involved in backyard projects or science experiments.

For educators, researchers suggest teachers build in some time for reviewing the previous year’s content at the beginning of the year. Kuhfeld says most teachers are already doing this, according to past surveys and research.

“Teachers face such a challenge in terms of having to review material and fit in the whole year’s worth of curriculum,” says Kuhfeld. “Building in time for review seems to be pretty normative, and the expectation is that kids won’t have remembered everything they’ve learned in the previous year.”​

Learning loss in teens

However, it’s not just younger kids who may experience learning loss during breaks. Older students might also encounter the summer slide.​

“I believe that older kids, especially high school students and college students, also have a learning loss, but that learning loss is not quite documented,” says Raza.

He explains that critical thinking, engagement, self-reflection and hands-on application are all deeply connected to learning environments. When older students are disconnected from the academic environment or their collaborative peer groups, they often face learning loss. But he says more research needs to be done in order to quantify or measure the impact.

Todd Irving, principal of Pinole Valley High School suggests students look into non-traditional summer school activities. Irving points out that his school offers a program during the summer, but that students can also take courses at a local community college or even online.

“There are multiple ways that you can do summer school,” said Irving. “We encourage them to read and just do different things.” ​

​But he cautions against students taking on too much during the break.​

“One of the things that we don’t want to do is burn them out in summer school, and so that when they come back in September, by the time we get to October, November, they’re like ‘I’m burned,’” he said. “So we have to be really strategic with how we do that.”

“I think this is an optimistic release,” Matthew Soldner, acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, told NPR.

Results from the long-term trend (LTT) report, released Wednesday, provide a national look at progress in reading and math for 9- and 13-year-old students. The tests, which students take on pencil and paper every few years, have asked many of the same questions since they were first given in the 1970s. The tests are part of the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) and are nationally representative of student learning. More than 30,000 students took the exams between October 2024 and March 2025.

Here are five takeaways from the results:

1. Nine-year-olds made some solid gains. 

The younger students tested showed gains in both reading and math, “which is fantastic,” said Soldner. What’s notable is that students across the board improved their scores, including lower-performing kids.

“It is just so encouraging,” he said. “Even though they’re performing below average, [they] are trending upward.”

One possible reason for the overall improvement, the report points out, is the students’ age. They were 4 when the pandemic started in 2020 and didn’t begin school until after most places had returned to full-time, in-person instruction. That means they didn’t miss key lessons in literacy and math in the early years of elementary school.

These students gave researchers hope about the potential that the nation can build back some of the slide that began long before COVID-19.

2. But 13-year-olds are hurting.

The report paints a less optimistic picture about 13-year-olds. Compared to the last assessment, students showed no significant improvement in reading or math.

Scores in reading remain below where they were at the start of the pandemic on average, and that includes Hispanic students, white students, female students, students who are economically disadvantaged and suburban students.

Reading scores from this test, on average, are not significantly different from performance in the first-ever administered test in 1971.

“The lack of progress in 13-year-olds raises huge questions and ought to serve as a catalyst for change,” Lesley Muldoon, the executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, said during a press briefing. Her organization sets policy related to NAEP.

For these 13-year-old students, unlike their 9-year-old counterparts, the pandemic was the backdrop for much of their elementary school experience. In 2020, they were in second or third grade. Those critical years for literacy and math skills were disrupted by school closures, and this stagnant performance may be one consequence.

3. Fewer students are reading for pleasure — than ever.

At the same time, the report found that reading is a pastime for a shrinking number of kids.

In 1984, 35% of 13-year-old students reported reading for fun on a daily basis. In 2022 and 2025, only 14% said the same. A far greater share of 9-year-olds — 37% — indicated they read for fun every day, but that’s sharply down from decades earlier.

4. Math progress erased for 13-year-olds.

From 1978 to 2012, the average math scores on the LTT for 13-year-olds improved by 21 points. The climbing scores were a bright spot in more than 50 years of data. This report shows that most of those gains have been erased.

