We’ve all seen the headlines – about book bans, school board shoutfests and new laws to limit how teachers can talk about gender identity or racism. America is deeply divided, and those fissures are ripping through classrooms – with teachers trapped straddling the chasms.

But are parents, teachers and the public feeling as divided as the headlines make it seem?

A pair of new, nationally-representative NPR/Ipsos polls reveals division, to be sure: A majority of Republican parents worry broadly about what children are being taught, compared to a minority of Democratic parents. There’s also division within the Republican Party around how to address that worry and whether banning books or restricting teachers is appropriate.

But there’s a surprising consensus among the general public too: a sweeping respect for teachers and broad agreement that they’re overworked and should be better paid.

One poll, of the general public, included 1,316 respondents with an oversampling of K-12 parents (452); the other surveyed 510 K-12 teachers. We sorted through the results and smooshed them thematically into a handful of the most interesting takeaways.

Before we start, a reminder: Polling is a butter knife not a scalpel, and the margins of error here are worth keeping in mind: +/- 3.0 percentage points at the 95% confidence level for all general public respondents, +/- 4.8 percentage points for K-12 parents, and +/- 5.0 for K-12 teachers. Now then:

1. Parents, teachers and the general public agree: Educators are overworked and underpaid

Just 19% of teachers surveyed believe they are paid fairly, and 93% say they’re asked to do too much for the pay they receive.

“We need to help support teachers as much as we can so that the good ones aren’t burning out and, you know, finding waitressing jobs because they can either get more money or they just don’t want to deal with it,” says Sylvia Gonzales, a longtime teacher in the Dallas area.

The surprise here isn’t that teachers think they’re underpaid; it’s that much of the public agrees.

Just 22% of the general public believe teachers are paid fairly, and three-quarters (75%) say teachers are “asked to do too much work for the pay they receive.”

“Even if they’re getting paid a million dollars, they’re not getting paid what they’re worth,” says Mike Kerr, a registered Republican and father of two children attending public schools near Fort Collins, Colo. “I can’t even tell you, like, I hold teachers in such high regard. Every single one of my kids’ teachers, from kindergarten now through seventh grade, I have absolutely adored.“

With nearly half of public schools having at least one teacher vacancy at the beginning of this school year, the fact that three-quarters of survey respondents now agree teachers are overworked and nearly 7 in 10 say they are underpaid doesn’t bode well for local and regional teacher shortages.

Like Kerr, most parents and the general public – 90% – also say they believe “teaching is a worthwhile profession that deserves respect.”

Little surprise, though, that two-thirds (66%) of parents admit they would be “concerned” about their child’s financial future if they wanted to become a teacher.

2. Americans say they trust teachers to make classroom decisions, but it’s complicated

With all the stories these days, about parents and activists challenging teachers over a host of classroom issues, you might think trust in teachers is low.

But you’d be wrong. Three-quarters of parents – and the general public – agree “teachers are professionals who should be trusted to make decisions about classroom curriculum.”

This question of trust is complicated though.

When asked who should be primarily responsible for decisions about what is taught in public schools, respondents splintered dramatically, with the public and parents broadly aligned.

Thirty percent say teachers should be primarily responsible, while about 27% side with parents and about 26% side with school boards. What should we make of this wild variation?

“In the abstract, people trust teachers,” says Mallory Newall, a vice president at Ipsos, but Republicans and Republican parents “are showing some signs of concern.“

For example, just 15% of Republicans overall say teachers should be primarily responsible for what’s taught in schools; 48% say that power should fall to parents. For Democrats, the dynamic flips: 46% say teachers should be primarily responsible while just 9% think parents should.

When we asked teachers who they think should be primarily responsible for decisions about what is taught, perhaps unsurprisingly, 60% side with their fellow teachers, while just 15% defer to school boards and even fewer, 10%, side with parents.

3. Republicans appear divided over political intervention in education

Republican officials in many states, including Florida, Iowa, Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma and Georgia, have waged pitched battles over what can and cannot be discussed in the classroom.

In Florida, for example, lawmakers and Gov. Ron DeSantis have led a handful of controversial incursions into state education policy, threatening teachers who cross new legal lines in conversations about race, racism and gender identity with students.

To be clear, many parents do feel anxious about what’s going on in classrooms. Sixty-five percent of Republican parents and 46% of Independent parents say they’re worried about what their child is being taught or will be taught. Just 30% of Democrats who are parents share that concern.

But this new NPR/Ipsos poll of parents and the public suggests Republicans are divided over efforts to put that worry into action by controlling what happens inside classrooms.

When it comes to state lawmakers “creating policies to restrict what subjects teachers and students can discuss,” 38% of Republicans are onboard, while 49% are opposed. At the same time, nearly half (48%) of Republicans approve of school boards limiting what subjects teachers and students can discuss, while 39% are opposed.

Odunayo Ajayi, a parent in Maryland, supports efforts to prevent teachers from discussing gender identity with students. He worries giving kids too much access to information, too much educational liberty, can overwhelm them. For example, if young people are told that gender is fluid, that “you can be whatever you want to be,” Ajayi says, “that is too much liberty.”

But it’s clear in the poll data and interviews that some Republican respondents feel differently.

“We’re really tying [teachers’] hands,” says Amanda Hickerson, a Republican parent in southeast Virginia. “I wouldn’t go to my mechanic and tell him how to fix my car… So why are we doing this to our teachers? It just doesn’t make any sense to me.”

In our NPR/Ipsos survey of teachers, educators say they feel the same. Ninety-three percent believe teachers are professionals who should be trusted to make decisions about classroom curriculum. Several veteran teachers tell NPR they feel hamstrung by federal, state and local officials, usually non-educators, telling them what they can and cannot do.

“When I first started teaching, teachers had a great deal more autonomy in their classrooms. I believe that [they] were treated more as professionals, recognized as experts in their field,” says Leeann Bennett, who has been teaching for more than two decades and now works in an alternative middle school on the Oregon coast, a job she says she loves.

Bennett says current efforts to limit teachers miss the whole point of teaching:

To help children learn how to think, not what to think.

“I always let [my students] know, ‘I’m not trying to make you think like I do,’ ” Bennett says. ” ‘I’m trying to help you figure out what you think.’ And when teachers get hamstrung… this is a disservice to our democracy and it’s certainly a disservice to growing minds.”

Scott Lone, a veteran teacher outside Milwaukee, takes particular issue with efforts in other states to prevent teachers from discussing sexuality and gender identity with their students.

Lone is openly gay but didn’t come out until he was 39.

“I know the loneliness and despair that many of our students who are part of the LGBT community experience on a daily basis,” Lone says. “All it takes is one teacher… to be a beacon of hope for that child, and that child will flourish. And if we can’t be that beacon of hope, then we have done a disservice to the teaching profession. We have done a disservice to humanity. And we really ought to be ashamed of ourselves.”

4. Democrats, Independents and Republicans oppose book bans

When it comes to state lawmakers removing certain books from schools, such bans have the support of just 5% of Democrats, 16% of Independents and 35% of Republicans. Fifty-two percent of Republicans oppose such efforts.

“Anything that depicts pornography should be removed. That’s not part of a public school,” says Heather Randell, who homeschools her 13-year-old son in the Dallas area. Randell identifies as a conservative-leaning Christian, and says “anything that is displaying actual sex acts, outside of a National Geographic special on reproduction, should not be in a library.”

But Randell disagrees with broader efforts to ban books based on their treatment of race.

“There’s a lot of books that I think that are politically charged or race charged,” Randell says. “Those do not offend me at all because that opens up a kid’s mind one way or the other. I’m OK with opening up their minds. Just don’t do sex.”

While Republicans are more likely to support local school boards doing the banning – 41% versus just 7% of Democrats and 21% of Independents – 46% of Republicans still oppose such efforts.

Kerr, the Colorado Republican, says, “as a child growing up, a lot of the books that I read, maybe I didn’t enjoy them, but I was forced to read them. But they opened my eyes to the world.”

Native Son by Richard Wright, for example, “a book that’s probably no longer allowed in schools, but it really opened my eyes, coming from where I grew up in a farming community to a city with other races and other cultures,” Kerr says.

On the subject of gender identity, several Republican respondents tell NPR they worry that efforts to limit what teachers can say – as one new Florida policy does – sends the wrong message to children.

“It’s just playing into teaching kids that, you know, somebody is different. Let’s get rid of them,” says Stephanie, a mother of four children in the Chicago area and a registered Republican. “I just think the better thing to do would be to teach kids about different people and how to accept everyone.”

Stephanie asked that we not use her last name because many in her community disagree with her views, and she worries her comments could hurt her family.

5. Public perception of teachers has gotten worse

Half the general public in our NPR/Ipsos poll say the public’s perceptions of teachers have gotten worse in the last 10 years. But it’s hard to know what to make of that. Keep in mind, these are the same respondents who say, overwhelmingly, that teachers deserve respect and aren’t paid fairly.

So support for teachers among individual respondents is strong – quite strong – even as many believe the broader public’s perception of them has gotten worse.

Teachers themselves tell a similar story. Seventy-three percent say the public’s perception of them has gotten worse over the last decade, and 66% say their working conditions have worsened.

As something of a surprise, teachers are slightly more likely than the general public (46% vs. 41%) to say the quality of public education in their area has also gotten worse in the last 10 years.

What explains all this?

Newall, at Ipsos, has one theory: The bitterness of the classroom culture wars – led by an outspoken minority of politicians, parents and activists, who, our poll suggests, may not speak for a majority of Republicans, let alone a majority of Americans – may be poisoning the well.

“It’s really this focus, I think, on some of the most extreme voices that has made teachers feel persecuted or feel like their job has gotten harder,” Newall says, “and that’s not how the vast majority of the American public feels.”

According to a recent review of 1,000-plus requests to remove books from schools during the 2021-’22 school year, The Washington Post found the majority were filed by 11 people.

6. Most teachers don’t regret teaching

Ending on a slightly more hopeful note, 80% of teachers surveyed say they’re happy they became teachers – despite widespread agreement that they’re underpaid.

How do you reconcile that happiness with so much bad news?

Well, 95% of teachers surveyed say they became teachers because they wanted “to do good.”

“For many, teaching is a passion. That was clear in our polling five years ago,” Newall says, referring to an NPR/Ipsos teacher poll from 2018. “They know it’s a hard job and they feel that the public’s views of their job have only gotten worse over time. And yet they still love the job and would choose to do it again. And that’s passion.”

Oregon teacher Leeann Bennett says she’s left teaching, several times, but keeps coming back.

“I come home every single day just emotionally wiped out because I am on point for seven and a half hours with kids, and I don’t get a break,” Bennett says, but it’s also deeply fulfilling.

“My job is fantastic,” Bennett says. “I love [it.]”

Edited by: Nicole Cohen
Visual design and data graphics by: LA Johnson and Alyson Hurt
Reporting contributed by: Janet W. Lee

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

If you haven’t heard about the Black girl who won the first national spelling bee in the U.S. 115 years ago, you’re not alone: even many in her family didn’t know about Marie C. Bolden’s feat until after she died, decades later.

“It’s astounding to me” that she never talked about winning a gold medal in front of thousands of people, Bolden’s grandson, Mark Brown, told NPR.

But back in 1908, Bolden’s victory made national news and upended racist stereotypes, less than 50 years after the Civil War. The 14-year-old did it by being perfect, spelling 500 words flawlessly to lead her hometown team, Cleveland, Ohio, to victory in the city’s then-new Hippodrome Theater.

“She never talked about this award, this amazing accomplishment,” Brown said. “But even Booker T. Washington mentioned [it] in his speeches.”

Bolden’s win was a national sensation

Boleden’s win was dramatic and unprecedented: Cleveland’s team was trailing in a field that included teams from New Orleans, Pittsburgh and Erie, Pa., near the end of the contest, according to contemporary accounts. But then Bolden vaulted her team to the top prize.

She never showed off the gold medal she won — in fact, her family isn’t sure what became of it — but in interviews after her win, Bolden told reporters she had studied hard for the competition, saying she wanted to help her city win, and that her mother and father wanted her to win.

“When I felt nervous at the Hippodrome, it steadied me to think of these things,” she was quoted telling The Plain Dealer. “I just kind of gritted my teeth and made up my mind that I wouldn’t miss a word.”

It was only after Bolden died that her family realized her place in history. Going through a box of her belongings, Brown says, they found a newspaper clipping from The Plain Dealer relating the story of the Black mail carrier’s daughter who out-spelled hundreds of white kids.

After her stunning victory, Bolden was hailed by “a storm of applause” and congratulations from hundreds of people, including members of the team from New Orleans, according to Indiana’s South Bend Tribune.

Bolden’s story has only emerged in recent years

Cleveland hosted the spelling contest in June 1908, using it as a marquee event to kick off the National Education Association’s conference. The contest is recognized as the first nationwide spelling bee by Guinness World Records — which also notes Bolden’s role.

The famous Scripps National Spelling Bee, which began in 1925, held its finals this week. Bolden’s accomplishment drew renewed attention in 2021, when Zaila Avant-garde became the first African American to win the Scripps contest.

Bolden’s story then drew the interest of Babbel, the language-learning software company, which contacted Brown after researching his grandmother’s win.

“Her parents and friends helped her memorize words, and she read a newspaper each day to perfect her spelling,” said Malcolm Massey, a language expert at Babbel. “It’s a blueprint for today’s would-be Spelling Bee champions.”

The 1908 bee also became a magnet for racism

Marie Bolden knew prejudice well; in fact, it was one of the words contestants were asked to spell. Her spelling rivals included a team from New Orleans, a squad that nearly didn’t compete at all, as its segregationist leaders balked at the inclusion of a Black student.

New Orleans officials knew there was a chance that an integrated team might compete at the spelling bee. As NOLA.com has reported, when one school board member considered how the team might respond to such circumstances, he replied, “Go ahead and knock the n—– out.”

Of such sentiments, Brown says, “It’s like, holy crap, these are young kids. What are you doing?” He added, “It’s hard to fathom now, that people would be treated like that.”

After Bolden’s win, furious members of the school board of New Orleans voted to censure its superintendent, Warren Easton. As the Black newspaper The Seattle Republican reported, the board passed a resolution stating in part, “we deeply deplore and regret the unfortunate occurrence at Cleveland and the pitting of our children against a Negro.”

Weeks later, Black residents of New Orleans were set to host a spelling bee in Bolden’s honor, but the mayor ordered it canceled.

The treatment of Black people in the U.S. eventually prompted Bolden and her family to move to Canada, Brown said. That process started with his grandfather telling his father to fight for Canada in World War II, rather than for the U.S., “because they didn’t treat colored soldiers very well,” Brown said.

Brown, 68, currently lives just outside of Hamilton, Ontario. As for how his family now views Bolden, who died in 1981, Brown said his adult daughters, Jackie and Stacey, are “amazed at the strength of this great-grandmother of theirs.”

“I think there’s a great sense of pride in the fact that our family history is based on sacrifice and people being adventurous, and taking on a new life, and not letting things hold them back.”

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

One of the most hotly contested teaching practices concerns a single minute of math class. 

Should teachers pull out their stopwatches and administer one-page worksheets in addition, subtraction, multiplication and division? Speed drills are such a routine part of the weekly rhythms of many math classrooms that they’re often called Mad Minute Mondays. Critics say these timed drills aren’t useful and instead provoke math anxiety in many children. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics urges teachers to “avoid” timed tests. But advocates insist that these tests, which last one to five minutes, help children memorize math facts, freeing up their brains to tackle more challenging math problems. 

This long-running debate captured my attention again because a group of more than a dozen education researchers, who founded an organization they call the “Science of Math,” declared that the stopwatch skeptics are wrong. The researchers built an entire webpage to set the record straight and devoted a section of a 2022 paper to explaining why it’s a myth that timed tests cause anxiety. A few readers contacted me after I first wrote about the Science of Math movement earlier in May 2023, urging me to look at the group’s claims about timed tests. After looking at the research, I think the evidence is not quite as clear as the Science of Math group indicates. 

The group argues there is no evidence that timed tests cause math anxiety. They also contend that timed tests improve math performance. Some researchers contest both points.

“Time tests don’t cause math anxiety?” said Jo Boaler, an education professor at Stanford University who is a prominent opponent of timed tests. “I could counter their studies with many more that show the opposite. And yes, you could conclude it’s a contested field, that there’s different evidence. But you can’t conclude that this is a myth.”

