The author of two college textbooks and five books for non-academic readers, she is equally at home researching and writing about adolescent mental health, sleep disorders, digital technology, homework and narcissism. She was one of the first experts to warn nearly that smartphones could hold negative consequences for our mental health. A decade after the advent of the iPhone, Twenge went viral in 2017 with an that asked, provocatively, “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?”

A professor at San Diego State University, she has collaborated for years with the researcher and author Jonathan Haidt, whose 2024 book was a mega-bestseller that has helped build momentum for school cellphone bans in a growing number of states — .

And she is one of the few experts in the education and mental health world to have appeared on HBO’s .

Twenge’s 2017 book, , looked at how modern teens are somehow both more connected than previous generations and less prepared for adulthood. In it, she theorized that depression rates among teens are rising because they spend more time online, less time with friends in person, and less time sleeping — a problematic combination. 

The dilemmas Twenge identified in 2017 are only getting worse: By 2023, the typical American teen was spending nearly five hours a day using social media, recent research finds, with severe depression rates rising. In , girls who were heavy users of social media were three times as likely to be depressed as non-users.

Her , out Tuesday, offers practical guidelines for parents raising kids in the age of ubiquitous connectivity and sophisticated — some would say addictive — social media.

Twenge doesn’t shy away from challenging harried parents to do better. Among her suggestions: No one — parents included — should have electronic devices in the bedroom overnight. Likewise, she says, the first handheld device a kid should receive is a “basic phone” that allows calls, texts and not much else.

“It’s a really big myth out there that if kids are going to communicate, it has to be on social media,” she said. “That’s just not true.”

Ahead of its publication, Twenge spoke with ����Ӱ��’s Greg Toppo about her rules, her work with Haidt and her belief that we need stiffer laws that keep young people off social media until they’re old enough to drive.

Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.  

I wanted to start with a quote from your book. It’s a parent’s description of his 10-year-old after she got her first smartphone: “She suddenly wasn’t playing with her younger siblings as much. Novels were promptly cast aside. She wasn’t around to help with dinner anymore. She danced less, laughed less. She was quieter. Our home was quieter.” That’s so heartbreaking, but I’m guessing it’s not unusual.

I don’t think it is. Many, many parents describe how their kids are different after they give them a smartphone. And it’s especially heartbreaking when that’s a 10-year-old, but even when it’s a 16-year-old who might otherwise be ready. It’s very noticeable how they change after they get that phone in their pocket.

Were there any particular data points about smartphones and social media that persuaded you they were causing a mental health crisis?

It was a slow process for me, and it wasn’t an immediate conclusion when I first started to see these trends in adolescent mental health. It was first a process of ruling out obvious causes, like the economy, which wasn’t aligned at all, and any other big events that might happen. I would trace it, really, to the big that I work with on teens, where there was just this combination all at once of not just rising depression, but teens spending less time with each other in person and less time sleeping. And then realizing, “Well, wait: What might explain all of those things happening at the same time?” 

And it seemed clear that a good amount of that answer is probably smartphones and social media, particularly after I found a Pew Research Center poll about the ownership of smartphones, that [it] in the U.S. at the end of 2012. And that’s right around the same time all these changes were happening.

I want to dig into a few of your rules. No. 3: “No social media until age 16 or later.” That seems a lot tougher than what most families practice. Why 16? And what do you say to parents who worry about their kids’ social isolation and FOMO or Fear Of Missing Out?

I have not found that with my kids — that they’ve been socially isolated for not having social media. Most other parents I talked to who have put off social media have also not found that with their kids. Social media is just one mechanism for communicating. There’s so many others. Kids can call each other, they can text each other — they do a lot of texting. They can FaceTime each other, they can get together in person. Usually that ends up tilting toward texting, but it does not have to be social media. It’s a really big myth out there that if kids are going to communicate, it has to be on social media. That’s just not true.

And that leads to rule No. 4, where you advocate “basic phones” — your phrase — before smartphones. In a world where even school assignments need Internet access, is that practical for most families?

Yeah, because kids have laptops. And if the family can’t afford to buy them a laptop, almost all schools provide a laptop. So they have Internet access on their laptop even if they don’t have it on their phone. And laptops have come so far down in price too, that if you haven’t bought a laptop recently, or if you use Mac laptops like I do and my kids do now, you might not realize you can get a . So that’s another big thing: Maybe 10 years ago, if a kid doesn’t have Internet access on their phone, then they don’t have Internet access at all. That’s just not true in the current landscape.

Although you do have problems with school laptops.

Oh, yes. I mean, this is a thing! They get Internet access on the laptop, whether it’s a school laptop or a personal one, and then that opens a whole other can of worms. Absolutely true. Laptops are the bane of my existence as a parent, particularly the school laptop, although they’ve gotten a little bit better, at least in my district. 

Actually, that was going to be my next question, this parental controls thing. It sounds like your district is being responsive.

Well, on that issue, they still don’t have a coherent phone policy during the school day. In the high school, it’s especially bad. That’s something I’m hoping will change. It is changing in a lot of schools around the country, thankfully. A lot more schools are doing “no phones during the school day, bell to bell,” which is what needs to happen.

A big message of the book is phone-free schools. And I know you’ve worked with , who has pushed for schools to get rid of phones. A few critics have said that this is a to a complex problem, and that it’s not entirely clear that phones are actually causing the mental health issues that Haidt has become a best-seller writing about. How do you respond to that criticism?

There are a couple of things to unpack there. For one thing, even if you take mental health out of the equation, kids should still not have their phones at school for academic and focus reasons, for the reason of developing social skills by talking to their friends at lunch, for the reason that a bell-to-bell ban is actually easier to enforce than a classroom-by-classroom ban. There are so many reasons for it that don’t even include mental health. 

The second question is [about] the research on phones and social media and mental health: We’ve known for quite a while that teens who spend more time on social media are more likely to be depressed or unhappy. Almost every single study finds that. Where you sometimes get more debate is, “O.K., that’s correlation. What about causation?” But in the last 10 years, we’ve gotten a lot more studies, and the studies that ask people to cut back or give up social media for at least three weeks a month or so, almost all of those studies show an improvement in well-being. And I don’t want to get too in the weeds here, but that’s actually a little bit shocking, because by definition in those experiments, you’re taking people who are at average use and having them cut back to low. 

That’s actually not where we see the biggest effects in the correlational studies. The heaviest users are much more likely to be depressed than the average or light users. So, you know, you can’t ethically do an experiment that would really answer the exact question: You can’t take 12-year-olds, randomly assign them to spend eight hours a day on social media, and then see what happens. At least I hope not.

In the book, you talk about the 10 rules “creating a firewall for kids against anxiety, attention issues and constant insecurity.” I think most parents would get behind that. But let’s be honest, they’re users of these tools themselves. How do we craft rules around web dependence and social media without being hypocrites?

Parents have to be role models. Parents are also allowed a small amount of what I call “digital hypocrisy.” Because they’re adults, they have jobs, they may be responsible for elderly parents, etc. But that said, parents should think about their technology use as well. They should get their phones and electronic devices out of their bedroom at night. They should also consider doing things like not having social media on their phone. If they want to use Facebook or Instagram or Twitter, do it on your laptop. That’s what I do. I mean, I don’t have much social media to begin with. I have X, but I don’t have it on my phone, and that’s very much a purposeful decision. During family dinners, unless there’s a really specific reason for me to have my phone with me, it’s upstairs.

That seems to be an easy one: Phones away at dinner.

Well, you’d think so, but you’ve got to get the whole family on board, and sometimes husbands are not really into that.

I want to skip to Rule No. 8: “Give your kids real-world freedom,” which will probably be met with some resistance. I have a 4-year-old grandson, and when I read your recommendation to let 4-to-7-year-olds go find items a few aisles away in the grocery store, I shouted, “Hell no!”

Why? Why is there, do you think, a resistance to that idea?

I have nightmares about this child being snatched from me at Safeway. I guess I want you to just pull me back from the edge, if you would.

I mean, that is not just unlikely to happen — the chances of that are so infinitesimal it probably shouldn’t even factor into our decision making. There’s one stat in there, and I forget the exact number, but someone calculated that if you wanted your kid to get kidnapped, how many hours — it turned out to be years — would they have to be in your front yard for that to happen? It’s something like 100,000 years. 

O.K., well that helps.

And a four-year-old loves that stuff! They love being grown up. I mean, look, even if you don’t do the grocery store thing, make sure they learn how to tie their own shoes, that they know how to get dressed. I remember when my girls were that age, and it occasionally amazed me when I would be with other moms in various situations and their kids couldn’t dress themselves at that age, and that’s where it starts. 

At pretty much every age, the great thing is that giving kids independence makes it easier for parents. It is easier as a parent if your 4-year-old can dress themselves. It is easier if your teenager makes dinner once a week. It’s good for everybody.

A lot of people might see this freedom rule as somehow contradictory to some of the other rules, in which you talk about adults being “in control.” Can you parse that?

For sure. Jon has said this as well — and I completely agree: We have kids in the real world and underprotected them online, and these principles are just trying to get those two to balance. When you’re talking about the real-world freedom thing, it’s not a matter of letting kids completely run wild and do whatever they want. We’re talking about giving kids some of the freedoms that parents themselves had when they were kids, and to build independence in a way that is really good for kids and good for them as they grow up. 

I can’t even remember who said this to me when I had young kids: “You’re not raising children, you’re raising adults.” And that’s just so true. That is your job as a parent. Giving kids some freedom and independence is a really, really key part of raising an adult.  

I wrote a whole book about learning games, and one of the powerful ideas that I took from that reporting is that many adults don’t realize video games have become. You acknowledge that, saying gaming is the primary way that some kids spend time with friends. But I gather that you see the risks as well. And I wonder if you could talk about that.

It really comes back to the principle of “Everything in moderation.” Many games are not as obviously toxic as social media. Games tend to be more in real time, more interactive. But is it a good idea for kids to be spending five or six hours a day gaming? Probably not. There have to be some limits.

You quote , the Facebook founder, admitting they’re “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology” to keep users on the app. Given social media’s sophistication, are mere parental rules sufficient? I mean, don’t we need a bigger hammer, like legislation and policies? 

Absolutely! Yes! Yes! It would be absolutely amazing for parents and for kids if we had laws that verified age for social media. I mean, ideally, that would be age verification to make sure they’re 16 or older, to raise the minimum age to 16. But even if we just enforced existing law with the minimum of 13, that would be progress, given the enormous numbers of 10-, 11- and 12-year-olds who are on social media, often without their parents’ permission — often explicitly against their parents’ permission — and actually against the law [Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule] that was passed in 1998.

What is the biggest obstacle to getting better regulation, or, to your point, to enforcing the existing regulations?

It’s interesting. The barrier is not the inability to verify age or the inability to verify age without a government ID. There are so many companies that will verify age now that they have their . It can be done in many different ways. The biggest barrier is tech companies themselves. Any time a state passes a law about verifying age on social media or even pornography sites, the companies — every single time. They have sued to keep those laws from going into effect.

Are any emerging technologies that parents should be concerned about? Do your rules need updating for AI or virtual reality or whatever comes next?

AI chatbots are what a lot of parents are rightly worried about. And yes, you could certainly modify or add to the rules and say, “No AI chat bots until 16 or 18 — probably 18.” And of course, it depends on what we’re talking about. It is common for kids to use ChatGPT when they need to look up something for homework or even have it write their essays — that’s a whole other horrible discussion. But what I’m specifically referring to is the many chatbots out there right now that are supposed to be AI friends, or worse, . There’s already been a tragic case of a child who , apparently due to one of these AI girlfriends. It’s just really scary to think of kids having their first romantic relationship with an AI chatbot. It’s terrifying.

The good news is, if you follow that rule about your kids having basic phones, if you give them one of the phones that’s designed for kids, those phones do not allow AI relationship chatbots. It’s on their banned apps, just like social media and pornography and violence apps. Parents have such a tough job, and it’s nice that there are at least a few tools out there that can make their lives easier and keep their kids off of things like AI girlfriend and boyfriend chatbots.

In keeping with the theme of overwhelmed parents, I wonder: If I were to come to you as a parent and say, “Oh my God, Jean, 10 rules is a lot. If I could only do two or three, where would I start?” Is that even a smart thing to do? And if so, where would you start?

I would say, “No electronic devices in the bedroom overnight.” Start there, because the research is so solid on it, and it’s such a straightforward rule, and it works for everybody, of all ages. Your teenager can’t say, “Well, you do it differently,” or, “You get to be on social media.” No, actually, my phone is outside my bedroom when I sleep at night too. So that’s a great place to start. And then, just because they have so much utility, I would probably say the second rule, about basic phones, because even with all of the mess of the laptops, I’m just so happy and grateful that my kids did not have the Internet or social media in their pocket until they were older.

As a parent and a grandparent, I really appreciate you using your real life to inform a lot of these rules. In a way, it hardens them a bit, makes them more durable. Anything I haven’t asked you about that you feel needs to be in the mix?

Two things I’ll throw out there just in terms of pushbacks: With “No phones during the school day,” the pushback is often “What about school shootings?” And it’s actually less safe for students to have access to their phones during an active shooter situation. And I go through the reasons for that in that chapter. 

And then the real-world freedom piece: When you look at the things that I’m suggesting in terms of how to give your kids freedom, obviously letting them go off on their own in the real world is important, and you should do that too. But there are lots of things in that list of suggestions you can do without even leaving the house: teens making their own doctor and hairstylist appointments, for example, or middle-school kids, or even elementary school kids, cooking dinner for the family. Those are great experiences for kids to have without too much parental interference. 

You do have to — and I know this by experience — step back, especially with the cooking piece, and let them do it by themselves and learn how to make mistakes. It’s tempting to just be there when they’re doing that, but you learn quickly that if you leave them alone, they’ll figure it out. And then you can go do something else. Go and read that book you’ve been meaning to read for a while. Go for a walk. Watch TV. Have some relaxation time that you wouldn’t otherwise get. 

I wrote a piece a couple weeks ago on unschooling, this idea of pulling kids out of school and letting them find their own level and their own interests. This almost strikes me as unparenting.

It is — and I’m not a huge fan of unschooling, because it’s a rare kid it would actually work for — but it is. It’s the general idea that not being up in your kids’ business all the time is better for both parents and kids. It’s something we really have to consider more.

Taken together, the trio would create sweeping restrictions on children’s access to social media, impose new requirements on social media companies to ensure their products aren’t harmful to youth mental health and bolster educators’ digital surveillance obligations to ensure kids aren’t swiping through their favorite feeds in class. 

The three separate digital safety bills have bipartisan support and lawmakers could greenlight them as part of the FAA reauthorization legislation, which faces a Friday deadline. If passed, the legislative package could potentially end years of debate on these thorny questions and would mark the most consequential effort to regulate tech companies and children’s online safety in decades.

“Parents know there’s no good reason for a child to be doom-scrolling or binge-watching reels that glorify unhealthy lifestyles,” Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican who is co-sponsoring The Kids Off Social Media Act, said in . “Young students should have their eyes on the board, not their phones.” 

The move comes as lawmakers across the political spectrum sound an alarm over concerns that teens’ addiction to their social media feeds — complete with algorithms designed to keep them hooked and coming back for more — have exacerbated mental health issues in young people. It follows congressional testimony by of knowing that apps like Instagram inflamed body image issues and other negative triggers among youth but failed to act to mitigate the harm while upholding a “see no evil, hear no evil” culture.

The controversial and heavily debated bills saw new life in January after social media executives were grilled during a contentious congressional hearing and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized to parents who said their children were damaged, and in some cases died, after the company’s algorithms fed them a barrage of pernicious content. 

But critics contend the provisions amount to heavy-handed and unconstitutional censorship that fails to confront the root cause of young people’s anguish — and in some cases could hurt them by limiting their access to educational materials, blocking information designed to help them deal with mental health issues or by subjecting them to greater online surveillance.

The three amendments are:

• The Kids Online Safety Act would require tech companies to “exercise reasonable care” to ensure their services don’t surface in children’s feeds material deemed harmful, including posts that promote suicide, eating disorders and sexual exploitation.
  
  First introduced in 2022, the legislation would also require tools that would give parents greater ability to monitor their children’s’ online activities and mandate tech companies enable their most restrictive privacy settings for their youngest users by default. 

• The Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act, also known as COPPA 2.0, amends a 1998 law that requires tech companies receive parental consent before collecting data about children under 13 years old. COPPA 2.0 would extend existing requirements to children under 16, ban targeted advertising for children and require tech companies to delete data collected about children upon parental request. 

• The Kids Off Social Media Act, introduced last week by Cruz and Hawaii Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz, would prohibit children under 13 years old from creating social media accounts and restrict tech companies from using algorithms to serve content to children under 17. It would also require schools that receive federal internet connectivity funding to block students’ access to social media sites on campus networks. 

The bill’s provisions have faced widespread pushback from digital rights and privacy advocates, including the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, which called it an unconstitutional infringement that “replaces parents’ choices about what their children can do online with a government-mandated prohibition.”��

On Tuesday, TikTok and its Chinese parent company that bans the popular social media app in the U.S. unless it sells the platform to an approved buyer, accusing the government of stifling free speech and unfairly singling it out based on unfounded accusations it poses a national security threat.

In March, — including Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas and Utah — to impose new parental consent requirements for children to create social media accounts. The Georgia law also bans social media use on school devices and creates age verification requirements for porn websites.

Aliya Bhatia, a policy analyst at the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology, said that each bill now included in the FAA reauthorization act has been the subject of debate and opposition. Including them in unrelated, must-pass legislation with a short deadline, she said, “undermines the active conversations that are happening” about the bills, which she said are “just not ready for prime time.”

The Kids Online Safety Act, which has the bipartisan , is endorsed by a host of , including the American Psychological Association, Common Sense Media and the American Academy of Pediatrics, who argue the rules could protect youth from the corrosive effects of social media. 

At the same time, the legislation, which has differing House and Senate versions, has also received and those representing LGBTQ+ students. The groups argue the bill amounts to government censorship with a likely disparate impact on LGBTQ+ youth and students of color. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, has endorsed the legislation as a way to restrict youth access to LGBTQ+ content, that “keeping trans content away from children is protecting kids.” 

