Eamonn Fitzmaurice/LA School Report

As schools continue to recover from the pandemic, there’s one troubling COVID symptom they can’t seem to shake: record-setting absenteeism.

In the 2021-22 school year, more than one in four U.S. public school students missed at least 10% of school days. Before the pandemic, it was closer to one in seven, the Associated Press reported, relying on data from 40 states and the District of Columbia.

In New York City, the nation’s largest district, chronic absenteeism hit 40%, according to district officials, meaning some 375,000 students were regularly absent. In Washington, D.C., it hit 42.5%. In Detroit, it was 77%.

Data are just beginning to emerge for the most recent school year, but a few snapshots present a troubling picture:

• In Oakland, Calif., district officials said 61% of students were chronically absent in the 2022-23 school year;
• In Providence, R.I., the district in September said fully half of students missed at least 10 percent last year;
• And in suburban Montgomery County, Md., near Washington, D.C., about 27% of students were chronically absent last year, up from 20% four years earlier. As elsewhere, high school students were more likely to be chronically absent.

While many policymakers have cited disconnection from school as a key reason for the problem, others say it has different causes unique to the times we’re in — causes that educators have rarely had to deal with so fully until now, from the death of caregivers to rising teacher absences and even, for older students, a more attractive labor market.

Here, according to researchers, school officials and parents’ organizations, among others, are six hidden (and not-so-hidden) reasons that chronic absenteeism rates remain high.

1. Worsening mental health

In a recent survey by the National Center for Education Statistics, 70% of public schools reported an increase in the percentage of students seeking mental health services at school since the start of the pandemic; 76% reported an increase in staff voicing concerns about students with symptoms of depression, anxiety and trauma.

And after modest declines in 2019 and 2020, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported record-high suicide deaths during the pandemic. Suicides are rising fastest among young people, among other groups.

“We’re in the middle of a mental health crisis for kids,” said Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union. She said mental health support, both in our public education system and larger health care system, is inadequate to deal with the crisis.

“Kids are literally refusing to go [to school]. That is a major issue that I hear from parents every day. ‘I can’t get my kid up. They do not want to go.’”

For many students, school has lost its value, she said, “because there’s not a lot of meat on the bone,” either because instruction has worsened or because many students feel they can do what’s required from home.

2. Death of caregivers

As many as 283,000 young people in the U.S. have lost one or both parents to the pandemic, researchers now estimate, with about 359,000 losing a primary or secondary caregiver, including a grandparent.

Those losses hit hardest in multigenerational, low-income households, since many grandparents and other relatives were playing caregiving roles, said Robert Balfanz, a research professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Education. “It now falls to the teenagers,” he said. Even those who don’t care for younger siblings may now need to do so for surviving parents or even grandparents, making school less of a priority.

3. Teacher absences

Among the most politically charged storylines to emerge from the pandemic was the that of teachers and other school staff pushing to ensure their safety, often by keeping schools operating remotely or demanding generous COVID-related sick-day policies.

The result has been an explosion of teacher absenteeism alongside that of students. In Illinois, just 66% of teachers had fewer than 10 absences in 2022. In one suburban district west of Chicago, it was even lower at just 54% of teachers.

A May 2022 federal survey found that chronic teacher absenteeism during the 2021-22 school year had increased in 72% of schools, compared to a typical pre-pandemic school year. In 37% of schools, teacher absenteeism increased “a lot.”

Simultaneously, it found, 60% of schools nationwide found it harder to find substitute teachers. And when subs couldn’t be found, 73% of schools brought in administrators to cover classes.

That makes school a lot less valuable for students, said Rodrigues. “What we saw in COVID is how little instruction many of our kids are actually getting,” she said. “And so it’s very hard as a parent to make the argument: ‘No, you’ve got to go. This is important for your future,’ when all you’re doing there is sitting and watching a movie because you have a sub again and again and again.”

4. Remote assignments

While many students struggled to keep up with schoolwork during the pandemic, the experience revolutionized schools’ thinking about remote learning. Most significantly, it gave students the ability to complete classwork entirely at home, without stepping into the school building. In many districts, schools have continued to allow students to, in essence, work from home like their parents.

Combined with looser rules around sick-day attendance, observers say, this has resulted in millions of students — and their parents — deciding that five-day-a-week school attendance is no longer mandatory.

“Kids don’t see why they can’t work from home,” said Tim Daly, former president of TNTP and co-founder of the consulting firm EdNavigator. In a recent issue of his newsletter, Daly noted that when students miss a day of school, “all the work is available online in real-time, making it simple for a student to complete it all from home before the day is even done.”

Given the low quality of instruction that many parents saw during the pandemic, he said, parents now are less likely to worry if their child is missing a day. “Sitting in a desk for six hours a day,” he wrote, “is for suckers.”

Student testimonials bear that out, said Montgomery County’s Neff.

Students in focus groups now tell administrators that five-day-a-week attendance now seems optional, he said. “They’ve told us repeatedly, ‘We got so used to a year-and-a-half or more taking classes, sitting on our bed in our pajamas on our computer.’ And many of them are continuing a struggle to get back into school regularly.”

​​A few observers say schools allowing students to do more work from home is worsening the chronic absenteeism problem (Paul Bersebach/Getty Images)

Students who learned reasonably well at home, he said, now wonder, “‘Why are you telling me now I have to sit in seven periods a day for five days a week?’

At one of the nation’s most renowned suburban high schools, New Trier High School near Chicago, the percentage of chronically absent students rose to more than 25% last winter, the Chicago Tribune reported. Absenteeism rose as students got older, officials noted, with rates of just over 14% for freshmen but nearly 38% for seniors.

By late May, even the student editors of the school newspaper declared that they had had enough: “While this trend isn’t unique to New Trier,” they wrote in an editorial, “it’s also not acceptable. We believe that both the school and students need to do more.”

Jean Hahn, a New Trier board member, last spring pointed out that many adults now work remotely. “So many of us don’t have to be at our desk 9-5 Monday through Friday anymore,” Hahn told attendees at a board meeting. “It’s challenging for parents to explain to our young people why they do.”

5. A higher minimum wage

Over the past few years, more than half of the 50 states have been in a kind of arms race to raise their minimum wage, tempting teens to trim their school hours or drop out altogether to help their families get by.

While the federal minimum wage since 2009 has remained $7.25, 30 states have set theirs higher, according to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. While just four states and the District of Columbia now guarantee a minimum wage at or above $15, eight states are on pace to get there by 2026 or sooner.

Chicago’s minimum wage is $15.80 for many large businesses, prompting a few observers to say that higher wages are worsening schools’ chronic absenteeism problems (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

In states offering $15 an hour, said Hopkins’ Balfanz, this likely made the absentee problem worse.

“That’s real money to a 17-year-old,” he said, offering them both a bit of personal agency and the opportunity to help out their families. “Things that did not make sense at $6 an hour do make sense, then, at $15.”

Steven Neff, director of pupil personnel and attendance services for Montgomery County Public Schools, the suburban D.C. district, said students “are telling us that there is great value in being able to have a job that is paying reasonably well.” Minimum wage work, he said, now “has even greater financial enticements than when I think about minimum wage when I was their age.”

6. Better record-keeping

One reason why chronic absenteeism seems to be spreading may have less to do with actual attendance and more with better record-keeping by districts and states.

Until recently, researchers found that the problem was often confined mostly to high-poverty neighborhoods.

President Barack Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act on Dec. 10, 2015, which allowed states for the first time to make chronic absenteeism part of their school quality indicators (NurPhoto/Getty Images)

But here’s the thing: A decade ago, few schools even kept track of chronic absenteeism. Most states didn’t actively track it until 2016, when new flexibility under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act allowed them to choose indicators of school quality according to their own desired outcomes. That’s when about 30 states made it an indicator in their accountability systems — and on school report cards.

Before that, Balfanz said, school districts typically measured average daily attendance, which could actually mask high chronic absenteeism that lurked around the edges. It’s mathematically possible, he said, to have an average daily attendance of 92% “but still have a fifth of your kids missing a month of school. Different kids on different days are making up that 92%.”

So by 2020, when the pandemic hit, schools had only been tracking it for a few years and had few good strategies to address it, Balfanz said. “It’s relatively new. And then the pandemic spread it everywhere.”

Where do we go from here?

At New Trier, student pressure eventually paid off, resulting in a new plan this fall: In preparation for the 2023-24 school year, a school committee recommended more stringent policies for absences, including just five “mental health days” per year. It also bans students from participating in extracurriculars if they’re not in class that day. They’ll get an email by 3:15 p.m. notifying them not to show up to sports or other activities.

Simple interventions can also help: A 2018 study found that offering parents personalized nudges by mail about their kids’ absences reduced chronic absenteeism by 10% or more, partly by correcting parents’ incorrect beliefs that their kids hadn’t missed as much school as they actually had — research shows that both parents and students underestimate it by nearly 50%.

That’s probably preferable to how many schools attack the problem, via “supportive” phone calls home, said Hopkins’ Balfanz. “Who’s going to make 150 phone calls a day in a school?” he said. “If you have that one person assigned to it, they literally would be spending the whole day calling.”

EdNavigator’s Daly says schools should reset the discussion around attendance, urging parents to let their kids miss school as rarely as possible and communicate honestly about absentee rates.

Neff, the Montgomery County attendance services director, said transparency “increases the urgency in all of us” and is essential if schools want to get parents on board.

“In order to fully have them understand the gravity of the situation, we needed to show them: ‘Here is our data. Here is where it was, here is where it is and where it is for certain groups. We need your help to fix this.’ ”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

Eamonn Fitzmaurice/LA School Report

Artificial intelligence now has a daily presence in many teachers’ and students’ lives, with chatbots like ChatGPT, Khan Academy’s Khanmigo tutor and AI image generators like Ideogram.ai all freely available.

But nearly a year after most of us came face-to-face with the first of these tools, a new survey suggests that few states are offering educators substantial guidance on how to best use AI, let alone fairly and with appropriate privacy protections.

As of mid-October, just two states, California and Oregon, offered official guidance to schools on using AI, according to the Center for Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University.

CRPE said 11 more states are developing guidance, but that another 21 states don’t plan to give schools guidelines on AI “in the foreseeable future.”

Seventeen states didn’t respond to CRPE’s survey and haven’t made official guidance publicly available.

As more schools experiment with AI, good policies and advice — or a lack thereof — will “drive the ways adults make decisions in school,” said Bree Dusseault, CRPE’s managing director. That will ripple out, dictating whether these new tools will be used properly and equitably.

“We’re not seeing a lot of movement in states getting ahead of this,” she said.

The reality in schools is that AI is here. Edtech companies are pitching products and schools are buying them, even if state officials are still trying to figure it all out.

Satya Nitta

“It doesn’t surprise me,” said Satya Nitta, CEO of Merlyn Mind, a generative AI company developing voice-activated assistants for teachers. “Normally the technology is well ahead of regulators and lawmakers. So they’re probably scrambling to figure out what their standard should be.”

Nitta said a lot of educators and officials this week are likely looking “very carefully” at Monday’s White House executive order on AI “to figure out what next steps are.”

The order requires, among other things, that AI developers share safety test results with the U.S. government and develop standards that ensure AI systems are “safe, secure, and trustworthy.”

It follows five months after the U.S. Department of Education released a detailed, 71-page guide with recommendations on using AI in education.

Deferring to districts

The fact that 13 states are at least in the process of helping schools figure out AI is significant. Last summer, no states offered such help, CRPE found. Officials in New York, Iowa, Rhode Island and Wyoming said decisions about many issues related to AI, such as academic integrity and blocking websites or tools, are made on the local level.

Still, researchers said, it’s significant that the majority of states still don’t plan AI-specific strategies or guidance in the 2023-24 school year.

There are a few promising developments: North Carolina legislation will soon require high school graduates to pass a computer science course. In Virginia, Gov. Glenn Youngkin in September issued an executive order on AI careers. And Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro signed an executive order in September to create a state governing board to guide use of generative AI, including developing training programs for state employees.

Tara Nattrass

But educators need help understanding artificial intelligence, “while also trying to navigate its impact,” said Tara Nattrass, managing director of innovation strategy at the International Society for Technology in Education. “States can ensure educators have accurate and relevant guidance related to the opportunities and risks of AI so that they are able to spend less time filtering information and more time focused on their primary mission: teaching and learning.”

Beth Blumenstein, Oregon’s interim director of digital learning & well-rounded access, said AI is already being used in Oregon schools. And the state Department of Education has received requests from educators asking for support, guidance and professional development.

Generative AI is “a powerful tool that can support education practices and provide services to students that can greatly benefit their learning,” she said. “However, it is a highly complex tool that requires new learning, safety considerations, and human oversight.”

Three big issues she hears about are cheating, plagiarism and data privacy, including how not to run afoul of Oregon’s Student Information Protection Act or the federal Children’s Online Privacy and Protection Act.

‘Now I have to do AI?’

In August, CRPE conducted focus groups with 18 superintendents, principals and senior administrators in five states who said they were cautiously optimistic about AI’s potential, but many complained about navigating yet another new disruption.

“We just got through this COVID hybrid remote learning,” one leader told researchers. “Now I have to do AI?”

Nitta, Merlyn Mind’s CEO, said that syncs with his experience.

Beth Blumenstein

“Broadly, school districts are looking for some help, some guidance: ‘Should we use ChatGPT? Should we not use it? Should we use AI? Is it private? Are they in violation of regulations?’ It’s a complex topic. It’s full of all kinds of mines and landmines.”

And the stakes are high, he said. No educator wants to appear in a newspaper story about her school using an AI chatbot that feeds inappropriate information to students.

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say there’s a deer-caught-in-headlights moment here,” Nitta said, “but there’s certainly a lot of concern. And I do believe it’s the responsibility of authorities, of responsible regulators, to step in and say, ‘Here’s how to use AI safely and appropriately.’ ”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

A record producer and music historian, Van Zandt has been a member of two well-known rock bands: Springsteen’s legendary E Street Band and the influential Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes. A fierce promoter of American popular music, he’s in the Rock ‘‘’n’ Roll Hall of Fame. Van Zandt found a new generation of fans in 1999 as TV mob consigliere Silvio Dante on “The Sopranos.” Twelve years later, he co-wrote, executive produced and starred in “Lilyhammer,” Netflix’s first original scripted series.

Oh, and before that, he landed a blow against the Apartheid-era government of South Africa by organizing the all-star 1985 recording session that produced the protest anthem “Sun City,” in which major artists vowed they’d boycott its eponymous segregated resort.

But in 2006, Van Zandt launched TeachRock, a free, comprehensive U.S. history course for K-12 students that uses pop culture to teach about the period between World War II and the near-present.

The lessons now number in the hundreds, and encompass every grade level. One middle-school lesson uses poetry and music to explore ways in which the United Farm Workers movement and Dolores Huerta contributed to civil rights struggles and the feminist movement. Another, for younger students, uses documentary footage and folk music to help students understand the environmental legacy of mountaintop removal by coal-mining companies in Appalachia. Students eventually create their own folk ballad about an environmental issue of their choice.

This fall, the program will get a big boost as the Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music at Monmouth University, a wide-ranging collection of materials related to Springsteen in particular and popular music more generally, partners with Van Zandt’s nonprofit. The partnership gives TeachRock access to a vast array of original material and allows it for the first time to bring teachers to the archives for workshops and events.

“We’re really excited to work with them to build bridges between classrooms and the center,” said Executive Director Bill Carbone. He noted an upcoming symposium in October celebrating the 50th anniversary of the release of Springsteen’s sophomore effort, “The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle.” The event will feature original members of the E Street Band.

TeachRock is already in more than 30,000 schools in all 50 states, and a recent efficacy study that interviewed participants found that, by far, students were most engaged when they were “learning something new that opened students’ eyes or caused them to think of something in a way they hadn’t before.”

With the current Springsteen tour on hiatus due to illness — the band leader is being treated for a peptic ulcer — Van Zandt, 72, sat down this month with LA School Report from his New York City home and talked about his program, his musical education and the legacy that Baby Boomers leave behind.

“I think it’s an obligation,” he said. “I really do feel it’s a responsibility for us to pass along something that was better than we had.”

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

LA School Report: One of the things I remembered from talking to you in 2020 is asking about this quote of yours, where you said, “I had a vacation once in 1978, and I didn’t like it.” And I wonder: It’s three years later. Have you had a vacation yet? And if so, did you like it?

Steven Van Zandt: No, but I’m starting to understand the concept (laughs).

So you’re easing into it?

Yeah. I’m discovering these things called weekends. And all kinds of revelations are coming to me late in life.

Excellent. Obviously, we’re going to talk about the work you’re doing in education. But I wanted to ask you about your own musical education. I wanted to actually spool back a little bit and ask about your earliest musical memory.

My earliest musical memory? That’s a good one. I want to say what comes to mind is the Mickey Mouse thing. “Fantasia,” was it?

Did you have a lot of music in your house when you were a kid?

Not really. My father was a part of a barbershop quartet. So I was exposed to that quite young. That may have planted my love of doo-wop. But around the house, not so much.

You talk about the Beatles a lot and their Ed Sullivan Show debut on Feb. 9, 1964, and the effect that had on you. That’s such an important part of your story.

