But a from the Brookings Institution concludes that when it comes to education, the risks of AI overshadow its benefits.

Researchers interviewed K-12 students, parents and teachers in 50 countries. Their conclusion: AI undermines young people’s foundational development in a way that simply can’t be offset by its productivity advantages.

“The risks we found are things like shortcutting learning so that you have less cognitive development,” said Rebecca Winthrop, who heads Brookings’ and is an author of the report.

While it can reduce inequality, providing access to content for an estimated 250 million young people who don’t reliably have it, AI can also amplify it, since free AI tools are the least reliable and accurate.

“It is probably the first time in ed tech history where you have to pay more to have more accurate information,” said Winthrop.

The co-author of a recent book about , she said researchers found that young people spending a lot of time with AI companions are “de-skilling” when it comes to basic human interactions.

In the end, researchers admitted that AI’s rapid evolution puts educators in a bind. They’re operating with little rigorous, longitudinal evidence on the effects of AI when it comes to student learning and well-being. As a result, they say, “None of us, not even AI’s creators, can predict its potential dangers or benefits with complete accuracy.”

Here are four key findings from the report:

1. AI poses risks that undermine children’s foundational development and may actually prevent them from reaping its benefits.

Using generative AI undermines young people’s foundational development, researchers found. 

At its core, the researchers note, AI is a set of powerful productivity tools now being harnessed most effectively by “professional adults with fully matured brains. They have already developed sophisticated metacognitive and critical thinking skills that undergird their approach to their work.” They also have deep expertise in their fields and the cognitive flexibility that comes with that expertise, allowing them to use AI as a “cognitive partner.” 

Not so for young people, who aren’t “mini-professionals.” Their brains are still developing and school should ideally help them practice critical thinking and “sustained engagement with challenging material.” 

For most young people, AI isn’t a “cognitive partner” but a surrogate. It doesn’t accelerate their development — it diminishes it via cognitive offloading. The result, researchers say: declining skills across the board.

A teacher tells them, “If students can just replace their actual learning and their ability to communicate what they know with something that’s produced outside of them and get credit for it, what purpose do they have to actually learn?”

A student puts it a bit more bluntly: “����’s easy. You don’t need to (use) your brain.”

2. AI can impede students’ social and emotional development.

Kids don’t learn in isolation. Relationships with others —in and out of school — help them develop a sense of well-being. But using AI can undermine their ability to form relationships, recover from setbacks and stay mentally healthy, observers tell researchers.

Young people’s use of AI chatbots — for everything from homework to emotional support, therapy and companionship — has adults worried, researchers report. Nearly one in five teachers worry about AI’s influence on student well-being, even though just 7% of students mentioned chatbots’ emotional harm.

The problem, they say, is that it’s equally possible kids aren’t experiencing emotional dependence — or that they simply lack “the self-reflective capacity” to recognize unhealthy emotional dependence and how it impacts their well-being.

3. AI is already eroding the trust relationships between students and teachers — on both sides. 

Teachers tell researchers they increasingly doubt that students are producing authentic work — while students think the same about their teachers.

Researchers found a fracturing of trust between students and teachers that cuts both ways. Teachers trust students less when they suspect them of using AI to complete homework. In interviews, 16% of teachers said this erosion of trust is “a significant concern.” 

And students also trust teachers less when teachers use AI to create lesson plans and assignments, but aren’t open about it. 

More broadly, this development could be undermining students’ trust in educational institutions themselves. “One of AI’s greatest casualties may be the trust that ensures young people have what they need in school to meet their needs and prepare them for the future,” they write. 

4. ����’s not too late to turn things around.

Researchers say that while AI is doing damage, the wounds are “fixable” and that adults “should neither capitulate to these harms nor focus solely on limiting their repercussions.”

The report offers 12 recommendations, including:

• Shifting education away from “transactional task completion” that AI can most easily help students with. 
• Co-creating AI tools with educators, students, parents and communities. The researchers suggest that schools create “student AI councils” that can help embed student voice into AI tool design “to ensure their relevance, inclusivity, and pedagogical soundness” before adoption. 
• Using AI tools that “teach, not tell.” Winthrop suggested, for instance, using AI to interface with a difficult digital text. “I’ve read this paragraph twice,” she said. “I don’t get it. Can you explain it to me in a different way?” Used in such a fashion, with vetted content, she said, “it can be really effective.” 
• Offering AI literacy that helps students, educators, and families understand its capabilities, limitations and broader implications. That includes robust professional development that equips teachers with deep knowledge to teach students about AI.

Winthrop highlighted the National Academy for AI Instruction, created last fall by the American Federation of Teachers. AFT President Randy Weingarten has said that over the next five years it will train 400,000 educators, or one in 10 U.S. teachers, in effective AI usage. 

“When I talked to Randi Weingarten about why she did it, she said, ‘We have to be at the table this time,’” said Winthrop. “‘We were not at the table during social media.’”

Winthrop said Weingarten “got a lot of flack” for creating the academy, but added, “I think it’s the right decision.”

“ board votes to close 13 school buildings.”

“ to close 7 schools, cut grades at 3 others despite heavy resistance.”

“: These are the SFUSD schools facing closure.” 

Such reports can leave the impression that districts are rapidly closing schools in response to declining enrollment and families leaving for charters, private schools and homeschooling. 

But the data tells a different story. 

School closures have actually declined over the past decade, a period of financial instability that only increased in the aftermath of the pandemic, according to research from the Brookings Institution. 

The , shared exclusively with ����Ӱ��, shows that in 2014-15, the closure rate — the share of schools nationwide that were open one year and closed the next — was 1.3%. In 2023-24, the rate was just .8%, up from .7% the year before.

“I think it’s important for people to realize how rare school closures are,” said Sofoklis Goulas, a Brookings fellow and the study’s author. 

Last fall, showed how schools that have lost at least 20% of their enrollment since the pandemic are more likely to be low-performing. The Clark County Public Schools, which includes Las Vegas, had the most schools on the list — 19 — but isn’t currently considering closures. In Philadelphia, with 12 schools in that category, district leaders are to discuss closures.

When it released Goulas’s initial report, of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute argued that low-performing schools should be the first to close. But efforts to do so are often met with pushback from families, teachers and advocacy groups who argue that shutting down schools unfairly harms poor and minority students and contributes to neighborhood blight. Their pleas often push district leaders to retreat. Working in advocates’ favor, experts say, is the fact that many big district leaders are untested and have never had to navigate the emotionally charged waters of closing schools.

“Closing a neighborhood school is probably one of the most difficult decisions a district’s board makes,” said Michael Fine, CEO of the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, a California state agency that provides financial oversight to districts. “They are going to avoid that decision as long as they can and at all costs.” 

Such examples aren’t hard to find:

• Just weeks after announcing closures, the San Francisco district to shutter any schools this fall.

• In September, outgoing Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez pledged to for another two years, even though state law allows the city to take action sooner. The district is in the process of absorbing to keep them from closing. 

• In October, Pittsburgh Public Schools ; several others were set to be relocated and reconfigured. About a month later, Superintendent Wayne Walters hit pause, saying the district needed more “thoughtful planning” and community input.

• Last May, the Seattle Public Schools it would shutter 20 elementary schools next school year in response to a $100 million-plus budget deficit. They later increased the number to 21. By October, the list had dwindled to four schools. Just before Thanksgiving, Superintendent Brent Jones entirely. 

“This decision allows us to clarify the process, deepen our understanding of the potential impacts, and thoughtfully determine our next steps,” to families. While the plan would have saved the district $5.5 million, he said, “These savings should not come at the cost of dividing our community.”

Graham Hill Elementary in Seattle, which fifth grader Wren Alexander has attended since kindergarten, was initially on the list. The Title I school sits on top of a hill in a desirable area overlooking Lake Washington. But it also draws students from the lower-income, highly diverse Brighton Park neighborhood.

Among Wren’s neighbors are students from Ethiopia, Vietnam and Guatemala. Wren, who moves on to middle school this fall, said she looks forward to visiting her former teachers and cried when she heard Graham Hill might close. She wanted her younger brother and sister to develop the same warm connection she had.

“I don’t think I would be who I am if I didn’t go to the school,” she said.

Tricia Alexander, her mother, was among those who opposed the closures, participating in outside the district’s administration building and before board meetings.

“We were really loud,” said Alexander, who’s also part of , an effort to advocate for more state education funding. She said there was “no real evidence” that closing schools would have solved the district’s budget woes. “In no way would kids win.”

����’s shared by many school finance experts, who note that the bulk of school funding is tied up in salaries, not facility costs. Districts may save some money from closing schools, but unless coupled with staff reductions, it’s often not enough to make up for large budget shortfalls.  

‘So bad at this’

If enrollment doesn’t pick up, experts say, leaders who delay closures will have to confront the same issues a year later or — perhaps even more likely — pass the problems on to their successors. 

“If there continues to be fewer and fewer children …then that doesn’t get better,” said Brian Eschbacher, an enrollment consultant.  

One Chicago high school, for example, had just last year. In Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest district, 34 elementary schools have fewer than 200 students and 29 of those are using less than half of the building, according to a recent . The share of U.S. students being educated outside of traditional schools also continues to increase, according to a forthcoming analysis Goulas conducted with researchers at Yale University. 