Privacy advocates have warned the legislation could result in age-verification requirements across the internet that could require online users of all ages to provide identifying information to web platforms. 

Meanwhile, social media’s effects on youth mental well-being remain the subject of research and debate. In last year, the American Psychological Association noted that while social media use “is not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people,” the platforms should not surface to their young users content that encourages them to engage in risky behaviors or is discriminatory. 

In , Surgeon General Vivek Murthy noted that social media use is nearly universal among young people, with more than a third of teens saying they use the apps “almost constantly.” While its impact on youth mental health isn’t fully understood, Murphy said, emerging research suggests that its use can be harmful — perpetuating a national youth mental health crisis “that we must urgently address.” 

The Kids off Social Media Act, which would prohibit youth access to sites like Instagram, is that requires schools and libraries to monitor and filter youth internet use as a condition of receiving federal E-Rate internet connectivity funding. In response, schools nationwide have adopted digital surveillance tools that use algorithms to sift through billions of student communications to identify problematic online behaviors.

Meanwhile, a recent found that web filters regularly used in schools do more than keep kids from goofing off in class. They also routinely limit students’ access to homework materials, educationally appropriate information about sexual and reproductive health and resources designed to prevent youth suicides. 

For years, privacy advocates have called on the Federal Communications Commission to clarify how the rules apply to the modern internet and have argued that schools’ tech-driven monitoring efforts go far beyond their original intent. 

When the law went into effect in 2001, monitoring “quite literally meant looking over a kid’s shoulder as they used the computer,” said Kristin Woelfel, a policy counsel of the Center for Democracy and Technology, but in 2024 student monitoring has become “a very specific term that now means really pervasive and technical surveillance.” 

of students, parents and teachers last year, the nonprofit found a majority supported digital activity monitoring in schools yet nearly three-quarters of youth said that filtering and blocking technology made it more difficult to complete some homework, a challenge reported more often among LGBTQ+ students, and that the tools routinely led to disciplinary actions and police involvement. 

“They don’t work as people think they do,” she said. “That, coupled with data that shows it’s actually detrimental to students, indicates even more that this is not the right path forward.” 

In a letter to lawmakers last week, a coalition of education nonprofits including the American Library Association and the Consortium for School Networking expressed concern about attaching social media limitations to E-Rate funding, which schools rely on to facilitate learning. 

“Schools and libraries will face delays or denials of E-rate funding due to allegations of non-compliance,” the groups wrote, arguing that it would give federal authorities control over social media policies that should be left to local officials. “The bill’s provisions seem to suggest that technology-driven learning models are always harmful, even when carefully crafted to promote educational purposes. In fact, there are several social media uses that can be beneficial for education and learning.”

In a announcing the legislation, Schatz offered the opposite perspective.

“There is no good reason for a nine-year-old to be on Instagram or TikTok,” he said. “There just isn’t. The growing evidence is clear: social media is making kids more depressed, more anxious, and more suicidal.”

In justifying the legislation, Schatz cites reporting by the psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt, who argues in his new book that young people — and girls, in particular — face a “tidal wave” of anguish that can be traced back to the rise of smartphones. 

Haidt’s characterization of tech’s role in youth well-being has , including by developmental psychologist Candice Odgers, who argued in that claims “that digital technologies are rewiring our children’s brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science.” 

Among the evidence is on the well-being of nearly 1 million people ages 13 to 34 and 35 and over as it was being adopted in 72 countries and found “no evidence suggesting that the global penetration of social media is associated with widespread psychological harm.”

The Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., was the latest act in a bipartisan effort to bolster federal regulations on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok amid a growing chorus of parents and adolescent mental health experts warning the services have harmed youth well-being and, in some cases, pushed them to suicide. 

In an unprecedented moment, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, at the urging of Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, stood up and turned around to face the audience, apologizing to the parents in attendance who said their children were damaged — and in some cases, died — because of his company’s algorithms. 

“I’m sorry for everything you’ve all gone through,” said Zuckerberg, whose company owns Facebook and Instagram. “It’s terrible. No one should have to go through the things that your families have suffered.”

Senators argued the companies — and tech executives themselves — should be held legally responsible for instances of abuse and exploitation under tougher regulations that would limit children’s access to social media platforms and restrict their exposure to harmful content.

“Your platforms really suck at policing themselves,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, told Zuckerberg and the CEOs of X, TikTok, Discord and Snap, who were summoned to testify. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which allows social media platforms to moderate content as they see fit and generally provides immunity from liability for user-generated posts, has routinely shielded tech companies from accountability. As youth harms persist, he said those legal protections are “a very significant part of that problem.” 

Whitehouse pointed to a lawsuit against X, formerly Twitter, that was filed by two men who claimed a sex trafficker manipulated them into sharing sexually explicit videos of themselves over Snapchat when they were just 13 years old. Links to the videos appeared on Twitter years later, but the company allegedly refused to take action until after they were contacted by a Department of Homeland Security agent and the posts had generated more than 160,000 views. The by the Ninth Circuit, which cited Section 230.��

“That’s a pretty foul set of facts,” Whitehouse said. “There is nothing about that set of facts that tells me Section 230 performed any public service in that regard.”

In an opening statement, Democratic committee chair, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, offered a chilling description of the harms inflicted on young people by each of the social media platforms represented at the hearing. In addition to Zuckerberg, executives who testified were X CEO Linda Yaccarino, TikTok CEO Shou Chew, Snap co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel and Discord CEO Jason Citron.

“Discord has been used to groom, abduct and abuse children,” Durbin said. “Meta’s Instagram helped connect and promote a network of pedophiles. Snapchat’s disappearing messages have been co-opted by criminals who financially extort young victims. TikTok has become a, quote, ‘platform of choice’ for predators to access, engage and groom children for abuse. And the prevalance of [child sexual abuse material] on X has grown as the company has gutted its trust and safety workforce.” 

Citron testified that Discord has “a zero tolerance policy” for content that features sexual exploitation and that it uses filters to scan and block such materials from its service. 

“Just like all technology and tools, there are people who exploit and abuse our platforms for immoral and illegal purposes,” Citron said. “All of us here on the panel today, and throughout the tech industry, have a solemn and urgent responsibility to ensure that everyone who uses our platforms is protected from these criminals both online and off.” 

Lawmakers have introduced a slate of regulatory bills that have gained bipartisan traction but have failed to become law. Among them is the Kids Online Safety Act, which would require social media companies and other online services to take “reasonable measures” to protect children from cyberbullying, sexual exploitation and materials that promote self-harm. It would also mandate strict privacy settings when teens use the online services. Other proposals would to report suspected drug activity to the police — some parents said their children overdosed and died after buying drugs on the platforms — and a bill that would hold them accountable for hosting child sexual abuse materials. 

In their testimonies, each of the tech executives said they have taken steps to protect children who use their services, including features that restrict certain types of content, limit screen time and curtail the people they’re allowed to communicate with. But they also sought to distance their services from harms in a bid to stave off regulations. 

“With so much of our lives spent on mobile devices and social media, it’s important to look into the effects on teen mental health and well-being,” Zuckerberg said. “I take this very seriously. Mental health is a complex issue, and the existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health outcomes.” 

Zuckerberg by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, which concluded there is a lack of evidence to confirm that social media causes changes in adolescent well-being at the population level and that the services could carry both benefits and harms for young people. While social media websites can expose children to online harassment and fringe ideas, researchers noted, the services can be used by young people to foster community. 

In October, 42 state attorneys general , alleging that the social media giant knowingly and purposely designed tools to addict children to its services. U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warning that social media sites pose a “profound risk of harm” to youth mental health, stating that the tools should come with warning labels. Among evidence of the harms is which found that Instagram led to body-image issues among teenage girls and that many of its young users blamed the platform for increases in anxiety and depression. 

Republican lawmakers devoted a significant amount of time during the hearing to criticizing TikTok for its ties to the Chinese government, calling out the app for collecting data about U.S. citizens, including in an effort to surveil American journalists. The Justice Department is reportedly investigating allegations that ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, used the app to surveil several American journalists who report on the tech industry. 

In response, Chew said the company launched an initiative — dubbed “Project Texas” — to prevent its Chinese employees from accessing personal data about U.S. citizens. But employees claim the company has . 

YouTube and TikTok are by far the platforms where teens spend the most hours per day, according to a 2023 Gallup survey although Neal Mohan, the CEO of Google-owned YouTube, was not called in to testify.

Mainstream social media platforms have also been exploited for domestic online extremism. Earlier this month, for example, a teenager accused of carrying out a mass shooting at his Iowa high school reportedly maintained an active presence on Discord and, shortly before the rampage, commented in a channel dedicated to such attacks that he was “gearing up” for the mayhem. Just minutes before the shooting, the suspect appeared to capture a video inside a school bathroom and uploaded it to TikTok. 

Josh Golin, the executive director of Fairplay, a nonprofit devoted to bolstering online child protections, blasted the tech executives’ testimony for being little more than “evasions and deflections.” 

“If Congress really cares about the families who packed the hearing today holding pictures of their children lost to social media harms, they will move the Kids Online Safety Act,” Golin said in a statement. “Pointed questions and sound bites won’t save lives, but KOSA will.” 

The safety act, known as KOSA, has faced pushback from civil rights advocates on First Amendment grounds, arguing the proposal could be used to censor certain content and . Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee and KOSA co-author, said last fall the rules are important to protect “minor children from the transgender in this culture” and cited the legislation as a way to shield children from “being indoctrinated” online. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, endorsed the legislation, that “keeping trans content away from children is protecting kids.” 

Snap’s Evan Spiegel and X’s Linda Yaccarino both agreed to support the Kids Online Safety Act.

Aliya Bhatia, a policy analyst with the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology, said that although lawmakers made clear their intention to act, their directives could end up doing more harm than good. She said the platforms serve as “peer-to-peer learning and community networks” where young people can access information about reproductive health and other important topics that they might not feel comfortable receiving from adults in their lives. 

“It’s clear that this is a really tricky issue, it’s really difficult for the government and companies to decide what is harmful for young people,” Bhatia said. “What one young person finds helpful online, another might find harmful.”

South Carolina’s Sen. Lindsey Graham, the committee’s ranking Republican, said that social media companies can’t be trusted to keep kids safe online and that lawmakers have run out of patience.

“If you’re waiting on these guys to solve the problem,” he said, “we’re going to die waiting.” 

When Annette “Polly” Williams died in 2014, she had spent 30 years as a Wisconsin state representative —��the woman in the Wisconsin Legislature. But it was her efforts in the late ’80s and early ’90s to create the nation’s longest-running private school voucher program that marked her career. The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, or MPCP, offered parents with limited means public funds to send their child to a nonsectarian private school.

Williams and her staff drafted legislation leading to MPCP. And she brought together an unlikely bipartisan coalition of moderate Democrats and Republicans, as well as a grassroots coalition of parents and community leaders to get the bill passed. Tommy Thompson, the Republican governor at the time, had tried for a few years unsuccessfully to move similar school choice legislation. But it wasn’t until Williams, a Democrat, black activist and community organizer, took the helm that it succeeded.

For her efforts and influence, Williams the “.” At her funeral, however, those closest to Williams were careful to qualify that legacy. “I was a Polly Williams choice person,” said a longtime colleague and friend. “She had a permanent interest in helping black people, and helping poor black children.”

Although many proponents celebrated the controversial parental choice program because of its historic introduction of competition into the public education space, this was not Williams’s ambition. To suggest that free-market theorist and economist Milton Friedman was her muse would cause her to balk. In fact, she admonished me for even using the v-word.

“Don’t call it a voucher plan,” she told me in 2012 during one of many interviews. “That’s not what I call it. It’s parental choice. My focus is always empowering the parents.”

Williams’s specific ambition was to empower low-income and working-class black families in Milwaukee to have more control over a variety of aspects of their lives, one of the most influential being education. MPCP was just one of many efforts she championed in this cause. In her 10 years in the state Assembly leading up to MPCP being enacted in 1990, she worked to give the black community more control over Milwaukee Public Schools in hopes of reversing its long record of underserving black kids.

She pushed for more black teachers and black paraprofessionals, believing that black educators would have a greater impact on black students. (A theory that now supports.) She introduced legislation to redraw school board election district lines to increase black representation and give Hispanic voters a chance to elect a board member.

She also fought to keep the city’s court-ordered school desegregation plan from overburdening black families and decimating majority-black schools. Key tenets of the plan included closing inner-city schools, converting neighborhood schools into magnet schools and busing students to achieve a racial balance. In each instance, black families were disproportionately impacted. Williams joined other community activists, including Howard Fuller, who would later become the Milwaukee Public Schools superintendent and subsequently an influential parental choice advocate, to mitigate that impact.

She supported Fuller’s bid to keep North Division High School (Fuller’s and Williams’s alma mater) from becoming a specialty school and displacing hundreds of black students. She introduced legislation to create a separate, majority-black school district, one where black educators and community leaders would have the resources and control to provide and decide what was best for black students and where more black students would be able to stay in neighborhood schools.

Ending forced busing, however, was the issue on which she was, perhaps, most consistent and persistent. In 1987, she introduced an amendment requiring parents and guardians to give written permission before their child could be bused to another school. Two years later, addressing her colleagues on the Assembly floor in 1989, she called on them to end “intra-district transfers” in particular. At the time, she said, of the 33,000 Milwaukee students who were being bused inside the city, 20,000 were black students being bused from one black school to another.

“They are not being bused for desegregation purposes. They are not being bused for specialty schools. They are just being bused for the sake of being bused,” she said. “Assume your responsibilities as state legislators who are responsible for the education of all children in the State of Wisconsin and take his burden off the backs of black students.” (*Transcript published in The Milwaukee Courier, July 1989.)

A mother on a mission

The busing issue is what initially drew Williams to grassroots activism. In the 1970s, she joined Blacks for Two-Way Integration, a group of mostly parents calling for black and white families to equally shoulder the burden of integrating schools. The group was organized by Larry Harwell, a known community organizer who would later serve as Williams’s chief aide and thought partner for much of her efforts to give the black community more control.

The group’s motto was “two-way or no way.” They were angry that their children had to wake up early and endure long bus rides, while white students remained in their neighborhood schools. Black parents were also frustrated because they couldn’t be as engaged as they wanted to be, finding it difficult to make it across town for parent-teacher meetings and to intervene on their child’s behalf when they needed to.

Initially, Williams said, “I was one of those parents who bought into integrating. … The perception was wherever white kids are, white parents are going to make sure their kids got the best.” So, she fought to get her oldest daughter’s assignment switched from a majority-black high school to a more integrated one. Officials originally denied the request, claiming that the school’s racial quota had already been met. But Williams persisted. Her oldest daughter remembers her mother telling school administrators that she would “go to school at Riverside or not at all.” And when officials warned Williams that truancy would land her in jail, she gave them her address, telling them where to find her. Her daughter also remembers her mother going up to the school and having meeting after meeting after meeting. “They got sick of Ma,” she said. “She bullied her way through.”

All four of Williams’s children would go to Riverside. But Williams marks that initial rejection as a turning point for her. For one, it made it clear to her that the city’s desegregation efforts were more about racial quotas than making sure black children in the city had access to a quality education. “Our children were being taken out of our community to integrate another community under the guise that it was a better education for them,” said Williams. “We didn’t see that it was necessary that black students’ education had to be tied to integration with white kids.”

To accept the premise that black kids had to go to school with white kids to get a good education meant that all-black educational settings were inherently inferior. This was far from what Williams, Harwell, Fuller and other community activists she worked closely with believed. Before she pushed to get her kids into Riverside, she sent them all to Urban Day, an independent majority-black community school serving grades K-8. Williams said she read in the paper about Urban Day, a former Catholic school that was reopening as a private school and where low-income families could pay on a sliding scale. To offset tuition, Williams did administrative work — typing, answering phones, etc. Williams would maintain close ties with the school, even after her kids graduated, serving on its advisory board. Later, Urban Day would be one of the first schools to participate in the Milwaukee voucher program.

The Riverside rejection also showed Williams firsthand how it felt, as a parent, to know what was best for your child’s education and not be able to access it because of something outside of your control — setting the stage for the historic parental choice legislation to follow. Looking back at that experience, she said, “I would imagine that had something to do with my fight to have a quality education no matter where the child lived. That a parent ought to be able to get the best, whatever they decide for their children, whatever it is, whether it is all-white, predominantly black, Hispanic … good quality education ought to be there.”

The people’s politician

Williams got her political inklings from her cousin Monroe Swan, who in 1972 became Wisconsin’s first black state senator. She worked on his campaign and then a few others. And in 1976, at 39 years old, she ran for state representative against a Democratic incumbent who also was black. Recalling her initial campaign, she said: “Black folks saw me as a problem. ‘You’re running against this black man. You’re trying to put him out of work.’” But Williams said he was not a “good representative.” So, even though she helped get him elected in 1972, she “decided to take him on.” She was unsuccessful in 1976 and again in 1978. But in 1980, on the charm try, she won.

When Williams showed up in Madison at the State Capitol, she had only one loyalty — to the people who elected her. She didn’t get support or money from the Democratic Party, since she was trying to unseat an incumbent. The money she raised came from family and friends, she said. “As a politician, either you have money or people … I had people,” she said. Each time she ran and persisted, she made a name for herself, earning the respect of the community. “I was able to turn them around and see me as a viable person who could do a better job,” she said.

From the beginning, Williams showcased her independence in the Legislature. “I came there with an agenda that I got from the community. Not the agenda of the State Capitol, where the leadership dictated what you are going to do and what you are going to vote for.” She remembered, in her freshman year, refusing to follow party lines and vote against the Republican governor’s budget. The budget had money to support community-based organizations in her district, so she gave her first of many impassioned speeches on the floor on behalf of what was best for her constituents. She was so emotional, she said, she had to leave the room crying. But when she returned, she learned that her pleas had worked and she had just secured $3 million for her district, she said.