What we call the British Invasion was a major turning point in my life. Pop music has always been around. We actually had good pop music in the fifties and early sixties. I started buying some singles a few years before the British Invasion happened. I was buying “Duke of Earl” and “Pretty Little Angel Eyes” and The Dovells’ records, The Four Seasons.

But I wasn’t really particularly interested in doing it until the British Invasion happened. There weren’t that many bands in America back then. If there was a band, it was mostly an instrumental group. You went to your high school dance, it was an instrumental group, usually, and a sax player would be the leader usually and then maybe put the saxophone down for like one song where he’d sing.

Then suddenly, here comes the Beatles. And then The Dave Clark Five and Herman’s Hermits and then The Stones and The Who and the Kinks and the Yardbirds and all of the British Invasion bands — four or five guys all singing and playing their own instruments and eventually writing their own songs, which was a major, major change. Up until then, most of the artists, with a few exceptions like Little Richard and Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, Buddy Holly — the major pioneers — were [not] writing their own songs.

Keep in mind that rock wasn’t mainstream, really, until the British invasion. Mainstream pop artists were mostly not writing their songs. So you had songwriters and arrangers and producers. It took an army to make a record in those days. Publishers were involved in all kinds of different facets of the business.

Then it all came together when you had a self-contained band like The Beatles. They just changed everything. They changed the entire configuration of the business. Technically, publishers were no longer relevant, because publishers’ main job was to expose a writer’s music to the world in the form of sheet music. They literally would publish physical music and they would make those piano rolls, back in the 1880s or whenever. They were popular.

And with a band singing their own songs — in other words, marketing themselves — the whole publishing thing would soon transform itself into mostly administration, which was collecting the music and collecting the money for these self-publishing artists.

[The Beatles] changed the whole culture. It wasn’t just me and other freaks, misfits and outcasts who had no real place in society. There were a lot of us who just couldn’t find our way through the options we were being offered. It was really a blessing to us to have the exposure [to] this whole new world. The entire culture changed into a band culture. Kids, when they were going out at night, you might go to a movie, mostly drive-ins in those days. And if you weren’t going to the drive-in, you were going to see a band. For our generation — and we were the luckiest generation ever — there were all kinds of teenage band activities. It wasn’t just the bars. But the bar culture had bands. But before you got to the bar culture, literally teenagers, 12, 13, 14 years old, you’d go to beach clubs, you’d go to V.F.W. halls, you’d go to your high school dances, you’d go to clubs that were built for teenagers, literally teenage discotheques, as they were called before disco happened. You would go out as a kid. Your parents would drop you off, and you’d go see a band.

But it was bigger than that. The entire culture was electrified. Suddenly, our generation had a soundtrack that was really quite significant. The fifties generation, the generation before us, also had a wonderful soundtrack going on, but it seemed to be a little bit more temporary in some ways. Our artists grew, our artists evolved. This one aspect that the Beatles brought gets underreported — and Bob Dylan was right there with them — but the Beatles actually introduced the idea of evolution in popular art, which was not a thing. Popular art was: If by some miracle you had a success, your job was to match that success as often as possible and as closely as possible.

The great example is the record called “The Twist.” And then you follow it up with “Let’s Twist Again.” (Laughs.)

Right. No shame at all!

The perfect template for what was the pop music methodology.

And for the Beatles, I think, it was just boredom because they’d been doing it so long. They had one of the longest gestation periods between starting and arriving. Only the E Street Band was longer than the Beatles, I think. It took us like seven years, but them, like five years — four or five years of working in bars, working in the clubs, absorbing all the material. In those days, they knew every song that had been recorded because there weren’t that many recorded [by] 1959. They knew every rock record that had been released.

They were playing them all over and over again and absorbing and absorbing. That’s why, when they started writing, they not only had a very high standard to live up to — which is why their songs were so good right away — but also, when they started writing, they were like, “Let’s try some new chord changes.” You know what I mean? “We’ve been doing these same chord changes for years. Let’s try some new things.”

And so it started there. All of a sudden, an interesting bridge. With songs, they could go somewhere odd, pretty early on. Then the second album was even a little different. And then the third record was a little different. They kept evolving almost to the end, really. And so as they grew, our generation grew with them. And it was just a wonderful, wonderful energy exchange. It was really a part of the fabric of your life.

Yes, it was a soundtrack, but it was also more than that. It was inspiration and motivation. We really, really were a music culture growing up. We didn’t have all the distractions of today. You didn’t have cell phones or computers or video games or TikTok. You didn’t have anything except the radio and three channels on TV.

You may be even one of the people who said it, that when we, for lack of a better term, met the Beatles in ’64, they were halfway through their career as a group. We were seeing a mature group.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that’s why, as I go into much more detail in my book, of course, when we saw them, it was an absolute epiphany, a world-changing event. Literally. The term gets used a lot, but this was a game-changer for real. They were so sophisticated that even though they revealed this incredible opportunity, a new world that you had no idea existed, you didn’t exactly say, “Jeez, I think I could do that.” Even though they were just 20, 21, 22 years old, the clothes were different. The hair was different. The accent, of course, their wisdom and wit. Already at that age, they were very, very experienced and very sophisticated and just perfect. The harmony was perfect, the playing was perfect.

That’s why I always credit the Rolling Stones with just about equal importance, because the Rolling Stones come four months later and they’re wearing all different things, their hair is not exactly perfect, except for Brian Jones. And they don’t have any real harmony to speak of really, at that point. They were like the first punk band and they did the same thing that punk would do, years later, by making what they were doing accessible, making it look easier than it was.

A teenager [could] say, “Well, I really don’t know if I could do that Beatles thing, but maybe I could do the Stones thing. It doesn’t look that difficult.” Of course, they were making it look a lot easier than it was.

But making it look easier was important. It was the same thing for punk, really. You listen to the Sex Pistols. And at first glance you might say, “Maybe I can do that.” But the record is phenomenal. It’s a phenomenal record that actually was quite produced. So the Stones were that for us.

Like I say, the Beatles revealed a new world to us and the Rolling Stones invited us in.

I want to give you a chance to talk about the work you’re doing in schools, beginning with something you said about the program. You said, “All I wanted was for every kid in kindergarten to be able to name the four Beatles, dance to ‘Satisfaction,’ sing along to ‘Long Tall Sally’ and recite every word of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues.’ The rest will take care of itself.” Which to me is profound. But I wonder … 

I’ll stick by that too (laughs).

How’s that working out? How has it developed from that conception?

Pretty good. Obviously, everything always goes slower than you hope. It took us a long time just to get it together to the point where I felt confident enough to go public with it, which only happened five or so years ago, after working on it for like 10 or 15 years.

It’s been a long time coming. But we have like 60,000 teachers and 200 partner schools and we’re in every state. I had the opportunity to visit one of our partner schools and, man, it was wonderful to see. I think it was the first five or six grades in this particular school. And the enthusiasm of the kids was amazing. The entire concept here was to do something that would get the kids interested and keep them interested and get them to come to school and stay in school. Judging by the enthusiasm that I saw, it really is working quite well because our whole concept begins with finding the common ground between the student and the teacher.

This generation is only right now. It’s all very, very immediate because of technology.

You’ve got to give them a reason to not look up whatever you were telling them in 30 seconds on their device. “Why do I need you? I got this thing.” So it’s a combination of curation, of selected information that we feel is important and inspirational and motivational, and using what the kids already have, what they’ve already brought with them, which is curiosity and energy and instinct and opinions. They come to school with that, with elements of an identity. And most of our school methodology in the past has been, “Leave all that outside, O.K. Just come in as a blank slate and we’re going to fill in. We’re going to tell you what you need to learn.” And it was a classic, “Learn this now and someday you’ll use it.” Completely irrelevant.

Over the past couple weeks, the Springsteen Archive agreed to work with you. Can you talk about what that will allow you to do that you couldn’t do before?

Well, it’s more exposure. Right now, our thing is exposure, just turning as many people on to this as we can because we know it works now.

It’s probably going to take another couple of years before we have irrefutable data. But we can just tell because we’re always improving it and correcting it. We get input all the time from our teachers. But we know it’s working. We have absolutely, across-the-board success. So now it’s just a matter of spreading this thing as widely and as quickly as we can because I believe this is going to transform the entire education system. I’m not exaggerating. That’s not hyperbole. I really feel that.

I feel our system is generally antiquated. The machine is so big and so bureaucratic, it can’t adjust fast enough to deal with this new generation. Now we’re into two or three generations of this modern technological world. Still, you can see the system is just struggling to keep up with all of its other problems.

That’s why it was important to us to make sure we made this available for free. Because all the problems begin with, “We can’t afford it,” right? So we were like, “That’s not going to stop us and we don’t want to hear you can’t afford it — because it’s too important.” The future generation is here. We’re going to lose them. I don’t want to hear about money problems when we’re talking about future generations’ quality of life. So we made sure that it’s free for everybody. That way it can spread quite quickly.

We made sure it meets all the state standards. It’s not an after-school thing. We integrate art into the principal disciplines. We add the A of arts into the middle [of STEM], turning STEM into STEAM. We integrate the arts into each of those disciplines.

So that’s a difference between our thing and what people think about art. We think of it in our country as a luxury item. Maybe it’s an afterschool thing or a special school you go to.I don’t think there is a word for art in the indigenous people’s language because art is integrated into everything they do. And that’s the approach we take. It plays on a different part of the brain, the more comfortable part of the brain, not the one that needs to be precise all the time. We like to dwell on the side where there’s no wrong answers. There’s no wrong answers in art, and we like to kind of hang around there, and then make people comfortable enough to deal with the more precise parts of the system.

The last question I want to ask you: What do you see as the legacy of this program 10, 20 years from now?

Well, we keep spreading it. The legacy is the transformation of the education system. It’s the public education that we focus on. Everyone is welcome. We are interested in where most of the kids are and most of the parents are. Most of the really hard-working, underpaid teachers that can’t find enough time to do what they do and end up going out and buying pencils and paper for their classrooms.

So we see this fulfilling our three goals eventually, which is making sure that art in general stays in the DNA of the public education system. Number two, creating a methodology that works for this generation and future generations that have no patience and are a lot smarter and faster than we ever were. It needs a new methodology, and we have that. And the third thing is keeping kids in school and increasing the graduation level and reducing the dropout level, which is just intolerable and scandalous.

We really intend to change that. Because if a kid likes one classroom or one teacher, they’ll come to school. The statistics show that. We want to be that class.

The last thing I’ll offer as an observation is: It’s interesting that somebody like you, not only an outsider, but somebody who even talks of themselves as being sort of like an outcast and ….

You can say, “Moron.” It’s OK.

Oh no! (Laughs.)

You can say even half a moron like me. I should have been a dropout myself. I get it. I know, it’s ironic, isn’t it? It is ironic, but like I say, I feel like I’m the luckiest guy in the luckiest generation.

I think it’s an obligation. I really do feel it’s a responsibility for us to pass along something that was better than we had because we’ve taken all the good stuff. We’ve taken an awful lot of the good stuff, and we’re leaving them a hole in the sky and a poisoned environment and a permanent recession really — all kinds of ridiculous problems in terms of the failures of our society.

So you look around, you say, “Oh, well, what can we do? What do we have control of that we can pass along that’s an apology to the next generation” So I’m hoping that this is one of the things, along with a couple of my radio formats [that] I hope will long outlast me and improve the quality of life for the next guy.

I mean, what else can you do? What else are we here for?

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Eamonn Fitzmaurice/LA School Report/Getty Images

A new working paper could give educators powerful new motivations to invest in summer programs, which seem to stem the tide of learning loss due to the COVID-19 pandemic — at least in math.

The paper, from CALDER at the American Institutes for Research, looked at the academic progress of students who attended summer school in 2022 across eight school districts, most of them urban or suburban, in seven states.

Here are four key takeaways:

1. Finally, a bit of positive news about post-pandemic interventions.

The new paper represents what could be the first encouraging findings coming out of post-pandemic interventions, said CALDER’s Dan Goldhaber. Earlier research has been discouraging, he noted, with few positive effects. “One of my takeaways is that it’s nice to be able to say, ‘Hey, there is something that school systems can do to help kids get back on track,” he said, “even if it’s only making incremental change.”

2. Summer school works for math … but for reading: not so much.

Dan Goldhaber

The researchers found that summer programs had sizable positive effects on students’ math achievement, potentially closing about 2% to 3% of districts’ total learning losses in math, but not in reading. The math gains were “positive and significant,” said Goldhaber, large enough for researchers to suggest that districts consider offering summer math programs to many more students in the future. Reading scores improved in just one of the eight districts.

He noted that research has established that so-called “math effects” due to school interventions are more likely than reading effects.

“The ‘math but not reading’ is consistent with education research writ large,” he said. Simply put, schools have a more significant impact on kids’ math skills than on reading skills, probably because kids read and write outside of school, but don’t necessarily do math.

3. Post-COVID summer programs are at least as good as those schools operated pre-COVID — and they’re targeting kids who need them most.

Researchers compared impacts of current summer programs to those operating before the pandemic and found that they’re having “about the same kind of impact as summer school programs pre-pandemic,” Goldhaber said. That’s encouraging, since in many districts, summer programs have grown in scale but haven’t suffered in quality, according to the new findings. Any time educators push to scale up interventions, he said, it’s harder to maintain quality. “So it’s encouraging” to see quality stay high.

He also said the programs they examined typically targeted students who were struggling and actually needed the extra help.

4. The good news about summer math learning is tempered by the fact that so few students are getting it at the moment.

The CALDER researchers estimated that only 15% of eligible students in 2022 were receiving summer math instruction. That means schools last year were under-utilizing what could have been a powerful, effective intervention.

Eamonn Fitzmaurice/LA School Report/Getty Images

The positive effects, Goldhaber said, “are kind of dwarfed by the magnitude of the COVID learning losses,” with the small number of students in effect disguising its potential effect on achievement. What could be a game-changer for the moment shows a “pretty small” effect on achievement as a result.

The new study is part of a larger “Road to COVID Recovery” partnership between researchers at the American Institutes for Research, Harvard University, NWEA and 11 school districts in total. Just eight supplied data to this study.

Researchers used value-added models to estimate the effect of each of the eight summer programs on MAP Growth test scores, with Spring 2022 as the baseline and Fall 2022 as the outcome. Summer sessions ran from three to six weeks, depending on the program, and daily classes ranged from 45 minutes to two hours.

CALDER’s findings could scarcely come at a better time, with recent NAEP scores suggesting that COVID had a “cataclysmic” impact on K–12 education, coming on the heels of a decade of stagnation.

Other recent research from Michigan showed that the pandemic slowed students’ math achievement over the three-year period from spring 2019 through spring 2022, with achievement growth “substantially lower” than that of comparable students in the three earlier years.

As with the CALDER findings, the Michigan researchers found that scores for English language arts, which include reading and writing, were small and generally not statistically significant.

In December, researchers from CALDER, NWEA and Harvard University, looked at achievement in a dozen mid-to-large sized school districts, enrolling more than 600,000 students across 10 states, and found that between fall 2021 and spring 2022, schools had basically put an end to student achievement declines in math and reading relative to pre-pandemic levels — but that average test score gains during the 2021-22 school year hadn’t moved past pre-pandemic levels.

Students in a few elementary grades improved substantially in math, but beyond a few areas, researchers didn’t find a lot of compelling evidence of recovery in other subjects or grades.

Aaron Dworkin, CEO of the National Summer Learning Association, said he was encouraged by the new CALDER findings, adding that summer programs can often try different strategies “that you might not be able to always utilize” during the school year.

He noted one successful free program in Detroit called Math Corps, created by Wayne State University’s math department, that uses an unusual model: College math majors get paid to teach high school students, who get paid to teach middle school students.

The program maintains a fun, playful high-energy atmosphere that catches students’ attention, especially in the summer. “Hundreds of kids and families love it,” Dworkin said. “And they’re so supportive.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

Eamonn Fitzmaurice/The 74

Catholic Church leaders in Oklahoma could within weeks get the go-ahead to create the nation’s first explicitly religious, taxpayer-supported charter school.

And while a few charter and school choice leaders are quietly supporting the proposed St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, seeing it as a watershed moment for religious freedom, others are saying, in so many words: Be careful not to drown.

While public funding would bring unprecedented growth and financial stability to such programs, it could also create a fraught path to the religious freedom they’re seeking, as the burden of complying with court orders and myriad regulations, which even autonomous charters face, could be overwhelming.

The school and others like it will almost certainly be tied up in litigation for months or years, said Greg Richmond, superintendent of the Archdiocese of Chicago Catholic Schools. And that’ll be bad, since it will take precious autonomy away from what should be independent schools’ sole decision-making power.

Richmond said he looked the other day at the Oklahoma Virtual Charter School Board website and counted more than 150 regulations, including meeting agenda formats, residency requirements, Open Records Acts rules and more.

“It’s odd to try to fit a religious school into that regulated charter framework,” he said. “The accountability that comes with charter schools, I think, would be a shock to many Catholic schools in terms of the quantity of measures — academically, financially, operationally.”

That said, what happens when a Catholic charter school teacher, for instance, takes to Facebook to advocate for abortion rights? Are the teacher’s free speech rights protected, as in a public school? Or can the charter school dismiss her because she’s advocating against the teachings of the church?