Dueling evidence

There isn’t much dispute about the lack of empirical evidence. I interviewed more than a half dozen math experts who confirmed there aren’t well-designed experiments that prove timed tests cause math anxiety. The Science of Math group could find only two experimental studies that have attempted to test the hypothesis and neither concluded that tests produce anxiety. 

Math anxiety is difficult to measure, and even children who enjoy timed drills may experience an elevated heart rate, an aspect of anxiety, as they race through a sheet of sums. Distinguishing productive adrenaline rush from detrimental anxiety isn’t easy. It’s also complicated to disentangle whether timed tests are making matters worse for children who already have math anxiety from other causes. There’s evidence for and against even within studies. 

Ideally, you would need to design a multi-year study — where some children were randomly given speed drills and others not, but were all taught the same way — and see what their math achievement and math anxiety levels were at the end of high school. That study doesn’t exist. 

What does exist are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of studies that document the stories of people who describe how much they hated timed tests. Interview excerpts like this one from a 1999 study of college students who were training to become math teachers are typical:

“If I am timed, I get nervous and forget everything. I do the ones I know, but then I get stressed that I’m not thinking fast enough and forget. I worry about finishing, and I can’t remember it even if I do know it. It is horrible. I get nervous just thinking about it.”

Others explained how they decided they weren’t a “math person” during these time-pressured moments and lost interest in the subject. 

First-person testimonials are sufficient evidence for some that timed tests are harmful. For others, subjective reflections like this, no matter how many and how emotionally compelling, still fall short of scientific proof. At the same time, we also don’t have compelling scientific evidence to prove that timed tests aren’t harming children. I think it remains unknown. 

Citation clash

Several math education experts questioned the Science of Math group’s scientific evidence on their second claim, that “timed tactics improve math performance.” One critic, Rachel Lambert, an associate professor in both special education and mathematics education at University of California Santa Barbara, had one of her classes analyze the group’s citations about timed tests, as an assignment on how to analyze education research. She showed me a spreadsheet of instances where the citations didn’t back their claims. In some cases, the studies contradicted their claims and found that students performed worse under timed conditions. “They’re calling themselves the Science of Math,” said Lambert. “But they’re not being careful in their citations.”

I found several of the citations confusing, too. Corey Peltier, an assistant professor of special education at the University of Oklahoma and one of the founders of the Science of Math group, explained that the primary purpose of the webpage and the article was to dispel the myth that timed tests and other timed activities cause anxiety. “We weren’t writing about how timing affects math performance,” he said via email. “Rather we were writing about whether timing causes math anxiety.”

Confusing citations or not, the more pressing question for math teachers and parents is whether there is evidence in favor of timed tests. The U.S. Department of Education seems to side with the Science of Math folks and against the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. A 2021 guide for teachers on how to assist elementary school students who struggle with math recommends regular timed activities – not necessarily tests – to help children build fluency with addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. The What Works Clearinghouse, a unit of the Department of Education that vets research, and an expert panel found 27 studies to back timed practice and called that a “strong” level of evidence.

Games vs. the stopwatch

These 27 studies suggest that timed activities – not in isolation, but in conjunction with larger interventions – help children learn math. In one 2013 study, struggling first graders received math tutoring three times a week and were split into two groups. One played untimed games to reinforce the lessons. The other was subjected to speed practice, where the children worked in groups to try to answer as many math flashcards correctly as possible within 60 seconds. Each time they were encouraged to “meet or beat” their previous score. After 16 weeks, the children in the speed practice group had much higher math achievement than the children who had played untimed games.

Children in the speed group answered more math facts correctly each day, the researchers found. The sheer volume of correct responses helped the children commit more math facts to long-term memory, according to Lynn Fuchs, who led the study. Cognitive scientists call that spaced retrieval practice, a proven way of building long-term memories, and children in the speed group got more of it. 

“That gives children an advantage as they progress through the math curriculum,” said Fuchs, a professor of education at Vanderbilt University. “A lot of kids will develop fluency on their own without any fluency building practice. But to say we can’t do that in classrooms is to deny the opportunity to develop fluency for a significant portion of children.”

Fuchs and other advocates question why timed practice is so controversial in math when it’s common in other fields. Musicians repeat scales by the rapid tick of a metronome and athletes do speed drills to build muscle memory. “In all walks of life, the strongest musicians, the most skillful athletes, they do drills and practice, drill and practice,” said Fuchs.

Opponents of timed tests also want children to automatically know that seven times eight is 56 instead of conceptually thinking it out each time (7+7+7+7+7+7+7+7), but they say that there are games and other less stressful ways to do it. Fuchs’s study is one of the few to directly test timed versus untimed conditions and we need more studies to replicate her findings before we can conclude that speed is considerably more effective and harmless to children.

Both sides of this debate are concerned with working memory, the ability to temporarily hold information in your head in order to process it, think and solve. One side worries that timed tests can produce so much anxiety that it overwhelms the working memory and prevents a child from learning. The other side wants to free up working memory to handle more complicated math problems by making basic arithmetic calculations automatic, and it believes the most effective road to automaticity is through speed drills. While the causes of math anxiety are debated and mysterious, many in the pro-drill camp suspect that children might feel less math anxiety if they became more proficient in the subject, which is something that drills might help accomplish.

Advice for math teachers

What can classroom teachers take away from this debate? I turned to a veteran researcher, Art Baroody, professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who spent his career studying the best ways to teach counting, numbers and arithmetic concepts to young children.

He agrees that timed tests can be used effectively, but he is apprehensive about a blanket recommendation for teachers to use them. “Timed tests are an educational tool and like any tool can be used to good, no, or bad effect,” he said. “Unfortunately, the tool is often misused with poor or even devastating results. I have seen the damage timed tests can do to some children.”

Baroody thinks it’s critical that children first understand conceptually what addition and subtraction mean and develop number sense before they are given timed tests. Too often students are taught mathematical operations through rote memorization, like random numbers, he said, and arithmetic learned this way is easily forgotten, no matter how much it’s drilled.

But once a child understands the math, he believes that timed worksheets are beneficial. Baroody said that if he were teaching in an elementary school classroom, he would administer timed tests at least once a week, and even more often depending on the topic and how much children have learned.

Fuchs is even more circumspect in her advice to teachers on how to use timed tests effectively without harming children in the process. Not only should students first master concepts, they should have already demonstrated that they know the correct answers in an untimed setting. “You don’t want to give students a page full of problems and they’re kind of lost,” said Fuchs. 

Immediate feedback is important too. “When you make an error, your teacher or your partner can say, ‘Hey, let’s fix that’,” said Fuchs. “You want to stop a student when they make an error because what you’re trying to do is practice correct responses. You don’t want students to practice incorrect responses.”

Advocates of timed practice disagree about the details. Some say students should be given long lists of calculations so that no one can finish in time and slam their pencils down, which leaves slower children feeling bad about themselves. However, Fuchs favors flashcards because she fears the sight of a long list of problems overwhelms some children. This is an area that needs more research to guide teachers on best practices.

The Science of Math group concurs that not all timed practice is good, and says the research shows that timed activities or tests shouldn’t start until after a child can calculate accurately. They also say that teachers should never count these tests toward students’ grades; the tests should be low-stakes practice.

“Much like any instructional activity, if it is used inappropriately, it will yield minimal benefits and in some cases could be harmful,” said Peltier. Timing students on “a skill they don’t know – not only is this a waste of time, it also can be demoralizing and harmful. Imagine being timed to parallel park a car at the age of 16!” 

This story about math drills 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 Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters. 

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.

In a classroom on Chicago’s West Side one morning last November, Teresa Przybyslawski sat side by side with a soft-spoken sixth grader. She read a script off her computer screen while he peered at his own tablet.

“On your screen, you will see some addition problems,” read Przybyslawski. “I want you to do as many of them as you can in one minute.”

She glanced at the sixth grader, John. His back was taut, his face tense.

Down the hall, the boy’s classmates at Brunson Math and Science Specialty School, a high-poverty elementary school, geared up to tackle dividing fractions. But here, alongside Przybyslawski, one of the district’s new interventionists tasked with helping students who fell behind during the pandemic, John was about to work on math normally taught in first grade.

“Are you ready? Three. Two. One.”

Numbers flashed on John’s screen: “2 + 7. 5 + 10. 10 + 4.”

At the start of this school year, John, whose real name Chalkbeat is not using to protect his privacy, read at a first grade level and did second grade level math. It would be Przybyslawski’s job to get him caught up – fast.

School districts around the country are pushing to help students bounce back from the pandemic’s profound academic damage: expanding literacy tutoring in Detroit, cutting class sizes in New York City, and buying science-backed reading curriculums in districts across Colorado.

Chicago Public Schools has turned to academic interventionists — a cadre of hundreds mostly classroom teachers already on the district’s payroll, tapped this year to turbocharge the learning of struggling students one-on-one or in small groups.

These newly-minted catchup specialists are tackling three years of COVID fallout layered upon pre-pandemic learning gaps and traumas, at schools that experts and educators agree should have been staffing interventionists all along.

Research has backed Chicago’s intervention approach, and emerging data here and in other cities shows school districts are making headway. But experts say the effort is in its infancy: A recent study by nonprofit test maker NWEA found students are rebounding, but schools are likely a few years away from returning to pre-pandemic achievement, especially for younger learners.

Meanwhile, educators face their own version of Przybyslawski’s countdown.

Three, two, one.  Before children like John arrive in high school unprepared, lowering their odds of graduating, starting college or careers, and escaping poverty.

Three, two, one. Before districts like Chicago run out of federal COVID relief dollars.

Three, two, one. Before society at large moves on, and the energy required to remain in full-on recovery mode fades.

As Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, put it at an academic recovery event this past fall: “If we fail to act differently to catch students up, to ensure every student graduates with everything they need, we will have failed this generation and future generations of students.”

One school on Chicago’s West Side tackles academic recovery

Brunson Elementary is in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood, one of the hardest hit by COVID and by a surge in the city’s other epidemic: gun violence.

Of Brunson’s 400 students, almost 90% are Black, and almost all are poor. Almost 60% were chronically absent last year, meaning they missed roughly 20 or more days. This year, Brunson has deployed  “attendance heroes” — teachers, paraprofessionals, and cafeteria workers — who check in daily with truant students. But across the district, attendance and disruptive behaviors continue to interfere with learning.

“It’s heartbreaking what kids here carry on their backpacks that we can’t see,” principal Carol Wilson said.

Since the pandemic hit in 2020, Chicago Public Schools — like districts across the country — has seen drops in the portion of students meeting reading and math standards on a required state assessment. The district’s latest scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as “the nation’s report card,” showed nearly a decade of growth in math had been wiped out while reading results held fairly steady.

When Chicago schools tested students this past fall to gauge where they stood, two-thirds of John’s sixth grade peers districtwide did not hit grade-level benchmarks in reading. A third were flagged as needing urgent interventions. The picture was similar in math.

Przybyslawski used to teach a classroom of 25 students math and science. Now, her focus is on 15 or so struggling middle schoolers at Brunson.

She set out to create an orderly, efficient operation, using new digital platforms that constantly size up how students are progressing in mastering skills they should have learned in earlier grades — and dictate what they work on next.

In reading, the school piloted an artificial intelligence program that gave students passages to read back to it based on their level and flagged mistakes they made.

She wanted John to divide fractions along with his peers eventually. But in the meantime, Przybyslawski, who also supervises the school’s new team of three tutors, all Brunson grads, measured progress in small increments.

During that session in November, John hesitated briefly before answering 6 + 5.

He was stumped on 3 + 8.

But on the rest, he rattled off the correct answers before Przybyslawski had even finished reading them out.

“We got to the third row,” she told the boy when the minute-long assessment was up. “Very nice work!”

After students left, she logged in their results into Branching Minds, a new platform used for tracking interventions.

Wilson, the principal, and district officials lean on the technology to monitor the progress students are making. Soon, Wilson would also get a second round of standardized tests — administered around the middle of the school year — she hoped would tell her if the school’s efforts were paying off.

‘How can we reach more kids?’

In the bid to speed up students’ academic recovery, Chicago leaders have bet on an arsenal of strategies. They’ve expanded after-school programs, started an in-house tutor corps, and poured millions in teacher training and a new in-house lesson bank called Skyline.

They also tapped some 250 educators to serve as new academic coaches. There are more counselors, social workers, and other support staff.

All in all, the district earmarked $730 million in COVID recovery dollars this school year for its recovery efforts.

Academic interventions — by tutors, classroom teachers, or the new interventionists — are at the heart of the strategy. The district budgeted for at least one interventionist on each of its roughly 500 campuses, though not all schools used the money for such positions, and some schools combined the duties with existing positions. And it required all schools to use the same digital platform to track interventions that Przybyslawski is using.

Across the district this past fall, new interventionists chipped away at catching up tens of thousands of students. One math problem and one sounded-out word at time.

At Moos Elementary on Chicago’s West Side, where most of the 430 primarily Latino students enrolled needed intervention in the fall, Elizabeth Battaglia and the tutors she oversees could reach about 60 students across all grades — not nearly enough.

“How do we get students a lot of extra support with so few people?” she kept asking herself, even as she was encouraged by her students’ growth.

In reading, Battaglia tried a blitz tactic: 20 minutes each day over two weeks when stronger readers are paired with struggling peers to read passages to each other and help correct each other’s mistakes. It helped.

At Sadlowski Elementary on the Southeast Side, where most of the school’s 620 students were flagged as needing intensive help at the start of the year, Emily Gasca has 38 students on her caseload — some of them third and fourth graders reading at kindergarten level.

She enlisted fellow teachers to build interventions into daily classroom instruction, but some colleagues felt she was laying more work on already full plates.

Gasca tried to remind herself she was helping build from scratch a sort of academic safety net that the district has needed all along.

Even before COVID, many Chicago students made it to high school unable to read well. The pandemic just made it harder to look away.

To experts and educators such as Gasca, it’s clear that trauma and social-emotional challenges — that invisible load in students’ backpacks — complicate academic catchup. But struggling to keep up in the classroom is also a daily source of stress, eroding students’ confidence — baggage they carry back home.

Educators search for signs interventions are working

By February, John’s sessions with Przybyslawski were a well-worn routine.

“On your screen you will see a story to read,” Przybyslawski read off her screen to him one morning that month. “I would like you to read this story for me.”

“We’ll begin in three, two, one.”

John looked relaxed in a black face mask, hoodie, and Nikes as he read a passage about a family visit on a farm.  At the one-minute mark, a bell dinged, and Przybyslawski smiled broadly. John’s reading had been largely free of mistakes — a huge leap from the start of the school year when he struggled to make it through a sentence or two during those fleeting 60 seconds.

“Good job overall,” she said. “I’ll get your score in a few minutes.”

Przybyslawski’s students were making headway. But now, her caseload looked different.

A few students “graduated.” They still need added help, but should be able to get it in the classroom. A few left the school, part of the customary churn at a high-needs neighborhood campus. And some were no longer on Przybyslawski’s caseload after being identified as needing services for students with disabilities.

Around this same time, Wilson, the principal, had gotten the school’s midyear test results.

Students in all grades were showing solid growth except eighth graders, on that all-important cusp of high school, who were flagged across the district for making little midyear progress.

Wilson was encouraged. Still, these tests predicted that fewer than 10% of Brunson students would meet state standards this spring.

“We’ve seen kids make leaps and bounds but still remain below the benchmarks,” Wilson said. “We’re catching kids up constantly.”

Districtwide in the early grades, there were double-digit increases in students scoring at grade level. Overall, Chicago Public Schools’ scores were in line or better than other urban districts. But much work remained: In the second grade, for example, more than half of students remained one grade level below in math, and a quarter were still two grade levels below in both math and reading.

Paul Zavitkovsky, an expert on testing at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said standardized tests are a helpful snapshot of how students are doing, but he cautioned against relying on them to drive recovery efforts. Remediating one skill at a time based on test results must happen alongside engaging, grade-level instruction — a tough balance to strike, Zavitkovsky said.

Based on an analysis of results on a standardized test named STAR 360 many Chicago elementary schools are giving three times a year, Zavitkovsky found almost all schools made four months of gains in the first four months of the year in math — an encouraging return to a pre-pandemic pace of growth.

But, he said, “Average gains are not going to be enough.”