The lowest-performing students now show no gains at all compared with the 1978 math test results.

“As a nation, we have to bring more focus to the middle school years,” Muldoon told reporters. “It’ll take a lot of collective work, but we’ve seen progress before, and it’s possible to see it again.”

5. This is the last we’ll see of the long-term trend report for a while.

This is the first NAEP long-term trend report released since the Trump administration began making cuts to the U.S. Education Department in 2025. Those cuts included laying off more than half the workers at the Institute of Education Sciences, the arm of the department charged with measuring student achievement and overseeing and processing the data that comes from the tests students take.

After those cuts, the department also canceled about a dozen national and state assessments of student progress through 2032 — one of those being the next iteration of these tests. (Since then, plans have been announced to restore some of those exams.)

Still, sudents won’t see these questions again until 2033.

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

In this digital age, kids are surrounded by messages about gender and sexuality. But are parents creating the space for conversation and understanding? Health educator Shafia Zaloom has a new book, “Getting Real About Sex Ed: What Today’s Students Need,” that guides parents through different stages of development. Having a more contemporary understanding of sex ed can help parents become the “askable parent” when kids have questions about the world — such as how they want to be treated and how that extends to relationships — so they don’t have to rely so heavily on peers, social media and algorithms.

Episode Transcript

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

Ki Sung:  Welcome to the Mind Shift Podcast where we explore the future of learning and how we raise our kids. I’m Ki Sung.

Today we’re going to get an update on sex ed in the United States., sex ed is no longer about just intercourse and preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. Sexuality education is more nuanced and starts earlier in life. And biologically, that makes a lot of sense. But culturally, we may have a lot catching up to do.

My guest today is Shafia Zaloom. Health educator and author of Getting Real About Sex Ed: What Today’s Students Need. Stay with us.

Ki Sung: Shafia Zaloom, welcome to MindShift.

Shafia Zaloom: Thank you so much for having me.

Ki Sung: You teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and you’re a high school health educator in San Francisco. You also work with schools across the country in states of all political leanings which you describe in your book Getting Real About Sex Ed: What Today’s Students Need.

For old timers like me, can you describe the evolution of sex education to sexuality education- What’s the difference and how are they taught differently?

Shafia Zaloom:  Yeah, of course. So when it comes to sex education in particular, that’s mostly information-based and it’s really grounded in sort of medical health, sexual reproductive health, right? So it has to do with preventing unintended pregnancy, unwanted pregnancy. It has to deal with preventing passing of sexually transmitted infections. And it’s very sort of clinical and medical-based. It’s important.
But sexuality education is a lot more holistic and it’s a lot nuanced and it includes a whole lot more. So not just the information, but what do you actually do with it and what’s the meaning we assign to it? It really has to do with… How we relate to ourselves and to the world, how we take care of others, how we treat others because that matters. And that’s really at the heart of comprehensive sexuality education. There’s an ethical aspect to it having to do with decision-making that promotes and encourages relationships grounded in mutual respect, empathy, and dignity.

Ki Sung: As a health educator, you must get asked all kinds of questions by students of all ages. What are some of the most frequently asked questions you get from middle schoolers and teens?

Shafia Zaloom: It is such a tremendous range, and I’ve been doing this for 30 years, right? So the questions have been the same for 30 years, and then other questions have sort of evolved and become different. And then there’s brand new stuff. And the brand new staff sometimes changes constantly because it’s within a context of digital spaces. And so it’s just super interesting, you know, for the younger kids from middle school. You know, they’ll just ask basic direct questions. What is this? What is that? How do I know if I like girls or boys? How do know if someone really has a crush on me? How do tell my best friend that I don’t like it when they’re always hugging me? You know questions like that that have sort of transcended time.