For their part, charter proponents fear that while the new school may be a good political fit in deep-red Oklahoma, the legal precedent it sets could both damage and perhaps even decimate the larger charter sector in coming years. “It will give opponents of charter schools yet another reason to claim charter schools are not public schools,” said Richmond, who formerly led the National Association of Charter School Authorizers. “So that does represent a threat to charter schools.”

Aside from betraying charter schools’ implicit vow to welcome and educate all students, they say it could further erode charters’ tenuous public support, especially in blue states. They’ve vowed to fight what could soon be one of their own.

In the most recent development, Oklahoma’s virtual charter school board last month turned down an application from the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City to open the new virtual school, a move that proponents say was largely pro forma.

But Nina Rees, president and chief executive officer of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said the board’s hesitation likely stemmed from “the strong probability of breaking state law if the school is approved. Should a charter school be authorized that falls outside the scope of the law, it will certainly be challenged in court, and we will be on the side of those seeking to uphold the law and affirm the public, non-sectarian nature of charter schools.”

Public or private actors?

While the Oklahoma case plays out, both sides say the coming weeks could also set in motion one of the most consequential federal court decisions ever about the future of charter schools: The U.S. Supreme Court will soon decide whether to take up a North Carolina case that could wreak havoc with the bedrock idea that charter schools are public schools, as they’ve maintained since the first one opened more than 30 years ago.

The case, Peltier v. Charter Day School, pits three female students against their “traditional values” school, which has required that they wear skirts. In doing so, they say, the school violated their civil rights — its founder has called female students “fragile vessels” and believes the dress code will preserve chivalry, ensuring that girls are treated “courteously and more gently than boys.”

In court filings, the school argued that even though it enjoys public funding, it is a private entity and not a “state actor,” like district schools. So the Constitution’s 14th Amendment doesn’t apply to it, the school maintained. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond last year rejected that argument, setting up a possible hearing in Washington, D.C., before a high court that has already struck down states’ so-called Blaine amendments, allowing public funds to flow to religious schools in small communities without sufficient school capacity.

“It’s not a new conversation,” said Rees. “What’s new about it is that we have a more conservative Supreme Court.”

For Rees, who served as a top official in George W. Bush’s Education Department, the truth of the matter seems clear: “As public schools, we can’t teach religion.”

They also must open their doors to anyone, both students and staff, she said. That could potentially bump up against schools that, as private operations, can openly reject candidates that don’t uphold their beliefs.

Rees and others say the path forward for funding these schools would more appropriately — and legally — be found in another recent development taking place in statehouses nationwide: taxpayer-funded education savings accounts, or ESAs, vouchers and tax credits, which in a few states offer as much money to families for private schooling as charter schools get per pupil.

“In some respects, if you wanted to promote religious education,” Rees said, “the ESA route will get you to that end goal faster, without rules and regulations that come if you open a religious charter school.”

In January, the charter school network Great Hearts, which operates classical education schools in four states and online, said it was doing just that: It announced it was opening a pair of Christian academies in the Phoenix area. But the schools, the network said, would be private and non-profit, funded by the state’s ESA program.

Jay Heiler, Great Hearts’ CEO, said Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts are worth about $7,000 per student, not quite enough to fund a successful private school, but enough “when supplemented with some philanthropic effort, which we’re out there pushing to try to make ends meet, partner-to-partner, with churches that have some existing classroom infrastructure.”

But Brett Farley, executive director of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma, which represents the church on public policy issues, said that in most states, ESAs don’t typically provide anything near full per-pupil funding, leaving students a dearth of options, especially in rural areas.

While Rees’ group has vowed to oppose schools like St. Isidore and efforts to reframe charters as private actors, others aren’t so sure.

Heiler said Great Hearts, which has operated charter schools for more than 20 years, “will continue to follow that pathway,” keeping its religious schools private. But it also filed an amicus brief in the North Carolina case, arguing that the Supreme Court should decide that charter schools “are not presumptive state actors.” Failure to do so, it said, “will wreak havoc” on education systems more broadly and innovative charters specifically.

Held up in court ‘for a long time’

Farley said the Oklahoma virtual charter board’s rejection last month was largely routine, giving the archdiocese 30 days to revise aspects of the plan that include how they’ll provide rural broadband statewide and special education services to disabled students. He said the board also wanted to know more about how the archdiocese will address the question of whether a religious public school violates state statute.

“We’re confident we’ll be able to answer all three of those questions sufficiently, and then we’ll move on to a vote,” he said. He anticipated that approval would take place in June.

But in interviews, he has not specified whether the new virtual school would admit LGBTQ students or hire such staff members, saying it would follow state regulations while maintaining its right to operate according to religious beliefs. Asked if gay, lesbian or transgender educators are invited to apply for employment at the school, Farley declined to comment. Like other public schools, charters are prohibited from discriminating based on religious belief, gender identity or similar factors.

He has said he believes that charter schools are non-state actors — Oklahoma’s charter framework, he said, is “very loose.”

M. Karega Rausch, president and CEO of the charter authorizers’ group, said even Oklahoma law is clear: It’s unlawful for a public school, including a charter school, to provide a sectarian education.

Whatever happens with the Oklahoma board, Rausch said, the case will be tied up in litigation “for a long time.”

If the Oklahoma board ultimately rejects the St. Isidore application, the archdiocese can appeal the decision to the state board of education.

Gov. Kevin Stitt has signaled his support for the effort, but new Attorney General Gentner Drummond has slightly complicated the process: In February, he withdrew an opinion from his predecessor that said the state board would be on solid legal ground if it approved a religious charter school.

His letter to the board said state law is “currently unsettled” as to whether charter schools are so-called “state actors” or private school operators. Like many in the sector, he’s awaiting the decision in the North Carolina case.

‘Proceed with caution’

Kathleen Porter-Magee, superintendent of Partnership Schools, a network of 11 independent Catholic elementary schools in New York City and Cleveland, said high-performing private schools like hers would love the extra per-pupil allotment that comes with being a charter school: It costs her about $11,500 per student to keep the doors open, yet her students bring in just $800 apiece from New York state in the form of reimbursements for mandated services such as required assessments, immunizations and attendance reports.

Were Partnership’s New York schools to become charters, they’d stand to bring in more than $16,000 per pupil, which the city’s charter schools typically receive, and about half of what they’d get if they were district schools. “We wouldn’t know what to do with that much money,” she said. “It would be just absolutely game-changing for us.”

But it would also complicate matters. “How much freedom do those religious organizations have to live out their faith every day if they are technically running public charter schools?” she asked.

Like many in the school choice world, she’s closely watching what happens in Oklahoma. She’s “deeply conflicted” about the case: Denying public funding to non-profits because of their religious status “feels wrong,” she said, so she supports the archdiocese’s application for charter status.

“From a constitutional standpoint, I think it is the right decision. I think it makes sense. But I just think it’s like, ‘Proceed with caution.’ ”

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While homeschooling, LaToya Brooks, left, and her three daughters meet Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams (Courtesy of LaToya Brooks)

By the time LaToya Brooks began homeschooling her three daughters last fall, the Atlanta mother had to ask herself: Why didn’t I do this sooner?

A former public school band teacher, Brooks said she was largely inspired by the grim pandemic realities of her kids’ schooling: Her 7-year-old, born late in the year, was stuck in kindergarten even though she knew the alphabet and could already read. Her 9-year-old was being bullied at a private Christian school, while her oldest, a 16-year-old rising film and TV actress, was simply too busy for typical school calendars.

“At the end of last school year, I was like, ‘I don’t think I can do this again,’” Brooks said.

So she quit her job — her husband still teaches music — and began homeschooling all three girls.

Brooks’ experiences sync with those of many parents who have turned to homeschooling since the pandemic. A November survey from the online education platform Outschool found that this group is increasingly concerned about the quality of education their kids are getting in school. They’re also more likely to be politically centrist or liberal and less likely to homeschool for religious reasons.

Other recent research suggests that they’re also more likely to be non-white: The U.S. Census Bureau in 2021 reported that homeschooling among Black families exploded in the school year following the start of the pandemic, from 3.3% in spring 2020 to 16.1% that fall.

In the Outschool survey, which tapped 622 homeschool families in August, Black families comprised 9% of respondents, but the results didn’t probe whether there has been a rise in these families. The survey did find, however, that parents’ concerns around racism in school during the pandemic rose: Among pre-pandemic homeschoolers in the survey, just 2% said racism was their No. 1 reason for leaving school; among newer homeschoolers, the figure was 5%.

And it found that the reasons families began homeschooling in the past year are “shifting away from being a values-driven decision to an environment-driven decision.”

Among other findings:

• 12% of new homeschooling parents said their decision was primarily because their child’s neurodiversity wasn’t supported in traditional schools, up from 7% before the pandemic;

• Just 1% of new homeschooling parents said their No. 1 reason was based on religious beliefs, down from 14% of parents already homeschooling who said the same;

• 47% of new homeschoolers described themselves as “progressive” or “liberal,” up from 32%;

• 6% of new homeschoolers said they had conservative views vs. 27% of pre-Covid homeschoolers.

Significantly, few parents said their decision, either in 2020 or 2022, was based on politically charged issues such as vaccines or schools’ political stances.

Traditional schools’ ‘hot mess’

Outschool co-founder Amir Nathoo said the findings suggest that parents are homeschooling for many reasons, including having children whose learning differences “weren’t being satisfied by the local school.”

Homeschooling families have traditionally valued its flexibility, Nathoo said. “But now what we’re seeing come bubbling up is just: Pure quality is a top concern.”

Alessa Giampaolo Keener, who directs the Maryland Homeschool Association, said the pandemic “changed a lot about homeschooling,” including the number of families willing to give it a try: In March 2020, just before widespread school closures, she counted fewer than 28,000 homeschoolers statewide. That figure now stands at about 45,000.

Keener noted that the recent uptick, especially in Black homeschoolers, stems from many public schools being caught “completely unprepared” in 2020. Educators “absolutely did the best that they could, given the circumstances. But it was a hot mess for a lot of kids.”

Tracking homeschooling is a bit slippery. The National Home Education Research Institute in September said about 6% of school-aged children, or 3.1 million students, homeschooled in the 2021-2022 school year, up from 2.5 million in spring 2019.

The journal Education Next, using Census Bureau data, in February reported that the percentage of U.S. households with at least one child being homeschooled essentially doubled from spring 2020 to fall 2020, from 5.4% to 11.1%.

Many of these parents said they were finding education at home “to be an exhausting undertaking.” One-fourth said they didn’t plan to continue.

But Alex Spurrier, who studies policy at the consulting firm Bellwether, said recent polling shows the pandemic has helped break a kind of psychological link in parents’ minds between education and a five-day, in-person school week. For many families, learning from home “worked really well and probably opened their eyes to a different way forward.”

As a result, he said, “it doesn’t look like we’re on a path to heading back” to pre-pandemic ideas about homeschooling.

One-on-one attention, bullying trump religious reasons

Michael McShane, director of national research for the research and advocacy group EdChoice, said the Outschool findings echo research his organization has done recently.

“When we asked people why they homeschool, things like religious reasons or political reasons, those were at the bottom of the list,” he said. At the top: School shootings, bullying, school violence, and wanting more one-on-one attention for their children.

McShane said his school choice work has changed his outlook on things like the socialization that homeschoolers enjoy. His conversations with their parents shine a light on the often “tremendously negative” experiences many students have had in school. “I can’t tell you how many parents were like, ‘Let me tell you about the socialization my kid got: It was getting the crap beaten out of them,’” he said.

Homeschooling researchers have also long noted that a top reason Black families often give for turning to homeschooling is racism in schools — particularly against young boys of color. Black homeschoolers, McShane said, often say they “just didn’t think their schools were respecting them, or respecting their kids, or treating them fairly. And so they wanted to kind of strike out on their own.”

Bellwether’s Spurrier said more families are likely interested in more flexible learning environments like homeschooling or microschools if the barriers to entry are lower. He’s keeping an eye on places like Arizona and West Virginia, which are both experimenting with generous education savings accounts for families.

• Read more: Black families look to continue pod schooling movement beyond pandemic

Singing, dancing, being kind

In Atlanta, Brooks has discovered an extensive network focused on helping Black homeschoolers thrive — she has even begun posting humorous videos that encourage other Black homeschool moms. “It’s been awesome, just being able to talk to people that look like me, that are probably going through the same thing.”

Like many families find, homeschooling has allowed her kids to focus less on grades and more on interests.

Brooks now posts joyous TikTok and Instagram videos of herself and her kids as they sing, dance, take field trips, and meet people like Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams at public events. They’ve lately been trying out advanced harmonies in an informal family a capella group.

Brooks said she’s also able to focus more on character education, a top priority that she said doesn’t get much love in school.

“We learn how to have conversations with each other,” Brooks said. “And I’ve seen from the beginning of the school year til now that they’ve changed drastically. They’ll catch themselves if they’re not being nice to their sister. They’re like, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to yell like that.’ Those kinds of things are happening without me telling them. And so I just know for sure it’s working.”

Eamonn Fitzmaurice/LA School Report

Though computer scientists have been using chatbots to simulate human thinking for more than 70 years, 2023 is fast becoming the year in which educators are realizing what artificial intelligence means for their work.

Over the past several weeks, they’ve been putting OpenAI’s ChatGPT through its paces on any number of professional-grade exams in law, medicine, and business, among others. The moves seem a natural development just weeks after the groundbreaking, free (for now) chatbot appeared. Now that nearly anyone can play with it, they’re testing how it performs in the real world — and figuring out what that might mean for both teaching skills like writing and critical thinking in K-12, and training young white-collar professionals at the college level.

Most recently, four legal scholars at the University of Minnesota Law School tested it on 95 multiple choice and 12 essay questions from four courses. It passed, though not exactly at the top of its class. The chatbot scraped by with a “low but passing grade” in all four courses, a C+ student.

But don’t get complacent, warned Daniel Schwarcz, a UM professor and one of the study’s authors. The AI earned that C+ “relative to incredibly motivated, incredibly talented students … and it was holding its own.”

Think of it this way, Schwarcz said: Plenty of C+ students at the university go on to graduate and pass the bar exam.

ChatGPT debuted less than three months ago, and its respectable performance on several of these tests is forcing educators to quickly rethink how they evaluate students — assigning generic written essays, for instance, now seems like an invitation for fraud.

But it’s also, at a more basic level, forcing educators to reconsider how to help students see the value of learning to think through the material for themselves.

Before he encountered ChatGPT, Schwarcz typically gave open-book exams. What the new technology is making him think more deeply about is whether he was often testing memorization, not thinking. “If that’s the case, I’ve written a bad exam,” he said.

And like Schwarcz, many educators now warn: With improving technology, today’s middling chatbot is tomorrow’s Turing valedictorian.

“If this kind of tool is producing a C+ answer in early 2023,” said Andrew M. Perlman, dean of Suffolk Law School in Boston, “what’s it going to be able to do in 2026?”

Fake studies and ‘human error’

Lawyers aren’t the only professionals in the chatbot’s crosshairs: In January, Christian Terwiesch, a business professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, let it loose on the final exam of Operations Management, a “typical MBA core course” at the nation’s pre-eminent business school.

While the AI made several “surprising” math mistakes, Terwiesch wrote in the study’s summary, it impressed him with its ability to analyze case studies, among other tasks. “Not only are the answers correct, but the explanations are excellent,” he wrote.

Its final grade: B to B-.

A Wharton colleague, Ethan Mollick, in December told NPR that he got the chatbot to write a syllabus for a new course, as well as part of a lecture. And it generated a final assignment with a grading rubric. But its tendency to occasionally deliver erroneous answers from its wide-ranging web searches, Mollick said, makes it more like an “omniscient, eager-to-please intern who sometimes lies to you.”

Indeed, AI tools often create problems of their own. In January, Jeremy Faust, an emergency medicine physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, asked ChatGPT to diagnose a 35-year-old woman with chest pains. The patient, he specified, takes birth control pills but has no past medical history.

After a few rounds of back-and-forth, the bot, which Faust cheekily referred to as “Dr. OpenAI,” said she was probably suffering from a pulmonary embolism. When Faust suggested it could also be costochondritis, a painful inflammation of the cartilage that connects rib to breastbone, ChatGPT countered that its diagnosis was supported by research, specifically a 2007 study in the European Journal of Internal Medicine.

Then it offered a citation for a paper that does not exist.

@medpagetoday The AI platform has great potential for use in medicine, but has huge pitfalls, says Jeremy Faust, MD #openai #chatgpt #medtech #medicaltechnology #ai #artificialintelligence #medpagetok #medicalnews ♬ original sound – MedPage Today | Medical News

While the journal is real — and a few of the researchers cited have published in it — the bot created the citation out of thin air, Faust wrote. “I’m a little miffed that rather than admit its mistake, Dr. OpenAI stood its ground, and up and confabulated a research paper.”

Confronted with its lie, the AI “said that I must be mistaken,” Faust wrote. “I began to feel like I was Dave in “2001,” and that the computer was HAL-9000, blaming our disagreement on ‘human error.’”

Faust closed his computer.