Williams recounted other instances when she “fought her party” and “refused to toe the line,” from policies regarding HMOs to serving as minister of education for Milwaukee alderman and former Black Panther party member Michael McGee’s . “I was a shock to them,” she said of her legislative colleagues. “I was a single [divorced] mom, African-American and poor. I needed the job. I made more money than I had ever made in my life. Prior to coming to the Legislature, my income was $8,000 a year with five of us. And when I went into the Legislature, my income jumped to $19,000. I had never seen that much money in my life.”

But there were consequences to her independence. The Democratic Party, she said, funded candidates to run against her in her first and second terms in hopes of ousting her. She credits her strong base in the community for keeping her in office. “If they didn’t put you in, they can’t take you out,” she said. So, almost 10 years into her 30-year tenure, when the opportunity came up to work with another Republican governor to push parental school choice, a controversial issue that would further distance her from her Democratic peers but would benefit her constituents, she didn’t think of her party, but of her people.

Open invitation to the White House

In his memoir Power to the People, former Wisconsin governor Tommy G. Thompson writes that the idea for the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program originated during a meeting in his office at which Williams and Fuller were in attendance. Fuller, in his memoir, No Struggle No Progress, maintains that the idea emerged out of talks in the black community after the bid to create an all-black school district failed. And editor of the Milwaukee Community Journal, Mikel Holt, in a comprehensive firsthand account, Not Yet “Free At Last,” names an origin long before —��as part of local black activists’ efforts in the 1970s to gain control over their educational destiny.

While there is discrepancy in the idea’s origin, there is no disagreement about Williams’s role in bringing it to life. Fuller, for example, writes that she deserves the “lion’s share of credit” for getting the bill through the Legislature and recently expressed that he’s “extremely disappointed that Polly doesn’t get the credit she deserves for so much of what’s happening today.”

Thompson corroborates a familiar story of Williams bringing busloads of parents, students and community activists to pack the Assembly gallery — a palpable presence for lawmakers as they voted on those same students’ educational fate. Holt gives great detail about Williams’s role in influencing her colleagues, as well as “sounding the trumpet” and “rallying the troops” among parents and community leaders. In all, she built strong public support among black parents, private school and community leaders and local black press. Together they organized a massive grassroots campaign (word of mouth, phone trees and flyers) to influence lawmakers.

And yet, when Fuller asked the audience this past July at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools’ annual conference in Las Vegas — a group that arguably owes its start to the Milwaukee parental choice program — if anyone had heard of Williams … few signaled yes. Williams’s story from being MPCP’s lead architect and proponent to near obscurity among today’s parental choice advocates is a complicated one, and one that has yet to be told — at least from her perspective.

In the years immediately following the program’s start, she traveled around the country and overseas as the voice of choice. “I spoke at the most prestigious places,” she said. Harvard, Stanford and the Brookings Institution are some examples. At Stanford, she said, she was on campus speaking the same weekend as Mikhail Gorbachev. “I was the Friday night banquet speaker, and he was the Saturday afternoon speaker.”

She was especially popular with conservative audiences and Republican lawmakers, who had been trying unsuccessfully to legislate private school choice for years. Ronald Reagan tried several times to introduce educational vouchers during his presidency. And George H.W. Bush continued the push early in his term. During the first Bush presidency, Williams said, she had an “open door policy” at the White House since she was invited so much. “I didn’t have to go in the way through all the security. The guy just told me to come to the back gate and they would just open it and let me in.” President Bush called her a “courageous hero” during a Rose Garden ceremony. And Newt Gingrich, she said, who was House minority whip at the time, told a room full of journalists from major outlets that they should all go out and write stories about her.

Many accused Williams of being naive and letting conservatives use her. But she said she was well aware of what she brought to their cause. “An elected official, an African American, a former welfare recipient, who was articulate, who could speak — they never thought they would get that. So I helped legitimize them.” She said she also knew that her conservative allies, mostly white and wealthy, had a long-range plan to create programs to benefit the rich: universal vouchers with no income limits. In the meantime, they needed low-income families like those she represented to open the door. So, just as she had, in her first term in office, taken advantage of a shared interest with those she generally disagreed with to benefit her community, she did the same.

But by the mid-1990s, that shared interest was not enough for Williams to set aside her core belief in black empowerment and community control. As the program expanded, the school choice coalition grew to include philanthropic foundations, religious groups and the business community. They helped bolster the program by funding organizing efforts and the many legal battles the program faced. But they were not typically controlled or led by African Americans. Thus, as they stepped up their efforts, Williams sensed she was no longer in control, and by extension she believed neither were the low-income and working-class black parents she had helped to organize.

“We just wanted the resources to allow [black parents] to be in control. I just didn’t see that,” she said. “Everywhere I went it was always white people. People whose background and their history was not serving or helping low-income families.”

Williams disagreed with the coalition on other matters. When the Legislature passed an amendment to make religious schools eligible, it increased the number of choice schools from 12 to 100 and students from 800 to almost 3,000 in a matter of months. (It also set in motion a constitutional battle that would hamstring the program for many years.) At the same time, by the mid-1990s, reports of choice schools closing due to cash flow problems, parents complaining of poor conditions and mistreatment, and other issues illuminated flaws in the program’s structure and the lack of regulation (not unlike the concerns put forth by many of today’s critics of similar programs).

Theoretically, the school closings could be considered signs of success, i.e., market forces at work. But Williams, who spent her days fielding complaints from choice parents in her district desperately scrambling to find new options when their voucher school closed mid-semester, couldn’t dismiss it as an ideological issue. “I’m not going to be an ostrich with my head in the sand pretending we don’t have a problem,” Williams told a local reporter.

Instead, she introduced amendments to limit religious school participation, strengthen oversight and make the choice schools more accountable. She also moved to limit the seats allowed for religious schools, so the existing pioneering choice schools — the few independent community schools like Urban Day — would not lose their opportunity to expand and be replicated. It was not unlike when she tried to limit forced busing the decade before. In theory, integrated classrooms promised to lead to a better education for black kids. But in the present, black families were being treated unfairly. In either case, she focused on fixing the problem at hand. Nonetheless, calling for more government-imposed rules to regulate a market-based approach (and trying to slow religious school expansion) further put her at odds with her allies. As Williams began to speak publicly about her frustrations, she solidified her split from the Milwaukee coalition, ultimately distancing herself from a national school choice movement that she helped to spark.

Other community leaders, such as Fuller, stepped in to represent the interests of poor black families in the national school choice movement. In MPCP’s early years when Fuller was superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools, he was restricted from advocating for the program. But once he resigned, he resumed his early activism, fighting to ensure that low-income and working-class families had access to quality education. More recently, however, Fuller has shared some of Williams’s frustrations. He includes details of his own split with longtime Milwaukee choice coalition members in his memoir. He also writes about the battle to keep Republican lawmakers from ending MPCP’s income caps altogether, meaning anyone would be eligible, including wealthy families who already have the resources to choose a better education — a fear Williams expressed early on.

Zakiya Courtney, a local community activist and Urban Day parent, would too emerge as an important leader in Milwaukee and in the national movement. She said that a lot of what Williams predicted came true, especially regarding the fate of the black independent community schools like Urban Day that pioneered the program. MPCP’s expansion to include Catholic and Lutheran schools left little room for them, she said. Today, both Urban Day and Harambee Community School, which shared a similar history and track record of successfully educating black children, are closed.

A Polly Williams choice person

Soon after her confirmation, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos evoked Williams’s legacy in a major on the Trump administration’s plans to expand school choice and then in testimony on Capitol Hill. Most recently, she referenced Williams during her in September. DeVos, in an appeal to bipartisanship, championed Williams as “a Democrat city councilwoman [sic] … [who] bucked the system on behalf of the kids she loved.”

DeVos was (mostly) right about Williams’s early role in the parental school choice movement. But she left out the second half of the story, when, after hard-won experience, Williams also bucked her allies, many of them with privileged backgrounds like DeVos’s. Williams was not alive to hear DeVos’s reference or to witness the recent federal push to expand school choice initiatives. But a close look at her more than three decades of public service and advocacy for low-income and working-class families offers insight into how she might have reacted as well as into exactly what her longtime colleague and friend meant when she said at Williams’s funeral that she was a “Polly Williams choice person.”

It’s highly likely, for instance, that Williams would have been upset with reports of students taking hour-long bus to voucher schools, politicians from tax-credit vouchers and policies that subsidize private education for the wealthy. She would have rejected programs with no to serve kids with special needs and programs having no problem turning away students with disciplinary problems and been disappointed by the showing little gains for low-income students and students of color.

But she would have celebrated the stories of black and brown students succeeding in various educational settings. And she would have been pleased to — public, private or charter — where both black students and black teachers say they feel welcomed, supported, motivated and culturally affirmed. And there’s no question she would have answered in the affirmative if she were asked the question today’s advocates are pondering: if “School Choice Is the Black Choice.”

Perhaps, most certain, she would have never questioned the role of low-income and working-class families in making decisions about their children’s education. That’s a premise she maintained. “When they ask me, knowing what I know now, would I still do it? I say yes. Even though I may not agree with a parent’s decision, they still have the right to make it,” she said.

Robin V. Harris is a former New America Fellow, working on a documentary project and book about the life of her cousin Polly Williams. Quotes from Williams and her family are all from personal interviews conducted in 2012-2014, unless otherwise noted.

Recent surveys of young people show that parents’ concerns may be justified: More than half of U.S. teens spend at least four hours a day on these apps. Girls, who are , spend an average of nearly an hour more on them per day than boys. Many parents are searching for support. 

Perhaps more than anyone, Carla Engelbrecht and Devorah Heitner are qualified to offer it. They’ve spent years puzzling over how families can help understand media from the inside out, and how schools both help and hurt kids’ ability to cope.

Engelbrecht is a longtime children’s media developer. A veteran of Sesame Workshop and PBS Kids Interactive, she spent seven years at Netflix, most recently as its director of product innovation. Engelbrecht was behind the network’s Black Mirror “” episode in 2018, which allowed viewers to choose among five possible endings. 

Engelbrecht is now in public beta testing for , a new social media platform for kids under 13. She calls it a “course correction” for young people’s social media, aiming to teach them to be more mindful, thoughtful and responsible online.

Heitner is an who specializes in helping parents and educators understand how digital technology, especially social media and interactive gaming, shape kids’ realities. Her books include 2016’s and her new work . 

Speaking to either one would be enlightening, but we decided to facilitate a broader conversation by inviting them to come together (virtually) to share insights and offer a bit of advice for both parents and schools. 

Their conversation with ����Ӱ��’s Greg Toppo was wide-ranging, covering the effects of the pandemic, the pressures kids feel online and the women’s experiences communicating with their own children.

The solutions they offer aren’t simple. In Heitner’s words, parents seeking to learn more about their kids’’ media usage should pull back their surveillance and “lead with curiosity.” 

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: Devorah, tell us a little bit about your new book.

Devorah Heitner: I wrote Growing Up in Public because I was speaking for years about Screenwise in schools and all these other environments, and people said, “O.K., I get that we want to think about quality over quantity with screen time. But we also want to understand what kids’ subjective experience is and not just focus on how many minutes are good or bad.”

People lie about that anyway. People are sort of oblivious to their own screen use sometimes and get over-focused on their kids’. A lot of adults are recognizing: If I could have had a Tumblr or a Twitter or Instagram as a kid, I could have really done a lot of damage to my prospects and opportunities by so openly sharing.

What are we doing to our reputations?

As I started digging into that question, I recognized that parents are really part of the surveillance culture with kids. So are schools, with grading apps like or [which keep track of kids’ location, among other functions]. I really started understanding in a fuller way how kids are scrutinized. Kids are growing up very searchable, very public, and some of that is awesome. They have a platform, they can be activists. Some of it is problematic. 

The title of your book, Growing Up in Public, says so much about kid’s lives these days. I saw this term the other day: not FOMO, “Fear of Missing Out,” but FOMU, “.” Are those competing interests for young people?

Heitner: Well, there’s definitely a fear of messing up and especially being called out. There’s a lot of “gotcha” culture going on, and kids documenting each others’ screw-ups. And as much as you patiently explain, as I have to my own 14-year-old, the concept of mutually assured destruction, if you’re on a group text with somebody for long enough, both of you have probably said a few things you don’t want repeated outside of that context.

I think it’s modeled by adults, but this kind of “gotcha” culture is very insidious and terrifying. And it should be terrifying. 

Carla, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Carla Engelbrecht: I’m a longtime product developer and researcher in the kids’ space. I’ve spent a lot of time making products for kids. I’ve seen for years kids wanting access to Twitter and Facebook and MySpace and , all through the generations of social media. And they always want what is not made for them. They’re aspirational.

Kids are just plopped into this. And just as you wouldn’t give a new driver the keys to the car and just say, “Go!” — you need to teach them how to drive — there’s the same concept for me with media use. We need to teach our kids. Parents don’t know what they’re doing, because none of us have really been through this before, and they abstain. They need support in learning how to do this. Where Devorah talks about things from that guidance perspective, I’m looking at: How can we build a product for kids that helps them learn? 

It seems to me like Betweened is a site for parents as much as anybody. 

Engelbrecht: There’s definitely two audiences here. There’s absolutely a path where I could build a product for kids and launch them onto it. But I wouldn’t be addressing all the pain points.

Kids want short-form content. They want to create. They want to connect with their peers. In order to successfully set kids up to do that, parents need tools, too. And so it is really a product for both kids and parents.

Carla mentioned all these different apps coming down the road. Devorah, I’m thinking about you saying to someone recently how you’ve been working on this book for five years. A lot has changed in five years. We didn’t have TikTok five years ago. 

Heitner: Screenwise came out in the fall of 2016, which was a memorable time for many reasons: a lot of social forces happening in our world with Trump’s election. 

And then you have the pandemic in 2020. That’s around the time I had sold the book and was trying to interview people. Suddenly, I’m not in schools anymore. I’m on Zoom with kids, which is a whole research problem: How do you get a wider range of kids, not just the super-compliant kids who show up to a Zoom? And the pandemic was an accelerant to a lot of things happening already with kids in tech.

It was certainly not the beginning of kids being too young and not [the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act gives parents control over what information websites can collect from their kids]. But it accelerated, and there was kind of a push toward things like Kids Messenger [on Facebook] and other things that I even experimented with at the time. 

The pandemic started when my son was 10. We were like, “Oh, what can we do to help him communicate with friends?” We experimented with Messenger. It was a fail for us, but I also talked to the people at and [two mobile phone companies marketed for children]. There are people, in different ways, trying to come up with solutions because they have understood that both the adult apps and the adult devices, like a smartphone that does all the things, might not be the ideal thing to give a 10-year-old. 

What’s changed since 2016 is there used to be more worry about one-to-one computing in schools. Now, every school pretty much is one-to-one. It’s really the outlier schools that don’t have tech or aren’t giving kids individual tech. Even as late as 2015, 2016, I was helping schools negotiate that with parents. And parents were like, “I don’t know. I’m not sure about screen time. I don’t know if I want my kid getting a Chromebook.”

Try to find a school now that doesn’t give kids iPads or Chromebooks or something. That’s probably one of the bigger differences. And then just the explosion in server-based gaming like Roblox and Minecraft and the ways kids interact in those digital communities. You see a lot of very complicated, weird ideas among adults who care about children. Like “I’ll wait until eighth grade to give a kid a phone. Meanwhile,my third-grader plays Roblox on a server with strangers.” 

Engelbrecht: Or has access to text messaging through their iPad.

Heitner: Exactly. And they’re very smugly waiting till eighth grade and I’m like, “For what? For your kid to make voice calls?” That’s the one thing they don’t want to do.

Carla, you come from a game design background. People have lots of terrible takes about video games, which I’m sure you’re used to. How has that background informed what you’re doing and what Betweened looks like?

Engelbrecht: A lot of people come to video games and they’re just like, “They’re evil,” or “They’re awful,” or “They’re violent.” And you can say the same thing about television. You can also say the same thing if you only eat broccoli. Anything in excess is not good for you — like running a marathon every day. I take a very pragmatic approach to most things we can actually find good in.

When I look at video games, I can’t classify them as evil. I instead look for the good things. And it’s the same with social media. Social media as part of a balanced media diet gives parents a lot of opportunities to connect, gives kids a lot of opportunity to express creativity and develop skills. 

I’ll give you an example on the games side of things: Years ago, I did a South by Southwest talk called “What Can Teach Us About Parenting.” Left 4 Dead is not a game that kids should ever play. It’s a violent, first-person zombie apocalyptic shooter. It’s also one of the most beautifully designed cooperative games ever. I’m terrible with thumb sticks on video game controllers. I can’t walk in a straight line in a video game. I’m not great at the actual zombie-killing side of things. But I’m really good at running around and picking up health packs and checking in on people who have been damaged by zombies.

So there are different roles that people can play. I can still participate in the game, even though the primary way of playing Left 4 Dead is not what works for me. 

Also, if I’m playing with people, it fosters communication. I have to talk to people and someone needs to say. “Hey, I need help,” and I can come over. That’s what I’m looking for in games and social media: What are those underlying skills that, with a thoughtful perspective, you can leverage for good?

I wanted to switch gears a little bit and talk about something you mentioned earlier, Devorah: casual surveillance. I think about the stories we hear about parents not even just surveilling their kids — tracking their phones or their cars — but just keeping up in a way that we never even dreamed of. I wonder: Where did this come from? And how do you think a site like Betweened is going to help? 

Engelbrecht: I wish I knew exactly where it came from, but it certainly seems it’s symptomatic of the same thing: Everything has just kind of crept up on us. It’s like, as phones started to be introduced, we just thought, “Oh, well, I need to charge my phone, so I’ll charge it next to my bed.” And then the next thing you know, you’re checking it first thing when you wake up. It’s this slippery slope without the mindfulness of what it’s doing. Something has to happen to stop you, to make you take a step back and think, “How far have I gone? What boundaries have I crossed or what new boundary do I need to establish?” And to Devorah’s earlier point, the pandemic accelerated a lot of this.

Heitner: Part of it is we do it because we can. Even in relationships. I’ve known my husband since before we each had cell phones, but we didn’t used to check in as often because we didn’t have cell phones. It had to really rise to the level of an emergency before I would call him at work.