Dan Goldhaber, who leads the University of Washington’s Center for Education Data & Research, said it’s not clear how long schools can remain in full recovery mode, which requires resources and sustained effort.

When the COVID money runs dry, Chicago’s army of interventionists hired in recent years could land on the budgetary chopping block, leaving classroom teachers to pick up the difficult work of recovery.

Bogdana Chkoumbova, the district’s education chief, says the district is encouraged by testing, grading, and other data; it will cover interventionists at each school and grow the tutor corps next year.

That’s because there’s more work to be done, Chkoumbova recently told the school board. Data show 20% of students have gotten some intervention, and of those, only about a third are on track to meet their goals — an improvement over earlier in the year.

But, as district leaders have noted, a lot of intervention work is not captured by the data. At Brunson, a girl recently asked Przybyslawski for help with multiplication and division off the screens. The interventionist set up stacks of flashcards, quizzing her the old-fashioned way.

“Confidence!” she told the girl. “Just be confident.”

Behind them, in the back of Przybyslawski’s classroom, a bulletin board was covered with certificates of achievement.

One was John’s. It showed a figure looking over a wheat field, a mountain peak rising in the background.

“Congratulations!” the certificate read. “Your reading POWERS are getting stronger, and it’s time to celebrate your hard work.”

Mila Koumpilova is Chalkbeat Chicago’s senior reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Mila at mkoumpilova@chalkbeat.org.  

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

Meet Xenia, a junior at Northwestern University, who leans into math and science, runs dutifully in her spare time and tends toward introversion. Now meet her fraternal twin, Madeleine, a double major in English and Philosophy at Johns Hopkins, who prefers reading and writing over sports and as a child was dubbed the school’s mayor by her father after he noticed her making the rounds in the cafeteria during a second-grade parent/child lunch. The girls get along, their personality differences allowing each to carve out an independent identity and buffering both from excessive rivalry. 

Another way these twins differ? When they were in high school, Xenia spurned all social media, the only girl in her grade, she thought, without Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Houseparty and all other social media sites on her phone. “I was never interested in it,” she told me. Madeleine, on the other hand, while not a devotee, relied on Snapchat to keep in touch with distant friends and used Instagram and other sites to stay on top of school gossip, fashion trends and entertainment news. “Interfacing with technology is Madeleine’s varsity sport,” her father said. 

Most adolescents would seem to follow Madeleine’s path. Almost all teenagers used smart phones in 2022, the Pew Research Center reported, and 53% of kids in cities acknowledged being online “almost constantly.” As for social media, most teenagers are all in: TikTok is now the most favored platform, used by 67% of 13-17 year olds, followed by Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook, whose popularity has declined dramatically. More and more research has shown that excessive use of social media undermines kids’ mental health. A British study of nearly 12,000 teenagers found that frequent social media use is associated with a lower sense of well-being, especially among girls who experienced cyberbullying or diminished sleep. Social psychologist and author Jean Twenge, who has explored the link between excessive screen use and deteriorating mental health, blames the former for triggering the latter, noting that rates of depression and suicide among teenagers have increased since smart phones became ubiquitous. 

Though far from a controlled lab experiment, twins who grew up in the same house and diverged over their phone use offer interesting insights into how Instagram and its ilk can amplify what’s already there. How the two have adapted their social media patterns during college also reveals how the wider environment can shape its use. 

In high school, Madeleine was the first to admit that she was easily distracted and bored, as well as quick to lose things, including the phone she relied on to stay in touch with friends. “I tend to leave my phone everywhere,” she told me. She wasn’t one to post pictures often, a habit that annoyed some of her friends, but she did check Instagram and Snapchat once or twice a day, she said, for up to an hour in total time. That was a far cry from many girls Madeleine knew, including some who tracked their accounts for six hours a day, she said. She liked the way big stories on Instagram or Snapchat sparked conversation and mentioned that a public spat on YouTube among dueling makeup artists preoccupied her entire grade. What Madeleine enjoyed most, though, was how these platforms allowed her to stay connected with the friends in Australia she met during a student exchange program. 

Xenia, on the other hand, is a minimalist, and not just with her phone, which she used about 90 minutes per week in high school. She didn’t care to be photographed, was oblivious to fashion trends, and didn’t fret over being last to the latest Instagram kerfuffle. “It’s not that I don’t hear about it,” she said at the time, “it’s just delayed.” Her sister Madeleine acted as a kind of social media screener, sharing highlights she knew Xenia would appreciate but leaving out Hollywood gossip and trivial YouTube quarrels. Xenia had no regrets: “I have better stuff to worry about than who opened my TikTok,” she said. She was mystified by those who lingered on social media and then whimpered about their limited time. “You intentionally chose to be on some site for many hours on the weekend; that’s a decision you made,” she said. And though she acquiesced to the group when friends chose a restaurant based on its Instagram appeal rather than its menu, she was baffled by the reasoning. “I don’t understand that aspect of it, the pointlessness,” she told me. 

A funny thing happened when the girls went to college. Xenia was forced to join Facebook for her COVID-era freshman orientation and ultimately caved to adopting Instagram: it was the most efficient way of staying in touch with friends from home. Had she finally fallen sway to its obsessive power, sharing shots of the day’s breakfast and choice of shoes? “I’m on it about 10 to 20 minutes a week,” she told me. “I’ve never posted anything.” As in high school, her college friends admired Xenia’s apathy towards social media, and many enjoyed studying with her; she was less distracted, and her avoidance of the platforms was contagious. At the same time, Xenia is on her phone more, in part because some professors use them for coursework and exams. But she remains bewildered by the power social media seems to wield over her peers. “I feel like it’s an addiction,” she told me.

College has changed Madeleine more dramatically. No longer surrounded by disapproving family members who discouraged excessive phone use, at first she found it harder to control herself. She fell deeper into time-consuming rabbit holes and got wrapped up in distant, trivial dramas. But it began to dawn on her that the curated lives she witnessed on Instagram weren’t important or real. By the middle of her first semester at college, she deleted the app. From Xenia’s vantage point, Madeleine is happier and her friendships seem more solid than the ones she had in high school. “Whether academically or socially, she’s a lot freer,” Xenia said. Madeleine said this: “My brain is way less cluttered.” 

A group of small children sits cross-legged with their teacher, Steve Mejía-Menendez, on a round carpet. He’s a pre-K teacher at Lee Montessori Public Charter School’s campus in Southeast Washington, D.C., and although I’m here to meet him, I almost don’t spot him because he’s eye level with his students.

Mr. Steve, as he’s known here, is talking a few students through a geometry lesson when another student approaches to ask an unrelated question. This kind of distraction happens all the time in classrooms around the United States. Mr. Steve doesn’t lose focus. He uses American Sign Language to say “wait” — palms facing up, fingers wiggling — and the child waits quietly. When the lesson arrives at a natural stopping point, the student is invited to ask his question, and Mr. Steve silently responds by nodding his head along with his fist, which is sign language for “yes.”

Blink, and you could miss the whole interaction.

This isn’t a school for students with hearing disabilities, but Mr. Steve uses ASL as part of a broader approach to minimize noise in the classroom. And it’s noticeably quiet. No one is talking louder than what’s often referred to in Montessori schools as “the hum.”

“Silence is kind of a peak achievement in a child’s ability to control themselves,” Mejía-Menendez says. “We create the conditions for children to concentrate.”

Unlike this classroom, the city outside is full of noise. And studies show that too much noise, particularly loud noise, can hurt a child’s cognitive development, notably for language-based skills such as reading. That’s because if noise is just, well, noise, it distracts developing brains and makes it more difficult for children to concentrate. But when their environment is quiet enough for them to pay attention to sounds that are important or particularly interesting to them, it is a powerful teaching tool.

“[Young children’s] brains are craving sound-to-meaning connections, so it’s very important that the sounds around them be nourishing and meaningful,” says Nina Kraus, a neurobiologist at Northwestern University.

She believes turning down the noise in our lives starts with embracing — even enjoying — silence.

Our noisy world shapes our brains

Silence is difficult to find and to create — for adults and kids alike. Around the world, fans of silence have begun to catalog the world’s disappearing quiet places. But Lee Montessori is in Washington, D.C., a city that is surround-sound cacophony: busy highways, screeching commuter trains, jarring car horns, waterways with the blare of boat whistles and the seemingly constant whir of presidential and military helicopters and the drone of commercial airplanes.

But teachers do what they can. Inside this bright elementary school, there are no disruptive public address announcements. Students even wear special classroom shoes made of cloth and soft rubber soles.

“The hearing brain is vast,” Kraus, the neurobiologist, says. “Our experience with sound really does shape us.”

In fact, she has written an entire book about that topic, called Of Sound Mind. The brain processes auditory input faster than visual input, Kraus explains, and when we have the space to listen, our brains prioritize what we tune in to and reward paying attention through a release of dopamine.

For example, if you’re a teenager excited to be learning the guitar, musical tones will get preferential treatment. If you’re learning to play basketball, the bounce of the dribbling ball and your coach calling out plays will get your attention. There are certain sounds, like the sound of your own name, that your brain is unconsciously conditioned to respond to, even when you’re asleep.

But when sounds are out of our control and not important to us, they shift into the category of noise: a neighbor’s dog barking at a squirrel, a faulty car alarm, the drone of a highway.

When the sounds we are exposed to aren’t helping us learn a new skill or stay safe at a busy intersection, the brain can get distracted and have trouble focusing.

It takes brainpower to ignore sound

When the world was a lot quieter, our brains paid attention to every little leaf rustle or snap of a twig as a tool for survival, Kraus explains. And when our brains are processing sounds that trigger questions like “Am I in trouble here?” or “Can I ignore this?”, there is less room to focus on the task in front of us.

Consider a modern equivalent: When you’re listening to someone tell you something and your phone dings — Ding! “Is that important?” — you just lost track of where you were.

Your brain has to work overtime to ignore sounds. Inside the cochlea — the spiral cavity of the inner ear that produces nerve impulses in response to sound vibrations — there are inner hair cells and outer hair cells that interact to amplify or deamplify the vibrations. Say you are listening to a piece of music on the radio, but traffic noise is in the background. Kraus says your brain will tell the outer hair cells to slow down and deamplify the traffic noise to protect your ears.

So when there is even just a moderate level of background noise, like traffic or a truck idling, our brains process more slowly. Kraus uses the analogy of a DJ sitting at a mixing board in your brain, assessing and adjusting sounds that come in all day long. The more that DJ has to do, the less operating power is available for your brain, making it harder to process new information.

It can become physically exhausting as well. People who have trouble hearing often experience listening fatigue.

Noise is especially distracting to young brains

“We can close our eyes, we can avert our gaze, but we hear in 360 degrees,” says Emily Elliott, a psychology professor at Louisiana State University who studies memory and cognition and is one of the authors of a study about how auditory distraction affects a young child’s ability to perform serial recall tasks. Elliott and her colleagues devised a test in which they gave young children a visual task of memorizing a series of items on a screen. Then they told the children that sounds would be playing but not to pay attention to them, because they weren’t relevant.

“In general, performance goes down when you’re asked to remember a series of things in order in the presence of irrelevant or distracting auditory stimuli,” Elliott found. “So that tells us that [the sound is] somehow being processed in the cognitive system, because you can’t just willfully go, ‘I’m going to not listen.'”

Elliott and her team found that the critical ingredient of distraction is sound that changes in some noticeable way. “It could be music with lyrics,” she says. “Music with lyrics is more distracting than music without lyrics.”

They also found that children under age 7 in particular are bad at memorization because their brains are not yet able to employ a key tactic known as rehearsal. That’s where you repeat things to yourself to remember them. And not only will they not remember a list of things, but they’re also not aware that they won’t remember them.

So when you’re giving a young child directions or teaching a new topic and a distracting noise is present, the odds of the child remembering any of what you’ve told the child are pretty low.

One study of New York City schoolchildren in the 1970s found that students in classrooms next to noisy elevated train tracks performed significantly poorer on reading tests than their peers on the other side of the building. After the study was published, the city took steps to soundproof the classrooms and minimize the noise coming from the tracks, and a year later, the students’ test scores were the same on both sides of the building.

In another study by neurologist Kraus and her team, they mapped the brain activity of 66 ninth-graders from Chicago Public Schools while asking them to perform reading and memory tasks. Then they monitored the children’s electrical brain activity while watching a movie and listening to disruptive sounds. They found that the students who grew up under circumstances associated with noisier environments performed poorer on the reading and memory tasks and that those students had what she calls “noisier” brains — meaning a lot of neurons were firing all the time, even when the brain wasn’t engaged in a task. You can think of that excess electrical activity as static.

“And if there’s too much static, it makes it hard to make sense of all of the information that you want to be processing,” Kraus says. According to Kraus, more static in a child’s brain means it’s harder for that child to listen and stay focused wherever they are.

How silence and some types of noise can benefit children

Kraus believes silence can be a benefit to children. When she and her team monitored kids with “noisy brains” under scalp electrodes, they found that periods of silence helped lessen the static.

Her team has also found that making meaningful sounds, like playing a musical instrument or singing, builds and strengthens neural connections.

Other research has found that pure silence can be healing. In one study on mice, scientists tracked brain cell growth among mice that were exposed to white noise, mice pup sounds, classical music and ambient sounds, and they compared those mice with mice that were left in silence. The mice that were left in silence had the most significant brain cell growth, leading researchers to conclude that the act of listening to silence regenerates nerve cells.

But absolute silence is rare outside a controlled lab environment. Even in the middle of the woods, you’ll hear natural sounds of birdsong, the running water of a stream, leaves rustling and insects buzzing. These types of sounds could be described as noise, but they are calming to us. And if we try, we can find and re-create these natural sound environments in the middle of a city.

In addition to being a researcher, Elliott, the psychology professor, is also a mother of three. She learned early on as a parent to put white noise machines in her kids’ bedrooms so that if one of them woke up screaming in the middle of the night, they didn’t all wake up.

“White noise is fascinating because it masks lots of variability in sound,” she says. “It takes out some of the frequency ranges and presents something that sounds like a continuous, steady sound.” In other words, it mimics running water in a stream, and our brains tune it out.

This type of noise becomes a benefit in this situation, because it’s masking the variability of the other sounds that would be a distraction.

Get cozy with the sounds of silence

Creating enough quiet to help hear meaningful sound is easier said than done. Some blame, in part, a culture that promotes constant stimulus. “There is some expectation that you need to be loud and flashy to capture your child’s attention. Everything has to be a fun fair,” says Ellen Doherty, chief creative officer for Fred Rogers Productions.

That’s the company that inherited the mantle of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, the children’s television program developed in the 1960s and known for its calm and reassuring tone. It’s still producing media for children, including Doherty’s series of shorts, Through the Woods, which is deliberately quiet.

The three-minute shorts are about a kid walking through the woods, wondering, observing and experiencing. Instead of background music, you hear birds chirping, the wind blowing and leaves rustling. The sound designers do a believable job of making viewers feel like they are in the woods. But Doherty says this kind of programming goes against the grain of expectations.

“We take our shows to focus groups and ask parents, ‘Would your child watch this?'” Doherty says. “And so often, parents say to us that if it’s not bright and flashy, ‘my kid won’t watch that.'”

Doherty calls that type of show the fun fair. She believes you can have good shows with music and bright colors that aren’t distracting but actually work to teach learning skills such as how to manage emotions or calm yourself down.

“My metric,” says Doherty, “is does this need to exist?”

“I think that we need to be able to honor silence,” Kraus says. “And there’s something almost mystical there. You know, may we have a moment of silence? It’s really a time to kind of get into yourself.”

Using Doherty’s question, “Does this need to exist?” as a guide, we might begin to think of silence as a chance to learn and look forward to making our lives quieter.

Edited by Emily Harris and Steve Drummond; visual design and development by LA Johnson; research by LA Johnson; fact-checked by Will Chase; copyedited by Preeti Aroon.

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

A version of this post was originally published by Parenting Translator. Sign up for the newsletter and follow Parenting Translator on Instagram.

“Redshirting” or choosing to delay kindergarten for a year is a popular topic for parents of young children at this time of year. Increased awareness of redshirting may have roots in Malcolm Gladwell’s bestselling book Outliers, published in 2008. In the book, Gladwell points to data on the birthdays of Canadian Hockey League players to argue that being relatively older than peers provides an advantage, and he extends this argument to children’s success in school. 