‘Proof of original work’

Such bugs haven’t stopped educators from test-driving these tools for students and, in a few cases, for professionals.

Last December, just days after Open AI released ChatGPT, Perlman, the Suffolk dean, presented it with a series of legal prompts. “I was interested in just pushing it to its limits,” he said.

Perlman transcribed its mostly respectable replies and co-authored a 16-page paper with the chatbot.

Peter Gault, founder of the AI literacy nonprofit Quill.org, which offers a free AI tool designed to help improve student writing, said that even if teachers think things are moving fast this winter, the reality is that they are moving even faster than they seem. Case in point: An online “prompt engineering” channel on the social platform Discord, devoted to helping students improve their ChatGPT requests for better, more accurate results, now has about 600,000 users, he said. “There are tens of thousands of students just swapping tips for how to cheat in it,” he said.

Gault’s nonprofit, along with CommonLit.org, has already debuted another free tool that helps educators sniff out the more formulaic writing that AI typically generates.

While other educators have suggested that future ChatGPT versions could feature a kind of digital watermarking that identifies cut-and-pasted AI text, Gault said that would be easy to circumvent with software that basically launders the text and removes the watermark. He suggested that educators begin thinking now about how they can use tools like Google Docs’ version history to reveal what he calls “proof of original work.”

The idea is that educators can see all the writing and revising that go into student essays as they take shape. The typical student, he said, spends nine to 15 hours on a major essay. Google Docs and other tools like it can show that progression. Alternatively, if a student copies and pastes an essay or section from a tool like ChatGPT, he said, the software reveals that the student spent just moments on it.

“We have these tools that can do the thinking for us,” Gault said. “But as the tools get more sophisticated, we just really risk that students are no longer really investing in building intellectual skills. It’s a difficult problem to solve. But I do think it’s worth solving.”

‘Resistance is futile’

Minnesota’s Schwarcz flatly said law schools must train students on tools like ChatGPT and its successors. These tools “are not going away — they’re just going to get better,” he said. “And so in my mind, ultimately as educators, the fundamental thing is to figure out how to train students to use these tools both ethically and effectively.”

Perlman also foresees law schools using tools like ChatGPT and whatever comes next to train lawyers, helping them generate first drafts of legal documents, among other products, as they learn their trade.

In the end, AI could streamline lawyering, allowing attorneys to spend more time practicing “at the top of their license,” Perlman said, engaging in more sophisticated legal work for clients. This, he said, is the part of the job lawyers find most enjoyable — and clients find most valuable.

It could also make such services more affordable and thus more available, Perlman said. So even as educators focus on the technology’s threat, “I think we are quickly going to have to pivot and think about how we teach students to use these tools to enable them to deliver their services better, faster and cheaper in the future.”Perlman joked that the best way to think about the future of AI in the legal profession is to remember that old “Star Trek” maxim: “ ‘Resistance is futile.’ This technology is coming, and I think we ignore it at our peril — and we try to resist at our peril.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

Meghan Gallagher/The 74

In 2022, 36 states elected governors, and the races saw clear partisan divides on education topics from school safety to teacher pay. But a new analysis suggests that the 72 Democrats and Republicans running to lead their states found a few select issues they could all agree upon.

Foremost among them: expanding career and technical education.

Andy Smarick, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, scoured the websites of all 72 major-party candidates in 2022’s gubernatorial races. In all, he found 27 education issues supported by at least one candidate.

The data suggest clear partisan divides: Among Democrats, the top two issues mentioned were increasing K-12 funding and expanding Pre-K. Among Republicans, it was school choice and curricular reform.

But one issue rounded out the top three among both Democrats and Republicans: CTE. Along with greater funding, it was mentioned more frequently than any other topic. In all, 30 candidates, or 42%, featured it on their websites.

Andy Smarick/Manhattan Institute

Higher funding held a distant fourth place for Republicans, far below CTE. An equal percentage of GOP candidates — 22% — expressed support for charter schools and better reading instruction.

Smarick, a member of the University of Maryland System’s Board of Regents who has also served as chair of the state’s Higher Education Commission and president of itsState Board of Education, said he wasn’t surprised to find CTE hold such a prominent place.

“So many people have pushed for so long for a ‘college for all’ mentality, which was good and important, that now a lot of elected officials are saying we also have to do something on certificates and certifications and apprenticeships” and other career-driven outcomes.

He also noted that many college-going students don’t end up with a four-year degree. “So state legislators and governors have to think in terms of ‘How do we serve all of these adults?’”

The findings resonate with those of a survey released earlier this month that found Americans now want K-12 education to focus on “practical, tangible skills” such as managing one’s personal finances, preparing meals and making appointments. Such outcomes now rank as Americans’ No. 1 educational priority.

U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona is already signaling that CTE is a priority: Last week he previewed the administration’s “Raise the Bar: Unlocking Career Success” initiative, which seeks to overhaul secondary education with an eye toward granting students the skills and credentials necessary to enter college or the workforce after 12th grade.

Designed in concert with First Lady Jill Biden as well as the secretaries of commerce and labor, it urges colleges to offer dual-enrollment coursework to high school juniors.

The National Student Clearinghouse has estimated that the number of students with “some college, no credential” in 2020 grew to 39 million, roughly the population of California.

It may be a surprise, then, that while 28% of Democratic candidates in Smarick’s analysis mentioned expanding community college, not a single Republican did.

Big differences between incumbents, challengers

Smarick also broke out mentions between incumbents and challengers, finding that non-incumbent Democrats discussed several issues that no incumbent did: one in four articulated what he called an “anti-school choice position,” and more than one in five argued for less school testing.

He theorized that perhaps these challengers “believed taking these positions would help them win primaries and garner support of teachers’ unions.”

Likewise, 38% of Republican non-incumbents expressed support for charter schools, while not a single Republican incumbent did. Non-incumbents were about twice as likely as incumbents to say they supported school choice more generally (81% to 40%). Smarick suggested that this is because these non-incumbents, like their Democratic counterparts, were also focused on winning primaries and earning the support of base voters who support more ideological causes.

Incumbents, he said, zeroed in on more practical day-to-day issues like early childhood and funding and, in red states, expanding the number of choices available to families. “It just seems like once you’ve been in office for a while, a lot of these incumbents realize that lots of families like their traditional public schools and they want to make sure that they’re well-funded.”

That may especially be true of schools in the “COVID era,” he said, which need extra funding so students can recover academically.

More broadly, Smarick said, public opinion polls consistently show that the public “likes the idea of well-funded schools. So it’s not really a surprise that incumbents, including Republicans, put that on their list of things that they want to make sure they accomplish.”

Harvard University education scholar Martin West, a co-author of the annual Education Next public opinion survey on school issues, said the differences between incumbents and non-incumbents are “fascinating” and suggest that “the experience of running a state school system, or perhaps the responsibility of having run one, has a moderating effect on candidates’ views.”

He also noted that the striking differences in positions taken by Democrat and Republican candidates are consistent with the most recent EdNext findings showing greater partisan polarization overall.

Blue state, red state, swing state divides

When it came to the states candidates were vying to lead, Democratic nominees didn’t offer many surprises: Those in blue states supported traditional “higher-dollar” initiatives such as expanding pre-K and community college, and raising K-12 funding levels and teacher pay. And while blue-state Democrats talked about investments in community college and university systems, swing-state Democrats were much more likely to discuss CTE.

As for Republicans, red-state GOP candidates were actually less likely to advocate for more red-meat Republican positions such as a parents’ bill of rights or anti-CRT measures. Just one in five GOP nominees in red states advocated for these policies, fewer than in blue or swing states.

Perhaps most striking: In blue states, more than half of GOP nominees took a pro-charter position, but in red states, not a single GOP nominee did. They were also four times more likely to advocate for more K-12 funding than their blue-state GOP counterparts.

Smarick said that perhaps red-state GOP nominees saw less of a need than their blue-state counterparts to fret about instructional crises in schools — or that perhaps their states’ public schools perform well enough to lessen the need to advocate for school-choice and charter reforms.

But it may also suggest a kind of “remarkable” generational change around charter schools, he said.

“If we go back 10, 15, 20 years ago, lots of Republican candidates were more willing to talk about charter schools than school choice,” Smarick said. “Now it seems to have flipped.”

And since many of those pro-school-choice Republicans won their races, he said, “in red states, we’re going to see the tax credits, more ESA [Education Savings Account] stuff. And this is different than it was, certainly, a generation ago.”

Overall, nearly two-thirds (64%) of Republicans in Smarick’s analysis talked about supporting school choice, while just one Democrat, Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, mentioned it.

When it came to how these issues played out, Smarick found a few surprises: Increasing K-12 funding was a “top-five” issue among winners in blue, swing, and red states.

Matt Hogan, a partner at the Democratic polling firm Impact Research, said he wasn’t surprised. He said Impact’s polling has consistently shown that increasing K-12 funding “is very popular and its continued popularity is consistent with voters’ desire a focus on bread-and-butter issues when it comes to education, rather than engaging in culture war fights.”

For Democrats, Harvard’s West noted, the push for more K-12 funding was paired with expanding Pre-K and community college, two investments “with which K-12 funding will have to compete.” That may help to explain why states that switch from Republican to Democratic control have traditionally spent a bit less on K-12 schools, he said.

In the end, what might be most significant in Smarick’s findings is what’s not mentioned: teacher shortages. They got “minimal attention” from candidates, with just three of 72 even mentioning the issue.

“I kept looking through these websites, expecting half or three-quarters of candidates to talk about it, and they just didn’t,” Smarick said.

Though the issue was all over the news in 2022, “It was the dog that didn’t bark” on candidates’ websites. “Which makes you think maybe we ought to take a look at what’s happening in states as opposed to just following national narratives about education policy.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

Panelists at a Jan. 11 Brookings Institution session on charter schools (from left): Doug Harris, Katrina Bulkley, Shavar Jeffries, and Roberto Rodriguez (screenshot)

Public charter schools may have lost some of the luster they enjoyed with centrist Democrats in Washington, D.C., a decade or two ago, but a top Biden administration education official this week sought to reassure the sector that it enjoys broad support on both sides of the aisle.

“I do not believe that the bottom has fallen out from under the bipartisan coalition for public charter schools,” said Roberto Rodriguez, assistant secretary for planning, evaluation, and policy development at the U.S. Department of Education. “I think if that were the case, you would see the funding completely deteriorating from this program. And in fact, you’re not seeing that.”

The Biden administration has faced harsh criticism for its stance on its $440 million Charter Schools Program, a key federal grant that more than half of charter schools rely upon. This comes as centrist Democrats, once the sector’s biggest backers, have sought political support from teachers’ unions, which for decades have forcefully opposed charters.

During the 2020 presidential campaign, then-candidate Joe Biden admitted, “I’m not a charter school fan.”

But on Wednesday during a panel discussion at Washington, D.C.’s Brookings Institution, Rodriguez adopted a softer posture.

“We support high-quality public schools for all kids, including high-quality public charter schools,” he told Brookings Nonresident Senior Fellow Doug Harris, the panel’s moderator. “Our budget stands behind that. The work we’re doing stands behind that. The rulemaking that we’ve proposed is not an effort to tear down the charter school sector. In fact, it is an effort to further promote that objective.”

Roberto Rodriguez

But the administration has warned that more than one in seven charter schools funded by the grant either never opened or shut down before their grant period ended, in effect wasting an estimated $174 million in taxpayer funding. In response, last year it proposed new regulations that critics said amounted to a new “war” on charter schools.

The originally proposed rule for applicants required them to prove their schools met “unmet demand” in existing public schools — a requirement that charter advocates said ignored a bigger problem in district schools: poor quality.

The department also said applicants had to collaborate with “at least one traditional public school or traditional school district,” in effect giving districts a veto over their plans, according to charter advocates.

A third requirement said charter schools had to show they wouldn’t worsen district desegregation efforts or increase racial or socio-economic segregation or isolation in schools.

Taken together, one observer said, the draft requirements were “tailor-made to ensure that the most successful charter schools won’t be replicated or expanded.”

The education department received 26,550 comments on the proposed regulations, and angry charter school parents showed up outside the White House in May to protest Biden’s stance on funding regulations.

Doug Harris

Charter school advocates eventually admitted that the final rules, issued in August, were less harmful but “not without impact” on future growth of the sector. Among the concerns: a shortened window for submitting applications.

Two groups sued days later, saying, among other things, that the department lacked authority to impose new criteria on the grants, which Congress approved as part of a massive spending bill in December. It level-funded the charter grant for the fourth year in a row.

Harris, who has long studied the sector, noted that recent campaign rhetoric “has been different from what the actions have been in the administration,” with more public-facing skepticism from lawmakers about charters than “what’s happening in the nuts and bolts of committee rooms.” He asked the panel if they see the coalition for charters “fracturing” on the ground, especially among centrist Democrats.

Shavar Jeffries, CEO of the KIPP Foundation, which trains educators for the network’s 280 schools, observed that even in the movement’s “halcyon heydays,” charters were simultaneously “contentious among a variety of different constituencies” and the beneficiaries of significant bipartisan support. That continues today, he said.

Shavar Jeffries

“I do think there’s a kind of false idea [that] people are moving away from the issue in ways that [are] maybe inconsistent with what we’ve seen in the past,” he said.

But Jeffries said opponents of the Biden regulations had a point about not wanting to collaborate with districts, since some district officials are “not interested in the practices we’re trying to share.” He added, “You can take a horse to water, but you can’t take it much further than that [if] people aren’t interested.”

In a few instances, Jeffries said, opponents “are actually acting aggressively to undermine the capacity for public charter schools to exist.” He recalled local superintendents who were not only opposed to KIPP practices, but “sadly, in some instances…didn’t even want us to be here. So the idea that we’re going to obtain their support is obviously not going to happen.”

He also said the requirement that charter schools not worsen segregation can, in some cases, amount to a requirement that schools serving Black and Latino students essentially find white students in the suburbs.

Katrina Bulkley

Charter schools serve more than 3 million students, recent research shows, about two-thirds of them Black or Hispanic and most low-income.

The Brookings panel also included findings from another panelist, Katrina Bulkley of Montclair State University, who led a team that found charter school authorizers are a key but little-studied aspect of the charter school world.

While some authorizers say equity is key to their mission, they found, others focus on choice or “market logic.” And they found that authorizers that prioritized equity received applications from schools that also prioritized equity. “This really suggests to us that those beliefs and the practices of authorizers are shaping what applicants are submitting,” Bulkley said.

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

An AI generated image by Dall-E prompted with text “robot hand writing essay with ink and quill.” (Dall-E)

ChatGPT, an AI-powered “large language” model, is poised to change the way high school English teachers do their jobs. With the ability to understand and respond to natural language, ChatGPT is a valuable tool for educators looking to provide personalized instruction and feedback to their students. 

O.K., you’ve probably figured out by now that ChatGPT wrote that self-congratulatory opening. But it raises a question: If AI can produce a journalistic lede on command, what mischief could it unleash in high school English?

Actually, the chatbot, unveiled last month by the San Francisco-based R&D company Open AI, is not intended to make high school English teachers obsolete. Instead, it is designed to assist teachers in their work and help them to provide better instruction and support to their students.

O.K., ChatGPT wrote most of that too. But you see the problem here, right?

English teachers, whose job is to get young students to read and think deeply and write clearly, are this winter coming up against a formidable, free-to-use foe that can do it all: With just a short prompt, it writes essays, poems, business letters, song lyrics, short stories, legal documents, computer code, even outlines and analyses of other writings. 

One user asked it to write a letter to her son explaining that “Santa isn’t real and we make up stories out of love.” In five trim paragraphs, it broke the bad news from Santa himself and told the boy, “I want you to know that the love and care that your parents have for you is real. They have created special memories and traditions for you out of love and a desire to make your childhood special.”

One TikToker noted recently that users can upload a podcast, lecture, or YouTube video transcript and ask ChatGPT to take complete notes.

Many educators are alarmed. One high school computer science teacher confessed last week, “I am having an existential crisis.” Many of those who have played with the tool over the past few weeks fear it could tempt millions of students to outsource their assignments and basically give up on learning to listen, think, read, or write.

Others, however, see potential in the new tool. Upon ChatGPT’s release, The 74 queried high school teachers and other educators, as well as thinkers in the tech and AI fields, to help us make sense of this development.

Here are seven ideas, only one of which was written by ChatGPT itself:

1. By its own admission, it messes up.

When we asked ChatGPT, “What’s the most important thing teachers need to know about you?” it offered that it’s “not a tool for teaching or providing educational content, and should not be used as a substitute for a teacher or educational resource.” It also admitted that it’s “not perfect and may generate responses that are inappropriate or incorrect. It is important to use ChatGPT with caution and to always fact-check any information it provides.”

2. It’s going to force teachers to rethink their practice — whether they like it or not. 

Josh Thompson (Courtesy of Josh Thompson)

Josh Thompson, a former Virginia high school English teacher working on these issues for the National Council of Teachers of English, said it’s naïve to think that students won’t find ChatGPT very, very soon, and start using it for assignments. “Students have probably already seen that it’s out there,” he said. “So we kind of have to just think, ‘O.K., well, how is this going to affect us?’”