Remember the days of 9-to-5 office jobs? He left in the morning and was at his job. I was a grad student then and I would go up to Northwestern and not even really have any reachability by phone. Now we have phones, and the expectation is pretty much down-to-the-minute: If I’m 11 minutes late, I’ll probably text and say, “I’m 11 minutes late.” There’s just so much expectation for contact and communication and knowing where other people are. We don’t use location surveillance for that, but a lot of families do, and a lot of people have watches and will check into each other’s location on watches.

Because it’s there, people do it. And then there’s also just tremendous worry right now about kids. Given that we as a society think it’s a good idea for everyone to have assault weapons, parents are a little nervous. That anxiety creeps into everything.

My older daughter is 31, and I remember getting her first cell phone when she was 12 or 13. I remember the intense peer pressure she felt to have a phone. And I really didn’t like it at all. But I kind of justified it by saying to myself, “This is going to keep her safe.” And I remember thinking to myself, “You’re so full of shit. You’re just really trying to smooth things over.” And I guess I wonder: As parents, do we have an overextended sense of peril about our kids these days?

Heitner: There’s a sense of peril. Also, the Internet and online news and targeted algorithms just fuel that worry and outrage. It’s a bit of a vicious cycle.

Engelbrecht: In some ways, it’s almost like there are more risks that could stick with you. There wasn’t social media when I was in college. A bad decision in college couldn’t chase me through my entire life. In that sense, there are risks that feel much larger.

I think about my daughter and I don’t want something to chase her for her entire life. That part of it feels very real. And then it feels out of control. I don’t have the tools or know exactly how I can best help her except for having hard conversations and trying to put some bumpers around her. But there’s not a lot of tools to put the bumpers around her.

Devorah, one of the things you have said is that the kind of surveillance a lot of parents are undertaking is really undermining the trust their kids feel, and backfiring because kids won’t open up to them when they really need to. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Heitner: You just see kids really getting focused on going deeper underground. If their parents are like, “I’m going to get Bark and read every single thing they text,” then you see some kids who are like, “O.K., I need to go deeper underground, I need a VPN or to only text on Snapchat, or I need to do something where I can be more evasive.” And that concerns me, because then there’s no way to make use of the parent when the parent might be useful.

Engelbrecht: I think about how to create space to allow the kid to have a second chance at telling me the truth. For example, if there’s an empty bag of gummies and the kid is the only one who could have eaten it but says they didn’t, how can I create space to talk about making mistakes versus lying or intentionally hiding the truth? Saying, “I’m going to ask what happened to the gummis again, but first I want you to take a moment to think about your answer — it’s OK to change your answer, because I want to understand the truth. We all make mistakes and we can talk about it. But intentionally hiding the truth has consequences.”

If I later find out that the child lied, then there’s consequences. The hope is that eventually, a parent can say, “If you end up at a party where there’s alcohol, don’t drive home. Call me for a ride home. If you try to hide that there was alcohol and make poor decisions, then there’s additional consequences.”

It’s important to be able to say, “I made a mistake” and talk about what to do from there. Hopefully, that provides an alternative to the arms race of increasingly sneaky strategies that Devorah described.

Heitner: That makes a lot of sense. I was just going to say: The surveillance — schools just push it really hard. Every time I go to a school, they’re like, “Are you logged into ?” or “Are you logged into ?” They’re just really pushing it so hard.

Are schools culpable in this? Sounds like you’d say, “Yes.” I don’t know if you’d call it surveillance, though. One of the functions of schools is to keep track of things, right?

Heitner: But what about the location tracking? My kid has to scan a QR code to get into the cafeteria. I skipped lunch every day of high school and ate with my drama club friends in the theater. Was that so bad? They have 3,500 kids QR-coding themselves into study hall. It’s pretty locked down. It’s pretty Big Brother, or if you read Cory Doctorow. 

Engelbrecht: Homework tracking means having full visibility of my daughter when part of what she needs to learn is the executive function skills to actually be able to plan and follow through and do her homework. I don’t want to be in the place where I’m policing her homework. Now that she’s in seventh grade, it’s time for her to be learning those skills before there’s the consequences of missing your homework in high school or college.

So to me, it’s kind of that same thing: The information is there. Should it be provided? How do you use it? And, for me it’s: How do we better equip administrators, teachers or parents to stop and think about how to leverage this information? So maybe a kid who’s consistently missing their homework, yes, the parents should have more visibility as part of a support program to get the kid back on track and help them learn the skills. But to Devorah’s point, it doesn’t mean everyone needs to be badging into lunch.

Devorah, your message to parents is: There are all these things happening. There are all these things you have to keep track of. There are lots and lots of risks to kids being on social media, especially teenagers. But you shouldn’t panic. And I wanted to just throw this out to both of you: Instead of panicking, what should parents do? 

Heitner: Carla, you’re talking about creating a new community space for kids that’s more of a learning space, and that’s one alternative. Another alternative, in addition to, or potentially instead of, for parents who don’t have access to that, is just leaning into one or two spaces they really want to mentor their kids in.

Maybe their kid’s really involved in Minecraft. And if they want to join [a free voice, chat, gaming and communications app], the parents are waiting and saying, “O.K. You can join your library Discord with or your school Minecraft club on Discord, but not general Discord.”

Parents will tell me their kids are playing or they’re on YouTube. But I’m like, “What channels? It’s just like if somebody says, “I’m watching TV.” Well, what are you watching? Because that really is a big differentiator in terms of the experience.

Engelbrecht: It goes back to your “Fear of Messing Up.” I think so much about how it’s important for parents to wade in and get involved with their kids. This has been the advice for decades, whatever the newfangled thing was. I was just doing some writing about encouraging parents to actually do with their kids. It’s an opportunity to bond. It actually requires some planning and practice. It’s physical activity. I assume most parents are like me, that they’re not a great dancer and it’s uncomfortable and you don’t want to mess up.

But modeling that I’ll do something that’s out of my comfort zone and connect with you over something that I know you enjoy, can be very simple. It doesn’t mean a parent has to suddenly learn all aspects of Roblox or Discord, because they can be intimidating. But just find an entry point and connect with the child and participate with them. It just has so many benefits. It’s true whether they’re into Tonka trucks or Roblox. Parenting means, “Get in there with your kid.”

Devorah, you use the phrase, “Lead with curiosity.”

Engelbrecht: Oh, I love that.

Heitner: You want to be curious and have your kid share it with you. Their expertise and experience as well and their discernment — what do they like or not like about this app? How would they change it if they could? Staying curious is an alternative to spying — being curious and asking kids to be curious even about their own experience. Do I actually feel less stressed when I scroll this app? That’s maybe a lot of mindfulness to expect of kids, who have a lot going on and a lot coming at them. But it’s important for all of us to be curious about how our experience is going.

Engelbrecht: That’s one of the ways I’ve been thinking about it from a product perspective: just how to help build in some scaffolds for mindfulness — things like when you start an app, actually having a timer that’s like, “How long do you want to spend on it right now?”

I set a timer for myself when I use TikTok because I spend a very long time on it. So being able to put that in there as a scaffold, to start being mindful and thoughtful about it. We’re posting content, but we’re actually not posting endless scrolls where you could spend all day.

I don’t want to prioritize the traditional tech metric of “time on task.” To me, success is like, “You can come and use Betweened for 20 minutes and then know you can come back another day and there’s lots of interesting stuff for you.” But it’s not all-consuming, must-do-this-all-the-time. And that’s a different perspective on tech products. It’s not how most products are developed.

Castillo, who is in her fourth year of teaching, says she finds joy in making her classroom a safe haven not only for herself, but for her students by creating a well-equipped, stimulating and hands-on environment for learning.

Castillo teaches middle school physical science and Earth space science at the Florida A&M University Developmental Research School in Tallahassee. The K-12 laboratory school, located on the campus, is affiliated with the university’s College of Education, Castillo’s alma mater. She received her bachelor’s in biology education there in 2021.

During her first year of teaching, she designed her classroom based on the Cartoon Network show Total Drama Island and posted pictures on social media. Her received over a quarter-million likes — and she’s never looked back. She documents her elaborate, hand-made classroom decorations on TikTok —  typically based on favorite childhood shows and movies such as Stitch from Disney’s Lilo and Stitch or the characters from Disney Channel’s hit show The Proud Family —  and posts videos of special Friday projects that teach students essential skills like cooking, sewing, proper table etiquette and balancing a checkbook. 

Would you cook with your students?

Castilllo has received so many messages from teachers asking for tutorials that she posts theme concepts on TikTok and offers custom borders and posters on Etsy.

My classroom reveal for my Proud Family Themed Classroom

Her social media presence also garnered the attention of Grammy Award-winning rapper Megan thee Stallion, who sent Castillo and her students a special in 2021. 

That moment you and your students get a special shout-out from Megan Thee Stallion @theestallion

Castillo also uses her Instagram account, @ScholarDreams_, to keep her students and parents informed about school events such as sports tryouts, weather-related cancellations and class supply lists.

Making her classroom as lively as possible is no small feat. It typically takes Castillo the entire summer to prepare, and she spends between $300 and $400 for decor each school year, plus about $100 for every “life skills” project. Support from the college and online donations help to offset the cost.

It’s totally worth it, she says, to always make her students feel welcome and know that someone took the time to invite them in and make them comfortable.

At least eleven school districts, one county, and one California county system that oversees 23 smaller districts have filed suits this year, representing roughly 469,000 students. 

Two others in Arizona are considering their own complaints, one superintendent told ����Ӱ��. Eleven districts in voted to pursue similar litigation, as did . Many others across the country are on the verge of doing the same, according to a lawyer representing a New Jersey district.

“Schools, states, and Americans across the country are rightly pushing back against Big Tech putting profits over kids’ safety online,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, co-sponsor of the , bipartisan Kids Online Safety Act, told ����Ӱ��. “These efforts, proliferated by harrowing stories from families amid a worsening youth mental health crisis, underscore the urgency for Congress to act.” 

Algorithms and platform design have “exploited the vulnerable brains of youth, hooking tens of millions of students across the country into positive feedback loops of excessive use and abuse of Defendants’ social media platforms,” Seattle Public Schools claimed in the first suit filed this January.

Districts in Washington, Oregon, Arizona, New Jersey, and , , as well as say tech companies intentionally , exacerbating depression, anxiety, tech addiction and self-harm, straining learning and district finances. 

But the legal fight, whether tried or settled, will not be easy, outside counsel and at least one district leader said. 

“We don’t think that this is a slam dunk case. We think it’s going to be an uphill battle. But our board and I believe that this is in the best interest of our students to do this,” said Andi Fourlis, superintendent of Arizona’s largest district, Mesa Public Schools. “It’s about making the case that we need to do better for our kids.” 

Just how badly Mesa’s teens are hurting is laid out in detail in court filings: More than a third are chronically absent, 3,500 more were involved in disciplinary incidents in 2021-22 than in 2019-20 and the district has seen a “surge” in suicidal ideation and anxiety. 

Buried in the 111-page lawsuit, a high school senior’s video essay illustrates the painful impacts of social media addiction: risky or self-destructive behavior, disconnection from friends.

Simultaneously, and lawmakers are proposing bills to make platforms safer. Senate are underway, featuring parents whose children died by suicide. TikTok’s CEO this month to address concerns about exposure to harmful content. President Joe Biden flagged “,” in his last State of the Union Address.

Both legislative and legal efforts are after similar goals: changing the algorithms and product design believed to be hurting and kids. Through lawsuits, districts also seek financial compensation for the increased mental health services and training they’ve “” to establish. 

“The harms caused by social media companies have impacted the districts’ ability to carry out their core mission of providing education. The expenditures are not sustainable and divert resources from classroom instruction and other programs,” said Michael Innes, partner with Carella Byrne, Cecchi, Olstein, Brody & Agnello, a firm representing New Jersey schools.

Previous complaints against opioid and e-cigarette companies, which levied public nuisance and negligence claims as districts’ social media filings do, resulted in multimillion dollar settlements. 

But some legal experts say there’s a key distinction in this case: Big Tech companies aren’t the ones producing content on these platforms, individuals are. Companies have some hefty . 

“School districts are not in the business of suing people … the threshold for initiating litigation is very high,” said Dean Kawamoto, a lawyer for Keller Rohrback, the Seattle-based firm representing four districts, and thousands of others in Juul litigation. 

“I do think it says something that you’ve got a group of schools that have filed now, and I think more are going to join them,” Kawamoto added. 

Some outside counsel are . 

“I think there are questions about whether the litigation system is even a coherent way to go about this,” First Amendment scholar and Harvard Law professor Rebecca Tushnet told ����Ӱ��. “It’s very hard to use individual litigation to get systemic change, excepting in particular circumstances.” 

The exceptions, she added, have clear visions and specific outcomes, like requiring a doctor on-call for safer prison conditions. Those kinds of metrics are difficult to name when it comes to algorithms and mental health. 

What precedent (or lack thereof) tells us

Social media companies’ lawyers are likely to assert free speech protections early and often, including in initial motions to dismiss.

“The conventional wisdom is that if motions to dismiss are denied in cases like this, [companies] are much more likely to settle … reality is actually a little more mixed,” Tushnet said, adding if the claims come after business models, companies fight harder. 

An added challenge is proving causal harm — that social media companies have caused student depression, anxiety, eating disorders or self-harm. The link is one that neuroscientists and researchers are , though experts say there’s an urgent need. 

“This is a watershed moment where schools can really roll up their sleeves and do something because — not that they haven’t been in the past — but because it’s so obvious. It’s right in front of them. It’s impacting students’ education,” said Jerry Barone, chief clinical officer at Effective School Solutions, which brings mental health care to schools. 

About 13.5% of teen girls say Instagram makes thoughts of suicide worse; 17% of teen girls say it makes eating disorders worse, according to Meta’s leaked internal research, first revealed in a via .

Even if districts are able to provide proof, they may not ever see a judgment made. 

Public nuisance claims in tobacco and opioid mass torts were more successful in “inducing settlements, rather than in courthouse outcomes,” according to Robert Rabin, tort expert and professor at Stanford University. 

While he’s not “dismissive” of districts’ efforts, “the precedents don’t supply clear-cut support for the claims here.”’

The interim

As lawyers work out the details, students are left in the balance. Some are skeptical the suits will amount to anything at all, at least in their adolescence. 

“Why do you guys waste so much time on these useless things that you know get nowhere, when you can do it with things that you know will get somewhere?” said Angela Ituarte, a sophomore at a Seattle high school. 

Many young people interviewed by ����Ӱ�� described their social media use like a double-edged sword: affirming, a place where they learned about mental health or found community, particularly for queer students of color; and simultaneously dangerous, a place where they connected with adults when they were 14 and saw dangerous diets promoted.

Social media, Ituarte said, makes it seem like self-harm and disordered eating, “are the solution to everything. And it’s hard to get that out of those algorithms — even if you block the accounts or say you’re not interested it still keeps popping up. Usually it’s when things are bad, too.”

In a late February letter to senators, Meta touted a promising initiative to on one for extended periods. Only 1 in 5 teens actually moved to a new topic during a weeklong trial. 

To curb cyberbullying, users now get warnings for potentially offensive comments. People only edit or delete their message 50% of the time, according to the company’s responses to Senate inquiries. 

Meta, YouTube and Google did not respond to requests for comment. TikTok told ����Ӱ�� they cannot comment on ongoing litigation. The company has just started requiring users who say they are under 18 to enter a password after scrolling for an hour.

In a statement to ����Ӱ��, Snap said they “are constantly evaluating how we continue to make our platform safer.” Snap has partnered with mental health organizations to launch an in-app support system for users who may be experiencing a crisis, and acknowledged that the work may never be done. 

The process has only just begun. If the suits move to trial, some districts will be chosen as bellwethers to represent the many plaintiffs, tasked with regularly contributing to a lengthy trial. 

Still, there’s no doubt in Fourlis’s mind. 

“Sometimes you have to be the first to step forward to take a bold leap so that others can follow,” she said. “Being the superintendent of the largest school district in Arizona, what we do often sets precedents, and I have to be very strategic about that responsibility.”

Disclosure: Campbell Brown, Meta’s vice president of media partnerships, is a co-founder and member of the board of directors of ����Ӱ��. She played no role in the editing of this article.

The Democrat from Massachusetts, who has long championed consumer privacy and become a key adversary of tech companies like Meta for monetizing user data, joined a Zoom call Tuesday evening to rally support for two bills he said would protect kids from being manipulated by social media algorithms. But he also brought some bad news: The legislation had “stalled” in Washington despite bipartisan support. 

Advocates this week are making a push to get the bipartisan bills — the Kids Online Safety Act and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act 2.0 — across the finish line. In a letter on Monday, 145 groups including Fairplay and Common Sense Media urged lawmakers to pass the legislation in the interests of protecting youth mental health, now considered at an all-time low in this country. 

But Markey seemed to lay out a path requiring Herculean effort. 

“Only the paranoid survive,” Markey said, adding that the legislation would pass if its supporters — and youth activists in particular — called their lawmakers and demanded they “pull this out of the pile of issues” and give it priority. “We’re going to try to get it over the finish line, but we need you to just have your energy level go higher and higher for these final couple of months and we will get it done.”

The legislative push comes a year after a Facebook whistleblower disclosed research showing that the social media app Instagram had a harmful effect on youth mental well-being, especially for teenage girls. The whistleblower, Frances Haugen, to regulate social media companies — Meta owns Facebook and Instagram — that she accused of pursuing “astronomical profits” while knowingly putting its users at risk. revealed the company knew Instagram made “body image issues worse for one in three teen girls” who blamed the social media platform for driving “increases in the rate of anxiety and depression” and, for some, suicidal thoughts. 

The would make tech companies liable if they expose young people to content deemed harmful, including materials that promote self-harm, eating disorders and substance abuse. It would also require parental controls that could be used to block adult content and to study systems to verify users’ age “at the device or operating system level.”

The , which expands a law that Markey championed in 1998 to cover older teens, would ban targeted advertisements directed at children and require companies to offer an “eraser button” that allows children and teens to remove their personal data. 

But deep-pocketed tech companies, Sen. Richard Blumenthal said Tuesday, are standing in the way. 