At the same time that ideas from Outliers have circulated, kindergarten has become increasingly academic and rigorous. For parents of children born near the kindergarten cutoff date, the pressure to redshirt feels intense. My oldest child has a late August birthday, which is right around the cutoff date for her school. However, it seemed like all of the children with summer birthdays (and even April/May birthdays) were waiting an additional year to start kindergarten. Granted, she would have entered kindergarten in 2020, and the possibility of remote learning caused many parents to delay school entry that year. Yet in talking to school administrators and teachers and other parents about this decision, the message I heard over and over again was that the choice was obvious. It seemed that everyone I talked to had wholeheartedly accepted that delaying kindergarten was the best choice for all children. 

The research on redshirting

So does research actually find that redshirting will provide an academic and/or social advantage for children? The answer may be more complicated than you think.

Research on redshirting suggests that it is associated with a small academic advantage (that is, higher academic test scores), and test scores seem to increase at a greater rate in first and second grade However, this effect may begin to fade as early as the end of first grade. This research is all correlational, meaning we do not know whether it is redshirting that causes these advantages or if it is simply associated with advantages. The parents that choose to redshirt their children are often different from the parents who do not — most notably they are often the families that can afford to make this choice. 

Some research studies eliminate the problem of parent choice by looking at the impact of age for children within the same grade, such as comparing students with summer birthdays to students in the same grade with fall birthdays. Research finds that students who are relatively older than other children in their grade score higher on math and science tests and, although these differences decrease over the years, they are still present to some extent in eighth grade. Other research finds that children who are relatively older show less hyperactivity and inattention and greater educational attainment (translation: getting farther in school). However, the impact on educational attainment is greatly reduced when schools do not engage in early tracking (translation: sending children to different schools based on academic abilities in elementary school). Research also shows that children who are older than their classmates are more likely to be in gifted education and less likely to be in special education. These positive impacts seem to extend to high school and beyond. Children who are older than their classmates are also less likely to drop out of high school, less likely to commit a felony, and less likely to experience a teenage pregnancy. Children that are older than their classmates are also more likely to attend a four-year college than younger students.

Yet, it is important to note that this line of research only involves associations. Further research is needed in order to conclude that redshirting actually causes any of these positive outcomes. 

When might parents want to avoid redshirting? 

Are there any situations in which parents might want to avoid redshirting? Research suggests that when your child has an identified disability, a suspected disability or even if you are just concerned that they may need some extra help in school, delaying school entry may be associated with worse academic performance, because it would delay access to free essential services through the public school system, such as speech therapy and learning support. This short delay may have a big impact as research finds that services before age 5 are more effective in improving a child’s long-term outcome than services after age 5. Research also finds a negative impact of redshirting for children with more severe ADHD and no impact for children with learning disabilities.

Is redshirting more important for boys than girls? 

In any discussion of redshirting, it is commonly assumed that boys in particular benefit from redshirting. Is there any research to back this up? Research does find that girls are more likely to be behaviorally ready for kindergarten than boys. Research also suggests that boys may not do as well as girls with having higher-achieving classmates. Not surprisingly, boys are more likely to be redshirted than girls.

Does this research also apply to repeating a grade or holding children back?

Interestingly, outcomes for children who repeat a grade or are “held back” are very different from those who are redshirted. 

One million students are held back each year in the United States. This practice particularly impacts ethnic minorities, with retention rates of 2.7% for Black students and 1.9% for Hispanic students, compared to 1.7% for white students. 

A large body of research has indicated that holding a child back in school is associated with poorer academic outcomes and little social-emotional benefit. While some studies have found short-term social and academic benefits of grade retention, many of these effects fade after a few years.

Grade retention is also associated with an increased likelihood of dropping out of high school and a decreased likelihood of finishing college. Retained students are also more likely to be aggressive in adolescence. Grade retention after third grade seems to have a more detrimental effect, perhaps because it has a greater impact on self-esteem as children get older.

As with the research on redshirting, these studies only found associations between grade retention and these negative impacts, not causation. Regardless, it is important to discuss this research with redshirting because some parents assume that they can push their child ahead to kindergarten and then repeat a later grade if they are struggling. Yet, research suggests that the cons of this approach may outweigh any potential pros. In addition, redshirting reduces the risk for grade retention, suggesting that this may be another benefit for redshirting. 

Based on this research, most clinicians and educators advise parents to avoid holding children back in a grade unless there is no other option. If your child’s school is pushing for it, present them with the research and see if you can discuss other possible options. 

But is it fair?

For most families, delaying kindergarten means paying for full-time child care or delaying a stay-at-home parent from re-entering the workforce for an additional year. This is simply not an option for most families. Redshirting as a practice may also increase the ever-widening gap between students from high-income and low-income families, as only high-income families may be able to afford this option when wanting to give their child an advantage. Yet there is also research showing that having older classmates may actually improve the performance of younger classmates, suggesting that the practice of redshirting is at least not harmful to students who do not make this choice. 

How do you know whether your child is ready for kindergarten? 

The following may help you to decide whether your child is actually ready for kindergarten: 

1. Consider not only their academic skills but also their social-emotional and self-regulation skills. Social skills when entering kindergarten have been found to be related to success as an adult, including the likelihood of graduating college and gaining employment. More advanced self-regulation skills allow children to “catch up” even if they start behind their peers academically. Self-regulation is also associated with improved academic performance .
2. Consult with your child’s preschool teacher or director if possible. Your child’s teacher should have a good idea of how their skills compare to their peers and whether they have the classroom engagement skills necessary for kindergarten. 
3. Speak with your child’s pediatrician. Your child’s pediatrician can give you their expert opinion as to whether your child is developmentally and physically ready for kindergarten. 
4. Visit both possible classroom settings. Gain a better understanding of the expectations that will be placed on your child in kindergarten versus the expectations in preschool. Try to determine which setting best fits your child’s current ability level. 

Overall translation

Delaying kindergarten for a year may provide a small advantage to children. However, if you suspect your child has special needs or a disability, you may want to avoid redshirting and start school as soon as possible to get them the services they need. Once students enter K-12 schooling, parents may want to avoid holding their children back since the negative impacts may outweigh the positive. Parents may also want to consider that redshirting could increase the ever-widening gap between low-income and high-income children. 

Most importantly, parents should consider their own individual child in this decision. Does your child seem to gravitate more to younger or older children? Does your child tend to compare themselves to their peers and get upset when they fall behind? Does your child seem to benefit from older role models around or do they seem to benefit from serving in a “leader” role for younger children? 

Parents may also want to consider the school environment. Is the school more academic or play-based? Do they require children to sit for longer periods of time or are there movement breaks? Is redshirting typical for children around the cutoff date in this school system? Does the school compare children to others or use a tracking system for gifted education? 

Sometimes this choice does not involve any of the academic advantages discussed above. In August, I will give birth to my third child with a summer birthday and currently I am planning to redshirt all three of these children (a choice I feel very privileged to have). What is really driving my decision is not the academic benefits but the opportunity to have another year with my children in my home. Whatever choice parents make they should feel confident in doing what feels right for their individual child and family.

Cara Goodwin, PhD, is a licensed psychologist, a mother of three and the founder of Parenting Translator, a nonprofit newsletter that turns scientific research into information that is accurate, relevant and useful for parents.

The Department of Education has found that a Georgia school district may have created a hostile environment for students by banning certain books from its libraries, the agency’s Office of Civil Rights said.

In late 2021, several parents complained at school board meetings that Forsyth County Schools were carrying books with LGBTQ+ and sexually explicit content. Opponents of the bans said the district’s book screening process deliberately left out non-white and LGBTQ+ authors, the Department of Education said in its memo released late last week.

The agency concluded the district limited its screening process to sexually explicit books and did not violate two laws governing institutions receiving federal aid: Title IX, which prohibits discrimination based on sex, and Title VI, which bars discrimination based on race, color or national origin.

But the Department of Education also said that if a sexually or racially hostile environment was created for students as a result of the process, the district did not do enough to alleviate those concerns.

When reached for comment, Forsyth County Schools told NPR Tuesday that it is “committed to providing a safe, connected, and thriving community for all students and their families,” adding that it will continue following federal and state laws.

By implementing the federal agency’s recommendations, the district added, “we will further our mission to provide an unparalleled education for all to succeed.”

District media panel weighed several options

After receiving complaints about books, the school district’s media committee got a request to allow parents to grant or deny permission for their child to read books with sexual or LGBTQ+ content, but the committee rejected that option, saying students would find a way to skirt the system, and librarians would have to play “the role of ‘gatekeeper,’ ” the federal memo said.

The committee also denied suggestions such as keeping LGBTQ+ books in a separate area, or tagging them with a special sticker, as that could discourage students from using the media center and lead to bullying or harassment from other students.

In January of 2022, the committee approved posting a statement to the district’s website that partly read, “Forsyth County Schools’ media centers provide resources that reflect all students within each school community. If you come across a book that does not match your family’s values and/or beliefs, and you would prefer that your child does not check that book out, please discuss it with your child.”

Later that same month, District Superintendent Jeff Bearden authorized pulling books from school libraries that were deemed to be sexually explicit or pornographic. But the Office of Civil Rights says public comments at board meetings also mentioned gender identity, sexual orientation and diversity, leaving the impression that those qualities were included in the district’s screening. The office said the district fell short in two ways: not telling students about its criteria and process, and not addressing the impact the book removals could have on students.

To resolve the issues, Forsyth County Schools reached a resolution agreement with the Department of Education that lays out a series of actions for the district, such as providing resources to those impacted by certain books’ removal, posting the book screening process in “locations readily available” at middle and high schools and conducting a climate survey for middle and high school students.

“I thank Forsyth County Schools for assessing and responding to the needs of the students who may have felt subjected to a hostile environment as a result of the library book screening process and for ensuring that, going forward, it will take appropriate action regarding acts of harassment that create a hostile environment based on sex, race, color or national origin,” the Department of Education’s Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Catherine Lhamon said.

Residents speak out about books in schools

While the matter seems to be headed toward a resolution between the district and the Education Department, the roster of speakers at a recent Forsyth board meeting suggest that the debate over potentially banning more books isn’t going away.

A resident who spoke toward the end of the May 16 meeting alleged that students were being sexualized and exposed to “anti-God ideologies,” blaming a curriculum that she said was dictated by “Marxist corporations and people like Bill and Melinda Gates, and George Soros.”

But a mother who spoke next disagreed, saying she moved to Forsyth so her two children could attend its strong schools. While she is open to discussing any books her children want to read, the woman said, she doesn’t want principals and other senior school officials to spend their time vetting library books.

“We’re allowing people who don’t believe in this system to come in and destroy it,” she said.

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) has long been associated with young boys, but research over the past four decades has revealed a hidden world of girls affected by the disorder. Almost 13% of men and boys have ADHD compared to 5.6% of women and girls. Girls are often misdiagnosed or underdiagnosed in part because parents and teachers are less likely to refer girls for treatment or diagnosis.  “It’s taken a long time for the medical field to catch up,” said Stephen Hinshaw, a clinical psychologist and researcher at University of California, Berkeley.

Hinshaw’s work highlights the importance of early identification and intervention for girls with ADHD. “There may be a hidden pattern marked by coping and compensation that over the years can become quite serious,” he said. Girls who go undiagnosed are more likely to “suffer in silence,” which may include a higher risk of self-harm and suicidal ideation, according to Hinshaw. Once diagnosed, medication management, parenting strategies and classroom accommodations can help girls with ADHD achieve academic success and better outcomes. “I think we need to pay attention to girls’ symptoms,” he said. “But it’s not like we need dramatically, magically different treatments for girls versus boys.” In a presentation at Learning & the Brain’s Teaching Behaved Brains conference, Hinshaw shared practical solutions for supporting girls with ADHD so parents and educators alike can challenge stereotypes and embrace a holistic understanding of the disorder.

Different presentations, different medications

ADHD may present differently in boys and girls. For instance, boys often exhibit hyperactive and disruptive behaviors, while girls tend to show more internalized symptoms like daydreaming and social withdrawal, which often fly under the radar. Girls with ADHD often face challenges in making and keeping friends, which can lead to feelings of isolation and negatively impact their self-esteem. In a study where Hinshaw observed girls with ADHD at a summer camp, more than three quarters of girls with ADHD had trouble making friends, compared to only 30-40% of boys.

The most common medications for ADHD are stimulants like Adderall or Ritalin. They can help kids pay better attention in school, but they don’t really do much to help with social skills and friendships, Hinshaw said.  Women have more side effects from stimulants than men and are more likely to respond to the non-stimulant alternative, according to Hinshaw. Non-stimulant medications like Atomoxetine treat ADHD symptoms, as well as reduce anxiety. In addition to medication, girls with ADHD are likely to benefit from peer support groups or mentorship programs. Parents and educators can also help by teaching social skills and providing opportunities for structured social interaction, such as parent-assisted play dates. 

“Girls with ADHD, compared to a neurotypical comparison group, had more depression and anxiety, more conduct problems – although they started later – more executive function deficits, lower achievement,” said Hinshaw. He suggested that clinicians should address comorbid mental health conditions when treating girls with ADHD.

Parenting and ADHD outcomes

A child’s ADHD diagnosis can be stressful for parents, because some people mistakenly believe that ADHD is caused by poor parenting. That’s not the case; however, parenting can have a significant impact on outcomes for children with ADHD. “It’s time to radically accept that your daughter may not be exactly the kid you expected,” said Hinshaw. 

Hinshaw highlighted the importance of parents helping girls with ADHD develop their passions, which can improve their self-esteem and increase their engagement in academic and social activities. Their interests can also be used to encourage specific positive behaviors. “They’re going to require more structure. They’re going to require more extrinsic reward. They’re going to require more understanding [from adults] to get them the skills to make it later in life,” said Hinshaw. 

Hinshaw suggested that parents and children create a daily report card to set specific behavior goals. If the child meets the goals, the parent can give them a reward that is aligned with their interests. Dr. Hinshaw cautioned that when parents want to stop using a reward system, they should decrease rewards slowly. “Kids do really well with rewards and when you stop them, they go into extinction, and the behavior goes right back to baseline,” he warned.

Collaborate with teachers for consistent expectations

Coordination between home and school can reinforce positive behaviors and make expectations consistent. Hinshaw recommended that parents sit down with a behavioral specialist, their daughter and their daughter’s teacher to decide on two academic behaviors they’d like to improve. They may set a goal to come in from recess quietly or sit down in a reading circle for a set amount of time. Goals should be adjusted with progress. “[If] she’s sitting for an average of four minutes before she skips off, what’s your target next week with a reward system?” asked Hinshaw. “Seven minutes. And then nine. And then 10. Build slowly.”

If a parent opts to use a reward system at home, they can work with a teacher to make sure the same reward system is used at school. For example, parents and teachers may share daily behavior report cards with each other, so that the achieved goals are cumulatively tallied at the end of the day. “One of the first goals for a daily report card is ‘Did that daily report card ever make it home in that backpack?’” said Hinshaw. He recalled that a colleague of his whose child has ADHD discovered an assignment from the beginning of the school year still in the child’s backpack at the end of the year.

As more girls are diagnosed with ADHD, parents and teachers can help them manage their symptoms through tailored support, leading to success in school and beyond.

“What advice would you give to young people who are new to social media?”

“Have you ever felt like you need to change your social media use…?”

Teens and young adults from across the country answered these questions in a text survey in 2020. Their answers are eye-opening.

“I would tell young people … the internet is far off from reality and the more time you spend on it, the more you forget what real life is actually like…,” one person wrote.

“Don’t let social media control your life or your self-esteem,” another texted.

The study, published in September, reveals a striking awareness about the potential harms social media can have on teenagers’ mental health, but also their persistent attempts to counter these harms.

Some respondents explicitly said social media made them feel depressed. Many asked their parents to help them stop using it. Nearly two-thirds of respondents gave some version of this advice to future teens: Don’t use social media. It’s OK to abstain. Or delete your accounts.

“I have repeatedly deleted Instagram in an effort to improve my emotional state but then, I reinstall. Many times,” a respondent wrote.

About 95% of U.S. teens today use some type of social media, and about a third say they use it “almost constantly,” the Pew Research Center found in August. At the same time, teens and tweens are facing a mental health crisis. And research indicates that these two trends are intertwined: that social media can cause depression and lower life satisfaction.