I have some kids now in middle school who are asking about pornography. Which is different because it’s so ubiquitous, it’s still accessible now, that I see more questions that are very specific to certain types of media and what they’re exposed to in media. You know, what is popping the cherry mean? What’s a grundle? What’s gooning? You know, all these different sort of, this different kind of language that exists in digital spaces that they’re expose to. And are sort of wrestling with to make meaning of.

And then as kids get older in high school, the stakes feel a lot higher. I get a lot like to shave or not to shave. How do I make it not hurt when I lose my virginity? Questions like when is it okay to have sex with someone? How do you know what real trust actually is? Really pretty important and intense questions that also reveal… These aren’t being discussed in other spaces, right? That this is one of the first times someone has asked them, you know, what are you curious about?

And a lot of times too now, which is different from the past, kids are asking me to legitimize something. I heard that, or is it true that…” kind of questions having to do with what they’re exposed to in media, like “what’s a blue waffle? Can girls pee out of their vaginas?” Like there’s all kinds of different things that they’re exposed to that they are wondering about. Most of the time they’ll just Google, right? And so they get this information and then they have this intuitive response of like, I don’t know if that can actually be right. And then they ask it in class.

Ki Sung: Uh… That sounds way more complicated than I think the questions were asked in my sex ed class a long time ago.

Shafia Zaloom: [Laughter]

Ki Sung: Um, how do you navigate that world? Or maybe the better question is how are the kids navigating? You mentioned they’re searching online, but it seems like an endless rabbit hole that could lead you to pretty dark places, especially at a very young age, because I saw this study that showed that kids are encountering porn. The average age that they encounter porn is 12, and it happens a lot at school just by clicking through links unassumingly. And so that’s what I wonder, like how do you think they’re navigating the space? You mentioned like parents, but what else are they doing?

Shafia Zaloom:  I think more parents are trying to talk about these things, and modern parents, and good for them, yay, and we’re trying to get folks to talk about this more, but we’ll check the box around like, okay, I talk to my kids about consent, I talk my kid about STIs, I talk about birth control, things like that, if we’re talking about teenagers.

And then I have a kid come up to me to say, okay, I know the definition of consent, and my parents keep telling me, you know, I should respect women or I should respect whomever, whatever it may be. But what does that mean exactly? Right, like that’s the followup question that I’m now getting, what does that mean?

And so I think that’s important. The Googling, absolutely, a lot of times pornography will come up. It’s a lot harder for kids to avoid coming across porn or sexually explicit material than it is not to these days. And so then that, you know, that’s a whole rabbit hole in of itself. And because we’re not providing, and in fact currently rolling back comprehensive sexuality education courses in schools, you know. Kids are turning to pornography. It’s become the default sex ed of this country. That’s like watching the Fast and the Furious to learn how to drive.

And so, you know, kids are looking for information from their friends. They’re looking to social media. They’re asking Google. And for parents, if you’re not talking to your kid about sexuality, you’re the only person not talking your kid about sexuality because their friends are, the internet is, you know all these different influencers who are out there. And so that’s why this conversation is so important, not only in learning spaces, but also at home, because parenting adults, a kid’s guardian is the primary sexuality educator in a child’s life. That has been true forever. I don’t know a single professional sexuality educator who doesn’t believe that. And it’s challenging. It’s really hard to keep up, especially if you haven’t had a positive experience with that education yourself.

Ki Sung: I think one of the most fascinating aspects of your book is that you lay out a lot of real life scenarios in school in very precise language. For example, I’ve never heard of the term, and I think it’s okay to say, clamper. Oh yeah. It’s probably in a category of behaviors that…

Shafia Zaloom:  Mm-hmm

Ki Sung: happened on school campuses or elsewhere outside of the school. Can you describe what that is and how you’ve addressed that in schools?