“Our obstacles here are the big tech lobbyists,” he said. “They have armies of lobbyists. They pay them, they pay them very well. They hire them to block this legislation.”

While the legislation is designed to protect kids, some digital privacy experts say the rules could come with significant unintended consequences — and could lead to an age-verification system where all web users are made to submit documentation like a driver’s license, requiring them to hand over personal information to tech companies. 

On the Zoom call to bolster support for the bills was Vinaya Sivakumar, a high school senior from Ohio, who created her first social media profile when she was 12. What started out as being harmless, she said, quickly took a toll on her health. 

“It just snowballed into something that constantly perpetuated actions and thoughts like self-harm and eating disorders and it was really never let out of my sight,” said Sivakumar, referring to a stream of content she found harmful being fed to her by algorithms. “It almost encouraged me to make decisions that I didn’t necessarily feel were mine and my mental health was in the worst state ever.”

Kristin Bride, a mother and digital safety advocate from Oregon, implored lawmakers to pass the legislation for kids like her 16-year-old son Carson, who died by suicide in 2020 after he was “visciously bullied” by other kids on Snapchat who used third-party apps to conceal their identities. Last year, Bride , the company that owns the social media app Snapchat, and accused it of lacking safeguards to protect children from harassment. In response, Snap suspended two of the apps, Yolo and LMK. But , NGL, has since cropped up. 

“Until social media companies are held accountable for their harmful products, they will always put profit over people,” Bride said, “and kids like Carson and so many others are just collateral damage.” 

Despite the heightened focus in Washington around digital rights and tech companies’ use of user data for targeted advertising, broader digital privacy legislation has also struggled this year. which would create a national digital privacy standard and limit the personal data that tech companies can collect about users, has hit roadblocks, from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. 

Earlier this month, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission for violating European Union data privacy laws. The commission has been investigating the company for an Instagram setting that automatically sets the profiles of teenagers as public by default. 

Meanwhile, Meta has begun to roll out , including that automatically routes new users younger than 16 to a version with limits on content deemed inappropriate.

The childrens’ safety legislation, which would strengthen rules that haven’t been updated for decades, has received support from a broad range of groups focused on youth well-being, including and the American Psychological Association and The Jed Foundation. from digital rights advocates including the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In that while lawmakers deserve credit “for attempting to improve online data privacy for young people,” the plan would ultimately “require surveillance and censorship” of children and teens “and would greatly endanger the rights, and safety, of young people online.” 

“Data collection is a scourge for every internet user, regardless of age,” the report notes, but the legislation could ultimately force tech companies to further track their users. “Surveillance of young people is , even in the healthiest household, and is not a solution to helping young people navigate the internet.”

Disclosure: Campbell Brown oversees global media partnerships at Meta. Brown co-founded ����Ӱ��  and sits on its board of directors.

Along with her peer Reese Wiley, Laufgraben decided to launch a new group, IU Students for Reproductive Rights. In Indiana, Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb on Friday announced an emergency legislative session in early July, likely to enact a . 

With that backdrop, IU Students for Reproductive Rights will support people on campus with uteruses, run voter registration drives and share information about ways to take action, such as a Monday in Bloomington, said Laufgraben.

On Saturday, the leaders created an for the new group. Just a few days since its founding, the account already has hundreds of followers. More than 80 students have reached out asking how they can get involved. 

“We were not expecting so many people to be coming to us, saying, ‘I’m passionate, I want to help,’” Laufgraben told ����Ӱ��.

The co-founders created a group chat for their new student members. A cascade of messages quickly began pouring in:

“Hey guys,” one student wrote, “I just wanted to say to anyone on here, if you need support or love during this time, don’t hesitate to reach out.”

“I’m so grateful for the support because this is such an important issue that needs action immediately,” added another.

The camaraderie and uplift after a Friday ruling that left her and others “heartbroken,” said Laufgraben, has been encouraging.

“It has been sparking so many conversations and it’s honestly really beautiful because people are finding support within this group,” she said.

The response among Indiana University students is one of many examples of youth across the country rallying for reproductive rights in response to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Organization decision.

“Young people who have not been previously involved in the abortion movement are feeling called to act,” Tamara Marzouk told ����Ӱ��. 

Marzouk works with hundreds of youth advocates for reproductive rights as director of abortion access at the nonprofit . In the days since the Friday ruling, she’s seen a new wave of young people become galvanized over abortion access. 

In the 24 hours after the Supreme Court announced it was overturning Roe, more than 150 young people across the country — in states where abortion remains legal as well as where it is now banned — signed up to join the and work for reproductive rights in their communities, she said.

Since a leaked majority SCOTUS opinion came out in early May, youth advocates have been preparing for the possible overturn of Roe, including similar to what Laufgraben and her peers will pursue.

“We still need to be fighting for abortion policy, but in the meantime, young people are really taking care of one another,” said Marzouk.

, a Gen Z-led organization working to help youth nationwide get involved in politics, issued a statement promising mobilization at the polls in response to the ruling.

“[Friday’s] decision makes clear that the Supreme Court does not represent Gen Z or the future we imagine for our country,” the organization wrote. “We must elect representatives who will protect us when the courts have failed. Our generation will not stop fighting for reproductive rights — for human rights.”

Abortions are now illegal or heavily restricted in , and 12 other states have laws in place that could pave the way for similar bans. Still more, including Indiana, are expected to soon enact new laws outlawing the procedures.

In the past, Indiana University students seeking to terminate a pregnancy have been able to receive treatment at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Bloomington, Indiana, said Laufgraben. But if the legislature criminalizes the procedures, young people would soon have to trek out of state to receive care — an option that will be difficult for students who don’t have access to transportation or can’t get permission to skip their classes and on-campus jobs.

In Arkansas, a near-total abortion ban is already in effect with . Ali Taylor, president and co-founder of the Arkansas Abortion Support Network, said the law will have a disproportionate impact on young people.

“It’s difficult for minors to travel,” she told ����Ӱ��. “Most minors will probably [now] have great difficulty in accessing abortion.”

Taylor’s organization is based in Little Rock and the closest clinic now available is in Granite City, Illinois, a five hour drive away.

The fall of Roe “most adversely affects communities that are already marginalized,” Marzouk emphasized. “There are some people who might be able to travel across state lines. That may not be a burden as much for some people as it is for others.”

Laufgraben, for her part, is still absorbing the possible implications on her Indiana campus. But she’s determined to continue to push for change.

“Right now is really scary,” said the young organizer. But “the fight isn’t over.”

But rather than comments whispered in hallways, students frequently share those juicy nuggets through anonymous online “” accounts on Facebook and Instagram that much of the student body follows religiously.

“People will be talking about it, like, ‘Did you just see the new confession?’ ” said Samantha Farrow, a junior at Stuy.

Many confessions are harmless — complimenting a classmate’s smile or admitting apprehension about prom — but others target and bully students. In Farrow’s freshman year, a post called her and two peers overweight and unattractive. Dozens of students came to their defense, she said, reassuring them the insult was completely untrue. But still, the post affected her.

“I was mad and I was upset,” Farrow remembered. “It was very degrading to my self-esteem as a 14-year old.”

Accounts like Stuy Confessions are hardly rare, students across the country report. Though the pages , lockdown may have increased their popularity and influence as teens lost the ability to connect in person for months on end.

When schools en masse shifted online, much of young people’s socializing also migrated into virtual spaces like Discord servers, Google Hangouts and TikTok. Now two years later, even as pandemic restrictions have fallen across the country, many online communities remain, students say, and impact K-12 classrooms in ways that adults fail to understand.

“It’s really going over [educators’] heads,” Farrow told ����Ӱ��. “So much stuff happens on Facebook and Instagram, the confessions accounts, and they have no idea.”

“What people post on social media kinda seeps into the classroom,” she added.

In fall 2021, when Diego Camacho’s Los Angeles high school returned to in-person learning, students began taking pictures of their peers — sometimes eating, sometimes of their shoes under the bathroom stall — and posting them online anonymously without consent, he told ����Ӱ��. 

He and other students “were constantly looking over our shoulders, looking around when we ate and some [of us] refused to use the bathroom out of fear [we] would end up on the pages,” said the high school senior. 

It took school administration two months to shut down the account, he said. While the page was active, it “created a lot of distrust between students,” said Camacho.

At Mia Miron’s middle school in nearby Pomona, California, Instagram pages of a similar style continue to pop up despite old accounts getting banned on numerous occasions, she said. With page titles based on the phrase “Lorbeer Lookalikes,” a play on their school’s name, users send photos they took of classmates to the accounts via direct message, and the page administrator then posts the images without indicating who submitted them.

“I just followed it to make sure nobody that I know would get hurt by not knowing their photo was on there,” explained Miron. 

Twice, the accounts have shared pictures of her sitting at her desk. The eighth grader doesn’t know who runs the account, she said, and did not give consent for those images to be posted. 

“I wouldn’t like my photo to be on there without my permission,” she told ����Ӱ��.

While Miron says she hasn’t taken the posts personally, a friend of hers was cyberbullied on the page, she said, which took a toll on the middle schooler’s mental health. 

����Ӱ�� spoke with eight students in 6th through 12th grade and one college student about their experience of social media’s impact on education post-COVID. Most agreed that lockdown initially forced them to lean more heavily on online platforms to stay connected with peers and that some of those habits have since stuck around.

But the proliferation of online content and connection has also delivered some positive effects, students emphasized.

Kota Babcock, a senior at Colorado State University, said his roommate joined a pandemic Discord server they still use for weekly horror movie screenings. High schooler Ameera Eshtewi, of Portland, Oregon, hones her programming skills as a member of the online community . And Joshua Oh, a Gambrills, Maryland middle schooler, said Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter helped him and his peers quickly spread the word to wear pink in support of victims of an alleged sexual assault at a nearby high school.

Circulated within Oh’s student body, a satirical TikTok account pokes fun without crossing a line, the teen said. The “slander” page posts videos about students and teachers that he finds “funny when they are true.”

One of a cowboy coughing heavily and falling down on a train track is captioned, “What Lois thinks will happen if she doesn’t have gum for 00000.1 seconds.” Another video with the caption “Brandon trying to convince his ex to take him back” features a man in the rain to a Lil Nas X song. 

In a key difference from the pages at Miron and Camacho’s schools, none of the videos include images of actual students. 

And in Pomona, as a counter to some of the online toxicity within Miron’s middle school, a student also created a school-based TikTok account featuring an “appreciation post for the girls that got put down on that other Lorbeer account.” The pictures students’ smiling faces set to B.o.B’s Nothing on You.

Instagram and other social media can have degrading effects on youth mental health, including eating disorders and suicidal ideation, particularly for teen girls bombarded with unhealthy body image standards. Facebook (now Meta), Instagram’s parent company, has tracked the harms for years, internal documents reported by the , but implemented few measures to curb the addictiveness of its app, as teen users have driven much of its popularity.

Even when students use accounts to uplift each other, ZaNia Stinson, a high school student in Charlotte, North Carolina, said that she and her peers’ dependence on social media often makes them less present IRL — in real life. 

Teachers often collect phones during class, she said, and when the devices get returned afterward, “we don’t pay attention in the halls so we bump into people, like our heads are glued to [our] phones.”

During free periods at Stuyvesant, said Farrow, students will often sit next to each other in the hallway without saying a word, just scrolling. The tendency, she believes, to ignore human contact in favor of digital has worsened since COVID. From time to time, she herself pulls up Instagram during class without the teacher knowing, she admits.

Yet one online outlet has provided consistent solace for her since early in the pandemic. In June 2020, the high schooler created a Twitter stan account, or fan account, for K-pop megastars BTS, who she jokingly described as her “biggest passion in life.” She has fun chatting with other fans of the group and appreciates the low stakes because she doesn’t know any of the other users in real life, she said.

Social media is “a good outlet if you know how to use it the right way,” said Farrow. “But I don’t think a lot of people do.”

This story was brought to you via ����Ӱ��’s Student Council initiative, an effort to boost youth voices in our reporting. America’s Promise Alliance helped in the recruiting of our diverse 11-member council and the idea was conceived as part of Asher Lehrer-Small’s Poynter-Koch Media and Journalism Fellowship.

In early March, a pandemic celebrity best known for advocating that schools should move toward a pre-COVID normal wielded her weapon of choice, arguing in The Atlantic that lifting mask mandates for all but the youngest students is “.”

Emily Oster laid out what she, and many others, understood to be the situation at hand in her opening paragraph: “Although the CDC recently moved to relax COVID guidelines, it continues to recommend universal indoor masking in early-childhood-education programs for those ages 2 and older.”��

The CDC’s coronavirus for child care providers, last updated Jan. 28, lists a number of “key takeaways,” including that the agency “recommends universal indoor masking in [early childhood education] programs for those ages 2 years and older, regardless of vaccination status.”

But in a surprising twist, about a week later, the Brown University economist posted an update on her Instagram story.

“After my piece in @theatlantic last week, the CDC emailed me to let me know they DO NOT recommend masking for toddlers in areas with low or moderate transmission. Toddlers’ masking recommended to align with everyone else,” she wrote. “They are struggling to get the message out so maybe this will help!”

“I realize that seems a little crazy, but I am telling you that is the email I received from a senior person at the CDC.”

The federal agency has a yellow banner at the top of its that says the CDC’s latest recommendations “align precautions for educational settings with those for other community settings.”

“That banner … is intended to replace all of the information that is below it in the bullets that say that kids should still be masking,” Oster said in an Instagram video.

In late February, the CDC made major news when it replaced its previous recommendation that all schools require universal masking, stipulating instead that classrooms could now go mask-optional when community COVID rates were low or moderate, the current virus level across most of the country.

But without a vaccine available for those younger than 5, Oster and many others understood the guidance to apply only to K-12 schools, not early child care and pre-K programs. The CDC is “easing its recommendations for wearing masks in indoor K-12 settings,” the Los Angeles Times .

But in fact, the guidance was meant to apply to all educational levels, including those under 5.

In a Thursday email to ����Ӱ��, the CDC confirmed that “recommendations for masks in K-12 schools and early care and education (ECE) programs are consistent with recommendations for other community settings.” 

“Children ages 2-4 have a lower risk of severe disease from COVID-19 and parents of children in ECE programs as well as ECE staff can make appropriate choices about mask wearing in school settings based on local requirements and their personal levels of risk,” wrote spokesperson Jade Fulce.

She did not explain why it has taken the agency several weeks to update its website, but said they would make the information available “as soon as possible.”

To New York City parent Daniela Jampel, whose 4-year-old daughter has continued masking while her older sister goes to school face exposed, the delay is unacceptable.

“It’s ridiculous,” she said. “The CDC is having trouble updating its website so they reach out to Emily Oster?”

“Their website on this issue should not be left to interpretation. It should be very clear,” said Jampel, an early advocate for amid remote learning and now an outspoken critic of the city’s decision to leave masking in place for preschoolers.

Oster agreed that the unconventional communication method underscores the widespread confusion on the issue, but clarified that the CDC did not contact her asking her to spread the word about their policy. Rather, they were correcting what they said was inaccurate information in her Atlantic piece.

“They weren’t like, ‘Oh, by the way, it would be great if you could share with people this information,’” Oster told ����Ӱ��. “They just said, ‘Everybody should already know this.’ But I think it’s pretty clear looking at … how people responded that they have not managed to make that clear.”

Several parents, mostly in blue states like New Jersey, Connecticut and Illinois, responded to Oster’s update saying that their child care provider was still requiring masks, said the professor.

“I showed this (post) to my provider,” many parents wrote, and in response were told, “Well, if the website still says that masks are required, that’s not our interpretation of what that banner is.”

“There is a fair amount of people looking to this guidance and trying to interpret it and the way that it is currently stated is extremely difficult to interpret clearly,” said Oster.

The confusion extended to The Atlantic itself, which did not immediately update Oster’s original column to reflect the CDC’s clarified guidance after Oster received the agency’s email. In a follow-up interview with ����Ӱ��, Oster said she corresponded with her editor, but because the CDC had made no official announcement on how to interpret the vague website, the outlet decided not to alter its story at that time.

“[The fact-checker] read the banner at the top, but then everything below it still said there should be masking,” she said. “It went under the radar.”

However, after this story first published and ����Ӱ�� requested comment from The Atlantic, Oster’s piece was updated Thursday night to reflect the disconnect in the CDC’s guidance between the banner and the information below it.

Many early childhood education providers nationwide continue to require universal masking for 2- to 4-year olds.

Head Start, a federal school readiness program serving over 800,000 children from low-income families each year, 2-year-olds and up to wear face masks indoors, although in a Jan. 1 ruling, a U.S. district judge on the program’s rule in 24 states, mostly Republican. In the remaining 26 states, even those that long ago lifted their school mask mandates, participating toddlers are still required to cover up.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams cited hospitalization data when announcing earlier this month that the country’s largest school district was lifting its K-12 mask mandate but keeping the rule for 2- to 4-year-olds.

“When you look at those under 5, they were more likely to be hospitalized,” Adams . “People wanted to say, ‘Let’s lift it across the board,’ but that’s not what the science was showing us.”

Masking in early child care settings is associated with a in program closures due to virus outbreaks, according to a recent study from doctors at Yale University. But the data were collected during the early months of the pandemic before vaccines were available to staff.

And while federal data show that hospitalizations for children under 5 did spike during the Omicron surge, an outsized share of that uptick was driven by newborns not yet 6 months old, who the masking guidance does not apply to anyway.

Meanwhile, COVID cases in Europe are , fueled by a more transmissible Omicron subvariant. Even as infections continue to , many experts warn that the increases across the pond could foreshadow a coming wave in America.

Jampel, despite frustration with the CDC’s haphazard rollout of its guidance for toddlers, doubts whether more clarity would impact the rules affecting her family. 

“New York City schools have done many things that go far beyond what the CDC recommends,” she said. “I’m not convinced that it’s the CDC holding us up, and I’m not convinced that a CDC change will mean that our political leaders will take notice and change their policies.”

Neither the Department of Education nor the Department of Health immediately responded to requests for comment.

Steven Barnett, co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Research, said the two key questions on the issue are “What are the health benefits from masking young children?” and “What are the developmental consequences?”