While clinicians and psychologists try to come up with remedies to this crisis, some of them are realizing something paradoxical: Teens and young adults may be the best source of advice and solutions. They are the experts of these apps — not their parents.

And they’ve been affected by social media more than any other generation, says Emma Lembke, who’s 20 and founded the Log Off Movement to help teens have a healthy relationship with social media. “We, Gen Z, have felt so tangibly the impact of being left alone to big tech’s profit business model,” she explains. “And that relationship is completely asymmetric, and it is just harming young people.”

By listening to young people, Lembke believes, parents can work with teens to help them minimize the harms of these platforms while maximizing their benefits.

“I do believe social media has great aspects as well,” says Rijul Arora, age 26, a digital wellness coach and consultant who leads a project called LookUp India, aimed at helping teens unhook from social media. “I’ve been given a lot of opportunities because of social media. I can amplify positive content, and I’m connecting with a lot of people worldwide.”

If you’re a young adult struggling to keep up with school because you can’t put down your phone, Arora and Lembke don’t advise trying to cut off from social media altogether. Instead, they say find the sweet spot, “where you take the positive but leave the negative.”

The goal is to give youth more agency over social media apps, Arora says. “So teens are using these apps instead of the apps using teens.”

And parents, this all applies to you too: Here’s how to support and nudge your teen toward balanced screen use, while changing your own habits.

Step 1: Learn what you’re up against

Here’s what teens and young adults say over and over again: Know what you are up against with social media.

Back when Lembke was in sixth grade, she really, really, really wanted a phone.

“I remember as each one of my friends got a phone, each one of them was getting pulled away from conversations with me, from even playing on the playground,” Lembke explains. “So my initial response to this phenomenon was ‘OK, there must be something so magical and amazing within these social media apps.”

Then she got her own phone, she says, “And I remember for the first few months I was in love with Instagram.”

“One day, I think I commented, [to] Olive Garden, ‘I love you.’ And they responded, ‘We love you, too.'” Lembke says. “And I was screaming around the house. It felt like the best day ever.”

But within a few months, her time on her phone had increased from one hour to five or six hours each day. And her relationship with her phone shifted.

“I realized that the magic I thought Instagram — and all these social media apps — had was really just an illusion,” she says. “As I began to scroll more, I felt my mental, and physical health really suffer.”

Lembke wishes someone would have told her about this possibility before she began using social media.

“I have an anxiety disorder, and I have OCD,” Lembke told Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., in March 2022, during a roundtable hosted by the nonprofit Accountable Tech. “I was never warned that entering these online platforms would only amplify the things that I already struggle with.”

Meta’s global head of safety, Antigone Davis, said in a statement emailed to NPR that the company refers to research on social media and feedback from teens and families. The company has launched “more than 30 tools to support families,” she says, including some “that allow teens and parents to navigate social media safely together.”

A representative from TikTok noted in an email that the company released a tool in March for users to monitor their screen time.

So here’s what Lembke and other young people want you to know about how the apps work:

1. These apps aren’t necessarily going to improve your life. They aren’t necessarily going to help your fear of missing out. In fact, some teens say their feelings of FOMO actually worsened after starting social media. And for teenagers who are already struggling with mental health problems, studies suggest that social media can exacerbate these issues.

2. The goal is to keep you on the phone, even if you don’t want to stay. Even if you feel like social media is hurting you. The apps are designed to keep you using them so you can see ads. That’s how social media companies make money, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg explained to Congress in 2018.

Social media apps tap into an ancient pathway in your brain that makes you crave using them and makes it extremely difficult to stop, says neuroscientist Anne-Noël Samaha at the University of Montreal. “Social media apps know very well how to exploit human behavior to keep you coming back.”

Many teens say they feel like social media apps control them instead of vice versa. “I felt this addiction. I felt this pull, as if I had lost agency…,” Lembke said to Sen. Blumenthal. “As a young female, as a young person, that’s incredibly scary.”

But here’s the third thing teens say, over and over again about social media overuse: You can break the habit. And it starts with one key step: a digital audit.

Step 2: Get your baseline

Because of the way social media taps into our brain circuitry, most of the time we hardly realize we’re using the apps. It’s habitual or even subconscious. That’s why young people suggest doing a digital audit to help bring this usage into your consciousness.

For a project in high school English class, Sofie Keppler tracked the time she spent on each app on her phone each day for a week. The results triggered several big epiphanies for the 16-year-old: “First, that I was using my phone like a lot — I mean a lot — more than I thought,” she says.

Second, “it made me think like, maybe I should limit myself … so I’m not always on social media, and I’m talking to everyone around me,” she says. “The more I was on the phone, the more I was ignoring people in social settings.”

Ironically, you can do a digital audit easily with an app, such as Apple Screen Time, Moment, Toggl Track and Rescue Time.

“Facts don’t lie … [tracking my usage] really got my eyes to open up,” Lembke says on the Log Off podcast. “When I downloaded Moment and I saw I had like 200 pickups of my phone each day, I was horrified. People don’t understand those statistics … until they really, really see them.”

Then once you understand your baseline, have self-compassion, says Rijul Arora, who has struggled with what he describes as an addiction to social media himself. Don’t feel ashamed or anxious about it.

In workshops he gives on managing social media use, he tells teens: “Even if you have very high screen time … first acknowledge that you’re doing that, and it’s OK to be that way,” he says. Then when a teen seems ready to change, he adds: “It’s not OK to stay that way.”

Which brings us to the next step.

Step 3: Add “friction” to make yourself pause

Just as friction on the road slows down your car, friction on social media slows your usage. Basically, it’s adding apps that throw up small obstacles when using social media. Friction makes you pause for a bit and think before you mindlessly log on, scroll or click.

Some “friction” even makes you take breaths, fill out a wellness survey or meditate after some amount of time engaged with social media.

Adding friction is surprisingly easy. Again, there are a bunch of apps. Lembke recommends HabitLab from Stanford University. The app uses more than 20 interventions to reduce your time on whatever apps you choose. For example, HabitLab runs a clock at the top of the screen showing how much time you’ve spent on the app. It also blocks your news feeds and even stops your scroll after a certain amount of time.

For some apps, it uses an intervention called “Feed Diet,” which hides recommended content. Or it uses the “Mission Goal” intervention, which makes you type in why you’re entering this site.

Other friction apps include Moment, Freedom, Forest and Screentime Genie. Both Instagram and TikTok also have tools inside the apps to add friction.

Do these friction apps work? “Oh, I think my screen time decreased by like 80%” while using HabitLab, Lembke says.

If you’re tired of apps, Lembke recommends something she created: the five-minute power scroll. While looking at your news feed, stop at each image for five minutes. Say to yourself, “OK, with this image and with this person, why am I following them? Does this image make me happy? Am I benefiting from their content?” And if not, “unfollow them and give yourself grace to do that,” Lembke says.

This five-minute power scroll helps you reflect on why you’re using the app and what you want to prioritize during your time online, she says. “It’s how can I maximize its benefits for me, while mitigating its harms.”

Step 4: Hack your apps’ default settings

On many apps, Arora says, the default settings tickle his brain circuitry in a way that amplifies his cravings and habitual overuse.

“Never go by the default settings that tech companies give you,” says Arora. “Kids love this tip! Because they hate to be manipulated.”

Over and over again, teens say that turning off notifications is the first — perhaps the most critical — step here. You can do it for only certain times of day, if you need.

But also explore all the setting options, Arora says, including those related to privacy, your feed, comments and likes. “For example, many people don’t realize that you can turn off ‘likes’ on Instagram,” he says. “This helps reduce the competitiveness of the app.”

And if an app recommends videos or other content, or starts the next video on auto-play, don’t click. Go and find the video you want to look at, Lembke says. Remember, she says, you’re in charge. Not the app.

Both Instagram and TikTok have information for parents on how to set up teens’ accounts in a way that makes them safer but also can help with overuse.

For example, TikTok has started setting all users under age 18 to a screen time limit of 60 minutes each day. When they reach that limit, the app prompts them to enter a passcode if they want to keep watching, “requiring them to make an active decision to extend that time,” the company explained in March.

And in Instagram, teens can turn on notifications that urge them to “take a break” after a certain amount of scrolling. The app will also “suggest that they set reminders to take more breaks in the future,” Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, noted in December 2021.

Step 5: Enrich your 3D life

This one is huge. And it comes from Alassane Sow, 20, who’s studying environmental microbiology at Michigan State University. He and many other young people notice that they use social media when they’re bored (or stressed and need a distraction).

“A lot of people have a sort of shame when they see that they have 10 hours of screen time a day, and they don’t like that,” Sow explains. “But they don’t have anything else to do — or they feel like they don’t.”

Sow saw this in himself. “At some point, I realized that I couldn’t sit down for five minutes in my own space without looking at my phone for some sort of stimulus. That’s when I noticed, like, something was off,” he says.

So he went out and started to find other hobbies that don’t use his phone. He even has a special name for this: long-format entertainment. These are activities that take time to complete, such as reading a book, or drawing a picture.

“These activities make sure my brain isn’t only entertained by short videos and stuff like that,” he explains.

“I consciously plan to do them — instead of being on my phone, I say to myself, ‘I’m going to read a chapter of this book today or I’m going to go see my friends — that’s my favorite thing to do.”

Psychologists, psychiatrists and therapists agree wholeheartedly with Sow. Reinvigorating your life offline is critical to healthy social media usage. Then cutting down social media becomes much easier. You don’t have to accept boredom offline.

“I’m a big believer in passion in your life,” explains therapist Bob Keane at Walden Behavioral Care. “What do you really like to learn? What gets you really excited besides your phone? And that’s, I think, what we really have to encourage kids to develop.”

Not sure where to get started finding a passion? Lembke’s Log Off project has a whole series of projects and challenges to try, from dipping your toe into the 3D world to taking on big, long-term projects.

Step 6: Reach out to your parents for help — or if you’re a parent, get involved

This isn’t ironic or a joke. Teenagers say over and over again that they want their parents to help them regulate their social media use.

They don’t want parents to rip the phone away or be controlling or bossy. And they definitely don’t want to feel judged or shamed for their social media use. But they want parents to listen empathetically, offer gentle advice and set up guard rails. Even some rules. They want help learning to manage their device themselves.

“In order to prevent addiction and manage digital wellbeing, it is important for parents to set boundaries for their children/teenagers,” writes recent high school graduate Keegan Lee in a blog post on Log Off, called “A Message from Gen Z to Parents.” Lee describes how to talk to teens about their usage and gives some ideas for how to set up rules, including “Try to keep tech out of the bedroom.”

“Children may not like this suggestion,” she continues, “however, explain to them the purpose of the bedroom is used to rest and recharge.”

Also, Lee suggests setting clear consequences and punishments when kids violate tech rules. And “revisit the rules frequently,” she writes. If parents don’t help kids manage their screen use, she explains, no one else will.

Keane at Walden Behavioral Care says teenagers in his support group told him the same idea. “The kids were pretty clear to us that they need help,” he says. “They need help figuring out ways to be able to manage this because they told us, clearly, ‘We can’t do it by ourselves.’ ”

And the rules need to apply to the whole family, including the parents themselves. “For example, if you have a family dinner, no one has a device at the table,” Keane suggests. “If a parent is driving your adolescent to a game or a practice … the parent can say, ‘If you’re going to want me to drive you, you’re not on your phone, you’re talking to me.’ ”

The goal is simple but critical: Get kids back in the habit of socializing face-to-face. Because unlike online interactions, talking to other humans in person “is the glue of genuine human connection,” says therapist Kameron Mendes, who works with Keane at Walden Behavioral Center. And it’s time to replenish that glue.

“Adolescence is when kids start to become their own people in the world,” Mendes adds. “They try on finding friends, connecting with other people and connecting with other types of values and ideas. For that process to take hold and flourish, we really need to restore some level of human connection.”

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 9-8-8, or the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741.

Text messages, Instagram posts and TikTok profiles. Parents often caution their kids against sharing too much information online, weary about how all that data gets used. But one Texas high schooler wants to use that digital footprint to save lives.

Siddhu Pachipala is a senior at The Woodlands College Park High School, in a suburb outside Houston. He’s been thinking about psychology since seventh grade, when he read Thinking, Fast and Slow by psychologist Daniel Kahneman.

Concerned about teen suicide, Pachipala saw a role for artificial intelligence in detecting risk before it’s too late. In his view, it takes too long to get kids help when they’re suffering.

Early warning signs of suicide, like persistent feelings of hopelessness, changes in mood and sleep patterns, are often missed by loved ones. “So it’s hard to get people spotted,” says Pachipala.

For a local science fair, he designed an app that uses AI to scan text for signs of suicide risk. He thinks it could, someday, help replace outdated methods of diagnosis.

“Our writing patterns can reflect what we’re thinking, but it hasn’t really been extended to this extent,” he said.

The app won him national recognition, a trip to D.C., and a speech on behalf of his peers. It’s one of many efforts under way to use AI to help young people with their mental health and to better identify when they’re at risk.

Experts point out that this kind of AI, called natural language processing, has been around since the mid-1990s. And, it’s not a panacea. “Machine learning is helping us get better. As we get more and more data, we’re able to improve the system,” says Matt Nock, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, who studies self-harm in young people. “But chat bots aren’t going to be the silver bullet.”

Colorado-based psychologist Nathaan Demers, who oversees mental health websites and apps, says that personalized tools like Pachipala’s could help fill a void. “When you walk into CVS, there’s that blood pressure cuff,” Demers said. “And maybe that’s the first time that someone realizes, ‘Oh, I have high blood pressure. I had no idea.’ ”

He hasn’t seen Pachipala’s app but theorizes that innovations like his raise self-awareness about underlying mental health issues that might otherwise go unrecognized.

Building SuiSensor

Pachipala set himself to designing an app that someone could download to take a self-assessment of their suicide risk. They could use their results to advocate for their care needs and get connected with providers. After many late nights spent coding, he had SuiSensor.

Using sample data from a medical study, based on journal entries by adults, Pachipala said SuiSensor predicted suicide risk with 98% accuracy. Although it was only a prototype, the app could also generate a contact list of local clinicians.

In the fall of his senior year of high school, Pachipala entered his research into the Regeneron Science Talent Search, an 81-year-old national science and math competition.

There, panels of judges grilled him on his knowledge of psychology and general science with questions like: “Explain how pasta boils. … OK, now let’s say we brought that into space. What happens now?” Pachipala recalled. “You walked out of those panels and you were battered and bruised, but, like, better for it.”

He placed ninth overall at the competition and took home a $50,000 prize.

The judges found that, “His work suggests that the semantics in an individual’s writing could be correlated with their psychological health and risk of suicide.” While the app is not currently downloadable, Pachipala hopes that, as an undergraduate at MIT, he can continue working on it.

“I think we don’t do that enough: trying to address [suicide intervention] from an innovation perspective,” he said. “I think that we’ve stuck to the status quo for a long time.”

Current AI mental health applications

How does his invention fit into broader efforts to use AI in mental health? Experts note that there are many such efforts underway, and Matt Nock, for one, expressed concerns about false alarms. He applies machine learning to electronic health records to identify people who are at risk for suicide.

“The majority of our predictions are false positives,” he said. “Is there a cost there? Does it do harm to tell someone that they’re at risk of suicide when really they’re not?”

And data privacy expert Elizabeth Laird has concerns about implementing such approaches in schools in particular, given the lack of research. She directs the Equity in Civic Technology Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT).

While acknowledging that “we have a mental health crisis and we should be doing whatever we can to prevent students from harming themselves,” she remains skeptical about the lack of “independent evidence that these tools do that.”

All this attention on AI comes as youth suicide rates (and risk) are on the rise. Although there’s a lag in the data, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that suicide is the second leading cause of death for youth and young adults ages 10 to 24 in the U.S.

Efforts like Pachipala’s fit into a broad range of AI-backed tools available to track youth mental health, accessible to clinicians and nonprofessionals alike. Some schools are using activity monitoring software that scans devices for warning signs of a student doing harm to themselves or others. One concern though, is that once these red flags surface, that information can be used to discipline students rather than support them, “and that that discipline falls along racial lines,” Laird said.

According to a survey Laird shared, 70% of teachers whose schools use data-tracking software said it was used to discipline students. Schools can stay within the bounds of student record privacy laws, but fail to implement safeguards that protect them from unintended consequences, Laird said.

