Jennifer Founds had an eighth grade student who was always hanging out in the hallways when he was supposed to be in class at Martin Luther King Jr. Academic Middle School (MLK) in San Francisco. She considered him to be one of her more challenging students, but when the class started a unit to see which student could build the most supportive bridge for a competition, he willingly showed up. “So we were like, ‘OK, this is something we really need to build on,’” Founds said. “They [came] to class when they felt that the work was hands-on, meaningful and interesting.”

Many teachers know that these kinds of project-based learning (PBL) activities engage their students, but don’t have the time needed to effectively start doing it in their classrooms. “Instead of kids completing a worksheet that gets put in the grade book and maybe recycled, they’re creating stuff that’s meaningful in the real world,” said Founds about the extra involvement that goes into teaching through PBL.

Conditions like class sizes, instruction time and schoolwide culture have to work in tandem to support teachers trying to implement PBL, according to PBLWorks CEO Bob Lenz. “They’re going to be planning a project and assessing it,” he said. “It’s a lot.”

Six years ago, this kind of instruction would have been impossible at MLK.

“The suspension rate was high. MLK unfortunately had the highest rate of disciplinary referrals in the entire district,” said Leslie Hu, MLK’s community school coordinator who added that standardized test scores were really low. The principal wanted to incorporate PBL, but knew students were distracted by a lack of basic needs that could not be met at home. Shifting to a community school model helped students with needs like food and medical care, and teachers like Founds were able invest more time in developing their teaching practice.

Schools aren’t typically designed to offer more than instruction, but by addressing basic needs, they’re finding that students can learn better. Cincinnati Public School Learning Centers, Oakland Unified School District and even Lebron James’ I Promise School in Akron, Ohio, are community schools that lend a helpful framework for closing achievement gaps and improving student outcomes.

“The community school approach is where you take the resources that you think children and families need to really be successful. And you bring all those resources within the school building,” said Dr. Angela Diaz, the director of the Mount Sinai Adolescent Health Center.

For example, a community school can help families access health and safety needs by having a medical clinic, dental services, food programs and counselor services on campus.

Some schools, like Buena Vista Horace Mann (BVHM) in San Francisco, have gone so far as to create shelters for unhoused families on campus. Other schools that provide shelter include the Sugar Hill Project in New York and Monterey Peninsula Unified School District.

Community school coordinators find organizations that offer what their families need and partner with them to get access to professionals and funding. At MLK, the school started with food.

Food and nutrition services

Before MLK became a community school, teachers stretched themselves thin trying to help students struggling with trauma or food insecurity. “As a teacher, you’re really positioned to recognize a lot of needs of your students,” said Founds. “You read assignments where it reveals the student is really struggling with their mental health or you know that kid is always coming in hungry.” Founds used to go to Costco and buy granola bars so she would have them on hand for hungry students. When it’s on teachers to fill in the gaps for students, it leads to burnout and takes focus away from academics.

Free and reduced price lunch programs have been around since the 1940s to help families and nearly 30 million children nationwide rely on these programs. Food insecurity continues to affect 10% of kids in the US, leading to lower academic performance and a higher likelihood of behavior issues. When MLK transitioned to a community school model, they expanded student and family support beyond free and low-cost lunch to include a breakfast at school program and meals throughout the day.

Over the past six years, MLK has developed more than 50 partnerships, including organizations like Huckleberry Youth which provide case workers that help families get access to affordable food. “Our teachers don’t need to be as much of a social worker anymore. They don’t need to have their own stash of socks in their closet to give to young people because we have programs for that,” school coordinator Hu told me.

Health and wellness services

MLK distributed a comprehensive health assessment survey with questions about how much students slept and how often they exercise. The survey revealed that many of their students were stressed. “We knew that their health impacts their learning, their ability to stay focused [and] retain information,” said Hu.

The results from the assessments were shared schoolwide and led MLK to partner with the Beacon organization to support student mental health and wellness. Beacon organized community days to celebrate students’ achievements. They also provided push-in services. “If a student’s getting escalated in the class instead of kicking them out of the class or instead of letting them continue to get escalated and disrupt the learning, you make a call and then a support member comes into the classroom to help de-escalate that student,” said Founds, so she’s able to continue teaching the class and other students can learn.

“Students are getting better services,” said Founds. “It’s freeing up time and mental capacity for me to think about, ‘OK, what are the best projects that are going to engage the students and how can I provide differentiated curriculum to support a wide range of learners?’” During an election year, she tasked students with researching a local representative or ballot measure to increase voter engagement for a school wide event. “We were able to invite local candidates, local supervisors and a lot of them actually showed up to that election night. And so then it goes from just being like, ‘Oh, you did your report’ to, ‘Oh, you’re actually meeting people who could be your future representative.’”

Using the community school model went hand-in-hand with PBL, said Founds. “One supports the other.” Students had better academic performance with their Math and English Language Arts test scores, which improved by nine percent and outpaced the rest of the district. And MLK’s teacher turnover, which in previous years had been as high as 61%, has improved.

Housing and shelter

Each community school is different because the services they offer depend on the needs in the community. Buena Vista Horace Mann is a K-8 Spanish immersion school community in San Francisco. With a large population of recent immigrants and low income students, BVHM used the community school model to get them essential food, health care and mental health services. They already had partnerships with community mental health agencies and the local food bank, but they noticed that housing was an issue for many students’ families.

“We were seeing a ton of our families in shelters or homeless or in cars,” said community school coordinator Nick Chandler, who recalled one family asking him, “Can we just stay here tonight in your building?”

1 in 5 students in California have experienced homelessness with numbers growing due to unemployment in the wake of the pandemic. Latino immigrants experience a higher risk of housing instability and more barriers to getting help, including language barriers, according to a MacArthur Foundation report. There were not enough beds for families at local shelters and many Latino caregivers didn’t feel comfortable going to the shelter.

Students experiencing homelessness are more likely to be chronically absent and less likely to complete high school. “The brain is not going to absorb the best teacher in the world’s information if we’re not addressing these underlying challenges,” said Chandler. So Chandler and school leaders proposed turning their school gym into an emergency shelter for families.

They had schoolwide meetings to discuss the possibilities before they opened up this service four years ago. Latino and low-income families, who previously hadn’t spoken up much, supported the shelter, while affluent families, who were often white, were against it. “That power dynamic that existed in the community reflects the national power dynamic,” said Chandler about the community meeting. “Folks with privilege tend to have the control and influence and steer. This upset that balance.”

“There was stigma about who homeless people are. When you think of a homeless person, you think about addiction or violence. We didn’t want that near our kids,” said Maria Rodriguez in Spanish. She has three kids who go to BVHM.

To address concerns, BVHM made a website listing every question asked at the meeting and how they were answered. Around 200 questions were shared and answered in English and Spanish. In response to questions about sanitation, BVHM assured families that the gym would be cleaned each morning. Those who were worried about safety were told that there would be a security guard on duty during the hours the shelter was open. Parents were also assured that running the space would not cost the school additional money.

“As more meetings were held, we found out more about the rules for the space and how the shelter would be supporting families. I felt more calm after they said they’d be cleaning it up after families stayed the night and that kids would be able to use the gym again during the day,” said Rodriguez in Spanish.

BVHM decided to convert their gym into a shelter that operates from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. and operates in partnership with a local housing organization. “Our families have a place to be so that they can rest so that when [students] come to school, we know they have a place to sleep,” said Chandler. Up to 20 families are able to stay in the shelter at once. Families must have a student enrolled in the San Francisco Unified School District. This is the third year of their “stay over” shelter program.

After the shelter opened, some families left the school. “We did have a shift in our population, so we have less white students now than we did five years ago. And yet our enrollment has maintained and increased,” said Chandler.

For the parents that stayed, this process of discussing the shelter built trust between the families and the school. Parents felt that BVHM was committed to filling in the gaps and becoming a safety net when families navigated hard times.

“When I think about what a community school is, I don’t think every community school needs a homeless shelter,” said Chandler. “I think that willingness to open that space and to let families dictate the needs of the community and use that information to advocate for resources is what a community school is.”

From free and reduced price lunches to after school programs to buses, schools have always evolved to give assistance to families who need extra support. Community schools and their focus on the whole child are the next step in schools expanding to meet families needs. Kids are required to attend schools, making them an accessible place to provide resources for caregivers with crammed schedules while continuing to get students what they need to learn.

KQED’s Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí contributed to this report. 

A large body of research shows that Black students are likely to learn more when they are taught by a Black teacher. Quantitative researchers have found better results for Black students taught by Black teachers in Texas, Florida, Missouri, Tennessee and North Carolina. It’s one of the reasons that many education advocates have called for diversifying the teacher workforce, which is overwhelmingly white.

But a large study of a million elementary school students and nearly 35,000 teachers in North Carolina found that Black teachers aren’t always better for Black students. The race of the teacher didn’t affect the academic achievement of Black students in third through fifth grade across eight school years, from 2009-10 to 2017-18. Almost a quarter of the students were Black and they did just as well on their annual reading and math tests with a white teacher as they did with a Black one.

Instead, what mattered was where a teacher went to college. Both Black and white teachers trained at an historically black college or university (HBCU) helped Black students do better in math. Almost one out of 10 teachers in North Carolina graduated from an HBCU. Though not a large number, a quarter of these HBCU-trained teachers were white. During a year that a Black elementary school student had one of these HBCU-trained teachers, his or her math scores were higher. In the following year, if their teacher was trained elsewhere, these same Black students tended to post lower math scores.

“I thought that this has to be wrong somehow because so many papers have found an effect for a Black-teacher Black-student match,” said Lavar Edmonds, a graduate student in economics and education at Stanford University, who conducted the analysis. Edmonds ran the numbers in different ways “over and over again” and kept getting the same results. “I only note a same-race teacher effect for Black students when that teacher went to an HBCU.”

Previous studies weren’t necessarily wrong, but differences in the data can yield different results. For example, one earlier study focused on long-term outcomes, instead of test scores, and found higher college going rates for Black students taught by Black teachers. Edmonds’s study, “Role Models Revisited: HBCUs, Same Race Teacher Effects and Black Student Achievement,” hasn’t been peer reviewed or published in an academic journal, but an August 2022 draft was publicly posted. Bolstering Edmonds’s results is another unpublished national study of 18,000 students, presented at a September 2022 conference of the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness. It also failed to find higher achievement in math, reading or science for students taught by a teacher of the same race.

The boost to math achievement for a Black student learning from an HBCU teacher wasn’t terribly large, but it was often larger than the benefit of having a Black teacher in previous studies. The increase in math test scores was equal to about 5 percent of the typical test score gap between Black and white students. White and Hispanic students weren’t penalized; they did just as well with HBCU teachers as they did with non-HBCU teachers.

It’s worth emphasizing that this HBCU teacher benefit was detected only in math – not in reading. Black children’s reading scores were unaffected by their teacher’s race or university.

Exactly what HBCUs are doing to train more effective math teachers is an excellent question and Edmonds admits he doesn’t know the answer. There are 11 HBCUs in North Carolina and five of them, such as Fayetteville State University and Elizabeth City State University, produced most of the teachers in this particular study. Historically, many of the nation’s 100 HBCUs were founded as teacher training grounds or “normal” schools. In North Carolina, half of all Black teachers hailed from an HBCU.

At first glance, one might think that HBCUs produce teachers of lower quality. In this study, the HBCU trained teachers posted much lower scores on their teacher certification exams, called Praxis. “They’re clearly outperforming more ‘qualified’ teachers,” said Edmonds. “At a minimum, this raises the question of what we’re measuring.”

Edmonds doubts that math instructional approaches at HBCUs are dramatically different from those at other teaching programs. “The general concept of adding is going to be more or less the same,” said Edmonds, a former high school math teacher himself.

Edmonds speculates that HBCU-trained teachers experienced a different culture and climate in college that they replicate in their own classrooms. “Many of my family members went to HBCUs and a recurring theme is how they found it more welcoming,” he said. “They felt more at peace, more at home at an HBCU. Warmer, I would say. I think there is a component of that in how a teacher conveys information to a student. If you’re getting more of that environment, yourself, as a student at these institutions, I think it makes a difference in your disposition as a teacher.”

To be sure, different types of people choose to attend an HBCU in the first place. HBCU students might have had life experiences before college that helped them better connect with Black children in their professional lives. It’s possible that HBCUs aren’t doing anything magical at all, but that the people who attend them are special.

Teacher race remains a big factor when it comes to student discipline. Black boys were more likely to be suspended with white teachers than with Black teachers, according to the study. But once again HBCU training makes a difference here too. Black boys were less likely to be suspended by an HBCU-trained white teacher than a white teacher who trained elsewhere. (HBCU training didn’t make a difference for the suspension rates of Black girls.)

Given that the teaching profession is overwhelmingly white – nearly 80 percent of teachers – it’s heartening to see a study that can perhaps shine a light on how white teachers might become more effective with Black students, even as we try to diversify the ranks.

Edmonds, who is Black, says the point of his paper is to help the field of education “think more deeply about teacher-student relationships” and what makes them work well in ways that can transcend race. “Not to say that race is not important, but I think if we are overly reliant on these characteristics, it’s a slippery slope, I think, to race essentialism,” he said.

HBCUs are clearly enjoying  a renaissance. Applications to HBCUs spiked almost 30 percent from 2018 to 2021 even as the total number of U.S. undergraduate students dropped by almost 10 percent during the pandemic. This study suggests another reason why HBCUs remain relevant and important.

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

On a spring day, a group of elementary students and their chaperones walk along a sidewalk in the Lyell-Otis neighborhood of Rochester, N.Y. A few blocks away is their destination: Cameron Community Ministries’ after-school program.

The mood is cheerful – some of the kids are leaping or skipping – but their path, which they routinely take, passes more than a dozen spots where murders and aggravated assaults have happened in the last decade.

There’s the block west of here where a 17-year-old boy was shot and killed, allegedly by a classmate, back in March. He’s one of at least six minors who have been killed by gunfire since January, according to Rochester Police.

The students cross Otis Street where, six years ago, a father was shot and killed one morning as children were arriving at the school across the street. According to a report by a local paper that day, a neighbor saw dozens of children run “screaming at the top of their lungs” into the building.

Kaila Toppin remembers it – her sister was there.

“The school went into lockdown because [a student’s] father got shot.”

Toppin, 19, used to be a student with the program at Cameron. Now, she’s a chaperone, and Phyllipp McKnight is one of her charges. He’s been exposed to neighborhood violence, and he’s only in second grade.

“If you don’t know the violence, I’m teaching you right now,” he says. “And when you become 6 years old, like me, I don’t want this dark future that happened to me.”