“We don’t see a trajectory of enrollment recovery,” he said. “Things actually got worse in the most recently released data batch.”

But such conditions haven’t stopped advocacy groups from campaigning against closures. One of them, the left-leaning Advancement Project, has joined with local groups in Denver and Pittsburgh to make a case against closures nationally. 

“All children deserve to have a local, neighborhood public school in which they and their families have a say,” said Jessica Alcantara, senior attorney for the group’s Opportunity to Learn program. “����’s not just that school closures are hard on families. They harm the full education ecosystem that makes up a school — students, families, school staff and whole communities.”   

Last May, Alcantara and other Advancement Project staff urged the U.S. Department of Education to treat school closures as a civil rights issue. Nine of the 10 schools the Denver district in 2022 had a majority Black or Hispanic student population. 

The advocates argued that in cases of enrollment loss, run-down facilities and empty classrooms, there are alternatives to closing schools. They to push for renovations and urge district leaders to use vacant spaces for STEM, arts or other programs that might attract families. Opponents of closures also say that districts sometimes underestimate how much of a building is used for non-classroom purposes like special education services, early-childhood programs and mental health. 

Eschbacher’s assessment of why districts often back down from closing schools is more blunt. 

“Districts are so bad at this,” he said. “If you just do a few things wrong, it could sink the whole effort.”

For one, leaders often target schools with under 300 students for closure, appealing to parents that they can’t afford to staff them with arts programs, a school nurse or a librarian. 

But those explanations sometimes fall flat.

“Parents always say, ‘I wanted a small school. I know my teachers and they know my kid. And it’s right down the street,’” Eschbacher said. If they didn’t like their school, he added, they would have likely would have chosen a charter or some other option. 

District officials also run into trouble if they try to spin the data. When Seattle officials talked about “right-sizing” the district, to the loss of 4,900 students since 2019-20. 

But Albert Wong, a parent in the district and a lifelong Seattle resident, knew there was more to the story. Not only is the current enrollment higher than it was from 2000 to 2011, the pandemic-related decline seems to have . In a , he argued that officials presented misleading data “to make current enrollment look exceptionally bad.”

Graham Hill Elementary, fifth-grader Wren’s school, actually saw a slight increase in enrollment this year, including a new class for preschoolers with disabilities. And while Pittsburgh schools are another 5,000 students over the next six years, enrollment this year held steady at .

To Eschbacher, the “burden of proof is always on the district” to make an airtight case for why students would be better off in larger schools. He has applauded the Denver-area Jeffco Public Schools, which has schools since 2021, for having , not just district officials, explain population trends to families at community meetings.

‘It wasn’t realistic’

Walters, Pittsburgh’s superintendent, can easily rattle off reasons why the district should rethink how it uses its buildings. Early last year, showed that almost half of the district’s schools were less than 50% full. 

“We’ve lost about a fourth of our population, but we have not changed anything to our footprint,” he said. 

Meanwhile, the average age of the district’s buildings is 90 years old, and many lack , forcing some schools to send students home in sweltering weather.

But a consulting group’s showed that Black and low-income students and those with disabilities would be disproportionately affected by the changes. Several drew attention to those disparities, calling  the effort “rushed.” 

Walters agreed and put the plan on hold last fall, saying he lacked “robust” responses to parents’ tough questions about how schools would change for their kids.

“It doesn’t mean that we don’t see a path forward,” he said. “But it wasn’t realistic that we would have those questions answered within the timeline that we’ve been given.”

In March, parents pushed for , causing the school board to postpone a vote on the next phase in the closure process.

As the Jeffco district demonstrates, some school systems are following through with closures. The school board in nearby Denver unanimously voted in November to close seven schools and downsize three more. 

But that’s after community protests pushed the district to put on a plan to close 19 schools in 2021. Advocates argued that families in low-income areas, who had been heavily impacted by the pandemic, would be most affected. Then the district only in 2023, and now board members are considering on closures for three years.

School boards closing a dozen or more schools are often catching up with work their predecessors let pile up, said Goulas of Brookings. 

“Closing a single school allows for easier placement of students and minimizes the political cost and community stress,” he said. “When a district releases a long list of schools to close, it likely indicates that they waited for conditions to improve, but this didn’t happen.”

Angel Gober, executive director of 412 Justice — one of 16 organizations that called on the Pittsburgh district to drop its plan — acknowledged that their fight isn’t over.

“I think we got a temporary blessing from God,” she said. But she wants the district to explore a host of alternatives, like community schools and corporate support, before it shutters and sells off buildings. “We do have very old infrastructure, and that is an equity issue. But can we try five things before we make a drastic decision to close schools for forever?”

He won one of 20 available slots in a new —  just one of three at Accenture — in a city of 20,000 public high school students. 

Three years later, Brown-Weaver, now 19, has become a full-time employee, earning more than $20 an hour as a package app developer at Accenture.

But a good friend who missed out on the apprenticeships is struggling. 

“Because of the luck of the draw that I had (I’m working) … in the field that I want to be in,” Brown-Weaver told a recent .

His friend, he said, “works part time at Target, making minimum wage.”

“It’s sad to see that I simply just got lucky that day,” Brown-Weaver said.

Providing high school students like Brown-Weaver a chance to try out possible careers has become a growing focus for families, public officials, schools and even businesses the last several years. 

But all work opportunities aren’t created equal. 

There’s a hierarchy of experiences that rise in commitment, intensity and benefit for students and providers —  with career days and job fairs at the low end. At the top end are internships, where students work with adults; and apprenticeships, longer programs where students are paid to work and earn career credentials.

Schools and communities routinely boast of making great efforts to better connect students with real work opportunities, but the reality is these efforts rarely go beyond career exposure events like career days or job shadows.

“The ultimate internship…a paid experience…we still have a long way to go to provide more opportunity for young people to experience those,” said Julie Lammers, senior vice president of American Student Assistance, a non-profit connecting students to career training.

The best estimates available suggest five percent of students or less have the chance for the gold standard of work experiences —  apprenticeships or internships. 

At the request of ����Ӱ��, the U.S. Department of Labor compiled data showing a little over 10,000 16- to 18-year-olds started apprenticeships nationally last year — less than a tenth of a percent of the more than 13 million students that age. That’s including 18-year-olds who started apprenticeships after graduating high school.

����’s a dramatic difference from European countries such as Switzerland, where more than half of students use apprenticeships to start a career or as a stepping stone to university. Apprenticeships in Switzerland have the attention of Linda McMahon, the new appointee for U.S. secretary of education, who on the day her appointment was announced. 

There are more internships than apprenticeships for high schoolers, but still not many. A 2018 survey of more than 800 students by American Student Assistance, a non-profit that works with students on career choices, showed while 79 percent were interested in trying a work experience, only 2 percent completed an internship in high school.

Though the percentage of employers offering high school internships has, ASA estimates only four to five percent of students actually are participating in internships.

‘That’s still a very small number of young people,” Lammers said. “Those organizations may only be offering one or two opportunities, so the volume is still not there.”

Lammers said schools are instead adding “things that expose young people to work, but are not necessarily training them in specific skills.”

ASA’s recent survey found that close to half of employers offer mentorships, job shadowing, open houses and field trip visits — all valuable experiences for students but that barely scratch the surface of providing  the skills and training needed for the world of work.

Noel Ginsburg, co-chairman of the U.S. Department of Labor’s said schools and businesses can’t stop at just exposing students to careers.

“����’s not a bad thing,” he said. “����’s just not enough.”

“It’s a lack of understanding what quality actually means when a school says, ‘We have these partnerships with XYZ company, and they come in, they’re helping us in class, and sometimes they’ll donate old whatever (equipment to train with),” Ginsburg said. “That’s not what apprenticeship is…but that’s historically what it has been for them.”

Experts have agreed on a rough hierarchy of work experiences for several years, often distinguishing between those where students “learn about work” and those where they “learn how to work.”

As a co-written by Advance CTE, the national association of state directors of career technical education, notes, “Work-based learning includes a continuum of experiences ranging from less intensive opportunities such as career awareness and career exploration to more intensive opportunities such as career preparation and career training.”

The Advance CTE hierarchy below is similar to those created in 2009 like, a Bay Area non-profit that has worked on career efforts in California and New York. ����’s also similar to those used by nonprofits like Brookings, ExcelInED, ASA or adopted by states such as , , , or , sometimes labeling the top level as career immersion, development or participation.

Some take that hierarchy even farther. As officials in Indiana started developing plans for a statewide expansion of high school apprenticeships they ranked student work experiences with full registered apprenticeships at the top, pre-apprenticeships and other apprenticeships a level below, internships below those and work opportunities that teach students general employability skills a step lower.

The trouble is that while low-level career experiences like job fairs take just a few hours of time for students and businesses, apprenticeships and internships require much more effort from both sides. 

CityWorks DC, the program that organized Brown-Weaver’s apprenticeship, would like to expand to many more students, but is growing slowly.