Shafia Zaloom: Yeah, for sure. So clamping, depending on what classroom you’re in, and this tends to start sort of young, right? In the case of my book, there’s a field trip and they’re walking upstairs in a museum. There are different terms for it too, euphemisms, like fish in the creek, clamping. You know, a lot of different ways by which kids will reference this behavior. You know the euphemism is supposed to make it humorous, which sort of excuses the. Inappropriate or aggressive behavior behind it. And it’s basically poking someone in the butt and in the butt crack in particular and thinking that that’s really funny. And I don’t know a lot of kids who actually think that is very funny, but this is also happening during a time when they’re negotiating social landscapes, social power and currency, and how we connect to and relate to each other and what kind of influence different kids have.

So in addressing that, there are two things we need to do, and sometimes there’s a third. If there’s kid who brings that to your attention, because sometimes there is, right? There’s the kid who will say, hey, this is going on. Did you see this? Did you know this? They go to the adult because they’re looking for some sort of help, because intuitively they know that this isn’t something that’s okay. And that kid needs to be recognized, right, because… When it comes to that dynamic, you know, the topic of snitching comes up, it’s really important to be very concrete about the difference between snitching, which is telling on someone on purpose to get them in trouble on purpose, and reporting, which is where you’re sharing information, asking for help trying to support community and righting a wrong.

And then you have two other things: You have the kid who actually experienced the clamp or the poke, the unwanted poking, and then you have the kid who actually did it. And so those are two kids, usually the kid who does it, it’s important to remove their audience. When we address these things publicly, it’s important to say something, to stand for what’s right, to hold people accountable to the guidelines you’ve set up in your classroom or amongst each other in your community. But we don’t want to go too far because for adolescents when we go too far in a public setting, they shut down because it feels shameful. And so what we want to do is say something so that people know oh okay the teacher is aware the the caretaking adult knows this is happening and so they’re going to take care of it but they’re also going to honor and respect that kids make mistakes and that we have the opportunity to learn from them so that we can be better people. And that’s what you’re going do in private right? That’s what you’re going to do with discretion, not secrecy. That’s different. But hold kids accountable in a way that honors privacy and the opportunity to become available to the learning and the guidance.

And that social learning is going to be critical. So we want to support the kid who experienced it, find out how they felt about it, how things are going, what kind of support they may need. The other kid, we’re doing something similar. And we really want to get behind that behavior to see what need is. They’re trying to meet by engaging in that behavior.

Were they looking for connection? Were they are looking for affirmation through attention?, whether it was negative or positive, didn’t really matter for them, like, whatever it may have been, help them understand how their choice in making that, getting that need met actually didn’t serve them or anyone else. And it’s absolutely not acceptable. And so then what are the other options for them when they’re feeling that way to get those needs met, in a way that actually then affirms what they’re trying to figure out, how they’re in the classroom and how they are part of community?

Ki Sung: And I guess that can also be applicable to other interactions one has with others in the world.

Shafia Zaloom: Oh, 100%, yes. And it’s an opportunity to give, to impart a lesson to and to reinforce information, right? That very rarely do any of us, the first time we hear something, especially if we’re a young person, right, are we gonna remember, internalize, and make that a part of our practice? Practice is essential. That’s why kids are in school. And so that kid, it’s also an opportunity to review consent, bodily autonomy, asking permission, what accountability actually means, the value of community, what we’re actually going for in our relationships, who we wanna be. There’s a ton of things.

Ki Sung: But the scenario you describe is really detailed, as are a lot of incidents that are really uncomfortable or challenging. And I think what you do really well is lay out several raw descriptions of conflict you’ve heard about or seen on campus, including the use of slurs. And a lot those instances, when boundaries are crossed, you often end up with a student reply of, I was just joking or I didn’t mean it. So how do you address that seemingly common response to an infraction?

Shafia Zaloom:  That’s such a good question. You know, I think, so it’s so important when working with young people in particular that we get, that we recognize the behavior, that we hold them accountable, but that we also guide them to what’s behind the behavior. And I think that’s… The most important piece is when these things come up, because kids are in gender and sexuality school all the time, all day, every day, it’s constantly being modeled for them. They’re being socialized by all these different social institutions all the times, is that we guide them towards those universal values that we think are really important when it comes to relationships with others.