“The problem with trying to be an expert on this issue is that there is very limited science on which to base conclusions,” he told ����Ӱ�� in an email. “With respect to the health benefits, the known risks to young children from infection are quite small but this is a novel virus with unknown long-term risks.”

“All this leads me to think,” he continued, “that masks for young children may be prudent when there is a high rate of community transmission” — a conclusion that lands him in alignment with the now clarified CDC guidance.

But with all the CDC’s communication glitches along the way, Oster worries it will impact the public’s faith in the agency, which has been shaken several times throughout the two-year pandemic.

“This erodes trust,” she said. “If people are trying to trust the CDC, they’re trying to listen to them, when the messaging is confused in this way, or incomplete in this way, it makes people less likely to pay attention to the CDC.” 

“I was part of those people that sort of had their doubts,” the Miami high school senior told ����Ӱ��.

He was worried that the development of the shot was too quick, and that perhaps the safety checks were incomplete. He opted to hold off on receiving the vaccine.

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But soon after, a classmate changed his mind.

Abigail Felan, communications director for the student-led nonprofit , was presenting information on the vaccine to classes at Coral Gables Senior High School, where she and Montigny are students, as part of her organization’s all-new Teens Get the Vaccine campaign. For Montigny, who over the summer would be traveling to France to spend time with his grandmother and was worried about putting her at risk, Felan’s pitch struck a chord. Hearing her speak about the vaccine’s safety and benefits was enough to convince him to roll up his sleeve before going overseas.

Now, as schools across the country prepare to return students to classrooms after a summer marked by increasing COVID caseloads brought on by the Delta variant, New Voters is re-launching its Teens Get the Vaccine campaign. The group hopes to persuade peers, like Montigny, on the fence over whether or not to get vaccinated.

“This is such a pressing issue right now,” said Felan, whose state has one of the worst outbreaks of the Delta variant in the nation, with there this week.

Youth vaccination rates continue to . As of July 28, some , according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, representing 40 percent of 16- to 17-year-olds and 28 percent of 12- to 15-year-olds. Another 2.2 million teens and adolescents had received a single dose. Meanwhile, against COVID.

Down from a high of 1.6 million youth vaccinations per week in late May, rates fell to 315,000 shots per week in early July, before rebounding slightly, with 450,000 individuals under 18 immunized in the week prior to July 28. The uptick may perhaps reflect growing concern for the highly transmissible Delta variant, which more readily infects young people than previous strains. Youth 12 and up are currently eligible for COVID-19 immunizations, and .

In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio has launched an all-out blitz to vaccinate eligible students in the country’s largest school district, including a , before the district’s mid-September start.

Felan’s student-led organization, she believes, has special leverage to persuade teens to get vaccinated because they can empathize with their peers’ concerns.

“We have that youth appeal to show that we understand,” Felan, also a rising senior, told ����Ӱ��.

With misinformation about the vaccine constantly being spread online and landing in teenagers’ newsfeeds, Felan and her team try not to shame students for having the facts wrong, she added.

“It’s important to show that we are empathetic.”

From Aug. 6 to Sept. 6, New Voters will double down on its campaign. This spring, Felan reached over 2,000 students by Zooming into classes at her school and speaking about the vaccine. This fall, the group plans to expand its classroom presentation campaign to other locales where the nonprofit has member branches, including California, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, as well as other parts of Florida outside Miami.

The organization also recorded TikTok videos and Instagram reels that together amassed over 10,000 views and conducted a to answer youth questions on vaccine safety.

This fall, the youth-powered group plans to continue its information campaign and will partner with various civic engagement organizations such as and . On Friday, New Voters will hold an Instagram live session with Katie Grossbard, a founding member of the nonprofit , a nonprofit working to promote democratic participation, says Felan, who is hopeful that the collaborations will help her team’s message reach new audiences.

“On a national level, I really hope we can double our reach —��or triple our reach,” said the high schooler.

She knows there will always be people who watch their videos and ignore the information. But then again, she says, there will also be people who learn something new or are inspired to have a conversation about the vaccine. After seeing a TikTok clip, “maybe they talk to their sister or their friend about [the shot],” said Felan.

The group has already had an international impact. Montigny, inspired by the pitch he received from New Voters, was able to talk his French cousins, who he’s staying with this summer, into making vaccine appointments for themselves.

When he returns to Miami, he says, “If I have friends that are not [vaccinated], I know that I can try to convince them.”

There are two explanations for this. One is the students themselves. For justifiable reasons, kids without computers or Internet access at home are not able to participate fully in instruction delivered via technology.

But there’s another level to this that is out of the students’ control. In too many places, official district policies will lead to children missing so much instructional time that they would be considered chronically absent in any other year.

As I wrote back in August, every state a minimum number of days or hours that make up an instructional year. By law, schools are required to teach students for at least that amount of time. States typically allow some leeway if districts lose time due to severe weather or other emergencies, but after some threshold, districts are required to make up for lost time.

In that August piece, I ran the numbers on what my local public school district of Fairfax, Virginia, was offering to my children. Through its remote learning schedule, I calculated that Fairfax was offering less than half of a typical school year to my first-grade son.

These problems are not unique to Fairfax. of the nation’s school districts started the year with full, in-person instruction, and larger districts were more likely to start the school year fully remote or with hybrid schedules combining some aspects of each. In other words, the majority of American students are experiencing either a partial school day or week, or fully virtual classes.

To make those models work, and to avoid Zoom fatigue for both teachers and students, districts reduced the number of instructional hours. They also cut the number of days of instruction they were offering each week in order to give teachers more time to plan. Similarly, some districts, like Fairfax and New York City, started the school year late as they finalized their plans.

I’m not questioning the logic of any of these decisions. After all, we’re in the midst of a pandemic that no school leader alive today has ever experienced. But collectively, how much learning time will these decisions cost students?

To find out, I looked for sample schedules in 10 of the country’s largest school districts for students in fifth, eighth and 11th grades, to get a range of ages. These were not all easy to find. Some districts provided clear communications about what they might be able to expect for their children, while others buried the information in teacher labor agreements. In a few cases, mostly in the South, the districts did not provide a revised schedule because there was no change from prior years. From those schedules I could find, I compared the number of hours of live instruction the district planned for each group of students with the state’s for the amount of school time children should receive in a normal year.

The graph below shows the results. The red line across the middle represents a district meeting 100 percent of what the state requires in a normal year.

As the graph shows, seven of the 10 districts — Los Angeles; Clark County, Nevada; Wake County, North Carolina; New York City; Montgomery Country, Maryland; Fairfax; and Chicago — are all planning to deliver far less instructional time to students than normal.

On the other end, Houston; Gwinnett County, Georgia; and Miami-Dade, Florida, are all on track to surpass the minimal state requirements for instructional hours. Other researchers have about the political factors contributing to school reopening decisions, with big-city districts in Democratic-controlled states more likely to be fully remote than more rural areas in Republican-controlled states. But this exercise suggests we should extend that dynamic even further: The number of instructional hours students are receiving depends on what region or city in which they live. Students in rural areas and in the South are likely to receive many more hours of instruction this year than their peers living in other regions of the country.

The projected learning loss for students is staggering. Los Angeles, Clark County, Wake County and New York City all plan to deliver less than half of a normal school year’s worth of instruction for students of all ages. That translates into 433 lost hours for a fifth-grader in New York City and 558 hours in Los Angeles. Depending on the length of a school day, these losses are the equivalent of 60 to 100 days of lost learning time.

Now, these figures are hypothetical. Some districts are allowing parents to choose the type of schooling they want for their children, or varying their offerings for different student groups, while these estimates rely on the default schedule that districts are providing most students at the beginning of the year, and they assume that students will remain on those schedules. Although I am using the term “instructional” time, I did count non-academic time such as class transition periods and lunch breaks, but I did not count other forms of instruction, such as homework assignments or pre-recorded lesson plans, that may be going on outside of formal meeting times.

Still, these figures assume perfect attendance, and that an hour of virtual instruction is perfectly comparable to an hour of in-person instruction.

This exercise is meant to be illustrative and is not intended to suggest that these districts should immediately reopen regardless of the viral spread in their community. Nor is it meant to cast blame on any of the decisionmakers involved.

But it does illustrate the potential costs of our inability thus far to manage the spread of COVID-19. It should also serve as a reminder that we’ll eventually need to invest in those students who are getting less education than they deserve right now.

Chad Aldeman is a senior associate partner at Bellwether Education Partners and the editor of TeacherPensions.org.

The National KIPP Alumni Network offers both alum-to-alum support as well as outside professional guidance. The three external players in the network programs, financed by California-based Crankstart Foundation, are:

• The Career Booster Program, a two-week virtual career guidance bootcamp. The course will be free for KIPP alumni (classes of 2018, 2019, and 2020). It covers topics including building your LinkedIn, interviewing for jobs and how to network.
• , a placement and coaching organization specializing in historically underrepresented talent, will create a pilot program focused on supporting KIPP alumni who do not have a college degree with coaching and job placement. Eligible alumni must have at least two years of full-time work experience to apply for the program.
• will provide free mental health counseling services for alumni. The pilot starts with 300 alumni, who will have four free virtual counseling sessions per month. If the program works, it will expand. The sessions are designed to reach students who have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19 and experienced trauma from the recent police shootings of Black men and women nationwide.

The idea for the network arose from a huge gathering of KIPP alumni a year ago in Houston. KIPP, which was launched in Houston in 1994, now operates 255 schools serving more than 100,000 students across the country.

“We found out that our college graduates were coming out of college and not landing jobs, or not landing jobs that helped them move up,” said Nancy Kyei, manager of KIPP’s Alumni Impact Team, which oversees the effort. “They were finding jobs, but not careers. It’s tough because our graduates don’t have a network of family and friends that generations of affluent students have had coming out of college.”

A survey of close to 5,000 KIPP alumni revealed their priorities: How to connect to successful people in their field, how to turn entrepreneurial ideas into businesses, how to advance in their careers, how to manage their finances and access to mental health resources. More than half said they would like to mentor another student from KIPP.

Some alums are already receiving support.

Sara Aranda, who graduated in 2017 from the University of North Texas with an accounting degree, works as an accountant for Pecan Grove Farms & Nursery at their Dallas headquarters. Aranda attended the Houston KIPP alumni gathering and signed up for a Managing Your Finances series offered within the network.

Why would an accountant need help with finances? Aranda, whose parents brought her to the United States from Mexico when she was 6 years old, is in the DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program. Only Spanish was spoken at home, and for understandable reasons her parents avoided banks. Even a college degree can’t make up for some deficits.

After the virtual seminars, she started a spreadsheet that keeps track of every expense, made some stock market investments, drew up a plan to buy a house and has plans for graduate school. The course was taught by a KIPP alum.

“Hearing from someone like me who has done it made me feel like I can do it too,” Aranda said.

Two decades ago, the leaders of pioneering charter schools such as KIPP, Uncommon Schools, Noble Street and YES Prep had a radical vision: We can build schools that will dramatically boost the number of low-income, minority students getting into college.

Great idea, and it worked — sort of. The problem they discovered was that students getting accepted at colleges is not the same as showing up for freshman year classes, and that getting through freshman and sophomore years is not the same as actually graduating.

So those same charter leaders turned their work toward boosting degree-earning rates, again with mostly successful results, as least compared to their counterparts from traditional high schools. The charter students were earning bachelor’s degrees at rates two to four times what might be expected.

Problem solved? Not exactly, which led to the KIPP Alumni Network. As laid out in my recent book, , being a first-generation student earning a college degree doesn’t lead to the kind of career pathways that graduates from affluent families find. The lack of good internships during college left them with little job experience, and the lack of influential personal networks (mothers and fathers who contact other mothers and fathers to secure those crucial first-chance jobs) left them with a networking disadvantage.

David Segura, a KIPP alum from Austin, graduated from the University of Texas, Austin, in May and has yet to find a job in his field, marketing. Unlike a lot of KIPP students in college, Segura had summer job internships, but none in his field, which is hampering his search. Employers, he said, want marketing experience. It doesn’t help that he’s entering the workforce in the midst of a pandemic.

Over the summer, Segura participated in a Braven program. “I was able to get tips on how I should format my resume, how I should update it on LinkedIn, and how to prepare for interviews. It made me feel a lot more confident.”

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation, The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York provide financial support to KIPP and ����Ӱ��.

Standing at a podium in the rotunda of the National Archives Building, with original copies of the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights as his backdrop, President Trump addressed the White House Conference on American History. It was Constitution Day, Sept. 17 — roughly six weeks before voters would decide the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

Trump made news in his 15-minute speech by announcing the formation of a federal panel to promote patriotic education. The commission, he said, would help to clear out a “twisted web of lies in our schools and classrooms” that deliberately misrepresented the glories of the nation’s past. While aiming rhetorical daggers at the spread of critical race theory and workplace sensitivity trainings, the president reserved special condemnation for the 1619 Project, launched by the New York Times Magazine last year to mark the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first slaves in colonial Virginia.

“The left has warped, distorted and defiled the American story with deceptions, falsehoods and lies,” he said. “There is no better example than the New York Times’ totally discredited 1619 Project. This project rewrites American history to teach our children that we were founded on the principle of oppression, not freedom.”

The president had already raised the issue of U.S. history several times in the election’s home stretch: When the White House released ahead of the Republican National Convention, one of the two education-related bullet points was a call for schools to “teach American exceptionalism.” Trump has also from schools that teach developed jointly by the Times Magazine and the Pulitzer Center. Although events overtook the messaging war to an extent — Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died the very next day, and Trump himself took to his sickbed with COVID-19 just two weeks later — the tone had already been set.

The 2020 campaign is far from the first time that efforts to update history curricula have made ripples in national politics. But whereas previous skirmishes have erupted over the function and conduct of history instruction, they never drew the focus of a sitting president just weeks before Election Day.

Mary Frances Berry, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania and a former chair of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, called the conflict “an echo of earlier dustups” around U.S. history, such as the National History Standards in the 1990s. But this iteration has been complicated by the convulsive racial politics of recent years. And in Donald Trump, who has played no small role in elevating racial grievance to the fore, the arguments of the 1619 Project have found an eager combatant.

“This period in which we have people getting shot and killed … and we have Trump — it’s a context in which the 1619 Project becomes part of the fodder to fight over race,” Berry said. “Those who want to put racial division back in a box and say, ‘We don’t need to do anything about it,’ won’t like 1619 because it puts it right in your face. And those who think that something must happen want it out there and want people to contend with it.”

Since its unveiling a little over a year ago, 1619 has won widespread acclaim for its unsparing perspective on manifestations of racial injustice extending from the Middle Passage into the present day. In lengthy essays studded with detailed sidebars, the project’s authors explore the historical roots of modern-day ills, from the to the to America’s . As a measure of its glowing public reception, teachers quickly began incorporating elements of the series into their history lessons.

But the public response did not end with adulation, and its detractors are not numbered merely among conservative Republicans. Within months of its publication, a group of well-respected historians signed to the project’s assertions about the centrality of slavery within the context of the American Revolution and the pre-Civil War economy.

The 1619 Project’s principal claim — that the true birth of the United States came not with the signing of the Declaration of Independence but with the inception of slavery — has been called into question, along with the openness of project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones and her collaborators to expert critique.

Jonathan Zimmerman, a historian of education at the University of Pennsylvania, pointed to what he called a “significant” inaccuracy in the Times Magazine’s initial claims about slavery and the Revolution. Nevertheless, he said, the intense spat over the 1619 Project, and even its sudden cameo in our ongoing culture war, offered Americans both inside and outside the classroom an opportunity to reflect on their country’s past and present.

“What a historian is supposed to say is, ‘Oh, we’ve always done this.’ And it’s true that we have always debated history in different times and places, always tried to tailor it to our political predilections. But there is something different about this moment.”

In an interview with ����Ӱ��, Hannah-Jones stood by the interpretation of facts laid out in the 1619 Project. The controversy over some of its conclusions, she said, was due partly to the reality that the country is undertaking “a lot of questioning of the way that we’ve commemorated, the way that we have taught, the way that we have embraced a certain exceptional narrative of America.”

“It is really about wrestling over who can control the narrative of the country that we live in,” she said.

Fact-checking history

Although the 1619 Project was initially conceived as a special edition of the New York Times Magazine, it didn’t stay within the glossy covers for long. Indeed, it dominated the media in the months that followed, generating a live event series and a podcast. Luminaries like then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris took to Twitter to sing its praises. And the accolades kept coming in 2020, when the series received three and Hannah-Jones was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. By that time, , some version of the 1619 curriculum was in use in 4,500 classrooms around the country, including large-scale adoption in schools in , and .

The criticism that followed originated from venues both predictable and offbeat. In The Wall Street Journal’s famously conservative editorial page, civil rights activist that the project’s “insinuation that Blacks are born inherently damaged by an all-prevailing racism.” Meanwhile, the obscure World Socialist Web Site made attacking 1619 and Hannah-Jones , denouncing its thesis as “a racialist falsification of American and world history.”

Obscure or not, the website scooped the mainstream press by exposing significant dissatisfaction with the 1619 Project among some of the most famous living historians. It published lengthy and critical interviews with Pulitzer winners and , along with acclaimed scholars and , all of whom said that Hannah-Jones and some of her collaborators had gotten key historical facts wrong and overreached in their claims about the inescapable legacy of slavery in American life. Soon enough, all four signed on to asking the Times Magazine to issue corrections and provide detail about its research and fact-checking processes.

The experts’ gripes focused on a few areas, but the most prominent came in Hannah-Jones’s introductory essay, in which she wrote that the preservation of slavery was a primary motivation among American revolutionaries fighting for independence from the British Empire. After the claim , the Times in March acknowledging that only some colonial leaders were motivated to revolt by a perceived threat to slavery.

Further complaints were raised, hinging on both fact and interpretation. Hannah-Jones had written that “for the most part,” African Americans had “fought back alone” against racist tyranny — an omission, the letter writers argued, of the multiracial coalition that won the Civil War, abolished slavery and brought about the Civil Rights Movement a century later. that sociologist Matthew Desmond’s essay relied on research that grossly overstated the importance of the plantation system to the antebellum economy.