“The conversation around privacy has shifted from just one of legal compliance to what is actually ethical and right,” she said. She points to survey data that shows nearly 1 in 3 LGBTQ+ students report they’ve been outed, or know someone who has been outed, as a consequence of activity monitoring software.

Matt Nock, the Harvard researcher, recognizes the place of AI in crunching numbers. He uses machine learning technology similar to Pachipala’s to analyze medical records. But he stresses that much more experimentation is needed to vet computational assessments.

“A lot of this work is really well-intended, trying to use machine learning, artificial intelligence to improve people’s mental health … but unless we do the research, we’re not going to know if this is the right solution,” he said.

More students and families are turning to schools for mental health support. Software that scans young peoples’ words, and by extension thoughts, is one approach to taking the pulse on youth mental health. But, it can’t take the place of human interaction, Nock said.

“Technology is going to help us, we hope, get better at knowing who is at risk and knowing when,” he said. “But people want to see humans; they want to talk to humans.”

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters. This story was co-published with Vox.

Eric Hanushek, a leading education researcher, has spent his career arguing that spending more money on schools probably won’t make them better.

His latest research, though, suggests the opposite.

The paper, set to be published later this year, is a new review of dozens of studies. It finds that when schools get more money, students tend to score better on tests and stay in school longer, at least according to the majority of rigorous studies on the topic.

“They found pretty consistent positive effects of school funding,” said Adam Tyner, national research director at the Fordham Institute, a conservative education think tank. “The fact that Hanushek has found so many positive effects is especially significant because he’s associated with the idea that money doesn’t matter all that much to school performance.”

The findings seem like a remarkable turnabout compared to prior research from Hanushek, who had for four decades concluded in academic work that most studies show no clear relationship between spending and school performance. His work has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court and pushed a generation of federal policymakers and advocates looking to fix America’s schools to focus not on money but ideas like teacher evaluation and school choice.

Despite his new findings, Hanushek’s own views have not changed. “Just putting more money into schools is unlikely to give us very good results,” he said in a recent interview. The focus, he insists, should be on spending money effectively, not necessarily spending more of it. Money might help, but it’s no guarantee.

Hanushek’s view matters because he remains influential, playing a dual role as a leading scholar and advocate — he continues to testify in court cases about school funding and to shape how many lawmakers think about improving schools.

Hanushek began studying schools as a doctoral student in economics at MIT in 1966, when he attended an academic seminar to pore over a bombshell new study. The Coleman Report, published by the federal government, claimed that schools did not matter much for students’ academic success. More money for education wouldn’t improve things either, argued the report, which was influential but shot through with methodological flaws.

Hanushek couldn’t believe the conclusion that schools didn’t matter. By 1981, then an economics professor at the University of Rochester, he had found a way to make sense of the report’s vexing findings: Schools really did make difference, but you couldn’t tell which ones were good based on how much money they spent. Hanushek published a manifesto-like academic paper laying out this case titled: “Throwing Money at Schools.”

Eventually the debate became “Does money matter?” as the Brookings Institution put it in a book that Hanushek contributed to. He always described this framing as simplistic, but Hanushek essentially became the captain of team “not really.”

Hanushek hammered home this point with the message discipline of a politician and the data chops of an economist. He wrote updated versions of the same academic paper again in 1986 and then in 1989, 1997, and 2003. He also made the case in numerous reports and articles, as well as in testimony in increasingly prevalent school funding lawsuits. In 2000, he became a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank, where he remains based today.

Hanushek’s basic claim was that most studies of school “inputs” — like per-pupil spending, teacher salaries, and smaller class sizes — did not show a clear link between those resources and student outcomes. His 2003 paper showed that only 27% of the findings on spending were positively and significantly related to student performance. “One is left with the clear picture that input policies of the type typically pursued have little chance of being effective,” Hanushek wrote.

The basis for this conclusion was far more tenuous than Hanushek let on, though. Some researchers reanalyzed Hanushek’s data, and found that there actually was a link between spending and performance because his approach for summarizing studies was flawed. More importantly, the studies he relied on weren’t able to clearly isolate the impact of money.

“They were very poorly done by current standards,” said Martin West, a Harvard education professor. Nevertheless, Hanushek’s summary of these older studies, all published before 1995, is still sometimes cited today, including in legal proceedings.

Starting in the early 1990s, the economics discipline began focusing more on teasing apart cause and effect, using so-called “natural experiments,” an idea that recently won the Nobel Prize in economics. This eventually upended the school spending debate: A slew of newer papers using these methods came out showing a positive link with student outcomes. A recent overview paper by Northwestern University’s Kirabo Jackson and Claire Mackevicius combined the results of numerous prior studies. They found that on average, an additional $1,000 per student led to small increases in test scores and a 2 percentage-point boost in high school graduation rates.

The view that money matters now appears to be conventional wisdom among education researchers, although some still question whether the newer methods can convincingly show cause and effect.

Hanushek has downplayed this newer research linking spending to outcomes. Last year he even testified in a Pennsylvania school funding case that, “The majority of the studies that have been done to look at this relationship don’t give any statistically significant relationship.” This line was later cited in a trial brief by lawyers for the state.

Hanushek’s most recent paper, posted online several months after his Pennsylvania testimony, comes to a different conclusion.

Along with Stanford predoctoral fellow Danielle Handel, Hanushek reviewed rigorous studies released since 1999. Of 18 statistical estimates of the relationship between spending and test scores, 11 were positive and statistically significant. A separate set of 18 estimates examined the link with high school completion or college attendance; 14 of those were positive and significant. (The other four leaned positive but were not significant.) These findings appear much more favorable for school spending than Hanushek’s prior work indicated.

Hanushek and Northwestern’s Jackson have publicly debated the relationship between funding and outcomes, including in a recent Maryland court case. But their most recent papers are surprisingly aligned in results, if not interpretation.

“The findings reported by these studies were remarkably similar,” said Matthew Springer, a professor at the University of North Carolina who has testified on the side of states in a number of funding cases. Both show positive effects of money, he said.

Still, Hanushek insists this is the wrong takeaway. Don’t look at the typical effect, he argues; look at the variation from study to study. “A thorough review of existing studies … leads to conclusions similar to those in the historical work: how resources are used is key to the outcomes,” he and Handel wrote. “The range of estimates is startling.”

The context matters, they say. Sometimes money is spent well; sometimes it’s spent poorly. Sometimes the effects are big; other times they are small or nonexistent. Just focusing on the overall effect masks this variation.

To Hanushek, this aligns with what he’s been saying for decades: Throwing money at schools is a bad bet. “I still don’t think that that’s good policy — that you have 61% of very diverse studies [finding a relationship between spending and test scores] and you say I’ll bet the next billion dollars on that,” he said.

Jackson agrees that how money is spent matters. But he also thinks that Hanushek is missing the obvious conclusion from his own results.

“The vast majority of the time whatever school districts choose to spend the money on tends to improve outcomes,” he said. “I don’t see how you can look at that and then say therefore we don’t have enough evidence to suggest we should just increase the funds.”

Other researchers agreed that the variation in results is important, but that shouldn’t mean ignoring the overall impact. “The average effect still matters,” said West, the Harvard professor.

The new research has not stopped Hanushek’s advocacy work outside of academia. He is still testifying on behalf of states in court cases about whether schools should get more money, including in ongoing lawsuits in Arizona and Maryland. (Recently, he’s been paid $450 an hour for his time in these cases. Jackson was paid $300 an hour as an expert on the other side of the Maryland case.) “More often than not the academic research indicates no significant improvements in student outcomes despite increased funding,” Hanushek wrote last year in an expert report for the Maryland case.

Now, though, Hanushek’s own work contradicts his claim that most studies don’t show a positive relationship. “When I gave that testimony, I didn’t have this summary,” Hanushek said, referring to similar comments as a witness in Pennsylvania. “I wouldn’t answer it in that way” if asked again, he said. But ultimately, his thrust would be the same: “I would say that there is no consistent effect.”

The Pennsylvania judge didn’t buy Hanushek’s claims, and ruled for plaintiffs who sued the state. Other judges and politicians may be persuaded though. Some policymakers, including former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, continue to claim that money will not improve schools. This mantra may grow louder. Schools have received $190 billion in COVID relief since 2020, and although there has been little rigorous research on the money’s effects, many commentators have already argued that the funding has been ill spent.

Meanwhile, despite the impression left by four decades of his work and legal testimony, Hanushek says he’s not actually against more funding for schools. “I have never said that money shouldn’t be spent on schools,” he said recently. He simply thinks it needs to be used more effectively. For instance, he would like to see extra resources earmarked to attract and retain good teachers in high-poverty schools, a policy he found worked in Dallas.

So should policymakers spend more dollars on public schools, attached to certain requirements? Hanushek’s answer: “Yes.”

Matt Barnum is a Spencer fellow in education journalism at Columbia University and a national reporter at Chalkbeat.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering public education.

A Florida teacher is under investigation by the state’s Department of Education after she showed her students a Disney movie that features a gay character.

Jenna Barbee, who teaches fifth grade in the Hernando County School District, says a student’s mother lodged a complaint with education officials after Barbee showed the film Strange World in her classroom.

Barbee said the movie focuses on humans’ relationship to the environment, which was why she chose to show it to her class after a section on ecosystems, plants and animals. She said a subplot about a boy having a crush on another boy never crossed her mind before screening the film.

“It talks about love to all things, and that’s literally what this movie represents,” Barbee told NPR. “I find it interesting that now I’m getting in trouble for a similar topic.”

Strange World, a PG-rated Disney movie released last year, features actors Jake Gyllenhaal and Gabrielle Union among others and tells the story of three generations of a family exploring a dangerous land beneath their world.

Karen Jordan, a spokesperson for the Hernando County School District, confirmed to NPR in an email that both the district and the state are investigating the matter.

She said the Hernando County School District sent a note to the parents of children in the class informing them that their children had been shown the film.

“While not the main plot of the movie, parts of the story involves a male character having and expressing feelings for another male character,” the note reads in part. “In the future, this movie will not be shown.”

When asked why the district would no longer show Strange World, Jordan said there is a school board policy that guides the use of movies in classrooms and that the movie may violate Florida’s “Parental Bill of Rights,” a law signed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis last year.

The law — which critics have dubbed “Don’t Say Gay” — bars classroom instruction related to sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade. In April, the Florida Board of Education approved an expansion of the ban to all grades.

DeSantis has been targeting curriculum and diversity programs in public schools and colleges that he’s attacked as “woke indoctrination.”

Cassie Palelis, press secretary for the Florida Department of Education, said in an email to NPR on Monday that the department couldn’t confirm or deny whether Barbee is under investigation and pointed to the state’s legal process for investigating complaints against teachers.

The issue came into public view after one of Barbee’s colleagues tweeted a photo of the letter Barbee received from state education officials informing her that she was under investigation.

Barbee also posted a video on TikTok explaining her situation, saying investigators have been interviewing students about the matter.

@becomingabetterbarbee I am the teacher. Here is the truth. #indoctrination #disneymovie #disney #strangeworld #viraltweet ♬ original sound – Jenna Lynn

In an interview with NPR, she noted that Strange World also depicts a heterosexual couple kissing, but said that only the same-sex crush was the subject of the parent’s complaint.

“You don’t get to pick and choose which things you want and which things you don’t,” Barbee said. “That’s the issue with our school system today. It’s just this ongoing battle of everybody getting to push what they believe.”

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Poetry is a mindfulness practice for award-winning author and poet Clint Smith. But as a young person, Smith felt that poetry “was something that wasn’t for people like [him].” In a recent interview with KQED Forum, Smith said that poetry can feel intimidating when presented as if it’s a “geometric proof” or “a code that [students] are supposed to unlock.” He recommended that teachers instead emphasize that no interpretation is wrong. Online resources, too, can show young learners “that there are poets who are alive” and “reflect the diversity and plurality of the human experience of our society.”

“You don’t have to be published to write a poem,” said Smith. “Poetry is in all of us.” He said it’s important for educators to “make poetry feel like an invitation rather than intimidation.” Below, three poetry teachers from around the country shared how they expand the boundaries of poetry in the classroom.

Music and murals

In Carrie Mattern’s high school classroom in Flint, Michigan, students are introduced to poetry through Tupac’s book, “The Rose That Grew From Concrete.” She also includes rapper, poet and activist Akala’s video lecture, “Hip Hop and Shakespeare,” in her lesson plan. In the lecture, Akala quizzes listeners on whether a line is from hip hop or Shakespeare. Students quickly recognize rhyme, sentence structure and diction, Mattern said. 

Mattern’s “Is it poetry?” activity prompts students, in small groups, to move from station to station and identify different pieces of writing as poetic or not. This promotes collaboration and movement in the classroom, but also according to Mattern, “illustrates all the things poetry could be.”

Mattern recommended Melissa Alter Smith’s #TeachingLivingPoets movement and pointed to Clint Smith, Jose Olivarez, Fatimah Asghar, Danez Smith, Nate Marshall and Idris Goodwin as some of the contemporary poets who her students read in class. Mattern’s students also participate in a project interacting with murals in the Flint community.

Mattern said that connecting with your local poet laureate is another excellent way to engage with poetry within your community. Here’s what some of Mattern’s high school seniors said when asked what inspires them to be poets: 

• “I really enjoy writing stories and weaving tales; poetry is another way for me to do that.” – Dream
• “Poetry allows me to be more expressive. It is my creative outlet.” – Ashley
• “I like to express my ideas anywhere I can; whether it be poetry, art, or anything really.” – Jailen

Pocket poems and temporary tattoos

Christina Linsin, a poet, teacher and librarian in Virginia, has used music as an introduction to poetry for younger students. “It’s something that [students] are so familiar with and it does connect so well with the origins of poetry,” she said. When she worked at a middle school, Linsin would pick songs that were relevant to her students. After listening, students analyzed each song and identified literary elements.

Two years ago, as a high school teacher, Linsin had a new idea while contemplating a poetry tattoo of her own. Why not create temporary poetry tattoos for her students? Linsin customized and ordered the temporary tattoos online and brought them to class for her students to wear during National Poetry Month.

She also participates in National Poem in Your Pocket day, printing and handing out poems for students to carry in their pockets and ask one another to read aloud. Through the Academy of American Poets’ Dear Poet project, students write a letter to a poet in response to one of their works. “There’s no better way to make poetry alive for these kids,” Linsin said.

As someone whose love of reading was modeled by her mother, Linsin was drawn to the emotion and concision of poetry at a young age. One day in class, a teacher saw that she was reading Sylvia Plath and recommended that she pick up “Renascence” by Edna St. Vincent Millay. “I was hooked forever,” she said.

Countless possibilities

For Anthony Fangary, poetry is about vulnerability and honesty. Fangary has taught poetry to students of all ages in schools and community settings. (Editor’s note: Fangary works in a non-editorial role at KQED. He is not part of the MindShift team.) To avoid teaching inaccessible poetry, such as works that are hundreds of years old and use unrecognizable language, he introduces contemporary poets as well as non-traditional poetry, like an NPR Tiny Desk Concert. He aims to facilitate discussion by asking students questions like, “Where is the art?” 

Emphasizing that there are “countless possibilities” in poetry, Fangary has utilized different styles of poetry to get students excited about the subject. From epistolary poetry, writing a letter to someone, to ekphrastic poetry, a poetic reaction to a painting, to erasure poems, identifying and erasing the most significant parts of a poem, Fangary says that “the absence of language can be more powerful than the presence of language.”

Student check-ins are also an important part of poetry education for Fangary. Taking the time to ask questions like, “Based on how you feel today, what kind of animal are you?” allows students to think about themselves and their lives through a creative lens.

The common thread? These educators all find ways to help students connect with poetry in their everyday lives and communities. “The pedagogy has to reflect what the kids are dealing with today,” said Fangary. As Smith said on Forum, “poetry is everywhere,” and students “have an opportunity to be participants in that.”

When Alexandra Logue served as the chief academic officer of the City University of New York (CUNY) from 2008 to 2014, she discovered that her 25-college system was spending over $20 million a year on remedial classes. Nationwide, the cost of remedial education exceeded $1 billion annually; many colleges operated separate departments of “developmental education,” higher-education’s euphemistic jargon for non-credit catch-up classes. “Nobody could tell me if we were doing it the right way,” Logue said.