And what our culture teaches kids, because sex is everywhere and nowhere all at once. It’s something that a lot of people don’t have a lot practice talking about in really positive, productive, constructive ways. And so when it comes to kids, they’ve learned that when we talk about sex, if we veil it in humor, that we can get away with a lot behaviors. That if we didn’t veil them in humor, would definitely not be okay, that would be disrespectful, would be considered rude.

And this is a way by which sort of the sex stigmatization that has historically been a part of our culture continues and is perpetuated. So when talking with kids, it’s really important first that we not shame and this is the thing, most adults have been socialized to respond to issues of sexuality that would warrant, oh, I was just kidding, it’s not a big deal, I didn’t mean it that way, with some sort of shame, fear avoidance versus care, love, and affirmation. Because that’s the counter narrative, right, the care, love, and affirmation. And a lot of times kids, especially adolescents, are just mirroring and trying on navigating the gauntlet to adulthood of what they see in adult culture. So we have to help them understand. We have to contextualize it for them. We have to get behind the behavior to help understand the feelings that are there and what values we’re actually aspiring to. And the reason why that behavior actually erodes relationships and community versus affirms and builds them.

Ki Sung: I’m wondering if you can make a connection to being an adult by having these experiences early. How do they manifest in an adult’s life? And by experiences I mean standing up for yourself or communicating what you want or how you need to be treated and like entering into interactions with understanding instead of shame. I mean, you just mentioned many things here. So I guess generally like, you know, if somebody has this kind of experience, how does that project into their lives as an adult?

Shafia Zaloom:  Well, what we understand and know about social learning is that one, it makes us available to feel socially connected, actually improves and cultivates the capacity for young people to learn effectively. What we also know about learning is that we need practice and it needs to be scaffolded over time in a developmentally appropriate way. And so when we take this on, you know, Freud said that the two most important things in life are work and love. And this is ultimately comprehensive sexuality education. You know, we forget this sometimes because of our history of stigmatizing it, is that this is about cultivating the capacity to love and be loved. And so that requires skills. It requires being attuned to yourself and others. You know, skills are something we have to practice and build over time. And so when you have someone who’s had the benefit of these skills, of this sort of reinforcement, the contextualizing, applying these skills and cultivating these capacities in different contexts across different experiences, you have some one who actually becomes more considerate of others, who’s able to be attuned to others and to themselves to act in ways that are ethical in terms of how we treat each other because that really matters, who can exercise empathy, who can ask for help when they need it, and who have the language and the practice to verbalize what they’re thinking and feeling when they need to ask for that, or when they see that others need it too and offer it.

I think that’s a really important piece. I wanna make sure we don’t only focus on self. We really have to balance how we connect with ourselves as individuals with becoming community-minded and understanding the value of being socially connected and in community with other people.

Ki Sung: So what tips do you have for parents who really struggle with their discomfort around talking about sexuality and relationships with their kids?

Shafia Zaloom:  I mean, as much as we can is get comfortable with feeling uncomfortable, which is such a valuable thing to model, right? That sometimes the hardest conversations are the most important ones to have in a relationship. And there are plenty of scripts and resources out there, some great books for having these conversations with young people across developmental stages in ways that are cognitively congruent. And so I would say it’s really important for a parent to educate themselves to find those resources that align with their values so that they can start early. And it’s never too late, I wanna say that too. And to provide their kid with medically accurate, credible information first and foremost. But the most important piece is actually the values stuff.

So to get concrete around it, let’s say you’re in the car with your kid and you let them DJ for the ride. And a song comes on, you can simply drop a question, like, “huh, do you think this is about infatuation or authentic connection? Because I’m not really sure, you know?” It’s just a question like that.

Or you’re watching as a family, you’re a watching a show, or you’re just watching something with your kid, or you heard they’re watching something, so you start to watch it too. And you talk about the characters like real people. And you say like, well, do you think that was wordless consent? Do you think that that was actually like a response that really honored and respected what they wanted or their right to make a decision or I noticed they changed their mind, you know, like that kind of a thing.