“We definitely need more opportunities and hope to offer more, but one reason there are so few are the systemic barriers that make what we do very resource intensive and challenging,” said Lateefah Durant, CityWorks’ vice president of innovation.

She said it can be hard to find students that can commit to working several hours a week and fit that within their high school class schedules. ����’s also hard to find companies willing to take on high school students and train them.

In 2019, the program’s first year, one of nine companies that took on apprentices backed out. And one of the other Accenture apprentices alongside Brown-Weaver had trouble meeting standards and was dropped.

ASA’s 2023 survey highlighted several common challenges businesses see as they start high school internships, including finding appropriate work for them, devoting staff to training them, scheduling around class schedules and whether students have transportation to work.

Companies are less likely to view high school apprenticeships as a key part of building a workforce than just as a way to give back to the community. Using apprenticeships and internships as a real talent strategy, as they are in Europe, is key to them ever becoming widely available, experts say.

Those findings are in keeping with challenges experts have pointed to as holding growth of internships and apprenticeships back.

Transportation is a big problem for lower-income students, who often need to improve their career chances the most but rarely have their own car. And class schedules, along with extracurricular activities, can be a big hurdle too since they can limit the time a student can spend in a workplace each day.

Indiana is among states trying to overcome these issues. Transportation costs could be covered by new Career Savings Accounts – state grants to students for training expenses. And the state is considering more flexible class schedules, so students can work at an apprenticeship a few days each week.

In many cases, with few companies stepping up to take on interns or apprenticeships, students are placed instead in government offices or with nonprofits that advocate for work opportunities. The D.C. program has apprentices with the Department of Labor and with New America, a left-leaning think tank that is part of the national Partnership to Advance Youth Apprenticeship.

Indiana also placed early apprentices with Ascend Indiana, a non-profit that helped create them.

Schools and communities also lean on experiences that partly simulate or mirror work experience. These can include students doing exploratory summer internships with industry associations or schools that partner with companies so students earn money by doing a project, such as a small coding or marketing task, through school for the company.

Though there’s no consensus on where these fall on the continuum of work experiences, ASA’s Lammers said they can be worthwhile, if students are working on real-world problems for employers that intend to use the work product.

“If it is high- intensity project based learning, where young people are still exposed to a career…and are able to understand that it’s not just sort of an academic exercise… there is huge value in that,” she said. “It might not just be the nine-to- five paid experience that we sort of see in an internship, and that might be okay.”

Others look to third parties that the field is calling “intermediaries” to navigate some of the complex legal, liability and training issues, as well as to recruit, select and train students, along with training company staff in how to work with teenagers.

In Boston, the city’s Public Industry Council helps run paid summer internships for high schoolers, while also running staff training sessions to make sure students and companies benefit. CareerWise acts as an intermediary on some levels. Genesys Works, a non-profit, fills that role in eight regions — Houston, Minneapolis-St. Paul, San Francisco, Chicago, New York City, Tulsa and Washington, D.C., with Jacksonville coming next year.

Genesys gives students eight-week of unpaid training in the summer after 11th grade before placing them in paid internships for 20 hours a week as seniors. Students are paid employees of Genesys, not the companies, but they work in the offices of companies like Accenture, Medtronic or Target, the latter in corporate offices, not stocking shelves or working a register like Brown-Weaver’s friend.

“We’re going to our corporate partners saying, like, what are the roles, entry level roles in your corporate offices that you are filling over and over again?” said Mandy Hildenbrand, chief services officer of Genesys. “Let’s talk about how we can be a pipeline for that.”

For many apprenticeship advocates, some of the barriers are more about attitudes than real problems. 

“Culturally, U.S. companies haven’t traditionally viewed themselves as a training ground or an extension of the classroom,” said Ginsburg, founder of CareerWise, the nation’s largest youth apprenticeship program. “There’s a big difference between having an intern look over your shoulder and actually expecting real work from an apprentice.”

He said businesses should recognize that while they won’t see immediate returns, they will if they are patient and take the time to train students well.

“It’s hard,” he said, “before it gets easy.”

The report, released Monday by the Washington think tank’s , shows that parents also appear to overestimate how much students “love” going to school. The divergence in perceptions between adults and children only grows with age, mostly driven by a sizable drop in the numbers of students reporting positive experiences in school after the elementary years.

The figures point to a failure not only to keep students engaged in school, but also to keep families informed about the true state of their children’s learning, said Rebecca Winthrop, the report’s lead author and a Brookings senior fellow. Parents themselves, she added, find it “hard to admit” that K–12 education isn’t offering all that it should.

“It is psychologically hard for parents — and I say this from personal experience — to send their kids to school every day knowing that they are just not being challenged, not interested, and not enjoying their time,” said Winthrop.

Data for the report were drawn from , which conducts an ongoing querying pupils in public, charter, and private schools around the United States. A nationally representative sample of over 66,000 students from grades 3–12 was asked about their time at school — including their feelings of self-direction, community ties, and the relevance of the material they studied — between 2021 and 2024.

Additionally, Transcend contacted nearly 1,900 parents of school-aged children in 2023 and 2024, generating a trove of responses that has not previously been shared with the public. The findings, along with five years of personal interviews and reporting, have also been compiled into The Disengaged Teen, by Brookings later this week. 

The data highlight a profound degree of academic and social disengagement among teenagers. While students report comparatively high levels of enjoyment and agency at school, less than one-third of middle and high schoolers said they felt that what they learned was relevant to life outside the classroom, that their classmates persevered “when the work gets hard,” or that they had any say over what happened to them during the school day.

Older students were also more likely to report a sense of disconnection from their learning environments, with less than half saying they felt like they were part of a community or that adults respected their suggestions. Overall, only 36% of respondents from grades 6–12 said they were able to develop their own ideas at school.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the jaded responses grew substantially as children aged into adolescence. While 86% of third graders said they learned a great deal in school, just 44% of 12th graders said the same. The portion of students who said they “loved” going to school fell from 74% to 29% over those 10 academic years. 

While higher percentages of parents always responded more positively to those questions than children, the gap in perceptions also grows significantly with the passage of time. By their freshman year, just 30% of students say they “loved” attending school; by contrast, nearly 70% of parents said they believed their kids loved their time in the classroom.

Especially after the pandemic, when prolonged bouts of virtual instruction frayed the connections between families and schools, parents have been in the dark about the quality of schooling their children receive. being under-informed about students’ academic progress, leading to surprise and alarm when standardized test results reveal gaps in knowledge.

Growing alienation from the rituals and relationships of K–12 schools — particularly apparent in elevated rates of chronic absenteeism, which rocketed upwards during the COVID era — ultimately compound in “lost opportunities to form connections with students,” observed Hedy Chang, executive director of the advocacy group Attendance Works.

“Attendance and engagement are inextricably linked,” Chang wrote in an email. “When chronic absence reaches high levels in classrooms, the churn affects all students, making it harder for teachers to teach and students to learn from each other and their instructors.”

Nat Malkus, the deputy director of education policy at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said it would be useful for schools and districts to offer more feedback to parents about the level of student engagement. But it might be a tall order given the existing demands of data dissemination, he wrote in an email.

“Despite quality tests and lots of communication, parent perceptions of their students’ academic progress don’t match what tests are showing,” argued Malkus, who has student engagement and attendance problems over the last half-decade. “So I am skeptical that an additional layer of data collection and communication will be a breakthrough.”

Winthrop said that, atop families’ evident lack of information and COVID-related disruptions to education delivery, older students simply need to receive more independence and options than they are currently getting in conventional schools. Alternative schooling types, such as those that emphasize student choice and even work experience during the school week, could build a healthier sense of self-determination among young adults, she added.

“Whatever model you look at, if it gives kids more autonomy — holds them to strong standards, but also gives them freedom to apply what they’re learning in the real world — those kids become unstoppable, and they love school. So I think this is a design problem at its core.”

While applications for federal student aid dropped by double digits across all 50 states this year, those with universal FAFSA completion policies seemed to fare slightly better, with the majority performing in the top half of the country.

Of the 10 states with the highest completion rates, three — Louisiana, Illinois and New Hampshire — have mandatory FAFSA policies for high school seniors. Across all states, Connecticut had the highest completion rate among high school seniors and Alaska had the lowest, according to the

Indiana saw the smallest change year-over-year in its completion rate and Tennessee had the greatest year-over-year swing, with a 44.3% drop — though it still had the second-highest completion rate in the country. Typically, the stronger states were last year, the further they fell this year, according to the network.

Experts attribute this relative success to the mandatory states having supportive infrastructure that provided students with the tools they needed to navigate the submission process in what has turned into a notoriously problem-ridden year.     

But no state has emerged from the process unscathed. 

“While there is certainly some variation across the states, the pattern holds,” said Katharine Meyer, fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center of Education Policy. “Where submissions are down, completions are down. There are large gaps between the high-income and low-income high schools and then it’s just the magnitude to which those play out in different states.”

This year marked the release of the new form following the , which was meant to streamline and simplify the historically complicated application for federal student aid, expand access to Federal Pell Grants for low-income students and change the way expected family contribution is calculated. But a botched rollout marred by delays and technical glitches — particularly for students whose parents are undocumented and don’t have Social Security numbers — has led to a dramatic drop in the number of students who have been able to submit the form. That’s left seniors in a lurch and both high schools and colleges scrambling.