In a word, Thompson said, it’s going to upend conventional wisdom about what’s important in the classroom, putting more emphasis on the writing process than the product. Teachers will need to refocus, perhaps even using ChatGPT to help students draft and revise. Students “might turn in this robotic draft, and then we have a conference about it and we talk,” he said.

The tool will force a painful conversation, Thompson and others said, about the utility of teaching the standard five-paragraph essay, which he joked “should be thrown out the window anyway.” While it’s a good template for developing ideas, it’s really just a starting point. Even now, Thompson tells students to think of each of the paragraphs not as complete writing, but as the starting point for sections of a larger essay that only they can write.

3. It’s going to refocus teachers on helping students find their authentic voice.

In that sense, said Sawsan Jaber, a longtime English teacher at East Leyden High School in Franklin Park, Ill., this may be a positive development. “I really think that a key to education in general is we’re missing authenticity.”

Technology like ChatGPT may force teachers to focus less on standard forms and more on student voice and identity. It may also force students to think more deeply about the audience for their writing, which an AI likely will never be able to do effectively.

Sawsan Jaber (Courtesy of Sawsan Jaber)

“I think education in general just needs a facelift,” she said, one that helps teachers focus more closely on students’ needs. Actually, Jaber said, the benefits of a free tool like ChatGPT might most readily benefit students like hers from low-income households in areas like Franklin Park, near Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. “The world is changing, and instead of fighting it, we have to ask ourselves: ‘Are the skills that we’ve historically taught kids the skills that they still need in order to be successful in the current context? And I’m not sure that they are.”

Jaber noted that universities are asking students to do more project-based and “unconventional” work that requires imagination. “So why are we so stuck on getting kids to write the five-paragraph essay and worrying if they’re using an AI generator or something else to really come up with it?”

An AI generated image by Dall-E prompted with text “robot hanging out with cool high school students in front of lockers” (Dall-E)

4. It could upend more than just classroom practice, calling into question everything from Advanced Placement assignments to college essays.

Shelley Rodrigo (Courtesy of Shelley Rodrigo)

Shelley Rodrigo, senior director of the Writing Program at the University of Arizona, said the need for writing instruction won’t go away. But what may soon disappear is the “simplistic display of knowledge” schools have valued for decades.

“If it’s, ‘Compare and contrast these two novels,’ O.K., that’s a really generic assignment that AI can pull stuff from the Internet really easily,” she said. But if an assignment asks students to bring their life experience to the discussion of a novel, students can’t rely on AI for help.

“If you don’t want generic answers,” she said, “don’t ask generic questions.”

In looking at coverage of the kinds of writing uploaded from ChatGPT, Rodrigo, also present-elect of NCTE, said it’s easy to see a pattern that others have commented on: Most of it looks like something that would score well on an AP exam. “Part of me is like, ‘O.K., so that potentially is a sign that that system is broken.’”

5. Students: Your teachers may already be able to spot AI-assisted writing.

Eric Wang (Courtesy of Eric Wang)

While one of the advantages of relying on ChatGPT may be that it’s not technically plagiarism or even the product of an essay mill, that doesn’t mean it’s 100% foolproof.

Eric Wang, a statistician and vice president of AI at Turnitin.com, the plagiarism-detection firm, noted that engineers there can already detect writing created by large-language “fill-in-the-next-word” processes, which is what most AI models use.

How? It tends to follow predictable patterns. For one thing, it uses fewer sophisticated words than humans do: “Words that are less frequent, maybe a little more esoteric — like the word ‘esoteric,’” he said. “Our use of rare words is more common.”

AI applications tend to use more high-probability words in expected places and “favor those more probable words,” Wang said. “So we can detect it.”

Kids: Your untraceable essay may in fact be untraceable — but it’s not undetectable. 

6. Like most technological breakthroughs, ChatGPT should be understood, not limited or banned — but that takes commitment.

L.M. Sacasas, a writer who publishes The Convivial Society, a newsletter on technology and culture, likened the response to ChatGPT to the early days of Wikipedia: While many teachers saw that research tool as radioactive, a few tried to help students understand “what it did well, what its limitations were, what might be some good ways of using Wikipedia in their research.”

In 2022, most educators — as well as most students — now see that Wikipedia has its place. A well-constructed page not only helps orient a reader; it’s also “kind of a launching pad to other sources,” Sacasas said. “So you know both what it can do for you and what it can’t. And you treat it accordingly.” 

Sacasas hopes teachers use the same logic with ChatGPT.

More broadly, he said, teachers must do a better job helping students see how what they’re learning has value. So far, “I think we haven’t done a very good job of that, so that it’s easier for students to just take the shortcut” and ask software to fill in rather meaningless blanks.

If even competent students are simply going through the motions, he said, “that will encourage students to make the worst use of these tools. And so the real project for us, I’m convinced, is just to instill a sense of the value of learning, the value of engaging texts deeply, the value of aesthetic pleasure that cannot be instrumentalized. That’s very hard work.”

An AI generated image by Dall-E prompted with text “classroom full of robots sitting at desks.” (Dall-E)

7. Underestimate it at your peril.

Open AI’s Sam Altman earlier this month tried to lower expectations, tweeting that the tool “is incredibly limited, but good enough at some things to create a misleading impression of greatness.”

How does it feel, Bob Dylan, to see an AI chatbot write a song in your style about Baltimore? (Getty Images)

Ask ChatGPT to write a Bob Dylan song about Baltimore, for example, and … well, it’s not very good or very Dylanesque at the moment. The chorus:

Baltimore, Baltimore

My home away from home

The people are friendly

And the crab cakes are to die for.

Altman added, “It’s a mistake to be relying on it for anything important right now.” 

Jake Carr (Courtesy of Jake Carr)

The tool’s capabilities in many ways may not be very sophisticated now, said Jake Carr, an English teacher in northern California. “But we’re fooling ourselves if we think something like ChatGPT isn’t only going to get better.”

Carr asked the tool to write a short story about “kids who ride flying narwhals” and got a rudimentary “Golden Books” sort of tale. But then he got an idea: Could it produce an outline of such a story using Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey” template?

It could and it did, producing “a pretty darn good outline” that used all of the storytelling elements typically present in popular fiction and screenplays.

He also cut-and-pasted several of his students’ essay drafts into the tool and asked it to grade each one based on a rubric he provided.

“I tell you what: It’s not bad,” he said. The tool even isolated each essay’s thesis statement.

Carr, who frequently posts TikToks about tech, admitted that ChatGPT is scary for many teachers, but that they should play with it and consider how it forces them to think more deeply about their work. “If we don’t talk about it, if we don’t begin the conversation, it’s going to happen anyways and we just won’t get to be part of the conversation,” he said. “We just have to be forward thinking and not fear change.”

But perhaps we shouldn’t be too sanguine. Asked to write a haiku about is own potential for mayhem, ChatGPT didn’t mince words:

Artificial intelligence

Powerful and dangerous

Beware, for I am here

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona testifies before Congress, June 7. Cardona on Thursday proposed sweeping new protections for transgender students and others in a rewrite of federal Title IX regulations. (Oliver Contreras/Getty Images)

The Biden administration is pursuing sweeping new changes to federal Title IX law to restore “crucial protections” for victims of sexual harassment, assault, and sex-based discrimination that it maintains they lost during the Trump administration.

Under the proposed changes, announced Thursday, the law would protect victims against discrimination based not just on sex but on sexual orientation and gender identity, in effect adding transgender students as a protected class. Current regulations are silent on these students’ rights.

But the proposal sidesteps the question of transgender athletes’ rights to compete in girls’ sports, an explosive issue administration officials said will get its own set of regulations at a later date.

“This is personal to me as an educator and as a father,” U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said during the announcement. “I want the same opportunities afforded to my daughter and my son — and my transgender cousin — so they can achieve their potential and reach their dreams.”

The changes come 50 years to the day after President Richard Nixon signed the federal civil rights law that bans sex discrimination in education.

Cardona on Thursday noted that LGBTQ youth “face bullying and harassment, experience higher rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide, and too often grow up feeling that they don’t belong.”

The proposed regulations, he said, “send a loud message to these students and all our students: You belong in our schools. You have worthy dreams and incredible talents. You deserve the opportunity to shine authentically and unapologetically. The Biden-Harris administration has your back.”

Education and civil rights groups welcomed the proposed rules, with Ronn Nozoe, CEO of the National Association of Secondary School Principals saying they “greatly strengthen principals’ abilities to ensure schools provide what students need.”

Amit Paley, CEO of The Trevor Project, a suicide prevention and mental health organization for LGBTQ youth, applauded the administration’s bid to extend Title IX protections to sexual orientation and gender identity, saying, “School should be a place where students learn and are comfortable being themselves, not a source of bullying and discrimination.”

But the proposed rules irked some conservative groups. In a statement, Nicole Neily, president of Parents Defending Education, called the move a “federal overreach” and dubbed the proposed regulations “The Biden administration’s ‘Must Say They’ rewrite of Title IX,” refering to the preferred pronoun of some who are transgender.

“American families should be deeply concerned by the proposed rewrite of Title IX,” Neily said. “From rolling back due process protections, to stomping on the First Amendment, to adding ‘sexual orientation and gender identity’ into a statute that can only be so changed by Congressional action, the Biden Administration has shown that they place the demands of a small group of political activists above the concerns of millions of families across the country.”

Taken together, the proposed regulations would create a sharp contrast to Trump administration rules adopted in 2020 under then-Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. Under DeVos, for instance, schools were prohibited from opening Title IX cases if an alleged assault took place away from school grounds. Under the new rules, schools would be required to address “hostile environments” in programs and activities, even if the conduct that contributed to the hostile environment “occurred off-campus or outside the United States,” a senior official told reporters.

“Our view now is that the existing regulations do not best fulfill Congress’ mandate in Title IX,” the official said. “There is more we can do to ensure that students do not experience sex discrimination in school.”

Transgender rights advocates stood outside of the Ohio Statehouse in 2021 to oppose and bring attention to an amendment to a bill that would ban transgender women from participating in high school and college women’s sports. (Stephen Zenner/Getty Images)

Cardona’s proposed changes both expand the definition of sexual harassment and potentially limit opportunities for students accused of sexual assault or harassment to confront their accusers. Administration officials said the new regulations would require schools to take “prompt and effective” action on campus sex discrimination.

But they also said the regulations in effect loosen requirements on schools’ sex assault investigations: The proposed rules, for instance, would “permit but not require” schools to hold live hearings in which accused students can directly confront survivors.

A senior department official, who briefed reporters Thursday on background, said the administration has concluded that a live hearing, which resembles a courtroom procedure, “is one, but not the only way, to address investigation and to determine what has occurred.” The official noted that the vast majority of schools were not conducting live hearings before the Trump administration began requiring them in 2020. “And it was clear to us that a live hearing was not essential to determination of outcomes and a fair process,” the official said.

In a statement, Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), said the move “returns to the deeply flawed campus disciplinary process of the Obama Administration, which led to hundreds of inconsistent judgements and more than 300 legal challenges. The existing rule struck a balance that follows the law and is fair to both parties.”

Notably absent from Thursday’s announcement was any mention of Title IX’s application to athletics, which has caused a furor due to a handful of transgender athletes’ bids to compete in girls’ sporting events.

The administration said it will engage in a separate rulemaking process to address the law’s application to athletics and gender, but offered no immediate timeline for the process. A senior department official said the topic “deserves its own separate rule-making process.”

Administration officials have previously said Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination and harassment in programs receiving federal funds, will echo the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, which extended protections against sexual harassment and discrimination in the workplace to LGBTQ employees.

While the department’s interpretation of the Bostock ruling doesn’t mention sports, the Biden administration last year filed a brief in a West Virginia case in which a transgender girl who wants to compete with girls on her middle school cross country team is challenging the state’s 2021 law banning students born as male from participating in girls’ sports.

Vice President Kamala Harris and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona watch schoolgirls playing basketball during a Title IX 50th Anniversary Field Day event at American University Wednesday. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

A group of 15 Republican-led states, led by Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen, has threatened to challenge the regulations in court,. Since last year, a dozen states have passed legislation prohibiting trans females from competing in girls’ and women’s sports.

Last week, the International Swimming Federation, the world governing body for swimming, voted to prohibit transgender athletes from competing in high-level women’s competitions unless they began medical treatments to suppress testosterone production early in their lives.

The group, known internationally as Fédération internationale de natation, or FINA, said it would also establish a new, “open” category for athletes who identify as women but do not meet the requirement to compete against people who were female at birth.

By contrast, World Cup and Olympic soccer star Megan Rapinoe told TIME last week that she is “100 percent supportive of trans inclusion” in sports, noting that what most people know about the topic comes from “relentless” conservative talking points that don’t reflect reality.

“Show me the evidence that trans women are taking everyone’s scholarships, are dominating in every sport, are winning every title,” she said. “I’m sorry, it’s just not happening. So we need to start from inclusion, period. And as things arise, I have confidence that we can figure it out. But we can’t start at the opposite. That is cruel. And frankly, it’s just disgusting.”

The public has 60 days to send comments on the new proposal, which could take several months to finalize.

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A long, long time ago in Minneapolis, this question loomed over a small group of eighth-graders.

Appearing on a teletype machine — basically a primitive computer keyboard connected to a printer — at Jordan Junior High School, the strange question broke open the world of The Oregon Trail. Decades later, the title remains perhaps the most influential educational video game ever created, one that endures today as its influence is still being felt across the gaming industry.

Here’s the thing: If you thought the first kids to play this game were millennials in the 1990s, or even Gen Xers back in the 1980s, think again. The first students to experience The Oregon Trail were Baby Boomers, born in the late 1950s and now old enough to be grandparents.

The date: Dec. 3, 1971.

Caption: A familiar scene from an early version of The Oregon Trail, which put players in the shoes of westward explorers in 1848. (Screenshot from You Tube/LGR)

The Oregon Trail is that rarest of artifacts, a computer game that predates the rise of the personal computer by about five years — even the first rudimentary video arcade and TV computer games were still a year off. Built by an unlikely trio of undergraduate teaching candidates, its first young players encountered it on a paper roll fed into a hulking teletype, connected by a phone line to a mainframe computer miles away. There were no pictures or graphics, only lines of type and the occasional ringing bell.

It was mesmerizing.

Don Rawitsch, then 21 and a student-teacher at Jordan, had developed it originally as a dice-and-card game, laid out on a long butcher paper map. He’d been assigned to teach an eighth-grade history unit on westward expansion, and he wanted to do something new and interactive. Then, one evening just before Thanksgiving, one of his roommates came home, saw what Rawitsch was doing, and envisioned something completely different.

“I saw this map on the floor and I said, ‘Oh, this looks interesting,’” said Bill Heinemann, then teaching math across town. The pair, along with three other roommates, were all just months away from graduation at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., about 40 minutes south. Heinemann had taken a few programming classes and played some basic simulation games — Civil War logistics and lunar landers among them.

“There wasn’t much out there that was very fun,” he recalled.

Then he saw Rawitsch’s map, telling him, “Oh, this would be a perfect application for a computer.” He showed the map to another roommate, Paul Dillenberger, who was also teaching math. Dillenberger liked the idea and signed on as Heinemann’s debugger.

Rawitsch was delighted. He told them he needed it in 10 days.

Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger — creators of the original Oregon Trail game —as they appeared in their Carleton College yearbook, circa 1971. (Carleton College Foundation)

Thus began a mad dash to code the game in BASIC at a teletype at Bryant Junior High, where Heinemann and Dillenberger taught. The unit sat in an anteroom to the janitor’s closet, where there was space for just the teletype and one extra chair.

Over a week and a half, the trio laid out a basic narrative in which players loaded up a covered wagon with food and supplies and lit out from Independence, Mo., in April 1848, for Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Day by day, unforeseen difficulties arose such as illness, bandits, and bad weather, and players tried their hands at a selection of mini-games asking them to hunt and ford rivers. Players won by making it all the way to western Oregon with at least a few members of their party still alive.

The trio also programmed a few surprises to keep players on their toes.

“I wanted to make it so that it was fun, and I wanted to make it so that it was worth playing again,” Heinemann recalled. So he had the game generate “enough random things” along the trail such that playing even a dozen times brought something new and unexpected.

He programmed the game to randomly hand players an assortment of snake bites, wild animal attacks and broken wagon wheels. They’d occasionally get lost in the fog. And, of course, they’d sometimes succumb to disease — over the decades, “You have died of dysentery,” added in a subsequent version, became the game’s defining meme.

A common fate for players was death from diseases, such as dysentery, which later became a recurring meme among fans. (Screenshot from YouTube/LGR)

On Dec. 3, Rawitsch dialed the number to the district’s mainframe, snuggled a telephone receiver into place, and began moving groups of students through the game’s paces.

It was an instant hit. Students came to Rawitsch, asking if they could play before or after class. Lines would form down the hall each morning as students waited for a chance to try again. For many, it was the first time they’d sat down in front of anything even resembling a computer.

Because Rawitsch was able to reserve the teletype for just a week, he had to think creatively. So instead of letting students play individually, he had to combine them into groups of four or five. That turned out to make the game more compelling.