Many children like Phyllipp, who are regularly exposed to community gun violence, can struggle with feelings of hopelessness and anxiety. They can also have difficulty regulating their emotions – all symptoms of post-traumatic stress, which can have lasting impacts into adulthood.

But there’s a lot communities and after-school programs can do to help.

Teaching children that life doesn’t have to end in their teens

Riana Elyse Anderson, who studies child trauma and Black families at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health, says the key is to create supportive environments for children.

“The more you have supportive structures around you – like family, like peers, like adult mentors – the better chance you have of … surviving because you’re active and engaged and perhaps in spaces that may be a bit safer.”

Those supportive structures also help children shed challenging psychological beliefs, like life ends in your teens or life has little value – beliefs that can be reaffirmed by fatal neighborhood shootings.

Anderson says one way to get those supportive structures in place is through after-school programs, which not only keep kids supervised and off the street, but can also help children and teens learn about their strengths, dreams and culture. Most of all, it can help them see that life is valuable.

Cameron Community Ministries’ after-school program does this through mentoring, field trips and team-building activities. Luis Mateo, a youth program director, says he also teaches his students leadership skills, guides them through community-oriented projects and steps in when students are going through something heavy – like after the recent mass shooting in nearby Buffalo, or after a neighborhood incident.

“I had two kids that were just, like, stunned because a friend of theirs was shot,” Mateo recalls. “He lived but it was still traumatizing… So I talk with them, make sure they’re OK while that was going on. And on that street, too, another child was shot coming off of the bus. So it’s been a lot of violence, and unfortunately, they’ve normalized to it and it’s just another day in the neighborhood for them.”

Helping kids cope with their harsh reality is important, but Mateo says his youth program also prioritizes giving children and teens space to be themselves, be safe and explore their interests.

“You have these after school programs that are helping young people just identify who they are, what is it that they can do,” Anderson says. “When they live past 18, what is it that they want to contribute to their neighborhoods, to their families, to their culture, to themselves?”

How neighborhood violence and aggression interrupts happiness and joy

Phyllipp McKnight’s mother, Lerhonda McKnight, is one of a few guardians at Cameron Community Ministries’ summer cookout in August. She cleans up after the kids and keeps an eye out for mischief – like the boy shaking up a soda can, getting ready to spray it open.

“Hey! Don’t do that. Don’t do it,” McKnight warns with a laugh. “Put it down, let it sit for a couple minutes. Caught ya!”

Like Kaila Toppin and Phyllipp, McKnight also grew up exposed to neighborhood violence. She says she’s been through things that she doesn’t want her kids to ever experience, so she stays involved, brings them to Cameron, and makes sure to show them love.

“If the kids don’t get [love] at home, they’re gonna go somewhere else to get it. They’re going to. Whether they find it in streets, whether they find it in a drug house,” McKnight says. “They’re going to find it, because everybody needs it – everybody – because that’s what life is about.”

Across the street, a fight breaks out. There’s yelling and physical threats. McKnight barely acknowledges it. Around here, but not just here, violence and aggression have become as commonplace as inclement weather.

Kaila Toppin says she’s seen more than enough of it for a lifetime.

“It makes being happy and joyful, like it interrupts it sometimes. Like in the back of my mind, you know?,” Toppin says. “I’m out there having a good time but sometimes it just makes me think something bad could happen, because of all the bad things that happen. I don’t know, it makes it different and it also makes it a cautious joy.”

Toppin’s vigilance is a matter of survival. It’s what drives her to protect younger kids, so that they’ll have a chance to experience life after childhood.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

If you’re shopping for a teacher planner, the options are plentiful. Coil-bound or binder rings. Notebook-sized, pocket-sized or in-between. Solid covers, patterned covers. Customizable layouts. Sections for lesson planning and prompts for goal-setting. Teacher and author Nichole Carter has tried many of these variations. But with each purchase, she found herself in a cycle. “I’d start using it, and then it didn’t fit my needs and I’d stop using it. And then I’d feel guilty that I spent money on something. I’d go back, but I’d have all these blank pages from the week or the month when I had put it down.”

Carter disrupted the cycle when she abandoned pre-made planners altogether and started working from a blank journal. Now she designs pages based on what makes sense for her current tasks, which can change throughout the year. Some weeks it might be a daily calendar of appointments. Other times it’s a to-do list and an inspirational quote. Periodically, she devotes pages to bigger picture goal-setting and reflections. The change has helped Carter prioritize her tasks, focus her time and set boundaries between work and personal life. It’s also provided a creative outlet and way to relax.

Carter’s approach evolved from her forays into sketchnoting and bullet journaling. In her book, Creative Journaling for Teachers, Carter shares tools and practical prompts for teachers who want to bring a bit of creativity and moments of reflection to how they organize their work. And whether they start from blank notebooks or pre-made planners, she hopes these strategies will help teachers gain a feeling of time affluence amid a stressful, demanding career.

Scheduling beyond class

Teachers have been trying to manage full plates for a long time. But the COVID-19 pandemic has simultaneously increased the pressure and prompted educators to reflect on their own self-care practices, Carter said. Like many teachers, she used to feel overwhelmed about how to get everything done. One of the creative journaling strategies that has helped her is time blocking. That means planning the day in chunks of time dedicated to a specific task or type of tasks, rather than simply tackling a to-do list in random order whenever a moment allows. Schools already use time blocking for student schedules, but teachers often don’t approach their non-instructional time this way, Carter said. In her book, she recommends looking at daily tasks, grouping them together and then slotting them into blocks with realistic estimates about the time they will take. She also suggests scheduling discrete blocks of time for less productive habits, such as social media or online shopping instead of letting them creep into every spare moment.

Using these methods, teachers can better prioritize the tasks they tackle in limited prep time or before and after students arrive. Carter said the technique also makes it easier to face daunting tasks. There’s a big difference between staring at a stack of essays and committing to half an hour of grading, for example. “I look at a big project and I drag my heels,” she said. “But if I block out a time to just do as much as I can for 30 minutes, I still feel productive. I still get that dopamine hit.”

Carter knows that teachers aren’t always in charge of their time, even in prep periods. Students may need extra help, parents may call, and staff shortages may mean they’re helping out in another classroom. In her experience, though, the investment in being intentional about the parts of the day she can control paid off. Her increased productivity and heightened awareness of what she accomplished each day allowed her to leave school at school and focus on parenting while at home. “When we can take a step back and maybe have a better understanding of systems and strategies and time permanence for ourselves, we can take that time back,” she said.

Finding what works for you

On Saturday or Sunday nights, Carter cozies up with a cart of paints and markers, considers the week ahead and designs her next journal pages. The ritual has become a self-care practice. “[M]y brain has a chance to calm down, my blood pressure lowers, and I have managed to spend a little bit of time away from the screen,” she writes.

In her book and on Instagram, photos of Carter’s journals show the many creative banners, lettering and accents she employs throughout her pages. The artistry sometimes intimidates other teachers, she said, but she encourages not to focus on perfection. She has developed her style over several years, pulling inspiration from bullet journal enthusiasts and sketchnote artists on social media. Plus, the end product in her photos isn’t where she begins. “I’ll start with a very minimalistic design and then come back on a Sunday night as I’m watching TV and add some flourishes, some doodles and drawings and stickers and stuff and make it look very pretty,” she said.

Teachers can reap the benefits of time management and mental decluttering even without those extra touches. “You can literally grab a spiral notebook off your back shelf and a pen and start and find something that might work for you,” Carter said. “The more it speaks to you, the more likely you are to come back to it.”

College isn’t for everyone, many argue. But what is the alternative? An old idea is to train kids in a trade in high school. However, high school trade programs have had a deservedly bad reputation as a “dumping ground” for low-income students, providing a subpar education and failing to prepare young adults for the modern world. These classes are also bound up with a shameful racial history. When schools were forced to desegregate, many funneled Black students into vocational tracks to keep them apart from white students under the same roof.

High school vocational programs have changed a lot over the past 20 years by both increasing their academic rigor and expanding career fields, from construction and cosmetology to information technology and healthcare. Federal legislation has encouraged these programs to prepare students not only for a career, but also for college. Labels have changed too. It’s now called career and technical education and often abbreviated as CTE. Today, students are actively choosing, instead of being passively steered to shop classes, and white students are more likely to opt for a CTE high school program than Black students.

Massachusetts has been at the forefront of this trend. Four years of math are typically required of vocational students along with the option to take challenging honors classes and calculus. The state spends about $3,000 more per vocational student a year, according to a September 2022 analysis. Vocational programs are more costly to run because they require expensive equipment and spacious classrooms. The hands-on instruction also means smaller classes. Schools usually need to hire more teachers to serve the same number of students.

In recent decades, student performance at Massachusetts high schools dedicated to career and technical education has surpassed traditional high schools, according to a May 2022 book, “Hands-On Achievement: Massachusetts’s National Model Vocational-Technical Schools,” published by the free market research organization Pioneer Institute. Both test scores and graduation rates were higher.

It’s hard to conclude from raw data if students are really better off with job training in high school and whether it’s worth the extra taxpayer expense to run these programs. In Massachusetts, many vocational schools are extremely popular and have long waiting lists. They’re akin to magnet schools that admit the strongest students with unblemished attendance records and high grades. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that strong students might continue to thrive at a high caliber vocational school.

Now a pair of academic researchers from Florida State University and Vanderbilt University have analyzed the Massachusetts experiment in career and technical education by following students seven years after graduating high school in 2009, 2010 and 2011. Thanks to detailed school records, the researchers were able to compare students of the same race or ethnicity, family income and most importantly, with the same eighth grade test scores, grades and attendance records. The only difference was that some had career training in high school while others took traditional high school courses.

The biggest surprise was that college going rates were higher for students in five career categories: healthcare, education, information technology, arts/communications and business. For example, 77 percent of the students who specialized in healthcare enrolled in college within seven years of graduating high school. That’s 15 percentage points higher than similar students who had a traditional high school education.

“There’s nursing programs and allied health programs at community colleges that clearly follow after a student’s healthcare classes in high school,” said Walter Ecton, an assistant professor of education at Florida State University and lead author of the study, Heterogeneity in High School Career and Technical Education Outcomes, published in August 2022 in the peer-reviewed journal of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. “Students have a clear pathway and a clear track that they’re putting themselves on.”

Seven years after high school graduation, these career students’ salaries were higher too. For example, healthcare students earned $5,491 more annually than their traditional high school counterparts.

By contrast, college going rates were considerably worse for two career fields: construction and transportation, an area that includes auto repair. Students who specialized in construction fields in high school were five percentage points less likely to go to college than similar traditional high school students.

On the bright side, construction had the highest earnings premium after seven years. Students who studied construction earned $7,698 more annually seven years after high school graduation than similar students who had a traditional high school education. The earnings premium for transportation students diminished from over $6,000 (four years after graduation) to under $5,000 (seven years after graduation) as traditional high school students started to catch up.

“Students who go into construction, they are earning more, at least for the first seven years after high school graduation than we might otherwise expect, and quite a bit more,” Ecton said. “But they’re also much less likely to go to college than we might otherwise expect. I think that that’s a difficult tradeoff. Different students and families and counselors might make different choices here.”

Ecton’s bigger point is that all career and technical education isn’t the same. “We wanted to understand if certain career pathways are paying off more,” he said. “It’s not a simple yes or no answer. It matters which field you’re going into.”

In Massachusetts, every career field showed at least some benefit over a traditional high school education – either in higher earnings, higher college going or both. But Ecton says that’s not a reason for everyone to pursue a vocational high school course of studies.

“For a student who already has very high academic achievement, who is already on a clear path to attending and graduating from a bachelor’s degree program, I think that there’s less clear evidence to suggest that CTE is necessarily going to help those students,” said Ecton.

“I think CTE can be really useful for students who are less engaged in high school in a traditional classroom setting,” said Ecton.  “If I were advising a student on whether to be a CTE concentrator or not, one question I would ask is, how else are you going to spend your time if not as a CTE student?”

If the alternative is study hall or a test prep class for struggling students, which Ecton says is often the case, CTE can be more engaging and help expose students to clear options after high school. Ecton highlighted how ninth graders at Massachusetts’ vocational high schools take courses in several career areas, from construction to healthcare to business, getting a taste of many fields before settling on a specialization.

The rosy student experience with career-and-technical education in Massachusetts might not be true elsewhere. The state has a highly educated population with workforce needs in high tech and healthcare. And Massachusetts has invested a lot of money in high-quality vocational programs for high school students. A cost-benefit analysis published in September 2022 determined that the public gains between $56,500 to $113,900 in higher earnings and reduced welfare expenditures for each vocational high school student in Massachusetts. But in Connecticut, the benefits were much smaller — only about $10,000. New Jersey and Delaware run costlier vocational programs and more analysis is needed to see if they are paying off.

Still, even in Massachusetts, the results are uneven. The Pioneer Institute found that one vocational high school in Boston didn’t produce such glowing benefits for students.

“Sometimes in CTE we see a legacy program that’s been around for a very long time,” Florida State’s Ecton said. “But maybe it’s not setting students up for either college or a good paying job right after high school. But we keep those programs because they’ve been here forever. Maybe they’re even popular among students. I would really encourage schools to do this same analysis and make sure they’re seeing at least some positive outcomes in all of their different programs of study for students.”

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

A class of fifth-graders are sitting through an hour-long sex-ed lesson at Louis B. Russell Jr. School 48 in Indianapolis. Some fidget, others giggle. And they have a lot of questions.

How old do you have to be to start using tampons?

What’s acne?

It’s April, and sex ed teacher Haileigh Huggins does her best to answer them all.

One boy asks, “Can boys have babies?”

“No, they cannot get pregnant,” she tells him.

“Because they both would have sperm cells right? There wouldn’t be an egg cell.”

Huggins is trained to teach age-appropriate, comprehensive sex education. But she only has an hour with these students — and that’s just enough time to cover the basics, like puberty and reproduction.

When most people think of sex ed, those are the lessons that often come to mind. But comprehensive sex ed goes beyond that. It’s defined by sex ed advocates as a science-based, culturally and age-appropriate set of lessons that start in early grades and go through the end of high school. It covers sexuality, human development, sexual orientation and gender, bodily autonomy and consent, as well as relationship skills and media literacy.

With abortion access changing in many states, advocates for comprehensive sex ed say it’s more important than ever. But, like so many things related to schools, sex education is highly politicized.

Only three states require schools to teach age-appropriate, comprehensive sex education: Washington, California and Oregon. That’s according to SEICUS, a group that advocates for progressive sex education policies. In other states, what students learn about sex ed depends on what school leaders choose to teach.