Not all students have been impacted equally, though. Among those at higher-income schools — where fewer than half of students qualify for free or reduced-priced lunch — about 36% completed the FAFSA this year, while only about a quarter of students at lower-income schools have, according to the college attainment network. The year-over-year drop is also significantly higher for students at low-income schools with an almost 10-point difference. 

“It’s the lowest-income students, the first-generation students, who don’t have additional resources to guide them through this process, who are ultimately paying the price for this rollout,” said Meyer, “which is awful because the entire goal of the FAFSA Simplification Act was to target and support those students and make this an easier process.”

While there have always been gaps between students who have extra support and those who don’t, the added complexities and “minefields to navigate” on this year’s form exacerbated them, she added.
Overall, there’s been a in the number of forms submitted as compared to the same time last year, according to ����Ӱ��’s analysis of U.S. Department of Education data, and a in the number of forms that have been completed without errors, according to the college attainment network, whose members include school districts and nonprofits.

As of April 9, 16% of FAFSA applications still needed student corrections and about 30% of forms were potentially impacted by processing or data errors, according to a released by the U.S. Department of Education.

The completion rates are of particular significance, according to Bill DeBaun, the network’s senior director of data and strategic initiatives.

“Completions remain the target for NCAN and our members, and it’s what we’re encouraging the field to pursue,” he wrote to ����Ӱ��. “Having a college-intending student who was motivated enough to submit the FAFSA, but who did not connect with financial aid because of an error that they didn’t correct, is a tragic outcome.”

Sheri Crigger, a college counselor at the School of Cyber Technology and Engineering in Huntsville, Alabama, said the biggest challenge is for students who still don’t have FAFSA results or aid packages from schools, even as the traditional May 1 decision day deadline quickly approaches. Normally by now, she said, kids would be announcing where they’re headed in the fall and wearing their new schools’ colors. Instead, she said, there’s just a feeling of uncertainty.

“I feel for them because there’s not a fix for that until they have the information they need,” she said. “I like to be able to kind of point them in a direction [but this year] there is no direction.”

Changing the mindset from optional to required

Nationally, seven states — Illinois, California, Louisiana, Alabama, Texas, Indiana and New Hampshire — have implemented universal FAFSA policies and five additional ones — Connecticut, New Jersey, Kansas, Nebraska and Oklahoma — have passed them, according to the network. Louisiana, which was the first state to implement a universal FAFSA policy in 2018, to roll theirs back this year. State lawmakers said they were reversing course for a range of reasons, including arguments that the policy prioritized college over trade schools — although federal aid can often be used for the latter — and that completion is a for families.

Elizabeth Morgan, the attainment network’s chief external relations officer, disagreed with their line of thinking.

“Universal FAFSA is not about penalizing students or holding students back,” she said. “����’s about changing the mindset from optional to required.”

Students — especially those from lower-income backgrounds — don’t always realize that financial aid is available to them until they submit their FAFSA form, Morgan added. They also might not know that the aid can be used at institutions other than four-year universities, such as trade schools and community colleges. Filling out FAFSA, she said, is important for these students because it fixes these misconceptions.
In states where there are mandates or universal FAFSA rules, schools are more likely to integrate support for completion into the school day and create more of a culture around it, leading to a significant increase in filing, according to Meyer, the Brookings fellow. Events such as FAFSA drives can also help to in a typical year by providing families with the tools they need to navigate the cumbersome, complex process.

When looking at the list of top submitters this year, a lot of them are states that have these mandates in place, Meyer said, suggesting that universal policies may have helped insulate them — and their students — during the messy rollout.

“They still aren’t good FAFSA submission and completion numbers… but it is less bad than in some other states,” she said.

Some experts in the field remain anxious that this will be an ongoing issue in future years. Meyer warned that there are already signs that next year’s form won’t be released on time once again. If the form is delayed but not riddled with errors, she added, students may still avoid this year’s chaos, especially since institutions are staffing up in anticipation.

“I do think long term I am an optimist,” she said. “I’m hopeful that this act will ultimately increase college access for those students, but it’s a bumpy couple of years in the process.”

The release, from the National Center for Education Statistics, shows that with nearly 50 million students, enrollment was still 2% less than 2019 figures. Only Idaho and North Dakota saw enrollment increase about 2% over that time period, while multiple states, including California, Mississippi and New York saw declines of at least 5%.

The data confirms earlier state-level figures and pointing to the loss of students from traditional school districts and a shift toward private schools, homeschooling and newer models, like microschools and hybrid programs. Those trends added to large-scale declines in the number of school-age children that predate the COVID era. All combined, experts say, most districts shouldn’t expect to see growth anytime soon, and many have already announced school closures.

“This national demographic decline has first-order implications for whether many schools can reasonably expect enrollment to rebound,” said Thomas Dee, an economist at Stanford University who tracks pandemic-era enrollment data. As , he added, “We are seeing its implications for schools — enduring enrollment loss and the corresponding pressure to close schools and layoff staff.”

In December, NCES released data showing a small uptick in over the same time period that public schools saw their largest declines. Later this year, officials will release newer data on students attending private schools as well as those who are homeschooled. But even those figures could leave some questions unanswered. 

“We have reasons to expect to see an increase in the number of students being home educated, even though a lot of home education may be unreported,” said Sofoklis Goulas, a researcher at the Brookings Institution who has also analyzed enrollment data. 

Despite enrollment remaining relatively flat between 2021 and 2022 — less than a 1% increase — there was still a lot of variation at the state level. Louisiana saw the most growth, with a 5% increase, while several states, including California, Colorado, Illinois and New York, saw declines of at least 4%.

Days before Christmas, the school board in Jackson, Mississippi, to close 11 schools and merge two more — a drastic move that parents in the district had long feared. Some on the list have lost 30% or more of their students since 2018.

Despite the district’s high poverty, Superintendent Errick Greene said he could no longer afford to staff social workers and counselors at schools with long stretches of declining enrollment. Many older buildings were falling apart. It made no sense, he said, to have plumbers and HVAC technicians “racing hither and yon across the city” each morning to keep them running.

“Should we really be investing this money in these school buildings if they’re at best at half capacity?” he asked.

Such questions are weighing heavily on district leaders throughout the country. Fresh from the academic struggles that followed the pandemic, and with federal relief funds soon to run out, they now confront a massive enrollment crisis.

“I’m not surprised people didn’t want to talk about this until last fall,” said Brian Eschbacher, an enrollment consultant. “There was always hope that the kids were coming back.” 

But most have not — part of a decline that is throughout the . Oregon, New Mexico and West Virginia are among the states expected to see enrollment drop at least another 10%. 

A new analysis of national enrollment data, prepared by researchers at the Brookings Institution and augmented by reporting from ����Ӱ��, offers the most detailed look to date at how the crisis is playing out at the school level, as well as the districts that face — or will soon face — tough decisions about closures and cuts. 

DATA ANALYSIS

‘Enrollment Declines are Everywhere’

Based on data from the National Center on Education Statistics, the map displays districts with schools that saw at least a 20% decline in enrollment between the 2019-20 and 2021-22 school years. While it includes several small districts with only one or two schools, it excludes those with fewer than 100 students in 2021-22, virtual schools, alternative schools (like juvenile justice centers) and those that closed or were not operating in 2019-20. Several of the schools have closed in the intervening years, or are slated to close. | Click shaded districts for detailed information.

In an , Brookings researchers found that over a four-year period that includes the pandemic, about 12% of elementary schools and 9% of middle schools lost at least one-fifth of their enrollment. At ����Ӱ��’s request, they expanded that data to include all 4,428 schools in the country that reached or exceeded a 20% decline.

The results were sobering: “Enrollment declines are everywhere,”  said

In the years leading up to COVID lockdowns, fewer than 2,000 of the nation’s roughly 98,000 schools saw decreases on the level of Jackson. That number more than doubled between 2019 and 2021. 

Among districts with over 50,000 students, those with the greatest share of schools that declined by 20% or more are concentrated in the South. They include in Tennessee, the schools near Atlanta and several in Texas. Other large and mid-size districts topping the list include Los Angeles, , and the in Utah.

A shorter student roster each year might not make headlines, but it could serve as a harbinger of things to come, said. Administrators in shrinking schools often must merge classrooms, eliminate jobs or to save popular sports or music programs.

“The first place where these logistical and financial pressures will show up is the school,” he said. 

Many of the those facing such pressures are clustered in some of the nation’s largest districts, among them:

• Clark County, Nevada, where 33 of its more than 300 schools, most of them elementary, saw a 20% loss between 2019 and 2021. Further declines last school year translated to a reduction in state funds. 

• Tucson, Arizona, where 15% of its 82 schools lost a fifth or more of their students. say the state’s robust school choice climate is a contributing factor. 

• Kansas City, Missouri, which last school year, one of which saw at least a 20% drop in enrollment after the pandemic. Five more schools have seen similar declines.

‘The future is uncertain’

Because of its size, California has the most schools where enrollment loss hit at least 20% during the pandemic — over 1,400. High-priced areas like reflect a host of recent demographic trends, including and a limited housing market. Other families left districts during school closures for and .  All of these factors add up to fewer school-age children attending traditional public schools.