“They’d use this as an opportunity to do some group problem-solving,” he said, recalling arguments about who exactly did what in the game. “After a while, when they figured out that their time in class was going to run out if they kept wasting time arguing over decisions, somebody said, ‘Well, why don’t we vote on it?’ So they kind of created democracy on the fly.”

Bill Heinemann, The Oregon Trail’s original coder, with a scroll containing the game’s original 800 or so lines of code. (Gail Heinemann)

Each democracy also functioned as a meritocracy — the hunting mini-games required players to type words like BANG or BLAM as quickly and accurately as possible. Kids recruited the best typist in the group.

At the end of the week, Rawitsch had to relinquish the teletype, rolling it into a colleague’s classroom. The experiment came to an end, and the trio prepared to wrap up their work in the two schools. But before they did, they printed out a few copies of the 800 or so lines of code, tore off the three-foot printouts and took them home.

‘Trailheads’

The five-day stretch of play at Jordan Junior High that December might have been the end of The Oregon Trail, but in 1974, Rawitsch took a job at a new nonprofit called the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC), which sought to bring access to educational software to schools statewide.

By the early 1970s, Minnesota was a proto-Silicon Valley, with four of the U.S.’s biggest computing companies — UNIVAC, Control Data, Honeywell and IBM Rochester — setting up shop there in the years before the California-born personal computer took over in the popular imagination.And while most schools at the time looked upon computers simply as tools to, well, teach about programming more computers, MECC’s founders took a broader view, creating a library of instructional software on a variety of topics that any school statewide could use for free.When his bosses put out a call for innovative products, Rawitsch volunteered to find the paper roll and type out the code, and soon the game was available to anyone with a link to the state consortium’s mainframe.

Teachers began taking notice. The game quickly became MECC’s most popular title. As desktop computers began to sprout in classrooms, MECC spun off a for-profit company that sold millions of copies of The Oregon Trail and other early titles nationwide.

A new generation of coders added graphics, sounds, and music to create the versions of The Oregon Trail that most kids have played since. By then, Rawitsch had moved on, but in 1995, a decade after the game first appeared on Apple II computers, MECC President Dale LaFrenz told an interviewer that The Oregon Trail accounted for about one-third of MECC’s $30 million in annual revenue. One estimate has put the total number of copies sold at more than 65 million.

Because they gave the game to the consortium in 1974 without any expectation of being repaid, the original creators never saw a dime. Actually, they weren’t even widely recognized as its creators until 1994, when MECC brought them together for a celebration of the game at the Mall of America. After MECC handed each of them “Trailheads” jackets — a play on Deadheads — Dillenberger joked to a reporter, “I got a jean jacket and a copy of the game instead of owning an island somewhere.”

An early version of The Oregon Trail for personal computers (The Strong National Museum of Play)

In interviews, none of the three — by now all hovering around retirement from careers in teaching and tech — expresses any bitterness about the way things turned out. If not for MECC, Rawitsch said, the original game would have had no home at all, with no way to convert it a few years later from mainframe to PCs. The consortium’s subscription system also made it possible for the game to find fans among students and teachers nationwide in the 1980s and 1990s.

“I feel pretty proud of what we accomplished and how many people we reached,” said Dillenberger. Since MECC feted them at the mall, “We’ve been on TV, we’ve been in articles and podcasts. It’s kind of constant,” Dillenberger said. “I’ve got two other people trying to get a hold of me right now.” Loyal fans have created a reproduction of an early Macintosh-compatible version that’s playable today.

Eventually the state sold MECC to an investment group that was bought by a larger group. The intellectual property of MECC — by now no longer a consortium but a corporation — soon became part of a failed acquisition involving the toy company Mattel. Had it been successful, we might have actually seen Barbie traversing the Oregon Trail. The move was so ill-conceived that it earned a chapter in a 2005 business book on mergers and acquisitions titled Deals from Hell.

Not the first edu-game

The Oregon Trail didn’t actually represent the first known use of a computer simulation in school, said Jon-Paul Dyson, director of the International Center for the History of Electronic Games at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, N.Y.. That honor goes to a group of IBM programmers and teachers in Westchester County, N.Y., who in the mid-1960s developed The Sumerian Game, a sort of Dungeons and Dragons in the Fertile Crescent.

But The Oregon Trail stands out for being sensitive to its players — many of Rawitsch’s students were Native American, and the designers were aware of that. “One of the things that the game doesn’t do, for instance, is have the pioneers fighting Indians,” Dyson said. “It would’ve been very highly likely that a game in the ’70s would have that. But in fact, the interactions with Indians and Native Americans in there, it’s generally about providing food or that sort of thing.”

The latest version, developed for mobile devices by the firm Gameloft, goes further, promising “respectful representation” of native characters, with playable stories “celebrating the history and cultures of the peoples who first lived on this land and still live here today.”

The latest version of The Oregon Trail, designed for mobile devices, updates the adventure and offers what its creators call a “respectful representation” of native characters. (Courtesy of Gameloft)

At its heart, Dyson said, The Oregon Trail stands out for a simpler reason: “It’s a good game.”

It mixes resource management with an engaging “hero’s journey” narrative. “The game is very well balanced,” he said. That has helped it endure for so long — players can download the latest version in one of 14 languages.

For these reasons, it’s in the Strong’s World Video Game Hall of Fame, one of only 32 games so honored and one of just two education-related games.

‘You often died, which is kind of fun’ 

In some ways, The Oregon Trail had perfect timing, appearing on personal computers just as they were beginning to colonize suburban desktops and classrooms.

Gary Goldberger, president and co-founder of FableVision Studios, a Boston-based learning games company, remembered growing up in the suburbs of Rockland County, north of New York City, as computers began appearing. The Oregon Trailmay have been a one-player game, but he and his friends “just played it as a collective …. We would always do group decision-making, which is kind of the model that I like in general. It’s something we put into our games: How do we get people to talk outside of the game? And how do we have collaboration?”

He and his friends never actually thought of The Oregon Trail as an educational game. “We just thought of it as a game that we were playing, which is like the best of what we always try to achieve,” he said.

Even in its earliest versions, The Oregon Trail introduced mini-games that challenged players to develop skills related to the game’s larger narrative, a device still in use in big-budget games such as the Assassin’s Creed games. (Screenshot from You Tube/cryoburned)

Starting with the BANG-generated hunting, the game basically invented the mini-game, a quick challenge within the larger one that’s still used in the biggest-budget commercial video games, such as Assassin’s Creed, which tasks players with becoming a locksmith, among other things. At a more basic level, Goldberger said, the game put players in charge of their own fate — and wasn’t afraid to kill them to show that the frontier was unforgiving.“You often died, which is kind of fun also.”

From spectator to subject 

At its most basic, the game helps teachers confront one of the biggest challenges in teaching history, said Paul Darvasi, a longtime Toronto high school teacher: Students “have a very difficult time embodying the past,” he said. But a good game like The Oregon Trail makes that happen immediately by dropping players into situations where their decisions matter.

“What’s really interesting is that obviously when you are making decisions, you are deviating from historical realities, because history is set and done,” he said. But in making that leap, players immediately begin to understand why historical figures made the decisions they made. “It actually helps cultivate a historical mindset,” he said, because players are wondering about subjects’ motives: “Why did they want to go out west? Why would they want to suffer? Why did they make these decisions? Why did they cross the river and not take a bridge?”

Darvasi has become well-known for using immersive simulations — he used to teach One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by dressing up as a fearsome nurse and turning his classroom into a mental ward for a month. He said a game like The Oregon Trail can similarly “micro-target” students with content that sticks. “It’s a counterpoint to these massive historical surveys that we do: The History of the Roman Empire, 700 Years in Three Classes,” Darvasi said.

Fifty years later, starstruck fans feel the need to tell Rawitsch, Heinemann and Dillenberger how much the game meant to them as kids. Dillenberger, its original debugger, said autograph seekers still find him and say, “’You really saved my life in middle school because of this program.’ It’s just incredible how many people we touched.”

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In the spring of 2020, facing massive disruptions to in-person instruction, state education chiefs urged then-U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to waive federal test requirements that had been in place for nearly 20 years.

She granted a blanket, one-year “accountability waiver.” But in February, with a new administration in place, then-Education Secretary nominee Miguel Cardona said he’d require states to administer the federally mandated tests in the spring, with an asterisk: They had the option of giving shorter, remote, or delayed versions.

Now, as students begin a third year of school under the cloud of COVID-19, a pair of researchers suggest that those two moves, by two administrations, may have made the results of annual testing less valuable — and could harm the delicate political support such testing still enjoys.

Using different versions of tests makes the results less comparable across different years and school districts. And shorter tests produce less “actionable” information about individual student achievement in the short term, said Dan Goldhaber of the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the University of Washington.

“The waivers looked to us like they made state tests less useful for diagnostic purposes, both for parents and for teachers,” Goldhaber said in an interview.

Dan Goldhaber

In a new policy brief, Goldhaber, along with Paul Bruno of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, say that as states begin planning for next spring’s tests, they should consider exactly how useful the results are for families, who spent much of the past school year getting an up-close look at just how much their children know.

When these tests return full-force in schools post-pandemic, as they likely will in 2022, they run the risk of being out-of-step with parents’ new, pandemic-fueled understanding of their children’s needs, the authors warn.

If the test results can’t help guide decisions about student placement and skills levels, they could lose what tenuous political support they still have, according to the analysis.

The researchers looked at testing policies nationwide and found that in most states, educators use tests either for diagnostics, for research and evaluation, or as the basis for accountability systems.

But they might also be better used to provide “actionable and timely information” about how to help individual students do better in the subjects tested. If results could be disaggregated more often and in a timely fashion, they say, that would help parents and teachers look more closely at students’ skill levels and academic needs.

As it is, they say, state test results “often take several months to make it into the hands of educators or families, impeding the use of testing to help individual students.”

“We need to make sure, I think, that they are useful for more than just accountability purposes,” said Goldhaber, who is also affiliated with the American Institutes for Research.

He noted, for instance, that in Washington State, many high-achieving students in underrepresented minority groups, who wouldn’t typically be assigned to advanced classes, get that option based on end-of-year assessment results. “They’re used for those kinds of things, but I don’t think it’s well-known,” he said.

Twenty years after No Child Left Behind first mandated widespread spring testing in K-12 schools, the authors say refocusing the tests could also keep them from losing popular support among parents and teachers.

Federal testing requirements are “popular in the abstract,” Bruno and Goldhaber write, but that support appears fragile: 41 percent of respondents in a 2020 Phi Delta Kappa poll said there’s “too much emphasis on achievement testing” in public schools, up from 37 percent in 2008 and just 20 percent in 1997.

They also note that support for testing drops 20 percentage points when respondents are told that test administration takes, on average, eight hours of class time annually.

“I think there’s probably less public support than there was, certainly, when No Child Left Behind passed” in 2001, Goldhaber said.

Because of remote schooling, Goldhaber said, “Many parents have a window into what’s actually going on inside the classroom, in a way that they did not have before the pandemic, because they could sit in with their kids during classes.”

But in many cases, he said, the test results don’t necessarily offer “concrete information that suggests maybe your kids need help with complex fractions — the kind of information that you could at least imagine would inform parent-teacher meeting discussions.”

Jonathan Schweig, a researcher at the RAND Corp. and a professor at Pardee RAND Graduate School who studies education policy and teacher evaluations, among other topics, said he generally agreed with Bruno’s and Goldhaber’s notion that using tests for diagnostic purposes might be a way to increase public support.

Echoing Goldhaber’s point about concrete data, he said state summative tests generally “were not designed to provide diagnostic or instructionally useful information. Even under routine conditions, the tests are administered towards the end of the school year, and score reports are returned to schools and families during the summer, after the school year has ended.”

Schweig also said the scores generated by these assessment systems “are not at a grain size that would be useful to support remediation or other diagnostic uses.”

Jonathan Schweig

Summative tests, he said, “are best thought of as providing one piece of information about student learning, but they do not provide the only piece and perhaps not even the most important piece. As such, it is important for school leaders to think comprehensively about assessment and design coherent systems that include a mix of formative, interim and state-wide summative assessments.”

Any broad new federal testing policies will have to wait until Congress approves a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which helps fund public schools. That could take years, since lawmakers typically push back the timeline for reauthorization by years. But in today’s political climate, Goldhaber said, “I think that if we were to have a negotiation right now, I don’t know that the tests would survive.”

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The year 2050 may seem a long way off, but in 29 years our current crop of K-12 students will be well into their careers.

How will this chaotic school year have affected them?

Recent findings from the University of Pennsylvania warn that over the next three decades, our recent COVID-related U.S. school closures, as well as the shift to virtual schooling, could massively impact our national gross domestic product (GDP), putting a huge dent in future workers’ earning potential.

The damage from all that reduced schooling could hurt productivity and shrink the U.S. economy 3.6 percent by 2050, economists say. The results will be even worse for workers’ personal earnings.

The new estimates come from the nonpartisan Penn Wharton Budget Model, an initiative that examines public policy through an economic lens. The policy brief suggests an expensive remedy: extend the school year.

Adding just one month of summer school, they say, won’t be cheap: about $75 billion, likely financed through the federal government taking on more debt. But they note that the $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill passed in March provides approximately $123 billion to K-12 public education, with about $22 billion already earmarked for summer school, extended school days, an extended school year, after-school programs and “other enrichment.”

Spending billions on extending the school year, the economists say, could help mitigate learning losses, shrinking GDP loss about half a percentage point, from 3.6 to 3.1 percent. That smaller GDP reduction would produce a gain of $1.2 trillion over the next three decades, equal to about $16 for every dollar spent on more summer school.

Daniela Viana Acosta

That affordance “gives the kids a few extra hours for them that they wouldn’t have gotten otherwise,” said Penn’s Daniela Viana Acosta, the brief’s lead author. “We include that in their productivity, in their learning capacity. And then, once they come to adulthood, that gets incorporated in their ability in the labor market — that is, the wages they were going to make.

Her team estimated the relative effectiveness of virtual versus in-person schooling using previous studies that looked at the math skills of students enrolled in the different learning modes.

They also estimated how much a year of learning loss corresponds to later productivity. Looking broadly at U.S. public school enrollment and federal school reopening data, they estimated that graduates’ future labor income shrank by 10 percent for those who missed a year of middle school or high school. For those who missed a year of elementary school, it was even worse, 13 percent.

Recently approved federal aid could actually make the Penn prescription happen, in at least a few places. The American Rescue Plan includes $123 billion for K-12 schools with high levels of low-income students. Districts must spend at least 20 percent addressing learning loss. States, which can hold on to 10 percent of the money the federal government gives, must also spend at least 5 percent of it on learning loss, and at least 1 percent on summer learning.

Thomas Dee, an economist and Professor at Stanford University, said he’s glad researchers are conducting analyses like this, but said the Penn analysis “seems to embed the assumption that an extension to the school year will have the same effects as a school does on average.” That may not be a valid assumption, he said.

Dee said the framing of the policy choices “seems to preclude other options” like tutoring and conventional summer learning programs. Extending the school year could also be difficult, since it requires schools to restructure curricula and figure out staffing, among other challenges. And it ignores well-researched summer and tutoring programs that are proven to support students, he said.

Thomas Dee

Dee and two colleagues last year looked at a long-established summer learning program that serves low-income middle school students “and features unusual academic breadth,” as well as a social emotional curriculum. The researchers found that participating in the program led to fewer unexcused absences, lower chronic absenteeism and suspensions, and a modest gain in reading scores.

Acosta, the lead author of the Penn analysis, said the “what-if” of extending summer school presented an interesting exercise. Normally, economists would ask what happened if a group of students got more education. “In this case, because of the whole COVID environment, it’s the opposite,” she said. “We want to know what happens if you give up one year of your education.”

Acosta’s team tweaked the formula to account for the benefits of virtual schooling, which were enjoyed more by some students than for others. Then they “fast-forwarded” nearly 30 years and compared projected wages to what could have been.

“People are making less money — that means that they are less productive,” Acosta said. “And in an aggregate model, where we want to see what happens to the full economy, it’s as if we said, ‘Well, you didn’t have enough education. You don’t know how to perform some of the tasks, or something was disturbed in your learning process.’”

The team actually proposed a series of interventions, from extending both the 2021-22 school year and the 2022-23 school year, just extending the 2021-22 school year, or narrowly targeting the aid to offer a longer school year just to “economically disadvantaged” students nationwide. That more focused aid would reduce the cost to $25.6 billion, though the benefit would be slightly smaller.

But it could benefit individual students powerfully: The economists project that today’s low-income middle- or high school students could earn, on average, 8.2 percent less in 2050 because of the closure. Today’s low-income elementary school students could earn 10.9 percent less.

Though the results are surprising, Acosta said, she hasn’t had any peers in academia challenge the figures so far “because they’ve been fairly in line with what the literature has said” about education, productivity, and the experiences of students the past year during the pandemic. “It’s an entire generation that lost almost a full school year.”

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As more Americans receive Covid-19 vaccines and schools move to reopen widely, leaders are doing their best to make sure everyone gets the memo: School is happening in-person this fall.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently told reporters, “We must prepare now for full in-person instruction come next school year.”

In New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy said in March he is “fully expecting” schools across the state to return in-person in the fall, no exceptions. “We are expecting Monday through Friday, in-person, every school, every district,” he said.