And yet, research shows these lessons can lead to better health outcomes for students.

“The major finding of the research is that comprehensive sex education scaffolded across grades, embedded in supportive school environments and across subject areas, can improve sexual, social and emotional health, as well as academic outcomes for young people,” says Eva Goldfarb, a researcher at Montclair State University in New Jersey. She is co-author of a 2020 paper on the topic.

“Even though it may seem like sex education is controversial, it absolutely is not,” says Nora Gelperin, director of sex education and training at Advocates for Youth — an organization that promotes access to comprehensive sex education.

She says comprehensive sex ed is “always in the best interest of young people.”

Here’s what it looks like, for different age levels from grades K-12:

Elementary school: Consent, personal boundaries and healthy relationships

Age-appropriate sex ed for kindergartners introduces topics like consent, identifying who is in your family and the correct names for body parts.

“When we’re talking about consent with kindergartners, that means getting permission before you touch someone else; asking if it’s OK if you borrow somebody’s toy or pencil or game, so that kids start to learn about personal boundaries and consent in really age- and developmentally appropriate ways,” says Gelperin, who was part of a team that released the first national sex education standards in 2012.

Gelperin loves to use hula hoops to teach young kids about bodily autonomy: Each student gets one, and is instructed to ask for permission to go inside someone else’s hula hoop. The hoops are an analogy for boundaries.

“If someone is touching you inside your boundary in a way that makes you uncomfortable, it’s OK to say no and talk to a trusted adult,” Gelperin tells students.

Another good lesson for younger children is how to identify those trusted adults. Mariotta Gary-Smith, a sex ed instructor based in Oregon, asks students to write a list of people they trust in their communities: “People that you know care about you, people who are accessible to you, people who could support you.”

The list can include peers, immediate and extended family members or chosen family members. Then Gary-Smith, who co-founded the Women of Color Sexual Health Network, asks students to think about how they would talk to the people on their list about safety, respect and boundaries.

“When they knew that they had trust and safety in their circle, they felt like they could express themselves without judgment,” she explains.

As students head into third grade, Gelperin says they should start learning the characteristics of healthy relationships with friends and family.

“Sometimes there’s teasing and bullying that’s going on in those grade levels. So you want to talk about how to interrupt teasing and bullying and how to stand up for others that may be getting teased or bullied,” she explains.

There should also be a focus on respecting others’ differences, including different family makeups, cultural backgrounds and faith traditions.

Gelperin says lessons on consent should continue throughout elementary school. And she recommends lessons on puberty begin in fourth grade, because that’s when some students begin to see and experience changes in their bodies.

Middle school: Real talk about puberty

As students transition from elementary school to middle school, they should learn about the details of reproduction, including biological terms and why some people menstruate while others create sperm.

“That for me is a real hallmark of middle school sex education, is kind of really starting to understand how those parts and systems work together for reproduction,” Gelperin says.

It’s also a good time to connect the physical effects of puberty and hormones with the feelings of attraction that come along with them.

“Who gives you butterflies in your stomach? Who makes your palm sweaty?” Gelperin says. “Because we know with puberty, one of the changes is experiencing new hormones that make us feel feelings of attraction often for other people in a new and different way.”

Students should also learn about sexually transmitted infections, like HIV, and how they’re transmitted.

And middle school is a good time to start learning about gender expression and sexual orientation, as well as gender stereotypes. One Advocates for Youth lesson includes a scavenger hunt homework assignment where students look for gender stereotypes in the world around them, like a sports ad that only features men or an ad for cleaning supplies that only features women.

High school: When conversations about healthy relationships get deeper

Healthy relationships are a “hallmark” of comprehensive sex education, Gelperin says. As students move into high school, the conversation should expand from family and friends to partners and intimate relationships.

“What makes a relationship healthy? How do you know if a relationship is not healthy?” Gelperirn says.

Those conversations should also cover sexual abuse, sexual harassment and sexual assault.

At Mountainside High School in Beaverton, Ore., school health teacher Jenn Hicks shares statistics with students about the disproportionate rates of sexual violence for women, women of color and members of the LGBTQ communiity.

“Sexual violence can happen to anyone,” she tells her class, “but it doesn’t happen equally to everyone.”

That leads to a conversation about consent.

“We have to talk about how we treat each other better, why consent is so important and why we need to listen to each other and protect each other,” Hicks says. “Again, violence is used as a form of control to keep groups of people disempowered and fearful.”

And then, of course, come the classic lessons of high school sex ed, about pregnancy, how to prevent sexually transmitted infections and how to use contraception – a lesson Gelperin says is especially important.

“We can’t expect young people to know how to use condoms correctly unless we help them learn how to do that.”

One classic method: bananas. Specifically, having students practice placing a condom on a banana, as one Advocates for Youth lesson recommends.

Finally, there are lessons that don’t have anything to do with sex (or fruit) — like how to find credible sources of information.

Think about all the rumors about sex that can circulate in a high school – those rumors are also all over the internet. And for a kid looking for information, it can be hard to know what to believe.

“We’re allowing children to learn what’s out there, and they are,” says sex ed researcher Lisa Lieberman, who co-authored that Montclair State University paper. “They are accessing pornography; they are accessing the internet. They are learning in ways that are not the message that most parents and schools want children to have.”

Advocates for Youth recommends asking students to evaluate different sexual health websites, and identify the ones that are trustworthy.

For Hicks, the goal of all this is to give every student the tools they need to stay safe.

“It’s recognizing everybody that’s in the room and giving them the knowledge and skills to make the best possible decisions for themselves and to lead a happy, fulfilled life.”

Sex ed recommendations are always evolving

Mariotta Gary-Smith, with the Women of Color Sexual Health Network, says 10 years ago sex education wasn’t culturally reflective or respectful to everyone, including to communities of color.

“The images that are used, that have been used historically … you don’t see bodies that are not white, able-bodied, cis, slender, slim,” she explains. “You don’t see or hear about young people who choose to parent if they become pregnant. You hear about teen pregnancy as this thing to be stopped, but not honoring that there are cultures and communities where young people who choose to parent are celebrated.”

Gary-Smith has helped create more inclusive lessons through the Women of Color Sexual Health Network, and the sex ed standards Gelperin helped create in 2012 were updated in 2020 to include racism, inequality and their impact on sexual health. An Advocates for Youth lesson points students to examples of how racism has impacted the health and reproductive rights of low-income women of color, among other groups.

The national sex ed standards were also updated to touch on gender identity, sexual orientation, reproductive justice and sexually explicit media.

“It really allowed us to reflect the times in 2020 and what young people were saying was their lived experiences that they were so hungry to learn and talk about,” Gelperin says.

Keeping sex ed inclusive and culturally reflective means teaching about systemic oppression, discrimination and the history and impacts of racism on certain communities, Gary-Smith explains. For example, a lesson on reproductive health might discuss historical examples of forced sterilization of Indigenous women or Black women, or the criminal justice system as it connects to family relationships.

These lessons may seem a far cry from those on consent or gender, and Gary-Smith understands that.

“Everything I’m talking about now, 10 years ago, we weren’t talking about it,” she explains.

That highlights one of the most important characteristics of sex ed for Gary-Smith: It should always be evolving.

“It needs to shift and change because things shift and change.”

Lee Gaines is from member station WFYI, and Elizabeth Miller is from member station OPB. Nicole Cohen edited this story for broadcast and digital.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Two days after finding out her mother had cancer, journalist Melissa Hung took a walk in San Francisco’s Chinatown. 

“I didn’t grow up in a Chinatown. It is not my home,” Hung writes. “Yet when I think of my mother in Texas, I feel pulled towards Chinatown’s tightly packed stores and no-frills restaurants.”

In her piece, “Towards Chinatown,” Hung describes her experiences on a bus ride, walking through the streets and seeing people shop, eat and move throughout their day. She moves around the city feeling a sense of loss. The journey is meant to take her closer to her mother, and it inevitably has her reflecting on her mother tongue: Cantonese.

“Some words come easily. Others I grasp for,” she writes. “They exist just beyond my reach the way the details of a dream tease the waking mind.” 

Hung’s parents immigrated from Hong Kong, and she and her brother were born and raised in the U.S. They grew up speaking Cantonese in the house and English in school – Hung was placed in English as a Second Language classes as a kid – and when she was about eight years old, her parents made a conscious decision to switch to English-only. “My Cantonese freezes in time,” she writes, and English takes over.

Today, Hung’s Cantonese is just enough to get by, but she’s not able to have nuanced conversations – to follow a newscast, or talk art and politics, as she says. And she wonders what has been lost as a result of not being fluent in Cantonese. “I fear that some fundamental part of me has been displaced, that my inability to speak fluently renders me incomplete,” she writes. And beyond that, her connection to her family, “By losing my relationship to Cantonese, what have I lost in my relationship with my parents?”

WHAT’S LOST WHEN YOU LOSE A HERITAGE LANGUAGE?

According to 2019 data, there are nearly 5.1 million English learners enrolled in public schools in this country, and that number has steadily increased in the past two decades. Similar to Hung’s school experience, many students are taken out of class and placed in separate ESL learning rooms. Often parents are faced with a choice that involves investing more in English language learning than their heritage language. It’s a common experience for recent immigrants to the U.S. or children of immigrants. 

The decision is usually made out of necessity. English is often viewed as a requirement of successful assimilation into this country. But it does not come without a cost, and in the case of many people who haven’t been able to keep up with their heritage language, or who never learned their family language in the first place, it can have a significant impact on identity. 

“Language shapes you. It shapes how you think,” Hung says, referring to language structure and the way we form thoughts. “So if language shapes how we’re thinking, and I’m not able to think primarily in my native language, does that make me less of a Cantonese person and less Chinese?” 

The loss of a heritage language can also affect how people learn because fluency in your first language greatly increases your ability to learn a second language; not having that first language as a solid foundation to learn from can be a barrier to fluency in all language learning. 

Additionally, one’s heritage language is greatly connected to a sense of self, and can determine the way one moves throughout the world and the classroom. 

WHEN WE BELONG, WE LEARN BETTER

A sense of belonging — being seen, valued and feeling connected in school — can go a long way for students. It can be a profound motivator, and impact education success for students inside the classroom and in the greater community. 

Part of fostering that sense of belonging relies on a school’s approach to language learning and its embrace of non-English speaking students, as well as a diverse set of cultural heritages and backgrounds. 

“You’re not going to be able to center the voices and identities of students in your classroom if you don’t see those voices and those identities as precious and important to you,” says David Bowles, author and professor at the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley, where he teaches the next generation of educators. 

Bowles is dedicated to teaching his preservice teachers about the value of embracing student’s cultural identity and heritage, particularly by embracing languages beyond English in the classroom. 

“I think that schools ought to be preserving heritage language and that they ought to be using students’ home language as the primary vehicle for literacy instruction in those early years,” says Bowles. 

While language immersion schools have recently gained popularity, it wasn’t always that way. In the 1980s and 1990s, California banned all bilingual education programs as they were deemed a “threat to English,” and it took nearly two decades to bring it back. 

However, establishing bilingual education programs often require a lot of work and determination by educators, advocates and community members pushing for more. 

“I was told in order for me to finish the essays on time I had to stop thinking in Arabic,” says  Nour Bouhassoun, the youth coordinator with the Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC), about her time in U.S. schools supporting the idea that in order to succeed, it needed to be in English. 

“It’s not just a language, it’s my being, my culture. It’s the language I grew up speaking,” she says of Arabic. “So that language wasn’t validated. And I was feeling that I was not being my full self, not able to be my full self at school or in the school system.” 

Bouhassoun’s school experience helped motivate her to step into community organizing and working with AROC to impact change, including bringing an Arabic language pathways program to San Francisco.

It’s important, she says to “reclaim that sense of identity and sense of belonging, and feel that I am able to be proud of who I am, my family history and my language.”

Language is essential to identity. It can determine the way people live in the world, and in turn, it shapes world views. 

As student populations in the U.S. become more diverse, so does the call for better bilingual education – which includes acknowledging the role of a heritage language in all learning processes. “Teachers have to get to know their students,” Bowles says. 

Research will continue to show maintaining a heritage language has profound benefits, but a big challenge lies in creating the kind of bilingual learning environments needed for students to really thrive in, especially because students require a lot of one-on-one time with teachers and they’re in a system that’s already really taxing on teachers. 

It’s worth it, says Bowles. “We need to learn about each one of them and the particularities of their heritage language situation so that we can best support them in both the acquisition of English and the preservation of their heritage language, which I would argue should be the responsibility of U.S. schools.”

School started on an ominous note this year. On Sept.1, the U.S. Department of Education released disastrous test results. Based on a sample of more than 7,000 9-year-olds around the country, two decades of academic progress in reading and math were erased from 2020 to 2022. But the scores also raised many questions. I will try to answer six of them here. (Thank you to everyone on Twitter who challenged me to explain numbers that seem to be nonsensical and contradictory.)

Q: How can 9-year-olds lose 20 years of academic progress? They weren’t even born 20 years ago.

A: Today’s 9-year-olds today are posting the same test scores in reading and math as an earlier generation of 9-year-olds did back in the early 2000s. In other words, children today are reading and adding about as well as children the same age did 20 years ago.

Every few years, the Department of Education administers a test called Long-Term Trend NAEP or National Assessment of Educational Progress to a group of students selected to reflect the diversity of the U.S. student population. Before the pandemic, the reading and math abilities of 9-year-olds had been improving. Scores rose strongly in the 2010s and then flatlined, holding steady in the 2010s.

This graph from the statistical unit of the Education Department shows the history of the Long-Term Trend NAEP with the sudden plummet in test scores since the start of the pandemic.

Q: Is that really so tragic?

A: One can reasonably argue that it’s not so bad to be back where we were in 2000. Many children born 30 years ago, who would have been about 9 years old then, are educated adults and leading good lives today.

But it is troubling that the lowest achieving students in our schools lost the most ground between 2020 and 2022. Students in the bottom 10 percent in achievement lost four to five times more than students in the top 10 percent. In math, for example, that’s a drop of 12 points versus a three-point drop.

If these children don’t catch up, they will be at a far greater risk of not learning to read well enough to function in our economy or of dropping out of high school because they cannot pass minimum math requirements. Based on another set of plummeting test scores during the pandemic, the consulting firm McKinsey & Company estimated that the current generation of less-educated students could reduce the size of the U.S. economy by $128 billion to $188 billion a year.

Q: How can student achievement around the country be hit so hard if we reported in July 2022 that the pace of learning was back to normal? Was that earlier report wrong?