She suspected they weren’t. More than two-thirds of all community college students and 40 percent of undergraduates in four-year colleges had to start with at least one remedial class, according to a statistical report from the U.S. Department of Education. The majority of these students dropped out without degrees.

An experimental psychologist by training, Logue designed an experiment. She compared remedial math classes to the alternative of letting ill-prepared students proceed straight to a college course accompanied by extra help. The early results of her randomized control trial were so extraordinary that her study influenced not only CUNY in 2016 but also California lawmakers in 2017 to start phasing out remedial education in their state.

Over the seven years of Logue’s study, which took place at three of CUNY’s seven two-year community colleges, the results kept getting better. Students who started with college math were successfully passing the course at a fraction of the cost of remediation, getting their math requirements out of the way, earning their degrees faster and earning thousands more in the labor market. Many public colleges, from Nevada and Colorado to Connecticut and Tennessee, have followed suit, phasing out remedial ed.

Other data analyses have also shown benefits to bypassing remedial education, but this was one of the only real-life experiments, like a clinical trial, and so it carried a lot of weight. Most importantly, it studied math, often an insurmountable requirement for many students to complete their college degrees. This study has arguably been one of the most influential attempts to use experimental evidence to change how higher education operates and is now affecting the lives of millions of college students.

“It’s a great feeling of satisfaction,” said Logue, now a research professor at CUNY’s Graduate Center, “because it isn’t just CUNY. It’s across the country, using this really great evidence to help make things better.”

The third and final chapter of this long-term study was published in the January/February 2023 issue of the journal Educational Researcher, and as I pored over this body of research, I became confused about what it proved. The study could be seen as evidence against remedial education, but it could equally be seen as evidence for letting college students meet their math requirements without taking algebra.

The confusion stems from the study design. Instead of testing remedial versus college algebra, which would be a direct test of remedial education, the study compared remedial algebra to college statistics, a sort of apples to oranges comparison. In the experiment, CUNY randomly assigned almost 300 students who failed the algebra portion of a math placement test to an introductory statistics course. In tandem with this college class, students attended an extra two-hour workshop each week where a college classmate who had already passed the class tutored them. Researchers then compared what happened to these stats students with a similar group of almost 300 students who were sent to remedial algebra, the traditional first step for students who fail the algebra subtest. Logue had the same teachers teach sections of both courses – remedial algebra and college stats – so that no one could argue instructional quality was different. Also, only students who struggled with algebra, but not arithmetic, were part of this experiment; students with more severe math difficulties, as measured by the freshman placement test, weren’t asked to attempt the college course and were excluded from the control group.

By all measures, the students who went straight to college stats did better. More than half of the students who bypassed remedial algebra passed the stats class and earned college credit. Ultimately, these students finished their degrees a lot faster than those who started off in remedial algebra. They were 50 percent more likely to complete a two-year associate’s degree within three years and, according to the latest chapter of this seven-year study, they were twice as likely to transfer to a four-year institution and complete a bachelor’s degree within five years. Seven years after bypassing remedial ed, students were earning $4,600 more a year in the workplace, on average, than those who started in remedial math.

“What we can say is, for students who have been assigned to remediation, put them into statistics with extra help, and you will get a good result,” said Logue.

Some researchers argue that the shift to statistics might have made the difference.

“That switch from algebra to stats is a big one for a lot of students,” said Lindsay Daugherty, a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation who has studied remedial education and efforts to reform it. She said all the other studies that have looked at replacing remedial classes with college courses plus extra support haven’t produced better graduation rates. “This CUNY study is the only one,” said Daugherty.

The only other randomized control trial of remedial education is Daugherty’s Texas experiment to replace remedial English courses with college courses plus extra support. Going straight to college courses helped more students earn college credits in English but that didn’t help them get through college. Dropout rates were the same for students in both the remedial and the “corequisite” courses, as the college plus extra help version is often called.

“We know that the way that we did it before with these standalone [remedial] courses was not helping students, and most states and colleges have made a change and are moving towards corequisites,” said Daugherty.  “But the evidence does not suggest that these corequisite courses are the magic potion that is going to change completion and persistence. It’s going to take a lot more and a lot of other support.”

What we don’t know from this study is how to help students who are behind in math learn college algebra, a course that is similar to intermediate high school algebra, which remains a requirement for many business, health and engineering majors. All the students in this landmark CUNY study had intended to major in non-STEM fields that didn’t require algebra, such as criminal justice and the humanities, and for which college statistics would fulfill their math requirements.

Logue originally sought to conduct a simpler, cleaner study of only algebra, comparing the remedial prerequisite to the college course plus tutoring support. But she ran into problems with the algebra faculty. (There were too many different versions of college algebra for different majors and across different colleges at CUNY, each covering different topics, she said, and it was impossible to test one version of a basic college algebra course.) Meanwhile, the statistics department was open to the experiment and their introductory courses were very similar from professor to professor.

It’s unclear from this study how essential the weekly tutoring sessions were to helping students pass the statistics course. The experiment didn’t test whether students could pass the normal college stats class without peer tutoring.

The good news is that the switch from remedial algebra to college stats didn’t seem to harm anyone. Indeed, the students in the statistics group were just as likely to complete advanced math courses, along the algebra-to-calculus track, as students who started with remedial algebra, according to co-author Daniel Douglas, director of social science research at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, who led the data analysis. In the final number crunching, the stats students were just as likely to complete math-intensive degrees that required college algebra. Starting with stats didn’t thwart students from changing their minds about their majors and returning to an algebra-to-calculus track, Douglas said.

The bad news is that a lot of community college students still fell through the cracks. Although there was a 50 percent boost to the number of students who completed an associate’s degree within three years, only a quarter of the statistics students hit this milestone. Almost three-quarters didn’t. And though bypassing math remediation and heading straight to college stats led to a 100 percent increase in the number of bachelor’s degrees, only 14 percent of the statistics students earned a four-year degree.

The main benefit of allowing students to bypass remedial classes is speed, according to Douglas. Over the course of seven years, the students who started in remedial algebra eventually caught up and hit many of the same milestones as the students who started with statistics. “At the end of our data collection in the fall of 2020, their degree completion – the elementary algebra group and the stats group – they’re not that different,” said Douglas. As those students enter the workforce and gain experience, it’s quite possible that their wages will catch up too.

A CUNY spokesperson told me that their college system stopped placing new students into remedial classes in the fall of 2022. For students who are behind in math, there are now “corequisite” math classes, where the extra support is more costly and differs from the tutoring that was tested in this study I am writing about here. Now the college-level course is two hours longer each week, blurring the lines between regular instruction and extra help support, and entirely taught by instructors, not peer tutors. Many instructors who used to teach remedial courses now teach these corequisite courses.

For students who are significantly behind — struggling not only in algebra, but also in basic arithmetic — CUNY now operates a separate pre-college program, called CUNY Start, where students take only remedial classes. These students haven’t yet matriculated at the college and don’t pay tuition, and so CUNY doesn’t count them as students. And the numbers of students in this pre-college remedial program are swelling.

Students did better in these newer pre-college remedial classes than those who took traditional remedial classes, according to a separate 2021 study that Logue was also involved in. But these students aren’t necessarily doing better in college and earning more credits, unless they get a lot more advising and counseling support during their college years. Helping more young adults get through college isn’t going to be easy or cheap.

Amy Whitewater didn’t start a book club with social emotional learning goals in mind. It came from her own passion for reading. Whitewater taught English language arts for 10 years and later became a school counselor. When she got the idea for a student book club in 2013, she enlisted support from other staff members at her middle school, advertised the club to students, sought community donations and scheduled monthly meetings. She led the charge for six years until leaving for a new job.

Over those years, the club did more than build a culture of reading. Whitewater, who spoke about the club’s success at an American School Counselor Association conference, noticed the social and emotional benefits of the club, including:

• Cutting across cliques. Each year, 20 to 30 students joined the book club. “They were kids from all different backgrounds, all different socioeconomic statuses, kids who didn’t always interact with each other,” Whitewater said. “And so it was nice to bring them together and kind of see them connecting with each other in ways that they wouldn’t have.”

• Creating a safe space for ideas, feelings and opinions. Kids naturally have emotional responses to what they read. Teachers can tap into that, said Whitewater. Her book club did more than just discuss plot and literary attributes; they played games based on the books, listened to music from the time and setting, competed for prizes in Kahoot quizzes and did creative projects, such as making a Netflix watch list for a favorite character or a meme related to a character’s experiences. The variety of activities gave students different entry points to reflect on the books — and to listen to their classmates’ perspectives on what they’d read.

• Fostering healthy relationships with adults. About six teachers and staff members joined Whitewater in leading the club. That gave students different adults with whom to connect. “They didn’t all respond to me all the time,” Whitewater said. “But some of them had a really great relationship with, you know, our school registrar, and so they were able to talk to her about things sometimes that maybe they wouldn’t talk to me about.” Research shows that positive relationships with adults can help with kids’ academic motivation and classroom engagement. 

For educators verging on burnout, the idea of a student book club might sound great but exhausting. “No one wants another thing on their buffet,” Whitewater said.

Her advice? Assemble your army. Her first move in starting the club was a staff email asking, “Who wants in?” The colleagues who volunteered took turns picking books and planning activities — lightening the load for all.

Those adults also brought their specific expertise to different books. The social studies teacher, for example, gave students helpful context on the Vietnam War when students read “Okay for Now” by Gary D. Schmidt. And when they read “The Scorpio Races” by Maggie Stiefvater, the math teacher taught students about probability in relation to the book’s gambling plotline.

“That’s really what made (the book club) really special. We were able to have not just those different backgrounds, but also it kind of made it cross-curricular,” said Whitewater. Having a larger adult crew also meant that the book club lived on after she moved to her next job at the Oklahoma State Department of Education.

Some popular book club picks during Whitewater’s time were Scythe and Unwind by Neal Shusterman, The False Prince by Jennifer A. Nielsen and Moxie by Jennifer Mathieu, but she said educators should “make sure it’s appropriate for your kids, your community.” She also recommended re-reading before selecting a book to make sure it’s age-appropriate.

How does a revolution start? Sometimes, it’s a simple question. For Sarah Powell, an associate professor of special education at the University of Texas at Austin, the question was this math problem: Donna and Natasha folded 96 paper cranes. Donna folded 25 paper cranes. How many did Natasha fold?

In a study, Powell posed that question to children at the end of third grade, when they should have been able to answer it easily. Instead, most couldn’t solve it. One underlined 11 words in the question but didn’t attempt any math. Another jotted down the number 96 and gave up. A few wrote down random numbers that had nothing to do with the problem. More than half the students added the numbers 96 and 25 together. Only two children out of 15 she showed me got the correct answer: 96-25=71.

“I could send you hundreds of these,” Powell said. “It’s heartbreaking. How did we let it get to this? These are kids that just get passed from one grade level to the next. You shouldn’t let a kid get to fourth grade if they can’t add 12 plus 13. I see it as a huge equity issue. It is totally unfair what we are doing to these kids.” 

In early 2020, at an academic conference just before the pandemic hit, Powell commiserated with other experts in special education and students who struggle in math. They shared her frustrations about the state of math education in America. A majority of students weren’t mastering the subject, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a test that tracks academic achievement. The most recent test had shown that 60 percent of fourth graders and 67 percent of eighth graders failed to score at or above the proficient level for their grade.

The researchers begrudged the lack of attention math gets in schools compared to reading, but suddenly their rival discipline – reading – was providing a role model for action. At the time, the debate over why schools ignored the science of reading dominated education news. Parents and teachers were pressuring schools to switch to a phonics heavy curriculum in kindergarten and first grade. “We have a science of math just like there is a science of reading,” said Powell. “They are analogous. We just need to get people going.”

The special education community was also instrumental in drawing the public’s attention to the science of reading. In that case, it was parents of children with dyslexia who were clamoring for change in how schools taught reading. This time, in math, special education researchers are taking the lead.

In its most extreme version, this new math movement revives an old fight between advocates of teacher-led instruction of step-by-step procedures against those who favor student discovery and a conceptual understanding of math. It also raises new questions about what makes for good evidence in math education and pits well-designed quantitative studies of achievement gains against qualitative studies of people’s attitudes about math and why more women and people of color don’t enter STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields. 

At the urging of her colleagues, Powell emerged as a founder of the nascent movement. In December 2020, she invited dozens of like-minded education researchers to the first science of math Zoom meeting. They believed the research showed that teaching math properly in the early grades would drastically cut the number of children struggling with the subject who might need special interventions to catch up. 

The researchers continued to meet almost every month during 2021 as their campaign gained momentum. They launched a website, an advocacy group and an auxiliary group for teachers. A Science of Math Facebook group, which they started in December 2020, now has more than 21,000 members. More than 150 education professionals, ranging from teachers to education professors, have added their names to a public list of supporters. One of their leaders held a Science of Math event in Pennsylvania in 2022 and is planning another in 2023.

Their first public assault on the status quo came in August 2022, when Powell and two of her science of math collaborators – Elizabeth Hughes of Penn State and Corey Peltier at the University of Oklahoma – published a paper titled “Myths that Undermine Math Teaching.” They took direct aim at some of the teaching practices recommended by the influential National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), and Jo Boaler, a controversial professor of math education at Stanford University who has a large and devoted following of math teachers.

Citing 115 research studies to back up their views, Powell and her co-authors attacked what they described as common misconceptions about teaching math. They said it’s not essential to make sure children understand mathematical concepts before they are taught calculations. They insisted that algorithms, efficient ways of solving problems quickly, such as long division, aren’t harmful. They said that inquiry-based learning, where teachers encourage students to discover answers for themselves, is often not the best way to teach while explicit, direct instruction usually is. Forcing students to struggle with problems that they not only don’t know how to solve, but also haven’t mastered the tools needed to do so, isn’t helpful. Timed tests? It’s important, the researchers said, for students to master their sums and multiplication tables in order to free up the brain’s working memory to learn more complicated concepts. Periodic timed tests help teachers measure whether students are building speed and accuracy.

Powell says she and 13 other organizers have been volunteering their time to the cause and their group hasn’t taken any money from outside organizations or foundations. Powell’s own research is primarily funded by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Science Foundation.

The group is not arguing for a return to old-fashioned rote instruction, Powell says. She’s an advocate of active hands-on learning with tactile objects, what educators call “manipulatives.” But she says that research shows that children learn best when new topics begin with direct explanations from teachers who teach procedures and formulas alongside concepts. Then students practice mastering them. She isn’t opposed to inquiry learning, but she says it’s very hard to teach this way and the appropriate time is after children have mastered multiple strategies and have the tools to think through different possibilities. 

The pushback has already begun. In an interview, Stanford’s Boaler says the myths article is wrong because Powell and her colleagues “cherry picked” the research and “dangerous” because it will lead teachers in the wrong direction. And she questions why special education experts should determine what constitutes the science of math. She points out that there are no mathematics experts in Powell’s group. 

In January 2023, the NCTM, the math teachers group, reiterated its opposition to the rote memorization of math facts, such as multiplication tables. But that group’s president, Kevin Dykema, said the timing was a “fluke” and not in response to the science of math movement. Still, Dykema said he was “concerned” about the group and their disregard of rival research that shows kids are turned off by math when it’s taught as a boring set of procedures. 

“I worry that the science of math is so focused on rote memorization,” said Dykema, a middle school math teacher. “I know a lot of students see math as very meaningless. They think that math is a bunch of isolated skills that need to be memorized, and they don’t see any value in learning it.” A session on the science of math debate is currently being planned for the annual meeting of the NCTM in October 2023.

Behind the scenes, officials at state education agencies and education trade associations from Colorado to North Carolina are asking questions. Powell said she’s already received a positive response from the Kansas State Department of Education. Meanwhile, opponents are privately circulating drafts of rebuttals to the “myths” paper. The homepage of the North Carolina chapter of the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators says that the organization is working to understand the research behind the science of math movement and how to respond. “More information is coming soon!” the site promises.

Jon Star, a prominent professor of math education at Harvard Graduate School of Education, says that the science of math isn’t as clear as the science of reading and that there’s much we still don’t understand the best ways to teach the subject. He also points out that we really don’t know that much about how math is taught around the country. Although Powell’s paper discusses the shortcomings of progressive ideas about emphasizing conceptual math and not drilling math facts, it’s unclear if that’s what’s actually going on in classrooms and whether those practices are to blame for poor math performance. 