A number of scholars also the project, including some who accused its critics of holding an outdated view of America’s founding. In one nuanced reaction, Leslie M. Harris, a Northwestern University historian who had helped fact-check Hannah-Jones’s essay, that the Times Magazine had disregarded her advice to drop the argument about the Revolution — even while defending 1619 as a valuable, if imperfect, “corrective history.”

Hannah-Jones conceded that the project was not “perfect in all ways” but argued that historians were themselves caught up in the politics of the moment. The fact that some might have opted for a different interpretive lens than she was “not discrediting,” she added.

“This was an essay that spanned 400 years of history, and one could take any one fact in that story and say, ‘She should have expounded more about that fact,’” she said. “I’m not sure how I’m supposed to answer that, frankly. I wrote an essay making an argument … that I thought was important. I did not write a book about Abraham Lincoln, and I did not write a book about the founding.”

But the most vocal detractors haven’t gone away. Oakes, a two-time winner of the prestigious Lincoln Prize and one of the most widely cited scholars on the subject of slavery and the abolitionist movement, said that he was both discouraged by the Times’s response to critics and worried that “a good deal of misinformation is going to go into the school system with the 1619 Project.”

“All they have to do is say, ‘Yes, we’ve made a mistake, and we welcome all these critics showing us where we’ve made mistakes, and we’re committed to making sure that those mistakes are corrected so that what goes into schools is accurate,’” he said. “They’ve never taken that position.”

Zimmerman countered that, notwithstanding the factual errors highlighted by his fellow historians, the 1619 Project had done a public service by bringing attention to the tangled system of racial servitude, violence and theft that had characterized the American story.

“It’s good for Americans to spend 30 seconds considering the fact that during the Revolution there were millions of enslaved people,” he said. “This is not in any way to diminish the error, which is significant, but I would still say that the debate surrounding the 1619 Project is one of the best things to happen in my career. And you don’t have to endorse everything [in it] to say that.”

Research shows that American students possess a limited knowledge of early American history and the primacy of racism’s role within it. A from the Southern Poverty Law Center found that while most teachers felt comfortable discussing slavery in the classroom, only a small fraction of the student population identified the institution of human bondage as the central cause of the Civil War.

Oakes agreed that there exists a need for more and better history instruction — especially around slavery, which he called “the central theme of my career.” But there is danger, he continued, in taking up a new form of “consensus history,” one that suppresses the perennial struggles in American democracy in favor of Manichaean simplifications.

“The conflict that arises in the American Revolution — you start getting free states and slave states, and try to imagine American history from the Revolution to the Civil War without those designations — gets ironed out, taken away,” he said. “You can’t explain American history that way. It’s not the subject matter that’s the problem; it’s the way it’s treated.”

A nation ‘seriously under question’

No stranger to simplification, the president has chosen a foil already widely hated on the Right. Even before Trump it as “ideological poison,” Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, viewed as one of the GOP’s rising stars, to ban the use of federal funds in teaching the project’s curriculum. Just a week after its publication, conservative icon Rush Limbaugh a “hoax” and said that it represented “the end of journalism, officially.”

Berry, who surveyed the partisan landscape for decades during her tenure on the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, said that the project’s emergence as a political football was predictable.

“It was good campaign fodder to come out with this, and it should appeal very much to [Trump’s] voters,” she said. “It’s consistent with his approach to dealing with race and education and civil rights. So I’m not surprised at all because it was ripe for the picking, so to speak.”

The bitter politics mirror previous debates around school history curricula, which have effervesced into the popular discourse more than once in recent years. The backlash against perceived leftist encroachments into public schools has typically been the trigger, observed James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association.

“There were complaints in the ’50s that any teachers who sang Pete Seeger folks songs in class were practicing Communist indoctrination; that was a little overwrought, in retrospect,” he said. “In many ways, some of this hysterical concern about the impact of the 1619 Project does remind me about some of the hysteria about Communist influences in the classroom in the 1950s.”

Recent decades provide fresher examples. Just a few years ago, education officials in and attempted to ban the use of a new AP U.S. History framework that was seen as jargon-filled and politically slanted. References to the “bellicose rhetoric” of Ronald Reagan (especially compared with sunnier depictions of Democrats like Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson) and the “white racial superiority” powering America’s Manifest Destiny period would leave students “ready to sign up for ISIS,” , who was about to launch his 2016 presidential run.

The furor continued when the Republican National Committee issued a resolution condemning the new curriculum. The College Board, which administers the AP exams and had spurred the controversial revision, on many of the changes. In its re-released framework, mentions of the words “racism” and “xenophobia” were omitted entirely.

An even more dramatic clash came in the 1990s, when a curricular body at UCLA spent nearly three years developing the National History Standards, a set of teaching guidelines to be adopted voluntarily by states. They were assailed almost immediately by Republicans led by former National Endowment for the Humanities chairwoman Lynne Cheney, that the standards omitted references to famous Americans like the Wright brothers and Robert E. Lee in favor of commemorating Harriett Tubman and the National Organization of Women. In the aftermath, the U.S. Senate repudiating the initiative by a vote of 99-1.

Over time, American classrooms have come to include depictions of U.S. history through non-white, non-male perspectives. A by LaGarrett King, a professor of social studies education at the University of Missouri, found that racial diversity had increasingly penetrated K-12 schools through elective classes and partnerships with institutions like the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The celebration of Black History Month has spread throughout the country and the world, and found that high schoolers listed Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Harriett Tubman and Oprah Winfrey on a top-10 list of national heroes.

Even allowing for those developments, however, King believes that the complex history of American race relations has been buried beneath an optimistic story of forward progress. Episodes like the desegregation of schools, which led to an ugly white backlash and thousands of Black educators losing their jobs, are sanitized as unalloyed triumphs.

“We include these particular people, maybe a few viewpoints, but we don’t change the narrative,” King said. “We freeze Martin Luther King with ‘I Have a Dream.’ We situate Rosa Parks as this tired seamstress. We know Harriett Tubman from the Underground Railroad. But we don’t necessarily discuss the history that’s contentious. Black history is contentious to those progressive narratives.”

Zimmerman echoed that sentiment, arguing that for much of the 20th century, well-intentioned multiculturalism had swollen U.S. history textbooks with the exploits of a diverse array of protagonists: Christopher Columbus, Johann de Kalb, Crispus Attucks. But the lessons remained blissfully celebratory, even as “we went from cheerleading for George Washington to cheerleading for George Washington Carver.”

“Now the whole nation is seriously under question,” Zimmerman said. “The 1619 Project’s advocates aren’t asking for new figures to be included in the same old narrative; they’re questioning the very contours of the narrative itself. I think that’s great, provided that it’s framed as a question rather than a new set of answers.”

Twilight struggle

As of yet, with millions of students still learning remotely and a chaotic election in its closing weeks, it’s unclear whether 1619’s footprint will grow in K-12 schools or a conservative backlash will lead educators to steer clear of the curriculum.

President Trump’s rhetorical campaign against the project has elevated it above earlier battles about U.S. history into a kind of twilight struggle that also encompasses the fate of contentious monuments and the names of army bases. David Campbell, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame, noted that the racial entanglements of the past few years — especially after a summer of protests following the police killing of George Floyd — had raised the salience of quarrels about American history and culture.

“It’s not as though race were irrelevant to the earlier debates, but it’s certainly front and center now because of the 1619 Project in a way that it wasn’t before,” he argued. “And whenever anything becomes racialized, it raises the stakes for it, and that’s what we’re seeing. It’s also why it would be attractive for Trump, who of course never shies away from injecting himself into racial debates in the country.”

Hannah-Jones, who said she doubted whether the president had read the 1619 essays, argued that he had seized upon it as a useful target in an election year that has been a kind of “reckoning” — both with the brutality of slavery, secession and Jim Crow and with the present-day horrors of police violence.

“The only reason that the 1619 Project is even being mentioned by the president right now is that it’s part of this larger culture war that has to do with what brought him into office in the first place,” she said. “I think … white Americans are particularly primed for the message the president is putting forth.”

The 2020 election comes at a time when Americans’ surety in their national purpose and ideals is sorely diminished. While Republicans have always been more likely than Democrats to declare themselves patriotic in surveys, the recent partisan divergence on that issue : Just 22 percent of Democrats said they were “extremely proud” to be American in a 2019 Gallup poll, compared with 76 percent of Republicans. In this year, a shrinking number of respondents were willing to call America an “exceptional” nation.

Campbell noted that even while serving as a proxy dispute over racial attitudes and love of country, the row over the 1619 Project is also leading to a partisan role reversal. Typically, Republican politicians are especially jealous advocates of local control of schools against governmental incursions from the state. Now the party is calling for ambitious federal steps — including a commission on patriotic education that, even if it were formed, Campbell noted, “[could] not dictate curriculum across the country.”

King, who works with active and pre-service teachers, does not believe that the 1619 curriculum poses a threat to the largely pro-American orientation of K-12 history instruction. Like countless other workbooks and modules provided by third parties for use in the classroom, he said, it would be available as a resource for teachers to use or ignore.

“I don’t see 1619 as the be-all, end-all of how we should teach slavery,” he said. “There are some really good essays in there, but just like any educated person, you pull from different stuff.”

For his part, Oakes called the president’s proposals “an abomination.”

“I have no more interest in patriotic American history than I have in denunciatory American history. You don’t get patriotism or cynicism from history; ideally, you get wisdom. And it seems to me that nobody in this debate is interested in that particularly.”

Lead Image: President Trump during the White House Conference on American History at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 17. (Photo by Saul Loeb / Getty Images)

The background of the conservative federal appeals judge could draw scrutiny at a time when the nation’s high court is increasingly easing longtime barriers to private and religious schools receiving public funds.

In her relatively short stint on the Chicago-based 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, the Notre Dame law professor didn’t rule on many school matters. But her few opinions included that sided with a Purdue University student accused of sexual assault in a Title IX case and, notably, voting with against extending public school transportation services to a private school. Although the Supreme Court has no cases directly related to education in its upcoming term, its growing conservative majority is widely expected in the coming years to issue decisive rulings on such issues as raced-based admissions, gay and transgender students’ rights and the limits of school choice.

Chief Justice John Roberts “loathes 5-4 decisions,” said Joshua Dunn, a professor of political science at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs. “On some of these education issues, there’s a chance that she could pull Roberts into a 6-3 majority.”

Already this year, the court gave school choice advocates a victory in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, ruling 5-4 that excluding religious schools from a tax-credit-funded scholarship program violates an individual’s First Amendment right to freely practice their religion. But legal experts agree that the ruling left some questions unanswered at a time when at least three similar cases are pending in state and federal courts.

“There are going to be those who use Espinoza to leverage more school choice victories,” Dunn said. “I think there are going to be questions about whether a religious institution could run a charter school. You have to assume it’s coming.”

Barrett is a member of the conservative People of Praise organization, which runs Trinity Schools — a network of nondenominational Christian schools that teach “marriage to be a legal and committed relationship between a man and a woman.” She served as at Trinity School at Greenlawn, a South Bend, Indiana, school, until 2017. The schools have “provided the foundation” for “more than a dozen public charter schools in Arizona, Texas, and Colorado,” according to the organization’s .

‘A serious academic’

Describing herself as a “room parent, carpool driver, and birthday party planner” during her nomination Saturday, the 48-year-old mother of seven said, “Judges are not policymakers, and they must be resolute in setting aside any policy views they might hold.”

In his comments, President Trump noted that Barrett would be the first justice with school-age children.

She also has life experience that could “make her sensitive” to some school issues, such as special education, said Gary Orfield, the director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. Her youngest child has Down syndrome, and two of her children were adopted from Haiti.

But Orfield said her appointment doesn’t bode well for those arguing that students have a right to a basic level of education, as plaintiffs argued in a now-settled Detroit literacy case. A similar case in Rhode Island focuses on students’ claim that they should have a minimum level of to participate as citizens in a democracy.

“Anybody who is trying to figure out how to get the federal courts to order more funding for public schools is not going to go anywhere with this kind of court,” Orfield said. “I think that lawyers looking for positive orders of this sort are going to turn to state courts or work on laws in Congress or state legislatures because a court with six extreme conservatives is likely to be a desert for equity.”

Orfield, a Catholic, said he has visited Barrett’s charismatic People of Praise church, near the Notre Dame campus, and described the service as “very emotional.” He criticized Democrat Diane Feinstein’s reference to Barrett’s “dogma” during her for the 7th Circuit.

“I think [Barrett] is a serious academic and she has a set of theoretical beliefs, and they shouldn’t just be defined as dogma,” Orfield said.

LGBTQ-related cases

In the court’s upcoming term beginning Oct. 5, one case in which liberals would likely raise the issue of Barrett’s religious convictions is Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The court will decide whether a public agency violated the First Amendment by requiring a religious organization to contradict its beliefs to receive a government contract. In the case, the city told a Catholic foster care agency that it couldn’t discriminate against same-sex couples who wanted to become foster parents, but the agency did not comply.

John Bursch, senior counsel at the far-right Alliance Defending Freedom — which has paid Barrett to deliver a lecture — said that the outcome of Fulton could affect an education case in Maryland. A Baltimore-area Christian school is suing Maryland state Superintendent Karen Salmon, that the state revoked its eligibility to participate in a voucher program because the school lacks a nondiscrimination policy that protects LGBTQ students.

“Both cases involve a government entity making false accusations of bigotry against a religious organization because of its beliefs about marriage,” Bursch said. “No religious school should be forced to give up its Biblical beliefs to participate in a government program that provides educational assistance to low-income students.”

By a decisive 7-2 , the Supreme Court this year also upheld the “ministerial exception” that allows religious institutions to disregard the antidiscrimination policies that apply to secular organizations. The decision would be relevant in any future cases involving religious schools with anti-LGBTQ workplace policies that participate in school choice programs.

A ruling in favor of the plaintiffs in Fulton could also influence the outcome of cases involving , such as those in which teachers cite religious objections when not referring to transgender students by their preferred names or pronouns, said Sharon McGowan, chief strategy officer and legal director for Lambda Legal.

“There is an ongoing assault against transgender students’ ability to use appropriate restrooms and participate in athletic programs,” McGowan said, adding that Barrett is “cut from the same cloth as Betsy DeVos,” who in a letter to pull funding from Connecticut schools that allow transgender girls to compete as girls in track. The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights argues that having separate sports based on biological differences does not violate Title IX.

But the letter to the schools also references the Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling this year in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, which stated that Title VII protections against workplace discrimination include LGBTQ employees. Advocates like McGowan, and some argue that the ruling should now extend to schools. But Dunn, at the University of Colorado, noted that those wanting to keep the laws separate probably “feel better” than they did before Barrett’s appointment.

The Bostock decision also leaves the door open for future cases that deal more directly with transgender students’ bathroom use. With Trump nominee Neil Gorsuch writing for the majority, the opinion also showed that the president’s court picks don’t always rule the way his supporters prefer.

“Gorsuch shows that conservative justices will defy expectations,” Dunn said.

Other civil rights issues

Barrett’s 7th Circuit opinion last year in a involving Purdue University is under examination in light of pending Title IX cases that could reach the court. The appellate decision made it easier for men accused of sexual violence to sue their schools if they think they were unfairly treated. Several similar cases are currently pending at the circuit court level.

In one Title IX case that the Supreme Court could hear, a student who sued the Michigan State University Board of Trustees is trying to overturn an appeals court decision that found that the accuser must prove that the school’s “inadequate response caused further actionable harassment.” The lower court’s decision, , conflicts with those in other circuits.

The higher education community is also closely watching a Harvard affirmative action case in which plaintiffs are challenging the university’s policy considering race in admissions. The Trump administration the plaintiffs in the case, which some expect to reach the Supreme Court and alter college admissions policies nationwide. before a three-judge panel in the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals were held earlier this month.

Dunn questioned whether conservative judges would want to set policies for private institutions but added that it’s likely that the “days are numbered” for affirmative action policies at public universities. The last time the Supreme Court considered race-based admissions was in 2016 in , when it ruled that including race as one factor in admissions is constitutional.

At the K-12 level, the court’s in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 ended the practice of using race as a deciding factor in admitting students to popular public schools. Dunn added that any future efforts to use race as part of a school admissions process would not be able to “survive the court’s scrutiny.”

‘Powerful interests’ backing Barrett

Labor organizations, including the powerful teachers unions, would also be “in for hard times” if Barrett is confirmed, Orfield said. Dunn noted that some conservatives already think the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision in , which determined that forcing public-sector employees to pay union dues as a condition for employment violates free speech, hasn’t weakened unions as much as they’d hoped.

In a statement on Barrett’s nomination, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten targeted Barrett’s to the Affordable Care Act’s earlier requirement that employers provide health coverage that includes birth control. on the health care law’s provision that individuals maintain a minimum level of coverage is also before the court this fall.

“[Barrett] was chosen because powerful interests know she’s on their side,” Weingarten said, adding that the judge “said publicly that provisions of the Affordable Care Act are an assault on religious liberty.”

In recent years, the unions have mounted a concerted effort to curb the growth of school choice options. While Barrett’s background is steeped in private schools, her membership in People of Praise is part of her personal, not professional life, stressed Leslie Hiner, the vice president of programs for EdChoice.

“But if she has knowledge of children who need educational options, that’s something I find important, and positive,” Hiner said.

Seventy-four students at Trinity School at Greenlawn participated in Indiana’s voucher program during the 2019-20 school year, according to an annual report. A second school is in Falls Church, Virginia, and a third is in Eagan, Minnesota. People of Praise also founded in a low-income community in Shreveport, Louisiana. It is not currently on the list of schools participating in the state’s scholarship program.

Litigation over similar private-school scholarship programs is currently pending in lower courts.The Institute for Justice, a libertarian law firm that argued the Espinoza case, has in the 1st Circuit focusing on a Maine “town tuitioning” program that allows families without a school in their community to choose any public or private school. The state, by barring families from using the scholarship at a religious school, has said it is maintaining the of church and state.

The case, Carson v. Makin, was filed after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia Inc. v. Comer, which determined that excluding the church’s preschool program from receiving playground resurfacing materials, simply because it was a church, was unconstitutional. That decision influenced the Espinoza ruling.