A: Both reports are consistent with each other and show nearly identical declines in student test scores. The recent Department of Education report reflects just two snapshots of NAEP test scores: one taken in early 2020 before the pandemic and one in early 2022. Between these two time periods, the achievement of 9-year-olds plummeted.

The assessment organization NWEA measures children two to three times during the year using a test called Measures of Academic Progress or MAP, which is taken by millions of elementary and middle school students around the country every year. MAP scores plummeted dramatically in 2020-21 and then started to rebound slightly for many but not all children in 2021-22. Students at each grade level remained far behind where they had been before the pandemic, but they weren’t deteriorating further.

I liken it to the difference between a quarterly and an annual report in finance. A company may be making less revenue today than two years ago, but a quarterly report will show more detailed ups and downs. NWEA’s details show that most of the academic decline occurred in 2020 and 2021, but not so much in 2022. The Department of Education’s NAEP report cannot pinpoint the exact timing of the slide between 2000 and 2022.

Q: So is there learning loss?

A: Students haven’t regressed. It’s not that individual children used to know how to read and then stopped being able to read. The NAEP test implies and the MAP test directly documents that children continued to get better in reading and math during the pandemic. But students missed hours of instruction for many reasons: family tragedies, closed schools, teachers out with COVID, inefficient remote instruction. So students learned less than usual.

My best analogy, which I’ve used before, is a cross-country road trip. Imagine that students were traveling at 55 miles an hour, ran out of gas and started walking instead. According to the NWEA report, now they’re back in their cars and humming along again at 55 miles an hour. Some are traveling at 60 miles an hour, catching up slightly, but they’re still far away from the destination that they would have reached if they hadn’t run out of gas.

It’s this distance from the destination that educators are describing when they talk about learning loss. Some people like to call this problem “missed learning” or “lost learning.” Whatever you want to call it, it means that today’s 9-year-olds – or third and fourth graders – cannot read and multiply as well as 9-year-olds did 10 years ago.

Q: How could scores decline nationally, but not in cities or rural areas?

A: In math, it’s a simpler story. Everyone deteriorated. High achievers and low achievers, along with Black, white and Hispanic students. City, suburban and country students all posted lower math scores.

But in reading, test scores in urban school districts didn’t decline between 2020 and 2022. They were also unchanged in rural districts and throughout the West.

I talked with Grady Wilburn, a statistician in the assessment division at the National Center for Education Statistics, who drilled down into the data with me. There were not substantial changes in the racial or income composition of these regions between 2020 and 2022 that could explain why reading achievement held stable. Hypothetically, if cities had gentrified during the pandemic, higher income students would have had higher test scores and could have masked the score declines.  But that did not happen.

We also looked at different combinations of race, income and geography. Nationally, Black students scored six points lower in reading, but in the cities, Black 9-year olds scored the same in 2022 as they did before the pandemic hit in 2020. Also unchanged were the scores of white city students, Hispanic city students and city students who are poor enough to qualify for free lunch. In rural areas, both Black and Hispanic students held steady too, but white students in rural areas did deteriorate a bit.

“We were puzzled by these numbers too,” said Wilburn. “Our commissioner has been saying maybe that’s one place that researchers should dive into, to better understand what city and rural communities may have done.”

Meanwhile, the scores of Black, white, Hispanic and free-lunch eligible students in the suburbs as well as small towns all declined sharply during the pandemic. This means that the national declines in test scores were primarily driven by suburban 9-year-olds.

One possibility is that city and rural families read more at home. Perhaps brothers and sisters read to each other. Another possibility is that suburban schools deliver a vastly superior education to students that, in normal times, is very effective in teaching young elementary school children to read well. When school days were disrupted during the pandemic, student achievement suffered more. The more effective school is, the more students might suffer when they get less of it.

Q: Can we tell from this NAEP report whether school closures and remote instruction are to blame?

A: No. But the fact that city schools, where students were most likely to have missed more in-person days, held steady in reading (see above) is a sign that remote learning wasn’t always so detrimental. Suburban and small town students, who tended to have more in-person days, fared worse.

Accompanying the NAEP test was a student survey, which asked students if they learned remotely even once during the 2020-21 school year. But it didn’t ask 9-year-olds to count the number of remote days, so it’s impossible to say if more days of remote school led to worse outcomes.

A separate analysis of NWEA’s MAP scores, circulated in May 2022, found that students who learned remotely lost far more ground. It indicated that remote instruction was the primary driver of widening achievement gaps between rich and poor and between children of color and white students.

A more detailed report from the Department of Education on student achievement during the pandemic is expected in October. It will list state achievement scores for fourth and eighth graders on another NAEP test. Hopefully, we can unravel more of these knots together.

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

There’s a story that didn’t make it into Linda Flanagan’s book, but it’s so appalling she has to tell me about it. It’s about a family in her town whose son was on the “A” team at the local soccer club one year but placed on the “B” team the next. He was humiliated; his parents were livid. So livid that the father, who worked in a higher position at the same firm as the coach, had the coach transferred overseas.

It sounds outlandish enough to be fiction, and yet for those familiar with the excesses of youth sports today, it may not be surprising. Flanagan’s book, “Take Back the Game: How Money and Mania are Ruining Kids’ Sports — and Why It Matters,” is filled with anecdotes and statistics about the state of youth sports and how it got this way. She covers not just the misbehaviors but also the more mundane way sports can skew families’ priorities. And she doesn’t spare herself from the critique. She cringes, for example, over memories of times when she noticed her own ego swelling from her son Paul’s basketball success. And she laments time and money wasted on camps and tournaments that Paul himself didn’t care about.

“I couldn’t figure out why Paul’s athleticism seemed to matter so much to me, and why kids’ sports animated everyone in my orbit. But I felt that pull from his earliest days,” writes Flanagan. “While no one was looking, when we grown-ups were busy building our own lives and tending our own families, kids’ sports took a turn. These shifts became apparent to me while watching my son play, and became unavoidable the longer I coached.”

Flanagan said there are three broad sociological developments since the 1970s that led to this situation. First is money. As public investment in community recreation programs declined, commercial ventures filled in the void — and then some. Thanks to elite clubs, private trainers, state-of-the-art tournament facilities and all the companies selling the latest gear, youth sports is now a multibillion-dollar, “fabulously profitable industry,” as Flanagan put it.

Then there are broader changes in American cultural views about childhood in tandem and increasing trends toward individualism. Both have placed mounting pressure on parents to fixate on their children and on preparing them for a competitive adult world. Third, as admission to elite colleges and universities have become more competitive, families have looked to sports for an entry point.

These trends haven’t just harmed the kids of middle- and upper-class families who dominate the high-stakes world of contemporary youth sports. They’ve also made athletic opportunities increasingly out of reach for kids from low-income families. “It’s what I would call a feast or famine,” Flanagan said. For parents seeking a more steady diet, she advised letting children’s interests lead, keeping the family whole, putting sports in perspective and modeling the behavior you want your children to learn.

Look at your child

Many parents now see their kids’ athletic achievements as a reflection on themselves. How can you tell if you’re in that camp? Pay attention to how you feel about the outcome of the game, Flanagan said. It’s not bad to feel proud of your child’s performance, but there’s a limit. Even more indicative is when a loss or poor performance puts a parent in a bad mood.

To shift the focus back to kids, Flanagan said, “Let them take the lead. They should be the ones deciding what to play, when to play, if to play an organized sport.” She acknowledged that when given a blank canvas, many kids may choose screen time, which doesn’t yield the physical or mental benefits of sports. In that scenario, parents can nudge with suggestions, but she recommended giving a lot of options if possible, not just pushing them toward one specific sport.

Once they’re on the team, observe and listen to their experiences. Even if they’re naturally gifted in a sport, they might not actually enjoy it for one reason or another. Create offramps — opportunities for them to keep deciding whether they’re into a sport as they age. 

Keep your family whole

In addition to money, the time and relationship sacrifices some families make for a young athlete’s sport can be tremendous. Two basic measures parents can take to avoid fragmenting their families in the process is to start organized sports later and to stay in local leagues as long as possible.

Beyond that, Flanagan recommends occasionally saying no to a coach’s request or a club expectation. Groupthink can make that hard, but sometimes speaking up can give other parents permission to set boundaries, too. In her book, Flanagan gives an example she heard from the mom of a soccer player. When the first opponent in an upcoming soccer tournament forfeited, the coach scheduled a replacement exhibition match. Families would have to drive more than an hour early in the morning and wait hours there until the next game. Other parents confirmed that they’d be there — until this mom replied that maybe playing only one game was enough. Soon after, other parents agreed and the exhibition was canceled.

“Parents have a perception that they don’t have any power here,” Flanagan said. “And I’m like, no, you guys are writing the checks. You work together to set the terms.”

Keep youth sports in perspective

Don’t be confused. Flanagan loves and values sports. She played softball as a teeanger, she encouraged her kids’ athletic interests and she coached girls running teams for 17 years. She knows about the health benefits of physical activity and the satisfaction that comes from training hard. She also knows not to sweat the small stuff. “It seems so important. Many things do with raising kids. But it really doesn’t matter very much whether they make varsity or become captain. They’re going to be who they are,” she said.

To keep that perspective, Flanagan recommended befriending older parents, not attending every game and developing your own interests separate from children. That last item was particularly important for teaching her kids to respect her as a full human being, she said.

Model the behavior you want your child to learn

Having her own interests also helped model a “rich and satisfying adulthood” to her kids. When parents don’t do that, Flanagan said it sends a message that children should avoid growing up “because it’s really no fun.”

Other behaviors to model include treating coaches with respect and thanking them for their commitment. (Though not to the exclusion of watching for signs of abuse.) Coping with disappointments is another one. When parents’ react to something like making the B team as a crisis, it signals to their child to feel grievously wounded. “They take their cues from the parents,” Flanagan said. Instead, parents can “ratchet down the language” and help kids recognize these moments as part of life’s ups and downs. 

For parents who want to make bigger changes, Flanagan suggested joining leadership in sports leagues. She said that while coaching she worked with many great families with values in the right place. They’re out there. But their voices may need to get louder to be heard.

School counselor Catherine Livingston has had the same bulletin board in her office for five years. It shows four overlapping, differently colored circles. Each circle contains a word representing one dimension of wellness: physical, spiritual, emotional or mental. “We need to be taking care of these four circles in order to be okay,” Livingston said at the American School Counselors Association national conference in July.

The four circles on display in her office are bordered by large, curving letters that read, “TRY THIS” and “ASK ME HOW.” Students do ask, she said. “They come in, they might be talking about their grades and they look and go, ‘What’s that about?’” That question starts a conversation about self-care practices that comes out of student curiosity, rather than a lecture. Livingston, who is the 2022 Michigan School Counselor of the Year, described the four circles of self-care and gave examples:

• Physical – any kind of body movement, such as stretching, walking, dancing, sports and active games
• Emotional – ways of expressing emotions, such as journaling, art and music
• Mental – activities that challenge your brain, such as crossword puzzles and math problems
• Spiritual – activities that create students a greater purpose and worthiness, such as community service, mentoring or participation in faith communities

The visual model of the four circles of self care comes from Know Resolve, a nonprofit focused on youth suicide prevention. Adolescent mental health crises, including anxiety, depression and self-harm, have been on the rise for more than a decade, and the coronavirus pandemic has only worsened the trend. Whether or not they have a clinical diagnosis, Livingston said all teenagers need to develop skills for coping with stress, but the past three years have made clear that many haven’t. When talking with students about self-care, Livingston encourages them to write down three things they enjoy that fit into each circle and to attempt one of each daily. She said students often haven’t thought about those activities in relation to wellness, “But when you bring it to their attention that this is what’s happening, they will continue to do it every day.”

Livingston said that many wellness practices are already happening in classrooms. For example, some English teachers at Utica Community Schools, where she works, assign students to write in journals. They’ve seen students continue to write in them daily, even though that’s not the requirement. Livingston said she’d like to see the wellness-related benefits of such activities spelled out more directly for students. “We need to tell them it’s important.”

The four circles are a simple model that teachers can point to for such explanations, and it can become part of the classroom or school vernacular. For example, one health teacher at Livingston’s school has a poster of the four circles that students tag with sticky note examples. They can also take sticky notes off of the poster if they see something they want to try. Livingston said that by allowing all students to contribute and exchange ideas, this exercise itself can be a boost to spiritual health.

As students begin to practice activities in all four circles, “You’re going to see a difference in their grades, a difference in their attendance, and definitely a difference in their behavior,” Livingston said. She advised counselors and teachers not to expect sudden, radical transformation but to celebrate small successes, such as a student getting to class on time more often than the previous month.

Adults in schools can also benefit from using the four circles of self-care. “I’m still trying to work on this, trying to do something in each circle,” said Livingston, who’s been a counselor for more than 20 years and taught elementary school before that. “But if we start it and we continue with our students, the next generation of adults … my hope is they will have better coping skills than we have had.”

The data are stark: the typical American diet is shortening the lives of many Americans. Diet-related deaths outrank deaths from smoking, and about half of U.S. deaths from heart disease – nearly 900 deaths a day – are linked to poor diet. The pandemic highlighted the problem, with much worse outcomes for people with obesity and other diet-related diseases.

“We’re really in a nutrition crisis in this country.” says Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University

Now, there’s growing momentum to tackle this problem. The Biden administration will hold the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health on September 28th, and will announce a new national strategy. This comes more than 50 years after a landmark White House conference which helped launch today’s major federal food assistance programs.

“The 1969 conference was transformative,” Mozaffarian says. The programs it ushered in, like the WIC program, have helped feed millions of low-income families.

But this hasn’t been enough to solve the dual problems of food insecurity and diet-related disease. Food policy leaders say it’s time to think anew and build on what we’ve learned. The U.S. can’t “fix” hunger by just feeding people cheap, high-calorie, processed foods – the food that’s so abundant in our food supply, they say. Instead, it’s got to find ways to nourish people with healthy, nutrient-dense foods.

“There’s a lot of enthusiasm and thinking about food more broadly and how we can fix this crisis,” Mozaffarian told NPR. He’s co-chair of an independent task force that includes doctors, chefs, food policy and business experts, as well as farming and health advocates, who are helping form the agenda at upcoming the White House conference.

In a new report, they’ve proposed a wide-ranging set of recommendations to end hunger, advance nutrition and improve health. Here are seven big ideas they’re excited about.

1. Treat food as medicine

There’s a growing movement to integrate food and nutrition into health care, by providing healthy meals and groceries to patients to help prevent or manage diet-related illness.The task force wants to see this kind of work expand.

“We should pay for food-based interventions that are effective,” Mozaffarian says.