“I think a lot of coastal California looks like this,” said Todd Collins, a school board member in the Palo Alto Unified system. 

Big Districts, Big Declines

Large school systems with the heaviest concentrations of schools with plummeting enrollment

Based on data from the National Center on Education Statistics, the chart reflects districts with over 50,000 students, ranked in order according to those with the largest concentration of schools that lost at least 20% of their enrollment between the 2019-20 and 2021-22 years. The total number of schools excludes those that added or eliminated grade levels, or opened or closed during the time period studied.

In small schools, even a slight change in staffing or enrollment can be disruptive. Leah Russin‘s son Leo began the year in a combined fourth-fifth grade class at Barron Park Elementary in the Palo Alto district because there weren’t enough students for two classrooms. 

Two weeks into the school year, the 230-student school added a teacher and Leo changed classes.

Russin said despite the staff’s “incredible shuffling and gymnastics,” the instability was stressful. When Leo’s teacher assigned a nonfiction essay, “he wrote about the anxiety of not knowing if his friends were going to be in his class and if he was going to like his teacher.” 

Russin and other parents have written letters to the school board advocating for at least two classrooms per grade, even if classes are small. 

“We know that means more dollars per student,” she said. “But we believe that means that you are just giving our kids equal opportunity to access the education that kids in a more stable school get.” 

Despite the enrollment decline, Collins said the district isn’t planning imminent closures and hopes city planners’ proposals for become a reality, drawing in more families.  

“The future is uncertain,” he said. “The current trend is clearly down, but that could change quickly.”

Plans to build apartments near single-family homes often draw strong opposition from residents worried about traffic and property values. Last year, a developer proposed to demolish an old boutique hotel in Barron Park and put up a six-story complex. But the neighborhood association complained it would be too big and the city council said it would likely reject the plan. In hopes of winning approval, the developer has since to offer a mixture of apartments, townhomes and hotel rooms.

Restricting multi-family housing to particular zones “makes the city more segregated and separated,” Russin said. “I’m one of the people who strongly advocates for more housing at every income level.”   

About a half hour away, the Cupertino district isn’t waiting for families to return. The board closed at the end of last school year. 

Many districts with declining enrollment have been able to delay closures by relying on federal relief funds to offset the loss in state funding. Some states have also used that money to lure back students who stopped attending during the pandemic.

Washington state officials, for example, put toward reaching students who had become “completely disengaged” from school. In December, credited the program with contributing to a small increase of 2,000 students statewide. 

But even with the uptick, statewide enrollment languishes below pre-pandemic levels. “The scariest part is that there’s really no light on the horizon,” Eschbacher said. 

If a bright spot is to be found, he said, it could be that “districts are getting better at talking about this.”

He pointed to and Colorado’s Jeffco Public Schools — both of which recently closed multiple schools — as examples of how to communicate “the student experience.”

Rather than overwhelming parents with statistics about deficits and cost effectiveness, he said, leaders in both districts cited tangible examples of how enrollment loss robs students of a well-rounded education.

“Big schools get advanced courses and small schools don’t,” he said. “Big schools get art and music full time and small schools don’t.”

‘Center of our neighborhoods’

But even the most clearly-articulated plans won’t keep closures from being a bitter pill for most parents to swallow. 

It can be particularly tough for those with close ties to the institutions. “We’re the South. The center of our neighborhoods are churches and schools,” said Brooke Floyd, who leads a nonprofit community organization in Jackson.

Research shows that high-poverty, minority neighborhoods like those in Jackson are more affected by — and eventual — than those in middle-class communities. Goulas, from Brookings, found that enrollment was more likely to bounce back at schools serving well-off families, while the numbers continued to drop at those with higher poverty. 

For Floyd, it’s personal. Chastain Middle School, where she attended as a student, is one of the 13 schools closing. Oak Forest Elementary, where she taught third grade until 2017, was on the chopping block until community members pushed back. 

Leaders announcing closures often talk about “reimagining” schools — or, as Greene labeled his plan in Jackson, “optimizing for equity.” But Floyd said parents should make sure the district follows through. 

“If that’s what they’re going to push toward us, then we’re going to have to hold them accountable,” she said. “We’re going to have to remind them they promised that our schools were about to be amazing.”

When author and policy analyst Richard Reeves’s son started applying to colleges, he was dismayed at the difficulty of raising his high school GPA. He was doing well in his courses, but the number wouldn’t seem to budge. Reeves had to remind him of the lower marks he’d earned freshman year — and, he jokes, “explain what the ‘A’ in GPA stands for.”

It was a personal occurrence of a social phenomenon Reeves, a senior fellow of economic studies at the Brookings Institution, has spent years studying: the comparative difficulty that boys encounter as they move through their K-12 years, even as girls pull further ahead in many indicators of academic preparation and achievement. Given biological differences in the pace of intellectual development and emotional maturity, as well as a teaching workforce that is three-quarters female, he says, boys face significant obstacles to becoming outstanding students and high-functioning adults.

That argument forms the basis of Reeves’s new book, , released today by Brookings Institution Press. In it, he touches on the increasingly divergent outcomes for boys and girls in America. K-12 schools make up a part of these disparities, but they continue into higher education and the working world, where labor force participation for men has softened persistently in recent decades.

These developments are, in some ways, the flipside of a success story that is well-known: With fewer barriers confronting girls and women who seek to excel in school and professional life, more of them are earning college degrees and entering traditionally male-dominated professions. ����’s taken over a half-century, but the fundamentally sexist dispensation of the mid-20th century — at least as it concerns much of the education system — has been turned on its head.

That doesn’t mean that boys have kept pace, however. Male students now earn worse grades in school than their female classmates and enroll in fewer advanced courses. They attend and graduate university at lower rates (the growing male-female gap in bachelor’s degrees has been expanding for nearly 40 years). And the traditional advantages they have held in STEM performance and some standardized testing has ebbed. 

It would be one thing if this development was occurring only in the U.S., Reeves notes. But it’s increasingly the case in wealthy and highly educated countries all over the world. That means that similar economic and organizational forces are at work everywhere, he argues — and that they can be countered.

How? Reeves offers three main solutions in the K-12 arena: more male teachers, who make up a small and shrinking portion of the teaching force; more funding for career and technical education, which disproportionately benefits boys in terms of educational attainment and later-life earnings; and more “red-shirting” (i.e., the practice of keeping boys at home for an extra year before kindergarten). Combined with a heavy dose of high-quality early childhood education and some male-focused mentoring, he says, these proposals could offer boys more pathways to success and bring them back into parity with their sisters.

These are the kinds of policy interventions that Reeves has spent his career espousing. The former president of the London-based think tank Demos, he helped craft strategy during to the United Kingdom’s deputy prime minister. His ideas often target what he calls a “dream-hoarding” upper-middle class, including a call to like tax-preferred “education savings accounts.”

But to even address the issues afflicting boys in school, America’s political and educational classes have to first acknowledge that there is a serious problem — and overcome an understandable aversion to making policy that explicitly targets males. Gender gaps in education, no matter which way they cut, are a stumbling block on the way to a fairer economy and a more just society, Reeves argues.

“There’s no reason to be relaxed about the fact that one sex is doing much better than the other,” he said. “We certainly weren’t relaxed about that 50 years ago, quite rightly, and if we think that education matters, we shouldn’t be relaxed about it now.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: Why isn’t this a happy story? We’re essentially looking at a half-century of girls largely overtaking boys in school after barriers to their achievement were lifted. I’m sure a lot of people are cheering that development.

Richard Reeves: Look, there’s a very happy story here in terms of the catching-up women have done in education. In 1982, when men were still ahead of women in college completion, everyone was saying, “We have to get to gender equality!” What no one expected was that the lines on the graph would keep going and that we’d see women overtaking men. Literally nobody predicted that.

So it’s a great success story, but at a certain point, it brings a potentially troubling story with it. At what point do you start to worry about gender inequality when it’s running so far the other way, and especially when it seems to predict all kinds of things in the modern labor market? As a matter of course, if we see big gender gaps in either direction, that should be something that troubles us. There’s noreason to be relaxed about the fact that one sex is doing much better than the other. We certainly weren’t relaxed about that 50 years ago, quite rightly, and if we think that education matters, we shouldn’t be relaxed about it now.

What’s the clearest manifestation of these gender gaps in academics? There has been some analysis of the skewed ratio on college campuses a few years ago, but the K-12 situation seems less understood.

I was surprised by the extent of the gaps in K-12 and by the direction of the trend. A lot of people have this sense that, yes, girls do a little better at school and especially in English, but boys are better at math and science and tests, so it all comes out in the wash. That’s not the picture I see now, which is a very large and growing gap on the elementary side. 

In 10 states in the U.S., girls are at least one grade level ahead of boys, on average. In every state in the U.S., they’re at least half of one grade level ahead of boys. Meanwhile, to the extent that there’s a math gap in favor of boys, it’s tiny and shrinking. If you look at what’s happening in eighth-grade math, for example, girls have overtaken boys in pretty much every state. So it doesn’t come out in the wash. Actually, girls have significantly caught up with boys in math and science — to the extent that we can measure that with things like PISA [Programme for International Student Assessment, an international standardized test] and NAEP [the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often referred to as “the Nation’s Report Card”] — and they’re way, way ahead in English, and getting further ahead in some cases.