And you’re not, you’re not launching, um, and you’re just collecting these beautiful moments that you scaffold over time, and then you can go back and you can sort of embellish and bedazzle and hang all kinds of beautiful things on the scaffolding, but it’s really important to get that foundational piece first.

So, becoming the askable parent means that we have our eyes and ears open, and for adolescents, a lot of times that’s not on our time, it’s on their time, right, like late at night or whatever else because their circadian rhythms have shifted. And we’re doing a lot values education in particular, you know, we want to make sure they have access to the medically accurate information, but then the values education and how we apply that information to interpersonal dynamics is going to be super important.

And so for kids, even saying, hey, I heard this podcast and there was this woman speaking about sexuality education. Are you getting any of that in school and in what ways? And how’s it been? What do you think about it? Kids love to, they have a keen sense of justice too. Could even say, she said this,  do you think that’s true? Have you seen that come up? Do you think that would be valuable information?

But those are the ways that I. I think parents can become askable when it comes to their kids. And it doesn’t mean being your kid’s friend. They really need a parent with boundaries and doing the hard stuff. And how do you get comfortable with being uncomfortable? Those sorts of things.

Ki Sung: So I want to ask you, for maybe millennials, Gen Xers who grew up in a different era of sex ed, can you identify some myths about sexuality education that adults should consider unlearning?

Shafia Zaloom:  I think this is true of all adults, actually, just because it’s interesting, I think the stigmatizing aspect of sexuality has been perpetuated across its cyclical, right, generational cycles of this, and we really need to move away from that, and that requires people to work on themselves. And earlier you had asked about how can parents become askable parents, right? And get comfortable with this. And part of that’s a parent’s responsibility to do with other people their own age, right. Like your own friends, have conversations about this, practice having this conversation. The myths that are out there are that if we tell kids then they’re gonna go run out and do.

There’s no empirical evidence whatsoever. That tells us that’s the case. In fact, the inverse is true. And so, you know, that’s just when we’ve put political ideology above student health and perpetuated stigmatizing ideas around sexuality. All you have to do is look at the Dutch. I mean, they start age-appropriate sexuality education in preschool and kindergarten, and it follows them all up into adulthood. You know, their focus is really on responsibility and joy. Versus like disaster prevention, fear and avoidance. And so, and their young people are far more relational, their STI and unintended pregnancy rates are like some of the lowest in the world.

You know, it’s really important that we understand…we spend more, we invest more in fire prevention and fire safety, like information and learning with young people than we do on sex ed. And when you give that education to kids, like, okay, here’s how we prevent fires or how we deal with them if there is one or whatever else they don’t go home and start making fires.

When I tell young people that this is what adults believe, that if they acquire a sex education, they’re gonna run out and go start having sex, they look at me like I have three heads. And they’re offended. They’re like, really? And then they get funny and they’re like oh, think of all the other things that they tell us to do when they spend all this time trying to teach us and how we don’t do them. Right? Um, so I think that’s the biggest one is, uh, that if we tell them they’re automatically going to go out and do, um, because all the evidence and there’s tons of it, decades of it tells us that if engage in age appropriate comprehensive sexuality education as it’s meant to be, that all the things we hope for our kids, there’s a higher probability of that happening than the inverse, which people are afraid of.

Ki Sung: Thank you so much for all that context and guiding us to become the Askable parent.

Shafia Zaloom:  Thank you for having me and your interest.

Ki Sung: Shafia Zaloom is the author of the recently published book, Getting Real About Sex Ed: What Today’s Students Need. She’s a health educator who teaches at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and at a high school in San Francisco and consults schools across the country.

Credits: 

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.