For example, there’s mounting evidence that providing prescriptions for fruit and vegetables can spur people to eat better and manage weight and blood sugar. The idea is for health care systems or insurers to provide or pay for healthy groceries, combined with nutrition education, to help patients change their eating habits. It is being piloted around the country.

“Produce prescription programs help improve diet quality and food security,” says task force member Dr. Hilary Seligman, a food insecurity expert and professor of medicine at University of California, San Francisco, noting that they can help with diet-related diseases like high blood pressure and diabetes.

Another idea is to offer medically tailored meals aimed at helping people who are already sick reverse chronic disease. Currently the federal government is running pilot programs that let Medicaid or Medicare pay for the meals in several states.

2. Focus on quality of calories, not just quantity

The U.S. food supply is awash in cheap calories. And when you’re on a tight budget or relying on benefits like SNAP (food stamps), processed foods like chips and soda can set you back less than fresh produce. Of course, eating processed foods also contributes to cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes and other chronic illnesses, warns Nancy Brown, CEO of the American Heart Association.

Brown says federal food assistance programs have helped to address hunger. “However, many U.S. food policies and programs focus on improving access to sufficient quantities of food,” she says. Instead, it’s time to modernize these policies and focus on the quality of food, “so people have access to enough nutritious food.”

The task force wants to see food programs redesigned to nudge people towards healthier options. The report points to the GusNIP nutrition incentive program – which, in select communities – gives SNAP participants more money to buy fruit and vegetables. It’s a similar concept to the Double Bucks program which doubles the value of SNAP benefits when used to buy produce at farmers markets and other venues.

“It is important to scale up these efforts to ensure that everyone has access to healthy food options,” says task force member Angela Odoms-Young, a nutrition professor at Cornell University.

The task force recommends that Congress establish a nationwide produce incentive program for all SNAP participants. “These types of programs can help promote equity,” Odoms-Young says, noting that people of color disproportionately suffer from chronic illnesses.

3. Expand access to dietary and lifestyle counseling

The Affordable Care Act mandates that diet counseling be covered by insurers as a preventive care benefit for those at higher risk of chronic disease. The exact details of who is eligible for which services are left up to an advisory group of doctors and health care providers, as well as insurers, and many patients who would benefit may not have access to this service.

“The vast majority of Americans should be getting preventative behavioral lifestyle treatment,” Mozaffarian says. Too often, he says, doctors prescribe drugs for conditions before recommending or trying lifestyle changes. “Doctors go right to the drug,” he says. “I think that’s a big problem.”

The task force recommends that Congress expand Medicare and Medicaid coverage for medical nutrition therapy to people with high blood pressure, prediabetes, celiac disease, HIV/AIDS, cancer and other diet-related conditions. It also calls for expanded coverage of cooking classes and nutrition assistance, as well as coverage of the Diabetes Prevention Program, delivered by telehealth. This behavior-change program has been shown to be more effective than medicine in reducing the onset of Type 2 diabetes among people at high risk.

4. Support food entrepreneurs

People who start food businesses can help nourish their communities and create jobs. The task force calls on the federal government to pass policies that boost new healthy food enterprises, including providing new loans and grants to food and nutrition-related companies centered on health, equity, and sustainability. The idea is to focus especially on businesses owned by people of color and other marginalized groups.

“We don’t need more businesses creating diabetes and obesity,” says Tambra Raye Stevenson, who runs Wanda, a non-profit group that aims to build a pipeline and platform for a million Black women and girls to become local food leaders. “We need entrepreneurs that provide teaching kitchens, community gardens, healthy food retails, wellness studios, nutrition services, healthy consumer products, and urban agricultural centers,” she says.

She points to food entrepreneurs like Amanda Stephenson who opened a specialty food market in an underserved neighborhood in Washington, DC, Fresh Food Factory, and Mary Blackford of Market 7 who is planning a food hall that features Black-owned food and lifestyle businesses. “They are our food she-roes making a positive impact and providing healthy food access for our children and other women,” says Stevenson.

In the lead up to next month’s White House conference, groups like Food Tank, a food think tank, have organized listening sessions with food researchers and entrepreneurs. “For food to be more accessible and affordable, we need entrepreneurs that use science and technology,” says Danielle Nierenberg of Food Tank. She points to innovators like Journey Foods which is helping entrepreneurs bring nutritious foods and snacks to market.

5. Increase the number of new farmers growing healthy foods using regenerative farming techniques

If all Americans began to eat the recommended amounts of fruits and vegetables each day, there would be shortages. That’s because corn and soybeans are grown on most cropland in the U.S.. Now, there’s growing recognition of the need for more specialty crops – including fruits, vegetables, and nuts.

The task force recommends that Congress create a Farmer Corps to support new farmers, building on the Beginning Farmers and Ranchers Development Program. The idea is to provide new farmers with paid internships and apprenticeships to learn about sustainable farming, and funding to cover a living wage and housing. It also is pushing for loans to go to farmers growing with sustainable practices.

Growing the same crop, season after season, as many farmers do, can make lands less productive over time, and deplete nutrients from the soil.”The unfortunate reality is that today we subsidize conventional practices that degrade the soil,”says David Montgomery, a professor at the University of Washington and the author of What Your Food Atewho attended a listening session.

“What we need to sustain agriculture is to incentivize restoring healthy soils and train more farmers to be successful doing that,” he says.

6. Make school meals free for all students

School meals have been a fixture in U.S. schools ever since President Harry Truman signed the National School Lunch Act back in 1946. For decades, the federal government has reimbursed schools for meals they serve, and low-income students can qualify for free or reduced priced meals. Research has shown that low-income children who participate have better health.

Yet, many families who are eligible for free or reduced-priced meals may not receive them, sometimes due to the paperwork, bureaucracy or stigma of participating or enrolling. Amid the pandemic, school meals have been offered for free to all students. Now, the task force says this should be a permanent change.

“Without access to free meals at school, many children go without food at all during the day, and many more do not have access to the nutritious foods they need to thrive,’ says Seligman, of UC San Francisco. She notes that school meals help not only with kids’ nutrition, but they also reduce absenteeism and improve academic outcomes.

7. Establish a federal ‘food czar’

In order to turn ideas like these into action, the task force recommends the creation of a new role in the federal government, a national director of food and nutrition, a food czar figure, if you will. The new director would help streamline and coordinate the many disparate efforts already underway. The U.S. government spends more than $150 billion each year on food and nutrition related programs, and the health care system also spends billions on treatment of diet related diseases.

“This spending is fragmented across 200 separate actions and 21 different departments and agencies without harmonization or synergy,” the task force concludes. Now, they conclude, it’s time for a new approach.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

It’s a new school year and Jake Miller is not setting up his classroom in central Pennsylvania. He’s not getting to know a new group of eighth-graders in his social studies class. After 15 years of teaching, he quit.

“I was accused of teaching critical race theory when I taught about how the Civil War was fought over racism and slavery,” he said.

A couple of parents complained but weren’t satisfied with the school board’s answer.

“So they took it to a state representative who has used this as a dog whistle,” he said.

It was all just too much, Miller said. He can’t teach the Civil War without teaching about racism and slavery. But that incident wasn’t the only thing that pushed him to leave.

“There were other moments prior to that,” he said. “That just seemed to be the cherry on top.”

There was the shortage of substitute teachers that made it hard to take time off to be there when his kids were sick. The low pay. The lack of respect from parents and politicians; a lack of resources; and, of course, the pandemic.

“There’s been an attack on education for quite some time,” Miller said. “The pandemic was just a weight too heavy. That was the albatross that pulled me under. And I knew that I needed to pivot.”

Now he’s a business consultant making 50% more than he did as a teacher.

Pennsylvania’s Department of Education says the shortage is real as teachers like Miller leave. The spokesman has said they need thousands of new teachers and educators in other roles in the next three years or the problem could become chronic.

Other districts in states around the country are also scrambling to find and keep enough teachers to lead their classrooms as educators deal with burnout.

Teachers are also facing some unprecedented challenges: school board meetings that devolve into chaos over COVID policies; battles stemming from a politicized and misinformed panic over critical race theory; book banning; and a call to arm teachers in the face of gun violence.

Educators are on the front line of these societal fractures that can feel scary.

Miller said he’s not sure he’ll ever go back to education.

“To be honest, it’s going to take teachers being treated like professionals, to have their dignity back, and for the public to rally behind them for folks like myself to consider it,” he said.

Expected to do more, without support

Teachers across the country are making similar calculations as Miller.

Last year, Alexander Calderon’s colleague quit suddenly. Overnight, he went from being a seventh-grade English language arts teacher to also being the social studies teacher.

“I felt like there was little to no support in terms of understanding this new curriculum,” Calderon said. “I was really at my breaking point to the point where I was thinking about just leaving.”

So he opened up the notes app on his phone and started writing a list.

Pros of the job: pay wasn’t bad comparatively; his colleagues were supportive; he wanted to be there for his students.

Cons: very little support from the administration; he was doing the job of two teachers; school morale was terrible; and he was watching one teacher after the next leave.

Even though his cons list was slightly longer, this week Calderon started a new school year teaching both English language arts and social studies. His list is still saved on his phone.

“The kids are my No. 1 priority,” he said. “Seeing what the kids’ interests are and getting to know them as people is what ultimately drove me to stay.”

He also said he’s the only Spanish speaker on staff at his middle school. He recalls when a student — originally from Nicaragua — enrolled. He watched the boy’s mother struggle to understand the system and to communicate.

“It made me think of my own mom struggling through the American education system,” he said.

Calderon stepped in to help. It’s another reason he won’t quit.

“I felt that I was kind of morally obligated to stay,” he said.

Teaching angry, but with love

Then there are the teachers who plan to stick it out no matter what, like Eric Hale. He’s a first-grade teacher in the Dallas Independent School District.

In 2021, he was named teacher of the year for the entire state of Texas, the first African American man to win the honor.

“I got to meet these phenomenal educators that represented their state and we got to meet the president. It was a whole yearlong bonding experience,” he said. “Out of my crew, only me and the state teacher of Illinois are still actively in the classroom.”

He said he knows why they left.

“A lot of them, especially the teachers of color, got tired of fighting a system that necessarily wasn’t designed for people that look like me and the kids that I serve to be successful,” he said. “They got tired of the disrespect of the profession and most importantly, they got tired of the lack of compensation.”

But when asked if he would ever leave, Hale said no.

“Because, I’m in a position and I’ve been blessed that I’m changing the face of education,” he said.

Growing up as a Black student from a poorer neighborhood who didn’t have a support system, Hale didn’t have any teachers who looked like him — no teachers who truly understood his needs.

“So I teach angry. I’m chasing the ghost of the teacher that I wish I had when I was a child,” he said.

He remembers having to go to churches for meals because his family couldn’t always afford food. He didn’t have a support system at home, and he couldn’t find it at school either.

“I grew up being abused and in trauma in a neighborhood that was generationally underserved,” he said. “So, sadly, I didn’t have any great teachers. I just had one who made a difference.”

Now, he is that teacher every day in his classroom of first-graders, where many of his students live in poverty and the school just doesn’t get the books and equipment that public schools in richer areas get.

“I teach in the same type of neighborhood that I grew up in, and so I fight for these kids because I know the potential,” he said. “I’m a firm believer of some of the brightest minds come from the darkest places.”

Meanwhile, he said, he’s been watching this uproar over critical race theory around the country. Teachers can barely afford the resources for their own curriculum, he said, so it’s laughable that they’d shell out money for a college curriculum.

“They’re trying to criminalize good teaching,” he said.

It’s a political weapon, he said, to stop teachers like him. Teachers who think about the race, ethnicity and circumstances of each student they have and how to help them connect.

“I teach every child that I serve the Texas state curriculum. I add to that curriculum images in literature and in person to inspire them that they can be a doctor, a lawyer, a novelist, an author,” he said. “By bringing people that come from the same areas that they come from.”

“So because I’m African American, I have to do my research and find great leaders of Hispanic descent, because the population that I serve is mostly Hispanic. I wish that somebody would have brought a judge to the school. I wish that somebody would have brought a current congressman, a senator, the mayor. … Representation matters.”

Hale is a dapper dresser: an emerald green tie, a navy blazer, complete with a bright orange pocket square. In his classroom he has a DJ booth where he plays songs he’s made. Each one is named for a student, the beats and melodies tailored to their personalities.

“Each song is special and unique, just like the kids,” he said. “Because I sit at home and I say, ‘Oh, man, Jaime is very active. His feet are always moving. So I like these drums. They have a little pitter patter.’ So I’m able to describe the songs to them and it makes them feel so special and it makes them feel so loved.”

It’s what he would’ve wanted when he was a child. It’s why Eric Hale teaches.

Jake Miller, who left teaching, said he taught because of one teacher who inspired him to be the first in his family to go to college.

Alexander Calderon teaches to be the bridge builder for students who need him in the public school system.

And all of them, whether they stay or leave, look to the future of education with hope.

“I have two young sons,” Miller said. “So you better believe I’m darn hopeful that the education that they get is going to be as good, if not better, than the education that I received.”

“I know there’s always going to be teachers in the classroom that stick it out for the long run,” Calderon said.

And Hale leaves very little to chance: “I pray and I write a plan. How am I going to fix this? Why wait for Superman when you’ve got a cape in the closet?”

They said the future is in these students. But what that future looks like depends, they said, on whether the educators at the front of the room feel valued enough to stay.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

When it was time to return to school in person for her junior year, Kimberly Higareda was resistant. She had gotten used to being at home, multitasking while attending her Zoom classes and having time to cook for herself in the middle of the day. On top of all of that, the masks they had to wear at school gave her acne.

“When it was time to come back and do it all over again, I wanted to quit school,” she says.

Higareda was a freshman at Fremont High School in Oakland when the pandemic closed her school building. She felt isolated during distance learning and, like so many people, was struggling with her relationships with peers and family. But she found help through online restorative justice (RJ) circles offered through school.

“I brought my all to circles. It was so powerful because I didn’t have any other space to express it in,” says Higareda.

Providing outlets through school was especially needed at the start of the 2021 school year because the pandemic had deepened inequities and led to more poverty in Oakland. “There have been challenges where violence in the community will make its way into the school,” says David Yusem, the RJ coordinator for Higareda’s district. “There’s been an increase in behavioral issues in the schools. There have been challenges with attendance.”

Solutions for behavior issues

Disrupted routines and trouble connecting to peers or teachers during the coronavirus lockdown and its aftermath has led to frayed relationships with school for many students.

Studies show there have been more incidents of violence against teachers. An American Psychological Association (APA) survey of nearly 15,000 school staff shows almost 60% of teachers feel victimized in some way at work. 