Good luck with that.

Even as vaccination rates soar and the government authorizes access for adolescents, school districts nationwide are grappling with sometimes widespread suspicion and dissatisfaction over how they handled the pandemic, especially in communities of color. That’s forcing them to offer families an option that might have been unthinkable a year ago — and one that has a terrible track record: enrolling their children online this fall and continuing learning from home.

Dawn Williams, whose daughter will start first grade in August in Maryland’s Prince George’s County, said she’s seriously considering an online program. “Most of my friends that have children, their kids are still virtual,” she said.

So far it’s happening in just a fraction of the nation’s 13,500 districts. But those include a wide mix of rural and suburban districts, as well as large urban school systems like Albuquerque, Atlanta, Cincinnati, Dallas, Indianapolis, Nashville, Omaha, Richmond, and the District of Columbia, according to the University of Washington’s Center for the Reinvention of Public Education (CRPE).

In Colorado’s Jefferson County, the school district, responding to “high demand” from families, recently announced an online option in the fall. District spokesperson Cameron Bell said more than 700 students have enrolled so far, with at least 1,000 expected by August.

In Montgomery County, the largest school district in Maryland, officials are developing a virtual academy “to address both the students who may want to remain virtual for health reasons but also those who have thrived in virtual learning,” said spokesperson Gboyinde Onijala.

What’s going on here?

Much of this can be chalked up to simple consumer demand. One recent Ipsos/NPR poll found that nearly 30 percent of parents would rely on virtual learning “indefinitely” going forward. That suggests a potential market of more than 15 million students.

Districts are listening. When RAND researchers surveyed about 320 public school leaders last October, they found that one in five were either considering or actually planning to keep “one or more virtual schools” operating after the pandemic ends, said RAND’s Heather Schwartz.

“I expect that to hold, or even to increase somewhat based on early anecdotal indications that a sizable minority of students and parents prefer remote learning,” Schwartz said via email.

More recently, in early April, researchers at CRPE surveyed officials in 100 large urban school districts and found nearly identical results: 23, or just over one in five, plan to offer a remote option next fall.

District leaders told Schwartz and other researchers that their main motivation was “to be responsive to parent and student preferences” — and in no small part to improve sagging enrollments. One analysis of 33 states by The Associated Press and the education news site Chalkbeat found that public K-12 enrollment in 2020 dropped by more than half a million students, or 2 percent.

“You keep hearing this word: ‘thriving’”

As he talks these days to school leaders nationwide, education consultant John Bailey said he hears many of them say they plan to make online learning “a more permanent part of their offering to kids going forward.” A one-time U.S. Department of Education official who now advises the Walton Family Foundation, Bailey has supported the idea that reopening schools is safe. He said that while many educators acknowledge millions of students lost ground via distance learning, “for some kids, it’s working really well. So why not offer that going forward?”

Nationwide, families of color are keeping their children home at especially high rates. In Chicago, the district’s chief of school management told school board members late last month that most students are “learning virtually.” But about one in four Black high school students was absent from both in-person and remote learning in late April. Overall, only about two-thirds of high school students attended in-person classes on days they were expected in school, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

At the same time, Asian fourth-graders attend school remotely at the highest rate of any group — 95 percent, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Eighth-graders attend at an even higher rate: 96 percent. Asian families have expressed fears about their children experiencing anti-Asian discrimination or even violence in the wake of the pandemic.

While state and local restrictions can play a part in attendance statistics like these, many families are simply voting with their feet, said Bree Dusseault, a practitioner in residence at CRPE.

“There’s still a really sizable population of students who, even when given the option to be in-person, aren’t taking it,” she said.

“You keep hearing this word: ‘thriving’ — particularly in families of color,” said Annette Anderson, deputy director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Safe and Healthy Schools in Baltimore. “Districts have never had to wrestle with ‘How do we provide education in multiple formats?’ They thought this was a stopgap. Now what I think they’re finding is that there are many parents that were just fine with virtual learning.”

Anderson, a Black educator who is also a mother of three teens, said the past year has taught parents “that they have a voice at the table – and they are not being shy and retiring about letting people know what they want in terms of how they want their children to learn.”

Recent survey data suggest that Black, Hispanic and Asian parents are more likely than their white peers to say they prefer online learning. For instance, the journal Education Next recently noted data from early April that showed 60 percent of white parents have a preference for in-person learning, compared to just 25 percent of Black and Hispanic parents.

At the same time, Dusseault said, many parents of color see how badly education systems have served their kids in the past, with substandard instruction and more aggressive discipline.

When Anderson surveyed her three children recently, none wanted to go back to their Baltimore school this fall. They like learning from home and have been successful.

“I think my kids sometimes miss their friends,” she said. “But aside from that, I don’t have any of my three children saying right now, ‘Mom, I want to go back to school today or tomorrow.’ They have adapted to this.”

Anderson was quick to add that her kids “have every kind of technology possible,” as well as space at home to use it. All three have their own rooms, plus their home has a backyard. But whatever their situations, she said, “There are a lot of kids who are at home and they’re thriving. You can’t negate the success of those students and the opportunity that they have had to be separated from their peers and still do well academically.”

Williams, mother of the Maryland first-grader, said her daughter is already doing advanced work — and she’d like to keep it that way. Giving her child a chance to work virtually and independently is key.

“Students that are more advanced — and parents that have the choice — we’re going to keep our kids home,” she said. “Those kids are going to accelerate. They’re going to soar and they’re going to keep advancing.”

“School hesitancy” and safety

Vladimir Kogan, an Ohio State University political scientist who studies politics and public policy, said “school hesitancy” may in part be a function of the messages families hear — especially in places where teachers’ unions loudly demonstrated last year, enacting mock funerals and the like to warn of the dangers of reopening schools.

“I think that messaging has definitely filtered down to the parents,” he said.

But recent research has shown that when prevention strategies are in place in schools, transmission of the virus is typically lower than, or similar to, levels of community transmission, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

As a result, public opinion is shifting. A February Pew survey found that 61 percent of Americans said K-12 schools that weren’t open for in-person instruction “should give a lot of consideration to the possibility that students will fall behind academically.” That’s up from 48 percent last July. And fewer Americans said schools should give a lot of consideration to the risk to teachers or students.

“I think the number of parents who are hesitant is going to go down pretty substantially,” Kogan said. “But I don’t think it’s going to go down to zero.”

Bailey, who recently authored a study summarizing research on safe school re-openings amid Covid fears, predicted that there will be a group of parents “who will probably never feel that it’s safe until there’s a vaccine for kids.”

The prognosis on vaccines seems promising: This week, both the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention approved expanded use of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for children 12 to 15 years old. Pfizer also said it’ll ask the FDA for emergency authorization in September to administer its vaccine to children as young as 2 years old.

Both Johnson & Johnson and Moderna are conducting trials in children.The U.S. vaccine developer Novavax is also beginning trials on children — its vaccine has a reported 96 percent efficacy rate in adults and is awaiting emergency use authorization in the U.S.

A “really terrible” track record for virtual schools

Kogan, the political scientist, worries that by relying on virtual schools, districts are embracing a well-studied — and failed — reform.

In a 2019 literature review, researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s National Education Policy Center found that graduation rates at virtual and blended-learning schools were far lower than the national 85 percent average for public schools. The review followed years of similar findings from researchers nationwide.

In 2016, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, along with other groups, issued “A Call to Action” to improve their quality, saying far too many virtual schools “have experienced notable problems.”

At the student level, most of the dilemma lies in what’s required for students to be successful in virtual settings: huge amounts of self-control, motivation and discipline, said Kogan, who co-authored a report last January that found worse declines in reading achievement among Ohio third-graders in districts that used fully remote instruction.

The track record of these programs “was terrible before Covid,” Kogan said. “And I think it’s certainly the case that there are kids who do fine. But the districts are not saying, ‘We’re going to limit it only to kids who do fine.’”

To be fair, many educators get it. In its announcement of a “modified digital learning option,” the Gwinnett County, Ga., district last month offered an official warning: “Digital learning is not optimal for every student. Some students did not do as well academically, socially, or emotionally in the digital learning environment.”

In the long term, Kogan said, his larger worry is that this could open the door to a two-tier education system: a bigger, functional one for students whose parents are comfortable sending them to school, and a smaller, inferior one “for kids whose parents are too scared and keep them home.”

The long-term damage, he said, “is going to be so devastating. It’s going to exacerbate all the inequalities that we already have.”

Anderson, the Baltimore educator and mother, acknowledged the dilemma, but emphasized it was nothing new: Millions of kids weren’t being served well before the pandemic. Here’s a chance for something better, especially for students of color who are already staying away in large numbers.

While leaders may insist that everyone attend in-person on the first day of school this fall, Anderson said, “I’m not hearing what is going to significantly shift over the summer that is going to make sure that these large numbers of families of color are going to suddenly show up in September.”

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As families nationwide fret about “COVID learning loss” due to months of remote instruction and uncertain class schedules, key educators are advocating an unusual remedy: a national volunteer tutoring force, a sort of digital Peace Corps meets Homework Helpers.

Three former U.S. education secretaries — Margaret Spellings, Arne Duncan, and John King — have endorsed the idea, and a proposal to fund it, alongside other COVID-related remedies, is kicking around Congress.

Speaking at a recent webinar sponsored by The Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, King told educators, “I am a huge fan of the idea of a national tutoring corps, and just think national service could help us address both the learning loss [and] the socio-emotional isolation kids have experienced.”

As Congress and the Biden administration figure out their priorities, the non-profit sector is beginning to step in.

Khan Academy Founder Sal Khan in 2019. Khan believes a new volunteer tutoring platform can tap into both adults and teens looking for opportunities to help students who have lost instruction time since last spring. (Rachel Murray / Getty Images)

Khan Academy, the online tutoring site, was already experiencing a record number of users due to school disruptions when its founder, Sal Khan, began overseeing the creation of a free online tutoring platform. Now, months later, he and others think it’s a scalable blueprint for a national tutoring effort, one that could match knowledgeable adult volunteers — as well as millions of young people who have mastered key concepts — with students in need.

Educators are taking note. Schoolhouse.World has the official endorsement of top education officials in two states — Rhode Island and New Hampshire — as a platform for tutoring statewide, with more expected to sign on soon.

Rhode Island Education Commissioner Angelica Infante-Green has championed the new Schoolhouse.World tutoring platform, offering it to all of the state’s ninth-graders for math tutoring. (Getty Images)

“Those kids that really don’t have parents that can help them — this is like a lifeline,” said Rhode Island Education Commissioner Angelica Infante-Green. Her goal: to offer virtually every Rhode Island student tutoring through the site.

New Hampshire’s education commissioner, Frank Edelblut, has similar aspirations. Post-COVID-19, he said, efforts like widespread volunteer tutoring are “absolutely here to stay. In my mind, the pandemic accelerated this opportunity, but it didn’t create it. The need and the opportunity was there. The pandemic allowed it to be accelerated.”

Such needs, of course, are enormous. A recent analysis by McKinsey & Company predicted that cumulative learning loss due to the pandemic could be “substantial, especially in mathematics,” with students likely to lose five to nine months of learning by the end of the 2020-21 school year.

It predicted that students of color could end the year six to 12 months behind their typical achievement levels. For white students, the deficit could total four to eight months. An October survey by the U.S. Census Bureau found that Black and Hispanic students were twice as likely as white students to have no live access to teachers.

Infante-Green said the need for speedy interventions is huge. She recalled recently meeting a Rhode Island high schooler who told her, “You know, I’m in AP math and I’m an ‘A’ student — and I’m failing a class. I’ve never failed the class my entire life.”

Democratizing tutoring

The new platform, funded via philanthropic support, currently offers small-group tutoring via videoconferencing mostly in math, from pre-algebra to calculus and statistics, as well as SAT prep. Developers plan to add more subjects soon, and are working to expand their formal partnerships to more states and school districts in the coming months.

Drew Bent, Schoolhouse.World’s chief operating officer, said students from more than 50 countries are receiving tutoring on the platform. Most users and tutors are high schoolers.

The organization’s goal is to keep it free for students, with plans to earn revenue via partnerships with colleges looking for talented students who volunteer on the platform. The nonprofit may also ask corporations that supply tutors to contribute matching grants for each volunteer, one Schoolhouse.World official said.

Matthew Kraft, a Brown University scholar who studies coaching and teacher effectiveness, said Schoolhouse.World offers a promising model to “democratize” tutoring. “Right now, the status quo is demonstrably inequitable access to tutoring,” he said. “There’s a private market, and more affluent families are more able to take advantage of those services. Other students aren’t.”

Users on the new platform typically receive instruction from any tutor available, but students also have the ability to “follow” individual tutors and attend their sessions. That could be key to its long-term viability, research suggests, since tutoring functions better when students work with a tutor regularly over time.

Kraft said full-time, well-trained teachers are the best tutors, but that part-time volunteers can be effective if they’re also well-trained and use high-quality materials. He envisions the platform allowing vetted volunteers to register and work at specific schools.

“We have to be careful to not judge something versus the ideal,” he said. “Is this better than what we have? I would argue ‘Definitively so.’ Is it where I hope we can get to? ‘No.’”

“Math is the gatekeeper for everything”

Infante-Green, the Rhode Island education commissioner, believes that one of the most exciting aspects of the effort is the possibility that young people can interact with professionals in the field as well as peers with advanced skills.

She called the focus on math smart. “Math is the gatekeeper for everything,” she said. At the moment, all of the state’s ninth-graders are receiving math tutoring on the platform, which currently requires users to be 13 or older. It promises thorough vetting of prospective tutors.

What may set this effort apart most notably is that it’s free. Many well-off families, of course, have the resources to pay for one-on-one tutoring, and previous research has shown that it is effective but expensive. Tutoring is “among the most effective education interventions ever to be subjected to rigorous evaluation,” Kraft and a Brown colleague wrote last month. But their proposal to offer tutoring widely in K-8 Title I schools, which serve predominantly low-income students, estimated that it would cost between $5 and $15 billion annually.

Khan founded his academy in 2008, originally as a way to remotely tutor his young cousins in math. He has since spent more than a decade growing a free, conspicuously low-tech tutoring empire, with 150 employees and content offered in 36 languages. As the world’s most famous explainer — Business Week once called him the “Messiah of Math” — he has come in for his share of criticism from teachers, but has also cultivated powerful partners in The College Board, Google and other deep-pocketed donors.

After COVID-19 hit last winter, the site saw its traffic go through the roof, rising from about 30 million “learning minutes” per day to 90 million, as families scrambled for reliable material. Educators upgraded the site to help teachers and parents create lesson plans and school-day calendars, Khan said, but it was clear that, day to day, students’ access to live teachers “was very inconsistent.”

Khan and others saw the pandemic as an opportunity to scale its offerings. Engineers built out the new site over the summer.

Beyond tapping into talented and knowledgeable adults, Khan said, the system has the potential to leverage the talents of students themselves. He estimates that about 100,000 high school seniors each year are capable of being “very good tutors” for classmates. The same number, give or take, are the ones vying for admittance to top colleges and need community service hours for their resumes. “If we can eventually get 100,000 of these kids tutoring, they can serve the other 3 million or more, which would be powerful.”

Mastering material, then paying it forward

That idea syncs with what states like New Hampshire are doing, said Edelblut — the state already uses a competency-based system that requires students to demonstrate to teachers that they’ve mastered given material.

Marvin Lin, a junior at Westview High School in Portland, Ore., joined in October. He teaches calculus and SAT prep to students around the world.

“I’ve always enjoyed teaching people math specifically, because I’ve always liked math,” said Lin, 16. “I’ve always been good with it, and then I’ve noticed a lot of times a lot of people struggle with it.”

He has taught about 30 sessions, all in English, each averaging about 10 students. Across the board, he finds, most students come with weak foundational knowledge that keeps them from progressing to the next level.

Lin loves the “peer-to-peer” model of the platform that will allow his former students to become tutors themselves — though he understands that the effort is still finding its footing.

Once students master material, they can “pay it forward” as a tutor, in the process building a good “reputation” on the site as an able, knowledgeable instructor.

Marvin Lin, 16, conducts a Schoolhouse.World tutoring session. (Marvin Lin)

That proposition is already being put to the test at the University of Chicago, where Dean of Admissions James Nondorf said six high school-aged tutors on the site have already been offered spots in next fall’s freshman class.

“When somebody says they know something, that’s one thing,” he said. “When they score well on a test, that’s another one. But when you can actually teach it to somebody else, then you really have mastery.”

He said the site’s certification gives officials like him a look not just at students who do well on the typical academic skills measures but others as well. “Some students are great testers, and good for them,” he said. “Some students are not. And maybe this is an opportunity for them to show their promise. Let’s give it to them.”

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to Khan Academy and The 74.

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When Melissa Brennan begins school this fall at Mattie Lou Maxwell Elementary School in Anaheim, Calif., she’ll sit one-on-one with each of her special-needs kindergartners and first-graders and take the time to assess their basic skills. Brennan expects that the process will take place not in person, but over a video conferencing platform.

“I’ll Zoom with them, and I’ll share an assessment on the screen, as if they were sitting in a class with me,” she said.