Like many parents, Gottesman keeps tabs on her kids’ location through her phone’s tracking app.  It’s a widespread practice: about half of parents track their teenagers, while a quarter continue doing so when those children become young adults. According to Pew Foundation research, females dominate the space: young women (31%) are tracked more often than young men (21%), and mothers do more surveilling than fathers. Google Maps and regular Apple watches and phones allow parents to locate their children’s whereabouts instantly. Life360, another popular app, includes extra features, like crash detection in car accidents over 25mph, and driving summaries that provide a “weekly snapshot of everyone’s driving behavior.”

Much has been written about the drawbacks of tracking on children. Following adolescents electronically may thwart their independence and undermine trust when it’s carried out in secret. It can muddy accountability for the young person’s safety: an adolescent who knows he’s tracked may absolve himself of any personal responsibility to mind his whereabouts; Mom will save him.  And kids who resent their parents’ surveillance can find ways to circumvent the digital intrusion by parking their phone at home, allowing the battery to die, or otherwise outsmarting the technology. According to Lisa Damour, clinical psychologist and author of The Emotional Lives of Teenagers, “When it comes to knowing what is going on with a teenager, having their location cannot take the place of having a sturdy, working relationship.”

But how does child tracking affect the parents who monitor their offspring? “(U)sually people are using it to replace uncertainty with certainty,” Meg Jay, an author and clinical psychologist, wrote me in an email. The more anxious the parent, the more likely they are to check their kids’ locations. “Therapists call people like this reassurance junkies, because instead of living with the discomfort of uncertainty for a while, they look for data or information that things are OK,” she added. That reassurance can be short lived. Observing their kids partying into the wee hours, dining at a fast-food joint for the seventh time that week, or spending the night in a mysterious location provokes parent anxiety—and often generates friction between partners on what to do, Jay added.

And to the extent that tracking provides a flash of security, that feeling may be misguided: location tracking is a blunt instrument that can be easily misread; one child “trapped” in at an unfamiliar place may be carrying out a harmless project, while another apparently secure in an apartment or dorm can be taking foolish risks.

Regular surveillance also slows the growth of something subtler, said Lenore Skenazy, the president of Let Grow: a trust muscle. Before location tracking was possible and information ubiquitous, it was normal for parents to be ignorant about their kids’ every move, and mothers and fathers learned to believe in their children and the community; the default state for sane parents was typically “everything is OK.” But with location devices, that mindset shifts to “everything might not be OK”—so I’d better check.  Despite declining rates of violence against children, Skenazy said, “everything goes to death,” she told me. “Fear is winning.”

Experts have tips for parents who want to cut back on location tracking. A part of the answer is striving to tolerate uncertainty, Jay wrote. “Have faith in your child and how you raised them,”  and remind yourself that it’s natural for adolescents to separate from their parents. If easy access to digital surveillance is too tempting, limit the technology to one person’s phone, that of a partner or sibling, she added. Skenazy reminds parents that kids build confidence when they figure out how to fix their own troubles. If parents swoop in at the first sign of trouble—a tire goes flat, a ride doesn’t show, people at the party seem sketchy—young people don’t develop the self-reliance that comes from solving their own problems. Improving parent-child communication, and learning how to manage uncertainty, is healthier for both generations

Of course, not all child tracking is grounded in distrust, especially when it involves young adults. Some parents report that they track for practical reasons: knowing where their kids are helps them decide when to call. “For fun. Curiosity. To know when they’ll show up,” said Sue Greenberg, a mother of three adult kids whose location she follows. And these adult kids reciprocate, so that they too can “keep an eye” on their distant parents. “Our kids like tracking us more than we like tracking them,” explained Lisa McGahan about her four children, adding that it helps them figure out where their frequently on-the-go parents have disappeared to.

But their offspring’s status as adults doesn’t eliminate parents’ worry when the location tracker behaves suspiciously. Just ask Gottesman, who “absolutely loves” the technology despite the panic it caused when her daughter had apparently expired by the Hudson River.  “It’s not all fun and games,” she told me.

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.