Experts on the APA task force that conducted the study recommended improving teacher education programs so that there is more focus on managing student behavior, in addition to providing social emotional learning training for all school staff. The task force also backed the Comprehensive Mental Health In Schools Pilot Program Act which supports restorative justice as a social emotional learning technique to strengthen relationships between students, teachers and school leaders. But as can often be the case with recommendations – whether through lack of funding, will or support, for example – schools fall short. 

“We have seen behaviors at a level that we’ve never experienced before at my high school,” Marta Schaffer, an English teacher in Oroville, California, told me earlier this year. “There’s been fighting pretty much every week, aggression towards staff and teachers and fighting happening in classrooms.” 

Schaffer says there are four social workers to meet with students at the three schools in her district and no restorative justice programs. With limited mental health resources, student behavior during the first year in person after pandemic distance learning had been erratic and unpredictable. 

What is restorative justice? 

Restorative justice (RJ) programs are small talking groups called circles – because of how people are seated around one another – used to build community and respond to conflict. One person speaks at a time and everybody gets a chance to speak or pass. 

RJ circles are composed of three tiers: Tier one circles focus on building and maintaining community; they are meant to build relationships, so that conflict is less likely to happen. When a conflict arises, a tier two circle is done to address and repair harm. Tier three circles provide individualized support for someone coming back into the community. “It could be a student, teacher, or someone coming in from being incarcerated. We want to identify what they need to be successful and help them get that,” says Yusem.

OUSD has had RJ since 2007 and in 2017, they invested $2.5 million in their RJ programs. Yusem works with facilitators based in middle schools and high schools across the district. He says the facilitator’s goal is to “create an environment where teaching and learning can happen, where it feels safe, welcoming, where social and emotional learning can take place and students can begin to access the part of their brain they need to learn.” 

OUSD had built a strong foundation with restorative justice practices when the pandemic forced students and teachers into lockdown. They continued to do RJ circles online to support students. “We would do circles for people impacted by COVID,” says Yusem. “They were for people who either got sick themselves or had to take care of a loved one or lost a loved one.”

Restorative justice in the classroom

When students returned in person, Tatiana Chaterji, the RJ facilitator at Kimberly Higareda’s school, had to do a lot of work to help students feel comfortable around each other again. In OUSD, all ninth graders are required to take her RJ leadership class at least once. “RJ is all about relationships, and I think relationships have been weaker,” says Chaterji about her students. Because students haven’t seen each other in a while, some conflicts have been festering for years and may have gotten worse because of social media.   

“My day-to-day looks like a lot of training, teaching and introducing empathy,” says Chaterji. “Trauma, neglect, youth, social media, ego and all the sort of negative forces that encourage us to be so self-centered take us away from caring about others.” 

RJ helped Higareda keep in touch with her peers during distance learning. While her online classes were “dead silent,” people talked during online RJ circles even if they kept their videos off. “I definitely think it helped me because I knew names and I knew voices. Without that, I wouldn’t have known anyone,” says Higareda.  Even though she kept in contact with some peers through online RJ circles, Higareda says her in-person relationships with classmates were strained. 

For instance, in her RJ leadership class, there was tension between upperclassmen and underclassmen. Higareda and other juniors felt the younger students were not pulling their weight on projects and activities. “We were friends with each other and not them,” says Higareda. “At moments we yelled at each other. I saw a couple of people yelling at each other really bad words and comments,” she says. The class did a tier two circle to deal with the conflict.

Higareda is the oldest in her household, so when it was her turn to speak she told her classmates that she was tired of being a leader all the time; she wanted others to take initiative and contribute to the class community. 

“That circle opened up this space for us to talk and voice our opinions and it was great after. We all learned something new,” says Higareda. After the circle cleared things up, students who weren’t on speaking terms earlier in the year were following each other on social media and hanging out outside of class.

“We’re all going through so much,” says Kimberly. “I’ve done so many circles where people actually get more vulnerable and I see them for something more than they express to be.”

An ecosystem of care

School districts in Santa Ana, San Diego and Los Angeles  have invested in RJ programs. “There’s still a huge movement to adopt these practices in schools,” says Andrew Martinez, another member of the APA task force on violence against teachers.

Martinez studied the effect of RJ programs in New York schools. The research spanned two years and set out to see whether RJ could reduce suspensions. Based on his interviews with over 80 students, he found that RJ programs strengthened students’ relationships with the school, but did not reduce suspensions. That could be because suspensions have as much to do with adult decisions as they do with student behavior.

“The science behind restorative justice practices within school settings has kind of lagged,” says Martinez. Without research and numbers to back up RJ’s success, it’s hard to push for funding RJ programs at schools. 

Even still, Martinez sees similarities between how teachers used RJ circles to navigate the community violence in New York public schools and how RJ is being used to address poverty, loss and inequity after the pandemic. “It created a space to hear about a lot of concerning things happening in the lives of children,” says Martinez. 

He recommends that RJ is part of an ecosystem of care at a school. Once caring adults know what students are going through, they can give them referrals to additional support like psychologists, social workers and counselors.

“RJ is not the cure. It’s not going to fully address trauma, but it’s the space to begin to start to listen,” says Martinez.  

The first days of school usually include going over ground rules for the classroom as students return from nearly three months of summer break. All teachers approach this process differently, from posting rules on the board to co-creating norms as a class. 

There’s nothing inherently wrong with coming up with all the rules by yourself or deciding all the rules as a class, said Detroit-based educator Carla Shalaby, author of the book “Troublemakers: Lessons in Freedom.” But she also encourages teachers to consider how norms are carried out and what they communicate to students. 

“Classroom management in itself is a curriculum,” said Shalaby about how teachers – often without knowing – are teaching young people through rules. “We think we’re teaching math; they’re paying attention to how we’re teaching power, authority, use of control, definitions of safety, who gets to belong and who’s good or bad.”

A former public school teacher, Shalaby now trains educators at the University of Michigan’s School of Education. She helped open a partnership school with the Detroit Public Schools Community District where she’ll be working with novice teachers who work with kids from infancy to graduation.

When she trains teachers, Shalaby provides a list of eight questions they can ask themselves to guide how they think about classroom management.

1. Do I use power to manage people in a space or do I use it to hold and make space?

Children are not born knowing how to talk through what to do when someone breaks a rule or causes harm. So they’re looking to teachers as models for how power is used. 

“[These skills] are hard to teach and learn at home because home is not a democratic community. It’s a private space,” said Shalaby. “School is kids’ first exposure to the problems of the community.” 
[aside postID=’mindshift_58616′]
Shalaby encourages teachers to try out new models of power that feel fair and democratic. For example, teachers can opt to not kick kids out of class when they misbehave.

“Give kids practice in the problems that come up when you really try to take care of every single person without removing people from your space,” said Shalaby. Kids who violate rules will also develop the skills needed to take accountability. “We’re all human beings in this project together and in this space together, and we’ve got to figure out how to do it for 180 days.”

2. Am I serving kids by having a comprehensive set of rules that eliminates all potential conflict, harm and drama?

Sometimes rules are used to get ahead of any possible issue that might come up in the classroom. But disagreement and conflict can be generative for children and in the future when they’re adults.

“Solving all problems takes away kids’ opportunities to practice how to solve problems,” said Shalaby. When teachers eliminate the possibility of conflict, kids don’t learn essential basics, she said. For example, students might have a hard time working well in small groups without an adult because they don’t have the skills to find solutions on their own. 

“Kids grow to understand that the person in power gets to do that,” said Shalaby.

While it may seem like more work to deal with problems collaboratively than it is to decide and enforce rules, Shalaby said it takes more time in the long run to constantly redirect kids when they fail to comply.

3. If a student asks ‘Why?,’ will your reason for having the policy stand up to the uniquely smart and relentless scrutiny of 30+ young people collectively seeking freedom? 

Saying “because I said so” can lead to the “nightmare of an un-winnable power struggle” against students, said Shalaby. And it’s not worth it.

“The main way that time gets wasted in classrooms is power struggle,” she said. “It’s exhausting. It’s driving teachers out of our profession. It’s pushing kids out of school.”

4. Does this classroom rule exist only because I happen to have a personal pet peeve?

Teachers can tell students that a rule is based on a personal pet peeve, but they have to be prepared to accommodate everyone’s pet peeves because teachers are just another member of the classroom community, said Shalaby. 

It’s difficult for students and teachers alike to make space for each person’s unique quirks when everyone is used to deferring to a teacher. Students discover how to deal with the tensions and questions that come up when they are trying to make everyone feel like they belong.

“It’s the space and the time to skill build around harm, how we treat each other, how and whether we take care of each other and what the real challenges are in balancing what I need against what a group needs,” said Shalaby. “Those are really hard democratic problems that kids need many years of practice with.” 

5. Are my actions grounded in cultivating safety or control?

A common misunderstanding is that more rules make classrooms safer, according to Shalaby. 

“Those are efforts to try to avoid bad things happening by exerting more control over human beings, constraining their rights more and more so that they can be trustworthy,” she said. 

Shalaby admits that safety and control are tricky subjects these days in light of recent school shootings. In response, schools monitor students’ movements around campus, limit what they are allowed to bring into school and even restrict what they’re allowed to wear. 

As an alternative to counting on increased security to keep students safe, Shalaby points to research saying that young people are less likely to commit community violence when they join pro-social activities such as mentorships, arts programs and after school sports. Providing access to practices and activities that foster belonging increases safety without relying on rules to control students’ bodies and behavior.

But/and a key follow-up: “Am I defining safety in a way that requires control, or freedom?”

Safety results from radical, mutual care and responsibly practiced freedom. It’s NOT “I do whatever I want.” It can be understood as a collective responsibility, not an individual right. pic.twitter.com/In25DpKstz

— Carla Shalaby (@CarlaShalaby) August 7, 2022

6. Am I defining safety in a way that requires control or freedom?

When schools use restrictive regulations, security and surveillance to make schools safer, they operate on the idea that taking away students’ autonomy will lead to safety. According to Shalaby, freedom is an essential part of safety.

“Safety is the practice of freedom responsibly,” she said. “In order to learn how to do that, students need to practice being accountable to others.” 

If rules are too constraining, students don’t have the opportunity to make decisions to keep each other safe. Instead of relying on restrictions as a means to safety, Shalaby recommends a “We keep us safe” mentality. “We mind our actions in terms of how they affect and impact other people. We learn to take accountability for the harm that we cause and set things right. Those are the things that increase our safety.”

7. Does enforcing this rule require me to behave like a police officer or an educator?

If a student is on their phone during class, a teacher might tell the student to put the phone away or even confiscate the phone. And they’ll likely have to do this several times a week. “It’s the one policy that no matter how hard they enforce it, kids break the rule,” said Shalaby

Recent studies show that the temptation to look at cell phone screens is powerful for young people, who can get hundreds of notifications during the course of a school day. Instead of getting mixed up in a power struggle with her students over policing their phone use, she turns it into a conversation. 

“Nobody tells me when or how I’m allowed to use my phone,” said Shalaby about the complex decisions she has to make around using her phone as an adult outside of school. “What’s the real and genuine and authentic opportunity to teach and learn something about freedom?’” 

She shifts away from trying to get rid of phones completely to helping students make safe and healthy decisions about screen time and responsible phone use. They can discuss how to change settings to receive less notifications, understand the addictive nature of phones and how their phone use may impact other learners.

8. Why do I teach?

Teachers make decisions that align with why they teach. 

“If the reason I teach is to deliver instruction in a content area, then nothing else is going to matter,” said Shalaby. “If the reason I teach is because I want a safer, freer and more beautiful world than the one that we have now and I believe in young people as stewards of that possible future, then I’m going to make different moves in my every day as a teacher.” 

Historically, educators have played an important role in freedom movements and at the forefront of struggles. They registered people to vote, promoted literacy campaigns and organized students to advocate for civil rights. Teachers today can continue the work of teachers who came before and give students the opportunities and skills to practice and build a better world, said Shalaby.

At the same time, it’s hard to be a teacher right now. 

“Teachers are abused, mistreated, disrespected and disinvested in, so asking people why they teach now is such a hard and painful question,” said Shalaby.

Envisioning a new world with students keeps her from feeling demoralized because she’s actively working towards a future where everyone, including teachers, are valued. 

“Teaching is not for everyone and I think anybody who has the privilege of doing it ought to ask themselves every day, ‘Why do I do this?’ And, ‘Are my actions aligning with my purpose?’”

Is a four-day school week a bad idea?

The answer matters because hundreds of thousands of students at more than 1,600 schools across 24 states were heading to school only four times a week by the spring of 2019, according to one estimate. The number of four-day schools had exploded by more than 600 percent from 20 years earlier in 1999, when only about 250 schools had four-day weeks. That tally could be even larger today because more schools switched to a four-day schedule during the pandemic.

Although the switch was initially seen as a cost-saving measure, educators have quickly learned that longer weekends are immensely popular with families, especially in rural communities where the truncated school week is most common.

“We know that kids love it and so do parents and teachers,” said Emily Morton, a researcher at NWEA, a nonprofit assessment company, who has studied four-day school weeks around the country. “There are crazy high approval ratings for this policy.”  Eighty-five percent of parents and, perhaps unsurprisingly, 95 percent of kids said they would choose to stay on a four-day school week, according to a RAND survey published in 2021.

But over the course of a typical 36-week school year, a four-day week means 36 fewer days of school. Many policymakers lament the downsizing of education, worried that students may learn less. Legislators in New Mexico are debating whether to crackdown on the schedule switch. Oklahoma passed a law to restrain the move to four-day weeks but delayed putting it into effect. Today, when many education advocates want to expand learning time to help kids recover academically from the pandemic, the four-day week would seem to be a move in the wrong direction.

The research evidence isn’t clear. The first empirical study, published in 2015, found that Colorado students in four-day schools did a lot better. The number of fifth grade students who were proficient in math rose by more than 7 percentage points. The number of fourth grade students who were proficient in reading rose by nearly 4 percentage points. Those results seemed to defy logic.

But now seven newer studies generally find negative results  – some tiny and some more substantial. One 2021 study in Oregon, for example, calculated that the four-day week shaved off one-sixth of the usual gains that a fifth grader makes in math, equal to about five to six weeks of school. Over many years, those losses can add up for students.

The most recent of the seven studies, a preliminary paper posted on the website of the Annenberg Institute at Brown University in August 2022, is a large multi-state analysis and it found four-day weeks harmed some students more than others.