Though Brennan’s situation is unique — she typically teaches just a dozen or so students — she recommended that teachers with full class loads do the same.

As schools prepare to welcome back millions of students this fall, they must quickly figure out just how much progress students lost. Like engineers building a skyscraper, educators need to level-set a foundation before scaffolding on new, more advanced material. But figuring out how to measure the so-called “COVID Slide” is not as simple as it seems.

One thing is certain: U.S. students missed out on a lot of instructional time.

Melissa Brennan teaches kindergartners and first-graders remotely from her home in Anaheim, California. (Courtesy of Melissa Brennan)

In Los Angeles, home to the nation’s second-largest school district, officials last spring said about 15,000 high school students had failed to do any schoolwork in the first few weeks after coronavirus shut their schools down, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Between March 23 and May 26, one-third of Providence Public Schools’ 24,000 students were considered chronically absent, The Boston Globe reported, meaning they lost at least 10 percent of school days. In Providence as elsewhere, the issue will take on added importance as many school districts plan to bring back students virtually, potentially replicating the conditions that allowed students to lose ground last spring.

‘Academic death spirals’

Teachers have already said their ability to cover new material last spring was badly compromised: In a RAND survey issued in May, just 12 percent said they covered “the full curriculum.”

Researchers at the Northwest Evaluation Association predicted that students in a few grades could eventually lose nearly a full year of learning. And Kevin Huffman, the former education commissioner of Tennessee, warned that the pandemic could set back an entire generation of children.

(Northwest Evaluation Association)

Robin Lake, director of the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), told Congress in May that without widespread efforts, many students “could go into academic death spirals.”

Speaking to reporters recently, Lake said, “What we do in the fall really matters.We know how to flatten the learning loss curve, but it will require information and assessments to be able to diagnose those learning losses quickly.”

The national shutdown could hardly have come at a worse time. In the thick of the pandemic, states scrapped their traditional year-end tests, with the support of U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. That removed a key indicator of how much students learned last spring.

But educators and advocates said that simply recycling those tests this fall won’t work.

“They’re not well-suited to turning around information to teachers and school leaders about how to tailor instruction,” said Charles Barone of Education Reform Now, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that has proposed widespread testing this fall. The organization says determining student academic achievement levels “will be essential to a successful transition” to the new school year. The group assembled a list of assessments it says can be used quickly and affordably.

‘We’re not doing mass retentions’

But some educators say that after students spent months at home in quarantine, suffering through glitchy Zoom meetings, stressed-out teachers and harried parents, the last thing they need is to sit for a battery of diagnostic tests.

Sonja Santelises

Baltimore Schools CEO Sonja Santelises said summoning students for “an all-call cattle herd” of extensive testing is out of the question. “We’re not talking about a three-hour battery of testing, which I don’t think is healthy for either teachers or students right now,” she said.

Her teachers are working on ways to “compassionately and quickly assess” students as she strengthens the city’s tutoring corps. Santelises has ruled out holding entire groups of students back, even those who effectively checked out last spring. “We’re not doing mass retentions,” she said flatly.

Considering that most schooling in Baltimore will likely remain virtual in the fall, Santelises said, making decisions about student placements via online testing could also worsen inequality. For instance, an honor student whose family can’t get internet access shouldn’t be penalized in the fall for doing poorly on an online assessment, or even skipping it altogether. “Does that student now cease to be an honors student because of these life conditions?”

Kevin Dykema, an eighth-grade math teacher in Mattawan, Michigan. (Courtesy of Kevin Dykema)

Kevin Dykema, an eighth-grade math teacher in Mattawan, Mich., said about one-fourth of his students weren’t particularly engaged in schoolwork last spring. But when the school year begins, he’ll start with traditional eighth-grade content. If he begins with seventh-grade content that his students missed, “I’m going to bore 80 percent of my class – and they don’t need to be bored” in math class. “Let’s get new stuff, and I can fill in those gaps along the way.”

Educators also say there are other ways to smooth the transition back to formal schooling. Groups such as the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics say schools should consider “looping,” assigning teachers to the same group of students they taught last spring, but with content appropriate to the fall term.

“It is important to start with grade-level content,” said Trena Wilkerson, NCTM’s president, who recommended “an asset-based approach, a strength-based approach. The students have been learning, they have been doing things. They’ve been engaged in mathematics as well as other disciplines. We need to build on that and not just assume they don’t know, but rather assume that if there’s something they don’t know, then we can address that during the academic year.”

Eric Kalenze, a Minneapolis high school English teacher who runs a research conference in the fall, said many adaptive tests may not be appropriate for this job, since they measure “raw academic skill, not necessarily what content was missed out on.” And asking students to take a test that doesn’t have tangible consequences means they won’t necessarily take it seriously.

He suggested that educators “think as locally as possible, and maybe put your energy into improving your formative assessment game.” Such tests can guide instruction, but are rarely used in many schools. Educators should also figure out ways to quickly test students at strategic points during the year.

Making peace with boredom

That was one of the key findings of a panel of assessment experts convened by Lake at CRPE. “The truth is that kids have always been at different levels and had different needs,” she said.

The group, which released a white paper laying out seven principles for “effective assessment” during the pandemic, said students’ physical, social and emotional well-being should come first. It said students of color may be particularly anxious, “given the moment of racial reckoning happening in our country right now.”

The panel also noted that several high-quality curricula that schools already use may include assessments that can help guide instruction this fall.

“Start with what you have,” Lake urged school leaders.

Kalenze said districts should give teachers as many opportunities as possible to confer between grade levels “so they can say, both in terms of content and kids, ‘Here’s what’s coming to you.’”

Eric Kalenze, a Minneapolis high school English teacher, in the classroom. (Courtesy of Eric Kalenze)

But unlike Dykema, the Michigan math teacher, Kalenze said students should probably accept that material from last spring may come around again this fall. “Sorry, in this moment you’re going to be a little more bored than usual,” Kalenze said. He noted that cognitive science supports the idea that “Practice makes permanent,” that periodic repetition helps material sink in.

In the end, he said, there’s a chance that all of that missed school may not be as cataclysmic as we suspect: Widespread closures began just as schools were winding down instruction and preparing for big, end-of-year summative tests that never happened. Though in many states closures began in March, he called May “probably your most worthless month of the year anyway. It’s the month that is co-opted by all of your standardized tests, all of your AP tests in high school, every year-end thing, every field trip.”

But CRPE’s Lake suggested that there may be more happening in most classrooms each May than we suspect. Even review work strengthens students’ abilities to retain what they learned earlier. “The reinforcement that happens in the spring is kind of a critical piece of the teaching and learning process,” she said.

Looking ahead, Santelises, the Baltimore Schools CEO, said the teachers and schools that were most successful during the closures were those that already had strong ties with students before the pandemic. “Our young people are going to need ways of building back relationships,” she said, “because the relationship piece is going to give us other data that the assessment data is not going to give us.”

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The students, all juniors, trained on a past case handled by the San Diego nonprofit, which reviews pleas from prisoners who maintain that they’re innocent. Then, in teams of three or four, the students reviewed prisoners’ files and ultimately presented them to Innocence Project attorneys, with a recommendation to either champion a prisoner’s case or take a pass.

The project lives on with a new group of students each year, buoyed by a strain of progressive education philosophy that says students learn best with real work that resembles what they will likely encounter outside of school. It has been kicking around K-12 education for decades but has yet to be widely adopted. In recent years, however, the idea has quietly gained ground as more schools try project-based learning and subscribe to a philosophy known as “deeper learning.”

But does it work?

Harvard Graduate School of Education professor emeritus David Perkins calls it “playing the whole game.” He sees it as an alternative to schools’ traditional approach, which often presents students with atomized, decontextualized pieces of a subject. He conceived of the idea after thinking about the most meaningful experiences he had in high school, which were mostly “outside of the conventional curriculum”: drama, music, science fairs and the like. These and other large-scale endeavors, he said, “seemed more meaningful and I reached out for opportunities.”

Laid out most fully in his 2010 book Making Learning Whole, the idea goes something like this: Let students do something big and useful, from start to finish — perhaps a simplified version, but keep it intact. Give them extra help and lower stakes and they’ll work harder, learn more and come up with creative applications and solutions that adults couldn’t imagine.

Though it has yet to be widely adopted outside of project-based schools, “playing the whole game” has quietly thrived for generations in another context: afterschool activities, from team sports to debate club, drama productions and marching band.

“We know intuitively that when we get really serious about a domain of education, it looks more like this,” said Jal Mehta, also a professor at Harvard’s education school.

When students go out for the baseball team, they get an attenuated version of baseball, but they go out each time and play the entire game. “It’s not ‘baseball appreciation,’” Mehta said. Likewise with just about anything that takes place after school.

Afterschool activities also offer a system that supports teachers. Imagine, for instance, a classroom art teacher who wants to mount an exhibition of student artwork. She’d need to figure out how to give students longer blocks of time to complete the pieces, find an exhibition space and arrange it for exhibition night. Finally, she’d need to get people to attend.

Harvard scholar Jal Mehta in the classroom. “We know intuitively that when we get really serious about a domain of education, it looks more like this,” he says. (Photo by Lisa Abitbol)

“Now imagine you’re that same teacher and you’re directing a play after school,” Mehta said. “Basically, you need the same things.” But in most schools, these pieces are already in place: long rehearsal blocks, a dedicated performance space, and the expectation that students will annually mount a version of a big Broadway musical and the community will show up to see it. All of that support, he said, is already built in.

“The question we should ask ourselves is: If that’s the kind of method we use when we really want someone to learn something, why don’t we use those methods the rest of the time, for the rest of the students?” Mehta said.

Chris Lehmann, principal and co-founder of Science Leadership Academy, a small public high school at the edge of Philadelphia’s Center City neighborhood, said afterschool experiences have another plus: They have student choice “baked-in.”

“You’re getting the kids somewhere they want to be,” he said, “so you already have an advantage there.” These experiences are also usually built around a performance of some sort, with a natural structure, deadline and audience.

Mehta said the best examples he has seen during the school day are in science classes. In one school, instead of “imbibing scientific knowledge that was discovered long ago by famous scientists,” sophomores learned about the scientific method and designed rudimentary experiments — he remembers one that asked whether studying while listening to music through earbuds produced better or worse results.

“That’s not an earth-shattering question, but it’s a real question,” he said. In the process, students learned how to develop a hypothesis, gather data, review the literature and write up their results. By 11th or 12th grade, they were doing more advanced work, including partnering with nearby labs, he said. But students credited the sophomore-year course with getting them excited about — and familiar with — experimentation. “It was the place where they really learned how to do science,” he said.

Sarah Fine, who directs High Tech High’s graduate teaching apprenticeship and who last spring co-authored a book about deeper learning with Mehta, said the larger goal of “playing the whole game” is a kind of authenticity that often eludes students, especially in high school. “Ultimately, school is a contrived situation. There’s no way around that,” she said.

Fine recalled a student once saying to her, “‘Ms. Fine — school is just fake.’ He’s right — school is fake. We are designing experiences for the sake of kids’ learning.”

Yet the goal of the Innocence Project work isn’t necessarily to make students into lawyers. It’s to give them the sense that there’s “some professional domain that has rules and rhythms to it,” as well as a base of knowledge, she said. “It just has to feel real enough to kids — it has to be resonant enough with the real world that it compels them to feel like it’s worth engaging with.”

The students who reviewed prisoners’ cases “talked about feeling like they sort of had people’s lives in their hands,” Fine said. “And that is not a feeling they’d ever had in school before, that something they were doing had real consequences for people beyond themselves.”

Alex Simpson, associate director of the California Innocence Project, addresses students from High Tech High Chula Vista before they give presentations on their clients’ cases. (Courtesy of Mackenzie King)

Rebecca Jimenez, 18, who graduated last fall from High Tech High Chula Vista, said the Innocence Project gave her a sense of working on “an important cause.”

The more research she did on each prisoner’s plea, the more engrossed she became. “I wanted to keep reading and understand the person’s story,” she said. Eventually, she and her classmates would research a case that resulted in a judge throwing out a 20-year-old murder conviction and handing down new charges against the suspect’s nephew.

Novices vs. experts

One important aspect of “playing the whole game,” Mehta said, is interacting with professionals in the real world. “If you do an architecture project and you have real architects examining your work, that’s project-based learning. But it’s really powerful project-based learning because you’re not only showing students something about architecture. It gives them a conception: ‘I could be an architect.’”

But Tom Loveless, a California-based education researcher and former director of the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, advises caution. “Generally speaking, I think we should be skeptical of the whole idea,” he said.

For one thing, playing the whole game confuses novices with experts. “A novice can’t ‘play the whole game’ because a novice doesn’t know the whole game. In order to learn most games, you have to learn the bits and pieces that go into knowing the whole game. And with project-based learning in general, the idea is that you’re giving kids projects to do in order to learn about a particular topic.”

That’s a mistake, Loveless said, since students typically require “a tremendous amount of background knowledge” before they can execute a respectable project on, say, World War I. Without deep background knowledge, he said, “you have a lot of novice learners kind of sharing their ignorance and having a shared experience out of their ignorance — and there’s no guarantee … that they’re necessarily going to gain knowledge, because you’ve left all that in the hands of the students themselves.”

Harvard’s Mehta said “playing the whole game” actually demands more of teachers, implicitly asking them to not just be familiar with a subject but to remain, in a sense, practitioners. Just as we’d expect a good drama director to direct community theater on weekends, so do these schools expect the same of subject-matter teachers: English teachers who publish poetry or novels, or art teachers who sell their paintings, and so on.

Loveless said he hasn’t seen good evidence that students will necessarily enjoy school more if it’s inquiry-based. “It could be that exactly the opposite is true. It could be that actually what kids like is a lot of structure to the presentation of learning. They like the teacher taking responsibility for that.”

A bigger problem, he said, may be that because project-based learning tends to minimize the importance of prior knowledge, “playing the whole game” might work better in wealthy areas or in private schools, where students arrive with a measure of background knowledge about, for instance, World War I or how defense attorneys work. Elsewhere, it’s a riskier strategy.

SLA’s Lehmann would disagree. His school boasts that it draws students from every zip code in Philadelphia, and he can easily bring to mind the challenges that his students — past and present — bring the day they set foot on campus as freshmen.

A 2016 meta-review was cautiously optimistic about project-based learning, saying the evidence for its effectiveness is “promising but not proven.”

Ron Berger of EL Education, a Massachusetts-based advocacy group for project-based learning, pointed to a 2016 study by the American Institutes for Research that found that students in high schools that subscribed to “deeper learning” were slightly more likely to attend college — about 53 percent, versus 50 percent in other high schools. AIR also found that 22 percent of students at “deeper learning” schools enrolled in four-year colleges, compared with 18 percent for their peers elsewhere.

But the schools had little to show in terms of college retention — in both “deeper learning” schools and others, only 62 percent of alumni remained enrolled in college for at least three consecutive terms; about half enrolled for at least four consecutive terms.

Berger said the modest college-going results shouldn’t be the final word on these schools’ success. For one thing, he said, many of them are works in progress: his nonprofit, originally a partnership between Harvard’s education school and Outward Bound USA, has spent years pushing project-based schools to improve the quality of their projects, requiring field research, participation of outside experts and “an authentic audience,” among other factors. That’s not always a given, he said.

Where these conditions persist, Berger said, “the schools feel different,” with students able to articulate what they’re learning and why they’re there.

“It’s visceral,” he said. “When you walk into a building and kids are more polite, more mature, engage with you right away and want to tell you about their learning, [they] have a sense of social responsibility — it’s hard to collect quantitative data on this.”

‘Why do I need to know this?’

Lehmann, the Philadelphia principal, embodies this attitude perhaps as well as any secondary educator in America. In conversation with his students, he reminds them endlessly about how much they’ve grown and matured since he met them as freshmen. He has become well-known among educators for his head-on challenge to the notion that the job of high school is to get students ready for what comes next.

“School shouldn’t be preparation for real life — school should be real life,” he said. “We should ask kids to do real things that matter.”

Most significantly, Lehmann asks teachers to rethink the idea that high school is a “moratorium” for young people, a kind of holding pen where they wait out adolescence.

Kiana Thomas, Lauryn Lewis and Naima DeBrest, students who serve as part of the design team at Philadelphia’s Science Leadership Academy, work on laying out furniture for the school’s new campus, which opened in September. (Photo by Chris Lehmann)

“‘Why do I need to know this?’ should be a real question,” he said. “And the answers we should search out for kids should not be ‘someday’ answers — ‘If you want to major in this, you might seek out this information’ — but rather, ‘Why do I need this information now to be a better human being? To effect change in the world?’”

For Jimenez, the High Tech High graduate, playing the whole game changed everything. Early in her high school career, she thought she might major in business. “It sounded really cool and had money attached to the name,” she joked.

But Jimenez liked the work at the Innocence Project so much she spent the entire month of May 2018 interning there — High Tech High juniors undertake monthlong internships each spring. “During school, if I want to do something, I might as well be doing something that might actually make a change,” she said.

Now a freshman at the University of California, Riverside, Jimenez is studying political science and plans to attend law school. A first-generation college-goer, she wants to work someday for the Innocence Project.

“It would be great to be back in that environment,” she said.

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.