The other thing is that everything I’ve read suggests that a lot of these literacy skills turn out to be predictive of college-going and college completion. The biggest gender gaps are really only going one-way, and they tend to be in the subjects likely to matter most for what happens after K-12. To the extent that there are areas where boys are holding their own, it’s in things like standardized tests. Girls are slightly ahead on the ACT now, and boys are slightly ahead on the SAT, although the gaps have really narrowed. Now, a lot of colleges are moving away from using those for college admissions and moving toward Grade Point Average — and if you look at that, girls account for two-thirds of the top 10 percent of GPA scores, and boys account for two-thirds of the bottom 10 percent. The average girl is getting an A, the average boy is getting a B.

That means we’re seeing girls outperforming boys in all the areas that seem to matter most, and mostly catching up in the areas where boys were traditionally ahead. 

There have been stories, both domestic and international, of boys’ and girls’ math performance converging. Is that reflected in NAEP?

I was just pulling up the NAEP numbers myself to write about this . In science and math, the gaps have essentially disappeared up until twelfth grade. Whereas in English, the gaps are massive all the way through. This sense of symmetry people have about achievement in different subjects — really, it surprised me to discover that it’s just not true.

It’s true that there’s still a small advantage for boys in grade-12 math, but it’s small, and I don’t think it’ll last much longer. And it kind of doesn’t matter what comes after high school because colleges don’t admit people on the basis of their NAEP scores, and employers don’t ask what your NAEP scores are. As a measure of cognitive ability, it’s probably still useful, but I don’t find it to be that instructive in what it signals about your future opportunities. Whereas things like GPA seem to predict future opportunities pretty well. So if you’re thinking about what happens next and how your life is going to go, to the extent that there are even tiny male advantages — honestly, it’s just a few pockets now where there is any male advantage at all, and they’re soon to be mopped up — they are less consequential.

How does the magnitude of these disparities compare with the racial- and class-based achievement gaps that we’re more familiar with in education policy?

They’re smaller, for sure. It depends on exactly what measure you’re using for SES [socioeconomic status], but it’s absolutely true that Black-white gaps on most of these measures will be bigger than male-female gaps. Nothing I say in this book should detract from continued concern about those gaps. 

I did on gaps in high school graduation rates. And as an aside, it was a nightmare because states are not required to report the gender or sex of students in the high school graduation rate. I was literally Googling, “What’s the gender gap in on-time high school graduation?” I checked NCES, I asked people on Twitter, and they said, “We don’t know because they’re not required to report sex.” Because no one thinks that’s an issue. So if I achieve nothing else, I want that to change. 

At any rate, our research suggests that the male-female gap in high school graduation rates is about six points, 82-88. That’s not too far off from some of the other gaps! There’s a 10-point gap in graduation rates between white and Black students and an eight-point gap between white and Hispanic students. The gender gaps are of a similar order of magnitude as the racial gaps. And once you inspect these differences, it becomes very clear that gender gaps are much wider within certain demographic groups. The gaps between Black boys and Black girls, or between Black men and Black women, are just huge. 

This is where the proper application of an intersectional approach could be really useful. In many accounts of education, Black women are doing pretty well — it doesn’t mean they end up doing well in the world; that’s another question that draws in all sorts of other factors — but Black men are not. Considering there’s a two-to-one gap in terms of college completion between Black women and men, I really think these racial categories need to be looked at from a gender lens sometimes. But without better state-level data, we can’t see that interaction. I mean, we don’t know the high school graduation rate for Black boys in the U.S., and I think we should. 

The exact same thing is true of class. You get huge gender gaps as you move down the socioeconomic distribution. That’s one reason why I’m worried. Those are the men who would arguably get the most benefit from more education, but they’re the least likely to get it. Meanwhile, their sisters are much more likely to go to college than them.

Data collection isn’t the main thing here, but it’s obviously a reflection of national priorities that we measure and act on disparities in some areas instead of others. Racial gaps are at the heart of the education reform movement, and they’ve typically been the main story in the education press. Gender gaps have received very little attention by comparison.

There’s two ways to think about this. One is, “There’s a conspiracy against boys and men!” That’s not my view. My view is that we’re trying to catch up to certain social realities. Not that long ago, it just didn’t make sense to worry about gender gaps in high schools. We were worried about college because there weren’t enough women enrolled, and so we passed Title IX and took some other steps. It never seemed like there was a problem in high school. But there is now. 

The question is, how do you update your mindset when the change has been this rapid? An 82 percent graduation rate for boys is only two points higher than it is for kids who are eligible for free school meals. Once you know that, you really want to know how much of what’s happening to boys is really explained by poorer boys or boys of color. Because a good chunk of it is. There’s still a top-line gender gap — Black girls graduate high school at higher rates than white boys — but these demographic characteristics overlap and interact. 

One of the theses in this book is that there’s a structural disadvantage facing boys in the education system. One of my sound bites is that the education system is structured in favor of girls, the labor market is structured to favor men, and we should fix both. But because the education system is structured to favor girls, upper-middle-class families are investing disproportionately in their boys to help them to keep up. Parents with the will and the means and the time are hiring tutors for their sons and making sure their sons turn in their homework. I have a colleague who says that she’s a stand-in prefrontal cortex for her teenage son, and that’s what a lot of relatively well-off parents are doing. But that’s not true of boys whose parents aren’t in the same position, which is why I think we see much bigger gender gaps in less-resourced households.

In the book, you mention that colleges and universities are also trying to cope with this difference in academic preparation between men and women. What do you think is the scale of gender-based affirmative action in college admissions? Can that even be known?

It can’t be known because we don’t have the data, and of course, it’s only legal in private colleges. It’s one of those weird things historically. When Title IX was being passed, there was a to allow them to discriminate on the basis of sex in admissions. The reason was to protect single-sex colleges, especially women’s colleges, and the effect is that private, undergraduate schools can discriminate by sex. And they are, in fact, discriminating in favor of male applicants. 

Publics can’t do it, which is one reason why the gender gap is much, much lower in private colleges. It’s also because, for the reasons we just discussed, the gap between men and women isn’t so wide at the top end of the socioeconomic distribution. But is there a thumb on the scale for boys? Absolutely. It seems to me that it’s a bit of an open secret that you’ve got a better chance of getting admitted if you’re male because they’re desperately trying to stay somewhat close to parity. Virtually every single college has now flipped from majority-male to majority-female, but the gaps at those elite colleges are much smaller. 

One of the proposals from the book that has been the notion of keeping more boys at home for an extra year before starting kindergarten, commonly called “red-shirting.” Research does suggest that doing this could reduce achievement gaps down the line. But aren’t there limits to the potential here, especially given the fact that girls are already exceeding boys by the time they start kindergarten?

I think there are quite serious limits, not least because how well you do is partly dependent on the peers you’re with and when you start learning. But I also think boys would get some benefit from an absolute age effect [i.e., the fact of starting school at a more advanced age, regardless of the relative age of their peers], and I’m reasonably convinced from the evidence that the benefits tend to disproportionately go to the kids from lower-income backgrounds and those who are disadvantaged. 

A Tennessee included a lot of Black kids and a lot of low-income kids, and it really was those kids who benefited the most from being a year older in the classroom. And that’s a kind of perverse reality because they’re the ones who don’t get red-shirted right now. It’s upper-middle-class white boys, mostly, who are red-shirted, and they’re the ones who get the least out of it. Meanwhile, New York City doesn’t let you do it, because it was all rich white parents who were doing it. They , and now some of the same parents are going private.

In , I got enrollment data from a very well-known private school on the East Coast. When I looked at how old their graduating seniors were, it turned out that 30 percent of the boys were old for their year — in other words, their birthday was after the cutoff date for their grade year — and only 6 or 7 percent of the girls were. In private schools, there are basically different cutoff dates for boys and girls. Boys, and particularly boys who’d be younger for their year, are much more likely to be red-shirted because they can afford childcare and all that.

Again, there are limits. But if you can get past the idea of chronological age, and instead look at developmental age, it makes a lot of sense to recognize these biological differences. As I say in the book, I’m worried about seeing these gaps all the way through kids’ school careers, and I’m also worried about boys feeling like they’re behind all the way through. Because the gaps become more consequential as time goes on.

I was in remedial reading from ages five to seven, when teachers really worried about whether I was ever going to read. Now, the fact that I was essentially held back in English when I was six didn’t hold me back from going to Oxford, but the fact that I was goofing off and couldn’t focus when I was 16 or 17 very nearly did. That’s just one example, but I think it’s a familiar story for a lot of parents.

My view is, why not red-shirt? There are arguments against having boys start a year later, and I deal with some of them in the book, but overall, it seems like it would level the playing field. On most of the distributions I’ve seen regarding development and neuroscience, putting the boys into a classroom with girls who were a year younger would make those distributions much closer than they are now. So again, why not? 