Researchers at NWEA, led by Morton, and at Oregon State University began by analyzing the test scores of 12,000 students at 35 schools that had adopted four-day weeks in six states: Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, North Dakota, and Wyoming. Like the more recent crop of studies, they found that four-day weeks weren’t great for academic achievement on average. The test scores of four-day students in grades three through eight grew slightly less during the school year compared to hundreds of thousands of students in those six states who continued to go to school five days a week. (City students were excluded from the analysis because no city schools had adopted four-day weeks. Only rural, small town and suburban students were included.)

The switch seemed to hurt reading achievement more than math achievement. That was surprising. Reading is easier to do at home while math is a subject that students primarily learn and practice in school. During pandemic school closures and remote learning, for example, math achievement generally suffered more than reading.

The researchers focused on rural students. Rural schools accounted for seven out of 10 schools on the four-day schedule in this study. The types of students in rural communities were also different. They tended to be poorer than in small towns and suburbs and the rural students’ test scores were lower. In the six midwestern and western states in this study, the share of Native American and Hispanic students was higher in rural areas than in small towns and suburbs.

When researchers compared rural students who attended four-day schools with rural students who attended traditional five-day schools, ignoring small town and suburban students altogether, the results suddenly changed. Rural four-day students generally learned as much as rural five-day day students. Statistically, both groups’ test scores rose by about the same amount every year.

By contrast, small town and suburban students who switched to four-day weeks were far worse off than other students in the state. Though it’s less common for small town and suburban schools to switch to four-days –  they constitute only 30 percent of the four-day schools – their students really seemed to be harmed. For example, a quarter of the usual achievement gains that fifth graders typically make in a year disappeared.

The distinctions that the U.S. Census Bureau makes between a rural area and a small town are quite technical. I think of a small town as far from a metropolitan area, but with a bit of commerce and more people than a rural area would have.

This quantitative study of test scores does not explain why students at rural schools are faring better with only four days than students in small towns. NWEA’s Morton, the lead author, has long been studying four-day school weeks and conducted an earlier 2022 study in rural Oklahoma, where she found no academic penalty for the shorter week.

One possible explanation, Morton says, is sports. Many rural athletes and young student fans leave school early on Fridays or skip school altogether because of the great distances to travel to away games. In effect, many five-day students are only getting four-days of instruction in rural America.

“One district we talked to, half the kids would be out on Friday for football,” said Morton. “They would not really have math on Friday, because how can you teach with only half the classroom? So it’s affecting everyone.”

Absences for football games, considered to be part of school, are often “excused.”  Official records don’t reveal that attendance rates are any better at four-day schools because many of the Friday classes that five-day students skip aren’t documented in the attendance data.

Another possible explanation is teaching. The four-day work week is an attractive work perk in rural America that may lure better teachers.

“It is harder for rural districts to get teachers that are highly qualified or honestly, sometimes to get teachers period, into their buildings and to retain them than it is for town or suburban districts,” said Morton. “All of this is anecdotal, but they’re saying in interviews that teachers are happier. They like spending more time with their own children. It gives them time to do things that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to do.”

By this theory, four-day schools may make it easier to hire better teachers, who could accomplish in four days what a less skilled teacher accomplishes in five days.

Four-day weeks are not necessarily better, but five-day weeks have their own drawbacks in rural America: hidden absences, skipped lessons and lower quality teachers.

So what to make of it all? Morton says there are reasons to think that four-day weeks are working better in rural America than elsewhere, but she wouldn’t wholeheartedly recommend it. Hispanic students, who accounted for one out of every six rural students in this study, suffered much more from four-day weeks than white students did. (Native American students, who made up one of every 10 rural students, did relatively better with the four-day week.)

Morton is also worried that rural students may be ultimately harmed academically from the shorter week. In her calculations, she detected hints that even four-day students in rural schools might be learning slightly less than five-day students, but the difference was not statistically significant. A downside to a four-day education could be detected in a larger study with more students.

“We don’t want to say ‘it doesn’t hurt kids’ when it might actually be hurting kids a little bit,” said Morton. “Another thing that could be happening is it could hurt kids more over time. It could be that we haven’t observed it for long enough.”

For schools that are considering a four-day week, the schedule matters. Some schools have been better at preserving instructional time, reallocating the hours across four longer days, Morton told me. Others have struggled to protect every minute of math and reading instruction. Longer hours can also tax young children’s attention spans. It’s a tradeoff.

Historically, schools have shortened school weeks for cost savings. That’s been especially needed in rural communities, which were not only hit with declining tax revenues after the 2008 recession, but continued to suffer education budget cuts because of depopulation and declining student enrollment.

However, the biggest surprise to me in this review of the research is how tiny the cost savings are: 1 to 2 percent.  It does save some money not to run the heat or buses one day a week, but the largest expenses, teacher salaries, stay the same.

The four-day week may ultimately be a popular policy, but not one that’s particularly great for public coffers or learning.

This story about a four-day school week was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The remote-proctored exam that colleges began using widely during the pandemic saw a first big legal test of its own — one that concluded in a ruling applauded by digital privacy advocates.

A federal judge this week sided with a student at Cleveland State University in Ohio, who alleged that a room scan taken before his online test as a proctoring measure was unconstitutional.

Aaron Ogletree, a chemistry student, sat for a test during his spring semester last year. Before starting the exam, he was asked to show the virtual proctor his bedroom. He complied, and the recording data was stored by one of the school’s third-party proctoring tools, Honorlock, according to the ruling documents.

Ogletree then sued his university, alleging that the room scan violated his Fourth Amendment rights protecting U.S. citizens against “unreasonable searches and seizures.” In its defense, Cleveland State argued that room scans are not “searches,” because they are limited in scope, conducted to ensure academic fairness and exam integrity, and not coerced.

U.S. district court Judge J. Philip Calabrese on Monday decided in Ogletree’s favor: Room scans are unconstitutional.

“Mr. Ogletree’s privacy interest in his home outweighs Cleveland State’s interests in scanning his room. Accordingly, the Court determines that Cleveland State’s practice of conducting room scans is unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment,” Judge Calabrese concluded.

Since 2020, COVID-19 restrictions have forced students to take remote exams, so universities have come to rely on browser plug-ins and other software from third-party proctor companies to prevent cheating on tests.

Civil rights attorney Matthew Besser, who represented Ogletree, described the decision as a landmark case in a post on his firm’s blog: “The case appears to be the first in the nation to hold that the Fourth Amendment protects students from unreasonable video searches of their homes before taking a remote test.”

Privacy advocates laud the ruling

Digital privacy advocates have raised red flags over online proctoring services’ alleged civil liberty violations in recent years.

In December 2020, the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a complaint against five popular proctoring services, including Honorlock, for their “invasive” and “deceptive” data collection practices. Fight for the Future, a nonprofit that created the website BanEproctoring.com, called the decision a “major victory.”

The opinion documents state that the Ohio university is not aware of any data breaches related to remote exam recordings, and that access to the video is strictly controlled. Cleveland State University has not yet responded to NPR’s request for comment.

The definition of a “search” is in question

The university contested the fact that remote virtual room scans constituted “searches.” It argued that the scan was a regulatory process unrelated to criminality, with a goal of exam integrity.

The scan of Ogletree’s room lasted no more than a minute, and as little as 10 seconds. The defense argued, according to court documents, that the scan was “brief, only revealed items in plain view, and the student controlled the inspection to the extent that the student chose where in the house to take the exam and where in the room to direct the camera.”

The plaintiff was free to object to the scan, the defense added. A student who refused to perform the exam could still take the test, the school argued, even if opting out meant getting no credit for the exam.

The judge didn’t agree.

“Rooms scans go where people otherwise would not, at least not without a warrant or an invitation. Nor does it follow that room scans are not searches because the technology is ‘in general public use,'” Judge Calabrese said.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Excerpted from “Take Back the Game: How Money and Mania are Ruining Kids’ Sports — and Why It Matters” by Linda Flanagan. Published by Penguin Random House.

There’s no ironclad proof that sports build character. The results of a meta-analysis on the connection between athletics and character development make that clear: “Forty years of research, conducted by more than 20 researchers studying tens of thousands of athletes and non- athletes from youth, high schools, collegiate and Olympic levels, simply does not support the notion of sport as a character-building activity, particularly as it applies to sportsmanship behaviors and moral reasoning ability.”

It’s true that coaches can build cooperative team cultures and reinforce useful habits among players. “But that doesn’t mean they necessarily creep over to class, school, occupation, or family,” explained Jay Coakley, the country’s preeminent sports sociologist.

Furthermore, athletic teams are not the only place for kids to learn how to work together, and it’s impossible to determine which particular experience makes a person highly disciplined, say, or genuinely collaborative. “I played sports all the way through college, and beyond,” he said, “but I did all kinds of other things, too, that have made me who I am.” There’s simply insufficient data to tease out the effect of sports on a young person’s character vis-à-vis other activities and experiences that also shape development.

But that’s not to say that kids don’t learn from sports, or that coaches have no lasting impact on how children mature. Richard Weissbourd, a child and family therapist who runs the Making Caring Common project at Harvard, says that kids make discoveries through sports, but what they absorb is entirely dependent on the context. If a coach degrades players, makes competition too central to the experience, leaves kids out, tolerates backtalk to the referees, and mismanages parents, then kids will pick up destructive lessons. “Sports can be harmful to kids in these conditions,” he said. On the other hand, if the coach is fair and respectful to the team and referees; if she helps kids empathize with players on both teams; if she enables kids to handle loss, and to be grateful, and to respect her opponents, then yes—sports can build character. In short: it all depends.

In the absence of evidence, there are theories and testimonials posited by philosophers, child development experts, and ordinary adults who insist that athletics sculpted their lives.

“My high school sports experiences shaped me into a functioning adult,” Maggie Lynch, now twenty-four, explained in an email.

Aidan Connly, a recent college graduate who played high school football and lacrosse, said, “I learned to never quit and to ignore the noise.”

Jacqui Young, twenty-seven, said playing volleyball, softball, and basketball as a teenager taught her how to work with others, to appreciate her responsibility to the collective. (Group projects in the classroom resonated in a different way: “They made me feel more put-upon than anything,” she said.)

Memories may not be controlled experiments, but the volume and intensity of such reports is striking. Indeed, it seems that every adult who played sports growing up can instantly resurrect a story from the playing field or team bus that had an impact.

Kids can grow from sports in other ways, too. Competitive athletic environments compel them to engage with their own and others’ powerful feelings. Before long, they learn to manage the anger, sadness, embarrassment, and joy that playing evokes. If the sports environment is healthy, kids can also learn how to control their aggression. In games, after all, one team or individual is pitted against another, and during that competition the goal is to defeat the other—aggressively, if need be. But once the contest is over, everyone reverts back to human beings again, maybe even friends, and the aggression has to be shut down. “It’s hard to imagine a more powerful deterrent to violating another human being,” Weissbourd wrote, “than recognizing that our hostile feelings toward another person are a kind of fiction, manufactured by a game, and have nothing to do with him or her at all — that we irrationally invent enemies.”

With the right leadership, sports also can invite other moral virtues, including appreciation for an opponent’s skill, toleration for a weaker player’s mistakes, and respect for an imperfect referee. This kind of “demanding morality,” Weissbourd wrote, builds empathy: children learn that their emotions, no matter how passionate, are not paramount—that others’ feelings and experiences are equally valid.

Philosophy professor Drew Hyland argues that serious engagement in sports also can trigger two profound interior developments: “the experience of deep, passionate commitment and self-knowledge.” Hyland drew on his own time playing basketball to share how deeply it had affected him. “There was no experience in my scholastic or college education that led me to more self-knowledge than my basketball experience, no course or classroom in which I learned more about my capacities, my limitations, where I was willing to compromise, and where I would take my stand.”

One of the most lucid illustrations of self-knowledge gleaned through sports comes from Mark Edmundson, an English professor at UVA and former high school football player. In his 2012 essay on sports and character for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Edmundson explores how playing football drove the kind of moral growth that warrior communities value.

Physically unimpressive — “I was buttery soft around the waist, near-sighted, not especially fast, and not agile at all” — Edmundson nonetheless had the will to stick with the sport, despite the grueling double practices during summer’s dog days and regular beatdowns by the coaches. Flouting the expectations of all, he outlasted more talented athletes and earned a measure of self-respect. “I became a tougher, more daring person,” he wrote.

He also vanquished the self-consciousness that had haunted him and learned to evaluate himself by his own interior standards rather than those imposed from others. It was the regular practices, the hard drills day after day after day, that forced this lasting transition, he wrote. And the resilience and persistence he absorbed during football guided him through the long slog of graduate school and the job search that followed.

But there were rotten lessons, too. The daily orchestrated violence made him more brutal. Given the hierarchical nature of sports, he became more interested in power and reigning over others. He realized that he’d grown accustomed to thinking in terms of physical domination and that this mindset would be hard to let go: “Once the punch in the mouth is part of your repertoire—once you’ve done it a few times as an adult — it never really goes away.” And he could see how the culture he inhabited was aggressively homophobic, obsessed with physical supremacy, and consequently hostile to the value of kindness.

A handful of studies corroborate Edmundson’s experience. Kids who wrestle and play football are 40 percent more likely to be violent outside of sports than their nonathletic peers. “Players are encouraged to be violent outside the sport because they are rewarded for being violent inside it,” said Derek Kreager, who conducted the research. A study involving sixteen hundred male high school athletes found that football and basketball players were two times as likely to abuse their female dating partners as athletes in other sports. Most research on alcohol use among high school athletes shows a positive relationship between the two, though it’s not clear that one “causes” the other. The link is especially strong in higher-income areas.

We ferry our kids to the field for the same reason our parents did: because we believe sports build character. But the evidence is lacking, and the milieu in which kids now play is inclined to do the opposite. Coakley believes that the way youth sports have changed over the past twenty years undermines character development. “Sports have gotten more cutthroat and competitive among kids and parents,” he said.

“Some kids survive the system because they’ve joined other activities,” he added. “They’ve made it in spite of sports and become a pretty good twenty-three-year-old.”

To the extent that there’s consensus on sport’s contribution to character, then, it appears to be this: what kids glean from athletics depends entirely on a shifting and tangled array of variables. Community values, parental attitudes toward sports, the coaches’ manner and methods, the child’s own temperament and training, and countless other intangibles determine what kids learn from athletics. Sports themselves are empty vessels, imbued with the meanings we attach to them.

Linda Flanagan is a freelance journalist, researcher, and former cross-country and track coach. A graduate of Lehigh University, Flanagan holds master’s degrees from Oxford University and the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy and was an analyst for the National Security Program at Harvard University. She is a founding board member of the New York City chapter of the Positive Coaching Alliance and a 2020–21 advisory group member for the Aspen Institute’s Reimagining School Sports initiative, and her writing on sports has appeared in The Atlantic and Runner’s World. She is a regular contributor to MindShift. A mother of three and a lifelong athlete, Flanagan lives in New Jersey.