It seems clear that we may be heading for a new battle in the math wars, which have been raging off and on in American schools for decades. And that makes one veteran of these battles weary. 

“I go into this with some ennui,” said Deborah Loewenberg Ball of the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, another prominent professor of math education. “But this is a very important conversation to me.” She said that in order to come up with the most effective approach for teaching math, we need to agree on the goals of math instruction. Do we want kids to be able to compute accurately? Yes, but not everyone agrees that this should be the main goal of mathematics education. “The public needs to understand that the goals of math education are contested,” she said. Merely invoking the word “science” doesn’t resolve that debate, Ball said.  

I’m fascinated with this science of math group and what it has to say. In the coming weeks and months, I’ll be digging into the research on math instruction and what newer studies tell us about these old debates on procedures, concepts, multiplication tables, how to cultivate number sense, add fractions and solve word problems. I’m eager to see how it all adds up.

This story about the science of math 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 Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters. 

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters. Data analysis for this story by Thomas Wilburn and Kae Petrin.

After New York City’s public libraries last week averted deep cuts that would have significantly reduced hours, some parents and educators are raising alarm about the state of libraries in the city’s public schools.

For years, advocates have warned that many students do not have access to a library or a certified librarian on their campus. The nation’s largest school system, with 1,600 schools, has roughly 260 certified school librarians, education department officials said.

And according to a Chalkbeat analysis of school budget item lines for librarians, a larger share of high-poverty schools had no librarian on budget. (Other schools may employ librarians whose salaries are paid outside of school budgets, like through a school’s PTA, which may not be reflected in the data.)

It’s an issue that’s developed over years, as schools have had to make difficult financial decisions in the face of declining funds, and as librarians say their work has been devalued in the public eye. New York City isn’t alone. In Philadelphia, for example, there were just 10 certified school librarians in 2020, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

But in the five boroughs, where more than 800,000 K-12 students attend the city’s public schools, other factors have come into play. Under state law, secondary schools with more than 700 students are required to have a full-time, certified school librarian, with part-time librarians required for those who fall below the enrollment threshold. (Charter and elementary schools are exempt from the requirement.) But as the city trended toward smaller schools under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg in the early 2000s, schools found themselves with fewer students and shared building spaces — with libraries sometimes losing out.

“The library is often a thing that’s on the chopping block, because it isn’t seen as essential as a cafeteria, for example,” said Emily Drabinski, president-elect of the American Library Association and a CUNY librarian. “I don’t blame principals for having to make those tough calls. … But it speaks to our failure to understand the contributions that school librarians make to learning at school.”

A Chalkbeat analysis also found nearly a third of the city’s schools with more than 700 students — which would meet the state’s requirement for a full-time librarian — did not have one listed in their most recent budget.

Jenny Fox, a parent and children’s book author, said she started looking into the issue when her son’s Brooklyn elementary school lost its part-time librarian.

“It’s a quiet problem,” she said. “Half the parents at our school didn’t even know we didn’t have a librarian — people just assume that comes with a school.”

But not having a library at school can come with consequences. Studies have shown students at schools with certified librarians on staff tend to perform better on measures of academic achievement. School librarians often help inspire a joy of reading, as well as help students develop critical research and media literacy skills.

“In New York City, we’re always promoting college and career readiness,” said Arlene Laverde, a school librarian at Townsend Harris High School in Queens and New York Library Association president. “But what college students do you know that don’t do research? If you have to learn research skills in college, you are now five steps behind the private schools that have school libraries and school librarians ready to help.”

Laverede, who has worked as an NYC educator for more than 30 years and in school libraries for half of her career, said she’s watched as the field has shrunk. She’s heard people chalk up her role to just “reading all day” — a warped perception that has had painful consequences as schools have sought to trim expenses over the years, looking for positions that appear expendable.

While the majority of schools have no librarians budgeted, schools serving students with higher rates of poverty were also less likely to have one, according to a Chalkbeat analysis. More than 81% of schools with poverty rates higher than 75% did not have a librarian staff member budgeted. That was roughly six percentage points higher than schools with lower poverty rates.

Lauren Comito, a librarian at Brooklyn Public Library and board chair of Urban Librarians Unite, has seen students without a library or librarian at their school come into her library seeking help. Libraries on campus offer a crucial space for student exploration, one that some are missing out on, she added.

“We say that we want kids and students and schools to develop critical thinking skills, we want them to develop research skills, we want them to be able to identify misinformation or go out and find their own answer,” she said. “That’s something missing in schools — that ability to explore without it being connected to a rubric, and libraries provide some of that.”

Mina Leazer, a librarian at Manhattan’s Seward Park Campus Library, transitioned from teaching into her current role through an education department program. Working as a librarian has allowed her to continue helping students, providing a space for them to not just read and relax, but also to come seeking advice or help with a wide range of questions, she said.

Leazer said she fears many students without campus libraries or librarians won’t become lifelong readers.

“If those habits aren’t formed in that critical moment, they’re not going to miraculously appear again,” she said.

The city is trying to strengthen the pipeline of librarians, who are “invaluable resources for our young people in developing literacy skills and fostering academic success and college and career readiness,” an education department spokesperson said.

The education department offers a “Teacher 2 Librarian” program, which partners with universities to help licensed teachers earn a master’s degree in library and information science and become state certified to work as a school librarian. There are 18 new candidates preparing to join the program, according to an education department spokesperson. The city plans to keep working to increase the number of certified school librarians in public schools.

But though some programs have successfully turned teachers into certified librarians, Laverde said she worries years of dwindling positions have also turned some away from the career path.

“In their mind, it’s a dead certification,” she said of prospective librarians. “Why am I going to invest money into this degree and for a school library certification if there are no jobs available?”

Zalykha Mokim, a school librarian at Newcomers High School, a Long Island City school that serves newly arrived immigrants who may be learning English as a second language, shares others’ concerns over the scarcity of certified librarians.

Mokim became a librarian last year after a decade teaching — after experiencing multiple schools without a librarian on staff, and seeing how children across the city lacked equal access to librarians. The low number of school librarians has disproportionately impacted students of color and students from low-income families, she added.

“Of course I’m concerned about it, but I’m also hopeful, because there is a cohort of librarians who are trying to bring advocacy and trying to bring it into this realm where libraries are seen as essential and necessary for a vibrant public school community,” Mokim said. “Libraries are not a luxury for our students. Libraries are a necessity.”

Julian Shen-Berro is a reporter covering New York City. Contact him at jshen-berro@chalkbeat.org.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.

In 2019, Minnequa Elementary in Pueblo was on the brink of closing because of low test scores and declining enrollment. Today, the school is off the state’s “watch list,” has the state’s top “green” school rating, and recently won a $50,000 award for exceptional growth in math.

So, how did a school where only 8% of students scored proficient on state math tests in 2019 change course?

Principal Katie Harshman says it was a combination of factors, including a good math curriculum, regular coaching for teachers, constant data analysis, and a shift to having some upper elementary teachers focus only on math, while others teach reading and writing. Using state grants and federal money the school receives because it serves many students from low-income families, Minnequa also tapped outside experts, including the Relay Graduate School of Education and a math consulting group called 2Partner.

Harshman and her team say the yearslong math push has given students a better understanding of key concepts, pushed them daily to articulate how they solve problems, and pumped up their math confidence.

Minnequa students now post some of the highest rates of academic growth in the state, showing more year-over-year progress on standardized tests than the vast majority of their Colorado peers. Those gains are what earned Minnequa and 11 other Colorado schools state “Bright Spot” awards this spring — each coming with $50,000 in leftover COVID relief funds.

Educators and policymakers statewide are pushing to improve math instruction after sharp declines in scores on state and national tests during the pandemic. This spring, lawmakers passed legislation to offer after-school tutoring in math, expand teacher training, and encourage schools to choose high-quality math curriculum. State leaders also paid to provide a digital learning tool called Zearn Math to Colorado schools.

The work that has unfolded at Minnequa over the last five years illustrates how effective instruction can translate into student achievement.

Harshman and her colleagues say there’s more to do. While the share of students who are proficient on state math tests has more than tripled to 26% in four years, It’s still below the state average.

“We’re not done. We’re still going to keep going,” said Leslie Ortega, a fourth grade math teacher at Minnequa.

Still, after the threat of closure, the school’s progress is gratifying.

“It’s been like the light at the end of the tunnel,” Ortega said. “It just shows us what we as a whole school can accomplish.”

A few weeks before state tests were given this spring, Harshman stood in the back of a fifth grade classroom watching carefully as the teacher reviewed fractions. She noticed that students weren’t answering in full sentences as they should, and as they would be expected to on parts of the upcoming test. Harshman caught the teacher’s eye, brought her hands together and pulled them apart — a reminder that students needed to stretch out their responses into complete thoughts.

“It’s a very silent signal. It’s nothing dramatic,” she said.

This kind of real-time coaching — by Harshman, the school’s math coach Christy Vasquez, and outside consultants — has become the norm at Minnequa over the last several years.

The idea is to provide on-the-spot feedback through a whispered suggestion, a quick side conversation, or a few minutes of co-teaching so teachers can practice immediately.

“I’m not there to be like, ‘Ah-ha! Gotcha!’ I’m just there for support,” said Vasquez, who started as a teacher at Minnequa six years ago and took the math coach job last year.

Jeanette Valdez, a fifth grade teacher who grew up in Pueblo and lives just two blocks from Minnequa, said it’s been nerve-wracking at times to have so many people stop into her classroom to observe and coach — sometimes even top district administrators.

“I told myself that all they’re there for is to make me better and that’s my whole reason for being a teacher,” she said.

All the feedback — a coach was in her classroom practically every day last year — has helped her improve, she said.

These days, when students work on math problems independently, she’s in “aggressive monitoring” mode. That means she’s walking through the classroom to watch how students are solving problems and exactly where they’re getting stuck. Previously, she’d watch students work, but wasn’t checking for anything specific.

“I had to learn to be all up in their business …. and to really hone in on what it is I’m looking for,” she said.  

One of the biggest changes at Minnequa in recent years has been having some teachers in third through fifth grade specialize in math instruction — a practice often called departmentalization.

That means teachers like Ortega and Valdez teach math to all the students in their respective grades, while colleagues take on literacy instruction.

“I think it’s the best. I really do,” said Ortega. “I’m able to focus on one subject. I’m able to really dig deep into the math data and the math lessons.”

She said the switch has also given her more time for planning each day — 80 minutes, up from 40 previously. And while five years ago, she might have spent planning time cleaning her classroom, Ortega said Harshman ushered in a different expectation —  that teachers use the time to look at data on each student’s strengths and needs.

Alongside the departmental structure, consultants have helped teachers organize their daily math block so students are actively doing math most of the time rather than listening to the teacher. That has meant tweaking the school’s math curriculum, EngageNY, which the school adopted about six years ago when it was rated “red,” the state’s lowest rating.

Vasquez, Minnequa’s math coach, said the curriculum is high quality, but contains a lot of material. Consultants for 2Partner helped teachers identify the most critical parts and pare down the program’s long teacher-led lesson introductions.

Brianna Mazzella, a consultant with 2Partner who’s worked with Minnequa staff for four years, also dissects Colorado math standards with teachers to ensure they’re covering key pieces and building a solid foundation for the next big skill.

In April, she met with a fifth grade teacher to talk about long division, a skill students will be expected to master in sixth grade. They talked about the need in the last month of school to ensure students have a conceptual understanding of what division is, the language of division, and how estimation and knowledge of place values can give meaning to the rote rules that students also learn.

Mazzella said she wasn’t surprised by Minnequa’s math growth on state tests or that it earned a green state rating last fall. She knew how much work teachers did and saw the results in student work.

With a closure threat like the one Minnequa faced, she said, “You either rally or you don’t, and that building rallied.”

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat, covering early childhood issues and early literacy. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

This post was originally published by Parenting Translator. Sign up for the newsletter and follow Parenting Translator on Instagram.

As parents, our short-term goal is to get our children to listen to us and follow the rules and limits we set for our family. Yet, our long-term goal is to raise children who truly understand why we have created these rules and limits and develop an internal motivation to be kind and do the “right” thing. In other words, we want them to follow rules because they care about being a kind, moral person, not just because they are scared they might get in trouble. In research, this is referred to as internalization. So how do we make sure we are working towards this long-term goal? Could our short-term discipline strategies be interfering with this long-term goal? 

A recent study addressed this question. The researchers found that when parents used specific discipline strategies they were more likely to have children who showed early signs of internalization of the rules than parents who used different strategies. 

What strategies helped children to internalize the rules? 

1. Logical consequences instead of  punishments. Logical consequences are consequences that are related to the child’s actions, such as taking away a toy that your child threw at their sibling, ending meal time because they are playing with their food, making your child clean up a mess that they made or leaving the playground when they aren’t following the rules. These types of consequences are more likely to result in children actually taking responsibility for the problem they created and helping children to understand the importance of the broken rule.
2. Practicing “autonomy-supportive” parenting instead of “controlling” parenting. “Autonomy-supportive” parenting includes acknowledging your child’s feelings about a rule or limit, giving them some sort of choice or involvement in the decision-making around rules and limits, and providing the rationale behind the rule or limit. Controlling parenting often involves threats and punishment to make your child behave or trying to induce guilt or fear. Autonomy-supportive parenting helps children to internalize the rules, while controlling parenting makes children more likely to behave to please parents or avoid getting into trouble. 

How does internalization happen? 

This study, along with previous research, finds that, when children feel less anger and more empathy in response to their parents’ rule-setting, they are more likely to find the rule or limit acceptable. Research suggests that the more children accept the rule or limit, the more likely they are to appreciate and internalize the values that underlie the rule or limit. Research also suggests that anger in response to a parent’s discipline strategy may interfere with internalization since it makes children think more about how unfair the discipline is rather than the values their parents are trying to teach. Research finds that any parent discipline strategy that increases empathy is likely to enhance the internalization process. Logical consequences and autonomy-supportive parenting are effective because they help to reduce anger and increase empathy in the context of rule- or limit-setting. 

So how do parents apply this research?

1. Gently remind your child of a rule or limit before using any type of discipline. For example, if your child is throwing sand at the playground, remind them “We will have to leave the playground if you keep throwing sand” before following through on this logical consequence. 
2. Acknowledge their feelings if they are not happy about the limit you are setting. It is so important to remember that you can hold the limit while still acknowledging they might not like it. For example, “I know you don’t like being buckled into your car seat. It feels uncomfortable for you, but it is the only safe way for us to ride in the car.”
3. Use logical consequences instead of punishments when possible. Logical consequences are consequences created by parents that are related to the behavior and make logical sense following from the behavior. For example, if your child hits their brother, you ask them to stop playing to go get him an ice pack. If they make a mess, they have to clean it up instead of watching a movie with the rest of the family. A punishment is a negative consequence that is usually unrelated to the behavior and intended to be aversive to the child so they do not repeat the challenging behavior. For example, taking away screen time when they hit their brother or yelling at a child for making a mess. Research finds that logical consequences are more acceptable to children, which makes them less likely to cause anger and more likely to increase empathy. 
4. Give them a chance to make some type of choice or participate in decision making or problem solving in some way. If your child is having difficulty with a limit or rule you set, give them a chance to make a choice. For example, you can say something like: “We need to leave the playground now, you can either walk or skip to the car.”
5. Explain the rationale behind the limit, focusing on the impact on others when possible. Explaining the rationale (translation: giving them the reason for the rule rather than just saying “because I said so”) helps to reduce children’s anger about the rule, which then increases their likelihood of internalizing the rule. In addition, focusing on how the rule impacts others can help to build empathy, which is also key for internalization. For example, you can say something like: “We have to clean up our toys otherwise someone could trip over them and get hurt” or “When you grabbed that toy from your brother’s hands, it hurt his hands and interrupted his play”. 
6. Avoid threats (“If you don’t clean up your toys, I am going to throw them away”) or anything that is meant to induce fear or guilt (“Why are you always so mean to your baby brother?”). These approaches might be effective in the moment but can come off as controlling to children and increase anger, which ultimately reduces the chances of internalization. 

Cara Goodwin, PhD, is a licensed psychologist, a mother of three and the founder of Parenting Translator, a nonprofit newsletter that turns scientific research into information that is accurate, relevant and useful for parents.