But that’s just one step. There’s a whole bunch of other things we could be doing as well.

What would those other steps be? Is there a sound method for preventing these learning differences from manifesting by the time kids are five or six years old, whether through nurse home visits or high-quality pre-K or something else?

If that’s the kind of conversation we’re having, I’m pretty happy. Because that means we’re accepting that there is a problem, that the problem is partially about differences in development, and that we’re arguing about potential solutions. That’s exactly the kind of dialogue I want us to have.

One of the other proposals you make is to recruit a wave of men to join the K-12 workforce, which is . Is there good evidence that that would make an impact? It’s striking to me that we’ve got a huge body of literature about the effects of matching students with teachers of the same race, but not much on matching by sex.

Yeah, to the extent that research exists, it tends to focus on the female side and on higher education. But for all the same reasons why we think it’s good for girls to have same-gender teachers, it’s probably good for boys as well. I’m also pretty convinced by [Stanford economist] on English teachers, especially.

It all feels right to me, we just don’t have much research being done on it. Back to where we started this conversation, you have to accept there’s a problem before you start investigating it. There aren’t enough people yet who acknowledge there’s a problem here, or who’ve gotten past the zero-sum mindset — “If we’re doing this, it means we’re paying less attention to women and girls” — which is the false choice that poisons the whole debate. 

To me, there’s a difficulty in knowing why gender matching works. This is also true of my understanding of the literature on matching female pupils with female teachers. It’s just a bit of a black box. You can reasonably expect that they act as role models or that they understand same-gender students’ learning styles a bit more, and there’s stereotyping going in both directions as well. But to some extent, this could be one of those occasions where we don’t need to know — it just seems true, so let’s have more men, especially in elementary school and in those crucial subjects like English.

The other thing I’d say about the teaching profession is that it’s just getting more female. We’re at 24 percent of male K-12 teachers as a share of the whole now, down from 33 percent in the 1980s. Only one in 10 elementary teachers are male, and the number of men going into education training courses is dropping faster than the number of women, so moving forward, it looks like it’s only going to get more gender-skewed. And at what point do reasonable people start to say, “Okay, 10 percent is a bit too low”? I’m worried that, at that point, it’ll be game over, because it’s really hard to persuade men to go into professions that are 90 percent female. There’s a great line from the women’s movement: You have to see it to be it. 

A K-12 workforce that is 76 percent female is pretty close to some kind of tipping point. 

Particularly when it comes to the elementary grades, it feels like the tipping point has come and gone. 

In the book, I point to this startling fact — and my son actually works in early education, so I have some indirect experience through him — that as a percentage of the population, there are at least twice as many women flying U.S. military jets as there are men teaching kindergarten classes. Now, maybe 6 or 7 percent is too low a participation rate for women in the military. I can imagine a lot of people saying that it’s not good enough, and they’re actually redesigning cockpits so that they’re more accessible to women. I’m all for that because I just want the person in the plane who’s best at shooting down enemy planes. But as a matter of culture and social welfare, it’s probably more important to have men in kindergarten classrooms than to have women in cockpits. 

These gender gaps that run the other way don’t get discussed as much, and it creates a vicious circle. If entering the classroom as a man is a really weird thing to do, then people are going to think you’re really weird for doing it; if people think you’re really weird for doing something, you’re less likely to do it; and if you’re less likely to do it, then even fewer people like you will do it. That’s how the cycle turns, and that was exactly true for women in all kinds of male professions. Forty years ago, a woman engineer was assumed to be weird — like, what’s wrong with you? I’m incredibly proud of the strides we’ve made in bashing down those stereotypes, but we’ve made almost no inroads in the other direction for almost every female-dominated profession that we should care about: nursing, social work, psychology, teaching. 

Even among school counselors, it’s like a six-to-one ratio of women to men. If a kid’s struggling in school and sent to a school counselor or psychologist, wouldn’t it be better to have some men in those roles? As the father of three sons, and just as a person in society, my answer is surely yes. Interestingly, when you say this to people, no matter how left-wing or feminist they are, they all agree.

But what are we actually doing about it? Where’s the policy effort, the campaigns, the targets? In the book, I set this very modest target of 30 percent male representation in the K-12 workforce, up from 24 percent now. Women didn’t break into STEM and lots of other male-dominated spheres without a lot of intentional effort, and the same is going to be true the other way around.

There are also obvious pipeline issues with bringing more males into the profession, in that the growing BA gap between men and women means that fewer men meet the requirements to teach. Your third big idea is to dramatically increase resources to career and technical education, which has pretty clear benefits for boys — much less so, from the research I’ve seen, for girls — but it could also conceivably take more males out of that teacher pipeline, right?

We can do two things at once. For a start, investing in more of these technical high schools and apprenticeships is good for boys in and of itself. I just wrote about this , but most educational interventions seem to help girls somewhat more than boys. Free college, for example, really helps women but doesn’t seem to help men. But technical education is a distinctively pro-male policy. Everything in the literature that this isn’t going to harm girls, but it’s not really going to help them either.

That means that you have to deliberately invest in a policy that you know will help boys and men more than women and girls. And I doubt it’s a coincidence that , which would create a million new apprenticeships for $3.5 billion, has spent the last year stuck in a Senate committee, given the fact that 93 percent of apprenticeships are men. At the same time, the administration is willing to spend $500 billion forgiving student loans, two-thirds of which are held by women. I honestly believe, if it were the other way around, we would be having a different conversation. Because we just haven’t caught up to the new reality yet. 

In other words, one of the reasons we don’t invest in vocational programs enough is because their pro-male skew is seen by people as problematic. But I now see that as a feature and not a bug. Don’t get me wrong, I would like the male share of apprenticeships to be lower than 93 percent. But the gender gaps we see in mainstream education — the absolute numbers just dwarf the disparity in apprenticeships. 

The other thing is that we could really build up vocational training in some of these areas like health administration, education, child care. Those pathways skew quite female, but if we emphasized them more in technical high schools, there’s a chance that we could persuade more boys to do them. There are a lot of men out there, and even if we’re helping a lot of them go down a more traditionally vocational route, it doesn’t mean we couldn’t help others become K-12 teachers. There can be a recognition that we need to offer boys a variety of paths, in the same way that we don’t want to shove girls down one particular path.

For understandable reasons, this book is weighted pretty heavily toward academic disparities and the ways they can be corrected. But what about the social-emotional deficits facing males, which extend past their academic or even professional lives? I’m thinking of a study I covered that found that anti-bullying laws lead to better psychological outcomes — including reduced suicide rates — but only for female students.

So, very crudely, girls can become depressed and potentially suicidal when their friends are mean to them. The bad scenario for boys is just not having friends, which can lead to depression and suicidality. It wouldn’t be a surprise to me if anti-bullying laws had a gendered effect, because by and large, boys aren’t being bullied into suicide. They’re withdrawing into suicide.

On the larger question of non-cognitive or social-emotional skills, I think those gaps actually underpin all the other, more quantifiable gaps. I mean, why is there a gap in GPA? It’s not because girls are cognitively that much better than boys of their same age. It’s because boys are so far behind non-cognitively. That need for a “stand-in prefrontal cortex” explains a lot about future orientation and motivation and deferral of gratification. 

When you write a book like this, you’ve got the headline numbers like labor force participation or college degrees that become clear over big populations. But the things that stick are quite often the really weird data points. Like, why are women twice as likely to study abroad or volunteer for Americorps or Peace Corps?

Voting would be another one of those.

Yeah! And women are less likely to live with their mom and dad. There’s something about their sense of propulsion. [NYU sociologist] Paula England has explored this great concept of , and I love that word. It’s a true skill, planfulness, and it captures all these non-cognitive skills that girls seem to have much more than boys.

So what’s the answer? One, give boys’ brains a chance to catch up through red-shirting. Two, early childhood education: It looks like good-quality pre-K actually seems to help boys more than girls. I think that some of that is because you’re getting to them earlier and working on this non-cognitive stuff like social skills and social restraint. You know, one day in preschool, I wasn’t allowed to go swimming because I whacked a girl with a paintbrush. I remember that so vividly because I learned something right away. There’s some of that non-cognitive instruction going on in these pre-K classrooms, and it might just make sense to keep boys there a little longer.

And then there are these things like the , which specifically uses behavioral interventions with adolescent boys. Some summer schools can handle that too, but they’re all specifically aimed at boys who are dealing with social or developmental needs. This stuff would help to close a lot of these gaps, including race gaps. Think about how many Black boys repeat a grade by the end of high school; when people roll their eyes at red-shirting, I think, “Well, lots of boys are just held back a year later on in their education.” That’s a huge thing to do with older kids, holding them back a grade.

It shows you by counterfactual that the current system is really failing boys, especially boys of color. A lot of the recovery will come from developing these non-cognitive skills that seem to just develop earlier in girls. [Harvard economist] on that phenomenon is pretty instructive, and it’s one of the reasons why GPA is such a good predictor of what happens in college — it’s also a good marker of non-cognitive competence.