Students across the country are moving into dorms or getting ready to board school buses for their first day of class.

But unlike the past two years, COVID-19 numbers are down nationally and most students are walking in the school doors without masks. From kindergarten all the way through college, educators are trying to convey a sense of normalcy, and for Dr. Richard Martini, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the University of Utah, that push comes with added baggage.

“For some of these kids, [there is] a good bit of anxiety around getting back into the classroom on a regular basis,” he says, “They’re understanding and trying to deal with everything that has happened over the last two years.”

While the pandemic caused widespread disruption to learning, one of the biggest concerns, for students of all ages, has been how it has affected their mental health. High numbers of teenagers have reported persistently feeling sad or hopeless, and the Biden Administration has tried to make student mental health a priority.

For parents concerned about how their students are handling the new school year, here are five suggestions mental health experts say can help them monitor their child’s mental health:

1. Be proactive

Whether your student is starting pre-K or high school, there are many ways to be proactive. Martini says a lot of anxiety for students comes from the unknown, so help walk them through the steps – sometimes literally.

“Give the child an opportunity to walk around the school grounds,” he says. “If you’re talking about kindergartners … if there’s a playground that’s adjacent to it, get used to being around the building.”

If you don’t have access to the actual school grounds early, looking at a map in “street view” on your phone or computer can help. Get them used to talking about class or recess. Ask them what they want to eat for lunch. The more questions, Martini says, the more real it becomes: “What are they excited about? What are they looking forward to?”

Athletics and arts programs can help, too. Even if students are nervous about the classroom, he says, getting them to pinpoint other aspects of school life that excite them can relieve the academic stress and provide outlets for students to express themselves.

2. Ask about the good and the bad

Asking questions is the best way to understand how students are doing. But for older students, especially, if you’re only asking about the good things, you may not get the full picture.

“When you’re talking to your student, ask them about what’s going well, but also be very clear and ask what isn’t going as well,” says Nathaan Demers. He’s a clinical psychologist in Denver and helps run YOU at College, an app designed to connect students with mental health resources. He says, don’t shy away from the hard questions with your kids – ask them about the challenges they’re facing, too.

Demers tell parents: Pay particular attention to how you phrase the questions. Using “what” instead of “why” can remove any hint of accusation. That leaves room for students to open up about their feelings and relieves the pressure some students feel to be having a good time.

For example, you might want to ask “What isn’t going well?” instead of “Why aren’t you enjoying [school]?’ ”

3. Keep an eye on changing behavior

“One thing that can admittedly be challenging,” Demers acknowledges, is that “a lot of the common signs of the onset of mental health symptoms are very much those of major transitions.”

Things like changes in sleep, increased irritability, increased weight gain or changes in appetite can signal to clinicians that there may be an underlying issue. But for incoming college students, he adds, “a lot of those things can naturally happen … with students going away from home for the first time.”

There is no perfect answer, so Demers says to trust your gut. “Parents know their kids better than anyone else,” and often they can sense when something isn’t right. “There’s a difference between, ‘Oh, my son or daughter is having a challenging day or a challenging week’ versus ‘something just seems off.’ ”

For younger students, one of the most common warning signs is irritability with school or teachers, says Martini at the University of Utah. He notes that for younger students, irritability with teachers has been a recent trend in classrooms. “Particularly when you’re dealing with young children, there is a tendency to blame the school teachers and principals for some of the challenges they’re having,” he says.

4. It’s not just COVID

The increase in anxiety and mental health issues isn’t solely a result of the pandemic. The number of students struggling with mental health has been rising for years, says Sarah Lipson, an assistant professor of public health at Boston University. She helps lead an annual survey of hundreds of colleges around the country to get a better picture of student mental health.

“You wouldn’t look at a bar chart and say, you know ‘what started to happen in spring of 2020?’ ” she explains. “That’s not the case. We instead see this gradual but problematic trend that continued through COVID.”

According to her department’s survey, the number of college students experiencing mental health issues first spiked in the 2015-2016 school year and has been going up since.

While the past two years have been especially challenging, Lipson says not to belittle students’ feelings by explaining them away with the pandemic. In an academic year where there is a push for normalcy some students may not be ready to return to business as usual.

Lipson says to keep an eye on those students in particular: “One of the most powerful specific symptoms that we see— it’s also the strongest predictor of students dropping out — and that’s a lack of interest in their usual activities.”

5. Lend a hand

Parents can help by identifying the problem and offering solutions. Ultimately, resources are there to help students of all ages deal with their mental health, but the daunting task of finding the right one can keep students away.

“If you cut off your finger right now,” Demers says. “You know to go to the emergency room. But a lot of times when students have changes in their appetite, aren’t sleeping or feeling more frustrated, a lot of times students don’t know that [those are] signs of depression or anxiety.”

All of the experts we spoke with recommend that parents know about the resources available, and be ready to step in to help their children find the help they need.

Some in-person resources include talking with a counselor at school or finding an on-campus group like Active Minds. But often virtual resources are the easiest first step. Demers’ app YOU at College is one example – students can input their symptoms and find recommendations for nearby resources. In a crisis situation the easiest option for families is to text HOME to 741741 to connect via phone with a trained counselor.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

One of the most vexing dilemmas for teachers is finding the best way to respond to students who misbehave. Experts argue over whether the best classroom-management approach is a consistent, strict discipline or a more forgiving response where students discuss their grievances with an adult’s guidance, a process called restorative justice. For-profit software companies sell systems to encourage teachers to award points or stars for good behavior and deduct them for misbehavior, but critics complain that the constant monitoring can feel too controlling and public shaming can be discouraging. Who can blame new teachers for feeling confused and ill-prepared to manage classroom disruptions?

Education researchers have been studying ways to prevent behavior problems from erupting in the first place, much like the field of preventive medicine aims to help people live healthier lives to minimize incidence of heart disease, cancer and diabetes. Generously doling out praise has proved to be somewhat effective in previous studies. In this column, I’m going to explain an idea that steals a page from marriage counseling: perspective taking. Its advocates advise teachers to put themselves in the shoes of their most perplexing, misbehaving students and simply imagine what they are thinking and feeling.

It might seem far-fetched that a simple, imaginative exercise inside the mind of the person who isn’t misbehaving – the teacher – would make any difference to the classroom atmosphere. But Johns Hopkins education professor Hunter Gehlbach found that students of teachers who were briefly trained in this thought experiment reported better relationships with their teachers and earned higher grades.

“We know, unequivocally, one of the best things that anyone can do for classroom management and for teachers to be effective at their jobs across a whole array of outcomes, is to improve teacher-student relationships,” said Gehlbach.

His theory, and hope, is that students’ need or desire to misbehave might be reduced if they feel a positive connection with the teacher at the front of the classroom.

Gehlbach, together with two other researchers, put perspective taking to a real world test at a charter school network in the northeastern United States. About 50 teachers, in kindergarten through ninth grade, were randomly selected to receive a single, 90-minute workshop. Another 50 teachers would eventually also go through the same training, but the staggered timing allowed the researchers to study what happened in the classrooms of the teachers who received the training first compared to classrooms of teachers who were waiting for it.

The session resembled a theater workshop. Teachers sat in pairs and were instructed to begin by thinking about their most frustrating student, with whom they often had conflicts.

“There’s some child who’s on your roster, who is only one child, but takes up like 70, 80, 90 percent of your emotional bandwidth,” said Gehlbach, a former high school history teacher.

Certain students jumped to the front of the brain of more than one teacher; several teachers had the same exact perplexing student in mind.

Teachers were then told to think of a particularly puzzling behavior or an incident with the student and tell her workshop partner about it.  “We invite them to really let loose, say all the things that are frustrating and maddening about the child,” said Gehlbach.

Then, the teacher was asked to retell the story from the child’s perspective. If I were a teacher in this workshop, playing the role of the student, I might say, “Man, Ms. Barshay always picks on me. I think it’s because she doesn’t like me. Like, clearly, she’s out to get me. And I think she even got the other teacher down the hall to pick on me too, because she’s just that mean.”

“It doesn’t work for every single teacher,” Gehlbach said, “but the juxtaposition of the two perspectives gets a lot of them to internalize, ‘Oh, right. This is more of a two-way street. And I’ve gotten sort of sucked into my own perspective, a little too much.’”

With the partner’s help, the two teachers brainstorm reasons for why the student might have acted this way. Maybe the parents put too much pressure on the kid. Maybe the parents are going through a divorce.

“We don’t come to any sure conclusions,” said Gehlbach. “The final step is to go forth and get more information.”

A couple of months later, teachers who had taken the workshop reported more positive relationships with their students than teachers who hadn’t taken it. Students in their classrooms, similarly, reported more positive relationships with their teachers. Most importantly, students’ grades improved, a possible sign that improved teacher-student relationships were translating into more motivated students who wanted to learn and work more. However, while grades improved, math and reading test scores did not.

Another big disappointment was that the number of disciplinary incidents were no different among middle school students whose teachers had been trained compared with those who hadn’t; improved teacher-student relationships don’t necessarily translate into better student behavior. (The researchers only had discipline records for middle school students so they weren’t able to perform the same analysis for younger kids.)

The paper, “​​Social Perspective Taking: A Professional Development Induction to Improve Teacher-Student Relationships and Student Learning,” has been peer-reviewed and is slated for publication in the Journal of Educational Psychology this summer.

“It’s not bullet proof,” said Gehlbach. “But we have some evidence that they’re probably learning more from this teacher as a result of this intervention.” Gehlbach calls his classroom experiment a “proof of concept” and hopes to see if it can be repeated in other classrooms around the country

A 90-minute session on understanding someone else’s perspective will never be a complete answer to student discipline.  And, more broadly, all of these preventive discipline ideas are not a substitute for the need to react to student disruptions in the moment. But it’s an interesting theory that appears to do no harm, and this thought experiment might be a helpful addition to the teacher’s toolbox.

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

Talk about a storybook ending.

Author Jamil Jan Kochai searched for more than a decade for Susan Lung — the second-grade teacher who had changed his life over 20 years earlier. And on Saturday night, in one of those “life is better than fiction” twists, the two were finally reunited at one of his book-reading events.

“I pretty much learned how to read and write in English because of her, and if it wasn’t for Mrs. Lung, I don’t know what would have happened to me,” Kochai, who still finds it difficult to call his former teacher by her first name, told NPR.

“I feel like everything that I’ve done up to this point — all the success that I’ve had, the fact that I’m a novelist today — it all started with Mrs. Lung all the way back in 1999, when I was 7 years old,” he added.

Kochai is the author of 99 Nights in Logar, a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. He is currently promoting his second book, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories. His work has been published and praised in many of the nation’s most esteemed publications. But for much of his early life, he could hardly speak English.

The writer was born in a refugee camp for Afghans in Peshawar, Pakistan, and his family moved to California when he was just a year old. At home, they spoke mostly Pashto and some Farsi, so by the time he reached first grade, Kochai said, he was at a total loss.

As a result, he said, “I associated school and learning with punishment and with exclusion.”

He fell further behind during the summer of 1999, when the family spent several months in Afghanistan.

“I fell in love with my parents’ home village in Logar, but pretty much everything that I learned in first grade, I ended up forgetting by the time the summer was over,” Kochai explained.

The magic of Mrs. Lung — and all the devoted teachers out there

Then came Mrs. Lung, who quickly realized that Kochai was deeply struggling at Alyce Norman Elementary School, both academically and socially.

“I could see he was sharp as a tack, but it was hard for him,” Lung told NPR.

“Not only did he have to deal with forgetting all the English that he knew, but he had to deal with the kids who couldn’t understand him.”

The two got to work, meeting for one-on-one lessons nearly every day after school. By the end of the school year, Kochai said, he was winning reading-comprehension competitions.

Thinking back on the experience, Lung said it’s not an especially unique situation.

“There are many thousands of teachers doing the same thing all over, and they’re doing it for the love of it. Not for any kind of kudos but because we have a passion for it,” she said.

Lung added: “It’s just incredible to see their literacy grow by leaps and bounds. To see when they’re able to communicate with their little friends, which I think is a big part of learning English or any other language.”

The problem with not being on a first-name basis with your elementary school teachers

Lung and Kochai lost touch at the end of their year together. Kochai’s father got a job in another city and the boy moved on, albeit with a voracious new love of reading and writing. By the time he reached high school, Kochai’s parents encouraged him to find his former teacher to thank her. But despite his efforts, he failed to track her down.

“Part of it was that I didn’t know her first name. She was always just Mrs. Lung to me, so when I called places to ask about her, they couldn’t find any records of her,” he said, laughing.

But Kochai kept trying through college and afterward. Still, he came up empty.

Then, while promoting his first novel, he wrote an essay for Literary Hub magazine touching on the transformative impact that Lung had on his life. Lung’s neurosurgeon happened to read it, and during her next visit, the physician asked the now-retired educator, “Did you ever teach at Alyce Norman Elementary School?”

It was Lung’s husband who ultimately found Kochai. “He found me on Facebook and reached out to me out of the blue,” Kochai said.

They made plans for a phone call that same night.

“I finally got the chance after all these years to express to her how much I still thought of her and how much she meant to me,” Kochai said, adding that he also managed to get both of his parents on the call. “She was just the same Mrs. Lung. Just as sweet and kind and warm as ever. And we were all tearing up. It was a really emotional, lovely night,” he said.

It was the height of the coronavirus pandemic, and they promised to meet in person as soon as things returned to normal. But as life does, Kochai said, one thing after another seemed to get in the way, and the reunion never materialized.

Reunited and it feels so good

“Again, it was my husband who had the idea, to go to the reading on Saturday,” Lung said.

Lung’s husband had seen a Facebook post about Kochai’s new book and suggested they make the drive to a reading in Davis, California.

“I had no idea they were going to be there,” Kochai said, sounding absolutely delighted.

“I don’t know how I didn’t see her before, but Mrs. Lung was sitting in the front row. I mean, it had been 20 to 22 years since the last time I’d seen her,” he reasoned.

They hugged and he gushed, and she asked him to sign her copy of his first novel.

“And I got to leave a little note for her explaining how much she meant to me. And it was a really lovely evening,” Kochai added.

They exchanged numbers again, and now they’ve made a new plan. “We’re going to have a big family dinner next week!” Kochai said.

In the meantime, Lung has some homework: “I am part of the way through his first book and I just got his second book at the reading, so I’ll be reading that when I’m finished.”

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