My own son couldn’t get his high school GPA high enough to get into the sort of college he wanted to, even though he did well on his SAT. The reason was that his GPA in freshman year was 1.8. I kept trying to explain to him what the “A” in GPA stood for, but I could almost see his prefrontal cortex growing as he asked, “Wait, why is my GPA only at 3.0? I’ve been doing really well!” I said, “It’s because you got a 1.8 in freshman year.” He was like, “When was that again?” 

What’s the international picture for gender gaps in schooling? Are there identifiable traits in countries where these differences appear?

This is all second-hand, but the headline finding is that girls are ahead everywhere. Young women are more likely than men to have a college degree in every OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] country now, with the slightly less economically advanced ones catching up more recently. That seems like an important fact when we think about what might be behind this. Seeing this happen internationally does point toward a structural explanation: It’s not just something wrong with the U.S. K-12 system or higher education, because it’s true everywhere. 

And if it’s true everywhere, that means there are broader economic forces at work affecting all economically advanced countries in a similar way. To the extent that there’s a relationship between gender gaps and levels of economic development, it seems that the more economically advanced a country is, and the more gender-egalitarian it is, the bigger the gender gap in favor of girls and women. Essentially, those countries that have done really well in terms of taking down the barriers in front of women are the ones where the overtaking of men has been most dramatic.

But there’s no reason to think that it won’t continue in that direction in other countries. I don’t think this made it into the book, but there’s a paper looking at two forces affecting higher education attainment by gender. One was achievement in secondary education, and the other was attitudes toward the roles of men and women. The better that girls are doing in secondary education, the better they would go on to do in higher education — except in countries where there were still quite sexist views. Those two factors roughly balanced each other out, but over time, one would hope that sexist attitudes toward the roles of women and men are going to decline. When that happens, the advantage girls have in the education system will become apparent. In other words, the closer we get to having more gender-egalitarian views about educational and economic opportunities, the more the gender disparities in education appear. That’s why these very gender-egalitarian societies in Scandinavia, for instance, are very inegalitarian when it comes to education. The gender gap just goes in the other direction.

Do you think the political sensitivities around these problems — as you mentioned, some of the solutions you offer are deliberately tailored to prioritize boys over girls — make them harder to fix? Or even talk about?

There are two conversations going on, the public and the private, and I’ve constantly been stumbling across that difference. What you’ll find is that for a lot of people, especially if they’re in the public policy world, this is not an issue they want to go near. But privately, they’ll say, “My God, I’m really worried about my boys.” 

One of my hopes for the book is to create a safer space to talk about this, a space where things aren’t zero-sum. And it doesn’t require you to stop caring about women. My wife is trying to raise money for a start-up right now, so I know that it’s only 2 percent of venture capital money that goes to female recipients. I hear about it on a nightly basis!

There’s a lot of work that we can only do if we take away this fear that people are going to be asked to abandon their previous commitments. But as things stand, the mere reluctance to acknowledge the problem is politically dangerous because the problems are real, and if responsible people don’t deal with them, irresponsible people will exploit them. And viewed simply at the policy level, actually investing in policies that might help boys and men is impossible until we have an honest conversation about those problems. There’s a responsibility here, and the failure to engage honestly about these gaps, what’s causing them, and what can be done about them is a dereliction of duty. 

This situation is likely to fester. One of the reasons I wrote this book is because of the real conviction that a lot of the things we care about — equity, human flourishing, a better society, stronger families — are threatened, and we cannot cover our eyes. That’s the worst of all worlds.

The scores offer more discouraging evidence from NAEP, often referred to as “the Nation’s Report Card.” Various iterations of the exam, each tracking different subjects and age groups over several years, have now shown flat or falling numbers. 

The latest release comes from NAEP’s 2020 assessment of long-term trends, which was administered by the National Center for Education Statistics to nine- and 13-year-olds before COVID-19 first shuttered schools last spring. In a Wednesday media call, NCES Commissioner Peggy Carr told reporters that 13-year-olds had never before seen declines on the assessment, and the results were so startling that she had her staff double-check the results.

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“I asked them to go back and check because I wanted to be sure,” Carr recalled. “I’ve been reporting these results for…decades, and I’ve never reported a decline like this.”

The eight-year gap between 2020’s exam and its predecessor, in 2012, is the longest interval that has ever passed between successive rounds of the long-term trend assessment; a round that was originally scheduled for 2016 was for budgetary reasons. Given the length of time between exams and the general trend of increasing scores over multiple decades, observers could have expected to see at least some upward movement.

Instead, both reading and math results for nine-year-olds have made no headway; scores were flat for every ethnic and gender subgroup of younger children — with the exception of nine-year-old girls, who scored five points worse on math than they had in 2012. Their dip in performance produced a gender gap for the age group that did not exist on the test’s last iteration.

More ominous were the results for 13-year-olds, who experienced statistically significant drops of three and five points in reading and math, respectively. Compared with math performance in 2012, boys overall lost five points, and girls overall lost six points. Black students dropped eight points and Hispanic students four points; both decreases widened their score gap with white students, whose scores were statistically unchanged from 2012.

In keeping with previous NAEP releases, the scores also showed significant drops in performance among low-performing test-takers. Most disturbing: Declines among 13-year-olds scoring at the 10th percentile of reading mean that the group’s literacy performance is not significantly improved compared with 1971, when the test was first administered. In all other age/subject configurations, students placing at all levels of the achievement spectrum have gained ground over the last half-century.

“It’s really a matter for national concern, this high percentage of students who are not reaching even what I think we’d consider the lowest levels of proficiency,” said George Bohrnstedt, a senior vice president and institute fellow at the American Institutes for Research.  

Tom Loveless, an education researcher and former director of the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, said that the reversals in math performance were particularly disappointing because they defied NAEP’s recent trends. For roughly the last three decades, even as politicians and education policy mavens have emphasized literacy instruction, comparatively rapid growth in math scores have made that subject “the star of the show,” Loveless said. 

“Now it almost appears as if those gains are now unwinding, they’re going away. And I don’t think anyone has been able to identify why that’s happening.” 

Bohrnstedt who has followed NAEP for much of his career, said the declines in 13-year-old math performance was notable for another reason: The long-term trends assessment, which been administered by NCES for a half-century, differs substantively from from the content found on other versions of the test. Reflecting the way math was taught in the 1970s, the assessment features more naked math problems and less complex problem-solving than the so-called “main NAEP,” which is administered to fourth- and eighth-graders every two years.

“For the most part, it’s a more basic kind of math than is being taught today, so it’s disappointing to see that we’re still seeing this poor performance by large percentages of our children,” Bohrnstedt said.

Overall, Loveless said, the combination of flat scores on the biennial “main NAEP” and significant declines on this version of the test indicates that American math instruction changed direction over the last decade in a way that may have stymied learning. While hesitating to blame the Common Core curricular reforms that spread during the Obama administration — he recently wrote on the oft-maligned learning standards — Loveless called for further research to investigate possible causes.

“To me, it suggests that beginning a decade or so ago, something went wrong with how we teach math to younger students,” he said. “My own hypothesis is that an emphasis on conceptual understanding has gone too far, that without computational skills to anchor math concepts, students get lost.”

Michael Petrilli, head of the reform-oriented Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a defender of the Common Core standards, said that the results could reflect an alternative theory: That the social and financial overhang of the Great Recession profoundly disrupted skills formation for children who are now reaching their teen years. 

“Assuming that Common Core wasn’t implemented until about 2013, the 13-year-olds wouldn’t have been exposed to it until about second grade,” Petrilli wrote in an email. “The nine-year-olds, on the other hand, got it from kindergarten. So why are the 9 year olds holding steady?”

‘Very Discouraging’

Perhaps the most striking revelation from the release is the continued divergence in scores between students at the top and bottom of the performance distribution — a phenomenon that Commissioner Carr called “well-established” during Wednesday’s media session. 

Throughout all four age and subject configurations, when average scores for most students were stagnant, scores for the lowest-performing students were down; when scores for most students were down, scores for the lowest-performing plummeted.

In nine-year-old reading, where average scores remained unchanged from 2012 — and scores for the top-performing students ticked up a point — those for students scoring at the 10th percentile fell seven points. The same students lost six points in math, while 13-year-olds scoring at the 10th percentile dropped five points in reading and an astonishing 12 points in math.

Even comparatively low-performers at higher levels lost ground in some respects. Nine-year-olds marked at the 25th percentile dropped four points in math, while 13-year-olds at the 25th and 50th percentiles lost eight and five points, respectively, in the subject. 

“It’s very discouraging to see this steep drop at the 10th percentile in both reading and mathematics, but especially in mathematics,” Bohrnstedt concluded. “It also confirms what we’ve seen with respect to the high percentage of kids performing at the ‘below basic’ level in the main NAEP.” 

The long-term assessment is a crucial piece of data for another reason: It was administered to students between October 2019 and March 2020, making it a final snapshot of academic trends before the emergence of COVID-19. Loveless said he hoped future analyses of how kids learned during and after the greatest disaster in K-12 history wouldn’t overlook the “deeper,” persistent stagnation that preceded it.

“These scores represent the last valid, national assessment of student achievement pre-pandemic. For that reason, they will take on historical significance as a baseline measure when future analysts attempt to gauge the impact of the pandemic on student learning.”