Depending on the ruling in Carson, the plaintiffs could appeal to the Supreme Court, said Tim Keller, senior attorney with the institute. But he added that he has “no idea what they could be trying to say to get around Espinoza.”

The district is trying to sort out why enrollment fell by 1,500 students. Most of the drop comes from preschool and kindergarten, where students likely never enrolled to start school. That fits a trend that has been

But the district is just starting to investigate whether other missing students have moved, enrolled in private or charter schools, or just dropped out.

Data shared with city education leaders and the school board this week show that the district’s enrollment has dropped from about 36,900 last school year to about 35,400 today, with online classes now in their third week. Attendance online has been lower than last year, with some schools doing well and others with less than 70 percent of kids participating in class.

“I’d like it to be better,” district CEO Eric Gordon told city education leaders this week. “But that’s where we are.”

School board members and city officials questioned Gordon in a series of meetings this week on how long it would take to determine where the students are and how the district is trying to find them.

“There’s really no way yet to know how many students are possibly falling through the cracks … through this virtual learning environment?” asked board member Kathleen Valdez.

Monyka Price, chief education aide to Mayor Frank Jackson, asked Gordon when the district would start visiting homes or tracking families down.

“We’re working on it,” Gordon told the board. “Here in the next week or so, we should have a much higher level of confidence about who’s actually showing up and regularly engaged and who we have to go find and get them engaged, or families that have actually chosen to go another place.”

He added: “I’m not naive enough to think that no one’s falling through the cracks … We’ve really been stressing with our schools, including the teachers union, the importance of tracking down and finding all these kids. What I am not yet confident in is, what is the number of those kids?”

Board members and city officials are worried that the spring shutdown, summer break and inability for students to return safely to classrooms has led some families to give up on school. It’s a real concern for a city that the U.S. Census just found to be and the worst-connected to the internet in the nation, and for a district that has one of the worst chronic absenteeism rates in Ohio.

Verifying enrollment takes time even when schools are open, Gordon said, because Ohio does not require families to notify schools when a child withdraws or attends another school.

The pandemic also forced classes online this fall, a dramatic shift for a district that has struggled with digital literacy and for a city where 31 percent of households in the city have no internet access at all. The district bought and handed out 30,566 laptops and tablets to students, Gordon reported this week. When more than 6,000 arrived late, classes for many students were delayed a week or more.

The district also passed out 12,000 internet hotspots to connect families.

The district has now given devices and hotspots to almost all students that need them, Gordon said, so it can start tracking missing students.

The enrollment data Gordon shared this week are dominated by drops in the number of preschool and kindergarten students — two grades that Ohio does not require students to attend. Ohio law only requires school for kids 6 and older. Those grades also rely on families enrolling kids for the first time, so families cautious about school during the pandemic would show up in these numbers first. Preschool and kindergarten reductions also show families not ever starting their children in school, rather than students leaving.

Preschool enrollment of 2,000 students last school year has fallen to 773 this year. The kindergarten count of about 2,900 students last year dropped to 2,300 this year.

Combined, those two grades have 1,800 fewer students than last year.

”Many families are simply keeping their preschooler with them and will revisit school at a later time,” Gordon said.

That’s in keeping with what preschools across the city are seeing, said Debbie Fodge, the acting director of Starting Point, an agency that helps connect families to preschool. She said demand for preschool is lower this year, as many parents are keeping kids out of preschool for safety reasons or because they are out of work and at home.

Melissa Adipietro, a regional leader for the Ohio Association for the Education of Young Children, said preschools that are only online, as the Cleveland school district’s are right now, aren’t big draws, while in-person preschool that can solve the child care needs of parents can have waiting lists.

That drop could be a setback for a city that to boost preschool attendance. The hope is that quality preschool can close kindergarten readiness gaps between affluent families and low-income ones in the city. , but the drop breaks that pattern.

How much students will be hurt is still in question.

“We may not know for some time what all the outcomes will look like,” Fodge said.

For other grades, the district is looking at log-on data and attendance reports from teachers to see which students are participating in classes. Attendance reports provided to ����Ӱ�� last week by the district show widely varied rates by school, with some schools showing well over 90 percent of students attending some days, while others show less than 70 percent. The district has averaged about 91 percent attendance the past few years.

����Ӱ�� has requested daily student log-on counts to see how many students are not just enrolled but at least connecting to classes, but the district has declined to share them.

Gordon estimated attendance in online classes at about 85 percent, though the district is still weighing how to count synchronous lessons — lessons given live online by a teacher — versus other work students do on their own schedule. Technical issues blocking students from connecting also skew the data.

“This week, we can anticipate sufficient stability, as we’ve got the system going, that we’ll be able to start to look for those kids that are really not connected and find out, is it that they’re there but not participating? Is it that they are enrolled somewhere else and we just don’t know it yet?”

Depending on where you live, it feels radically different too.

Over the past few weeks, as new photos have emerged from schools around the planet, we’ve seen fleeting glimpses of normalcy: German students clutching their sugar cones, Ukrainian students greeted by bells and balloons, friends sharing much-delayed hugs across various continents. But zoom back a bit and that modicum of normalcy quickly fades into the background, obscured by masks, disinfectant sprays, distanced classrooms, shuttered hallways and one-way campuses.

Line up these photos from 16 different countries and you see the surreal mosaic of public education circa 2020.

See and share our global back to school gallery below, from England, where Education Secretary Gavin Williamson students’ return to school a “massive milestone,” to China, where about 195 million students have to in-person learning at public schools.

Across the U.S.

New York: Students stick to their socially-distanced bubbles for their first outdoor dance party of the school year in Honeoye Falls.

Lead Image: Students grab lunch on their first day back to school at Brequigny High School in Rennes, France. (Damien Meyer / Getty Images)

That same day, the nurse left. The following Monday, a different one arrived —��again, just for the day.

“We still do not have a permanent nurse,” Scott said. “How can they expect us to open the school on Monday, not knowing whether a nurse will appear?”

According to an analysis by ����Ӱ�� of reopening plans submitted by administrators to the Department of Education in August and updated over the summer, as of Sept. 12, 109 schools were still in the process of determining who will evaluate sick students in the event of a potential COVID-19 case. In August, Mayor Bill de Blasio promised to hire 400 new nurses — enough to staff every K-12 school building by the first day of school, which was subsequently delayed from Sept. 10 to Sept. 21.

“To all the folks who have been raising that concern, I hear you loud and clear,” the mayor then of the need for more school nurses. “We have a whole month until school begins.”

For more on how we did the story, click here.

In a conversation Monday, DOE spokesman Nathaniel Styer pointed out that the situation on the ground in the country’s largest school district is changing daily. But the forms lend at least some insight into remaining gaps at scores of the city’s 1,585 non-charter K-12 schools, as teachers and administrators plead with department officials for more answers about medical staffing during an unprecedented global pandemic. Looking at the data, Styer questioned its time stamp, citing five schools that indicated they were still locating appropriate staff but that he says now have assigned nurses. He declined to fact-check all of the schools and would not provide an updated number for how many still have nurse vacancies.

“The mayor and chancellor pledged that every school building will have a full-time nurse this fall, and we will deliver,” he said. “As we continue to navigate this public health crisis, this is a critical support, and our work with the Department of Health and Hospitals will guarantee access to a high-quality medical professional for every child.”

Many NYC schools lacked nurses before the pandemic. In 2018, The Wall Street Journal that, on any given day, an average of 25 public school buildings didn’t have a nurse assigned. Jan Scott’s Manhattan high school, which has 486 students, was one of them.

“We’ve always had this revolving door,” she says. “That’s a problem.”

A school nursing shortage is just one in a series of obstacles tied to reopening. In recent days, efforts from the Mayor’s Office and the Department of Education to stamp them out have come to resemble a frenzied game of whack-a-mole.

Last week, teachers returned to classrooms, where some they found missing protective gear; others who felt their buildings weren’t outside. So far, 55 out of 17,000 school-based DOE employees have tested positive for COVID-19. On Monday, officials promised 2,000 additional teachers to fill staffing shortages, while the principals union estimated that school leaders had asked for five times that many to implement hybrid learning this fall. Late Tuesday, the DOE announced that students doing the hybrid model on the days they’re learning remotely from home. Some of students have opted for fully remote instruction, up 15 percent in two weeks. In coming days, that number could climb higher.��

All of this has left teachers, whose faith in city leadership had been dwindling for months, spooked, and families of the system’s 1.1 million students wondering whether New York can really pull off being the only major urban district to return to in-person learning this fall.��

Since de Blasio made his promise about nurses, the DOE has matched more than 250 of them with schools needing coverage; all of them have been hired through the New York City Health and Hospitals Corp., according to officials. In order to locate new staff, the organization contracted with a handful of third-party vendors. Neither Styer nor a Health and Hospitals representative would provide the names of the companies involved.

School nurses interviewed by ����Ӱ�� said that their already-full plates are piled particularly high this fall, as they contact the caretakers of children with pre-existing health conditions to remind them to bring necessary medications to school, and educate their communities about the importance of virus mitigation. They spoke on the condition that their names not be used, citing a July 21 email from the Office of School Health — which is overseen by both the DOE and the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene — telling nurses working in the city’s Regional Enrichment Centers not to speak with the press. The centers were created to care for the children of essential workers.��

One Manhattan-based nurse who worked at one of the centers this summer has been preparing this week for the return of students to her elementary school. Most recently, she’s mapped out the direction that kids will walk through the hallways and placed stickers on the floor outside of her office, so that students will know where to stand if they have to wait there. The small space is adjacent to the school’s “isolation room,” where kids will be sent to be monitored by a paraprofessional if they show coronavirus symptoms.

The same nurse voiced concern that the relatively small capacity of her school, as it compares to the dimensions of the REC center, will make social distancing a challenge this fall.

“I think the DOE will push capacity,” she said, adding that there’s still no official word from her administrators on how many students should be allowed in her small office at one time.

Others wondered when they’d receive clarity about basic information, like what the official threshold is for a child being sent home for COVID-19 symptoms after he or she has been evaluated by a nurse. They wondered when they would get fit-tested for the N95 masks they’ve been promised. And they worried what reduced training for the latest round of hires —��one week, as opposed to the six weeks that permanently hired school nurses receive — could mean for their communities.

“We need the help,” said one veteran nurse, who tends to students with disabilities at one of the city’s specialized District 75 schools. “But if you’re going to promise a school nurse at every site, bring them in and train them enough.”

In a normal year, school nursing is no easy assignment, she added. “We’re the medical voice of the school,” she said. “If you’re not used to working alone —��and most nurses aren’t —��you’ll get overloaded.”

According to the DOE, assigned nurses reported to their schools on Sept. 8, in order to become acquainted with their buildings, colleagues and school policies.��

“They participated in staff professional development last week, and they will be partaking in nursing-specific training on working with students with diabetes or those who have limited English proficiency and COVID protocols,” officials said, adding that the Office of School Health-led training will run for four days and provide the new nurses with access to student electronic health records. The unnamed contract agencies “are responsible for the majority of training and supervision of nurses,” they wrote.

Jan Scott, the English teacher at Chelsea Career and Technical Education, called the lack of transparency “disheartening.”

“They’re not being honest with us,” she said. “We asked for everything to be public, and it’s not. They promised us on national television that we’d have nurses in every building, but if we don’t have them in there now, how are we supposed to have confidence it will happen?”

In the U.S., for example, the closures could ultimately amount to a loss of almost $14.2 trillion over the next 80 years, according to the , released by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an international group with 37 member countries that promotes economic growth policies. Another three months of learning losses could stretch that figure to almost $28 trillion.

The authors suggest, however, that schools could recoup some of those losses by “individualizing the instruction,” in which students work at their own speed to master academic goals.

“Unless schools get better, the current students will be significantly harmed. Moreover, the harm will disproportionately fall on disadvantaged students,” wrote economists Eric Hanushek of Stanford University and Ludger Woessmann of the University of Munich. They added that “permanent learning losses are not inevitable if countries improve the learning gains of their students in the future.”

The new research was featured this week in another OECD and using existing data from international studies to analyze the impact of the pandemic on key educational indicators.

The potential long-term damage to the economy is “why it is important for education systems to get back on track as quickly as they can,” Andreas Schleicher, OECD’s director for education and skills, said during the online event. Schleicher notes that even if school performance were to immediately return to pre-pandemic levels, countries would continue to see economic declines. That’s because “learning loss will lead to skill loss, and the skills people have relate to their productivity,” he wrote.

Drawing from surveys and data gathered before the appearance of COVID-19, Schleicher puts issues such as education spending and students’ use of technology in the context of what schools have experienced since March.

He notes the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security, or CARES, Act, enacted in March, as one example of what countries have done to prevent deep, short-term cuts. But he also notes that the effects of the pandemic on education spending could be long-lasting.

“Forecasts predict that the pandemic will lead to slower growth in government spending in the coming year,” he wrote, “and that if the share of government spending devoted to education were to remain unchanged, education spending would continue to grow but at significantly lower rates than before the pandemic.”

Using OECD’s , the paper also demonstrates the degree to which online platforms and resources influenced how students and teachers performed prior to the pandemic.

“Digital technology became the lifeline of technology,” Schleicher said during the webinar. “Suddenly, teachers’ and students’ technological skills became critically important.”

The data show that the U.S. was better positioned than some countries, such as Finland, France and the Czech Republic, to make the transition to remote learning, but not as prepared as Denmark, New Zealand and Australia.

Average class sizes before school closures in March are also likely to determine how quickly schools are able to accommodate in-person learning again. At the primary level, average class sizes in the U.S. line up with the OECD average of 21; Chile had the highest class sizes before the pandemic, with 31, and Costa Rica had the lowest, with 16.

“Countries with smaller class sizes may find it easier to comply with new restrictions on social distancing provided they have the space to accommodate the number of students safely,” Schleicher wrote.

During the webinar, Schleicher also offered lessons for the U.S. based on recent OECD studies and test results.

“The U.S is lucky that it has a lot of money in education, but I don’t think it’s using its resources very wisely,” he said, adding that there’s more funding going toward an “industrial structure” and district bureaucracy than quality classroom instruction. One chart in his presentation, for example, showed that the U.S. ranks last in teacher salaries compared with 29 other countries.

Much of the education spending in the U.S., he added, still goes toward “wealthy students.”

“Align the resources with needs,” he said. “Where you can actually make most of the difference is [with] the students who need it most.”

In their paper, Hanushek and Woessmann also recommend that school systems work simultaneously on improving distance learning and reopening schools.

“Comprehensive measures must be taken to ensure that learning takes place everywhere again,” they wrote. “It is possible and important to build upon the new organization of schools to ensure that the schools are actually superior to the pre-COVID schools.”

In the latest kid-friendly pandemic video published by , the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, explains to students of all ages the role they can play in controlling the spread of coronavirus.

Over the past several months, , a group of education websites that produce videos, quizzes and other materials to help translate challenging topics for students in grades K-12, has uploaded an array of pandemic-related projects. From defining “flattening the curve” to detailing how soap works, the animated shorts aim to help define and contextualize the crisis that kids keep hearing about on the evening news — and that is keeping so many of them from returning to class.

The new 11-minute video recaps Dr. Fauci’s background as a public health official before he takes the stage to review key safety practices that all Americans should be following and discuss the science of vaccines.

A few key highlights:

• How coronavirus affects younger patients: Children can get infected and infect others, but the symptoms — if there are any at all — are usually minor compared to those experienced by older people. That is why, he explains, “teachers and your health officials are going to try as best as possible to protect you from getting infected.”
• How COVID-19 spreads: Children can help mitigate the spread by not touching their faces, washing their hands as often as possible, practicing physical distancing and, if they’re old enough, wearing a mask.
• How kids can influence their parents’ decisions: “Parents listen to their children,” Dr. Fauci says. Children should encourage them to wear masks, practice distancing and stay away from large crowds.
• Science of vaccines: Dr. Fauci details how a coronavirus vaccine will work, explaining that it mimics antibodies to attack the virus without getting you sick.

• When can we get one?: When a vaccine comes along, which he said will probably be by the end of the year, we should all get it to protect each other and end the pandemic.
• Trusting in science: Dr. Fauci underscores the importance of turning to scientific truth to guide our actions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6KBgZDd3Ks

Dr. Fauci isn’t all science. Near the end of the video, the public health leader also offers a message of hope, noting the “resiliency of the American spirit or the spirit of all mankind,” and plays along in a round of “Fauc or Slouch” in which he’s quizzed on his New York City roots and knowledge of fly-fishing.

“BrainPOP has always focused on ,” said the company’s founder and executive chairman, Dr. Avraham Kadar, in a statement tied to the video’s release. “Twenty years ago, we began by tackling complex health and science concepts ‘at eye level,’ and we continue to take this approach with every topic we cover across the curriculum.”

Students and educators can access (mostly free) K-8 resources like lesson plans, coding games and more informational videos on . Animated videos can also be found on their .

Here are some of the other recent animations explaining elements of the pandemic:

Flattening the Curve: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlt8hgGh1-k&t=16s

How to Prepare for the 2020 School Year:

How to Stop the Spread:

How Soap Works:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApLOqrwHHrE

Social Distancing: A Kid-Friendly Explanation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvTZv31eRp0

The delay was the culmination of a month of increasingly heated exchanges between the United Federation of Teachers and the mayor over how to safely reopen the nation’s largest school district. Two weeks ago, UFT President Michael Mulgrew issued a school reopening checklist, which included a mandate that staff and students get tested for COVID-19. He threatened legal action or a strike if stipulations weren’t met, and UFT leadership inched toward this week.

Tuesday’s compromise still leaves New York as the only big city school district in the country planning to return to in-person learning, only under a new timetable. Teachers without medical exemptions will show up at school buildings on Sept. 8 to start preparing for hybrid learning. From the 16th through the 20th, they’ll check in with students about devices, Wi-Fi access and scheduling in what has been described as a kind of orientation. On the 21st, families who have opted into blended learning will start sending their kids to school, and remote instruction will begin for students doing distance-only learning. There is also a new, mandatory testing plan for schools: Every month, a randomly selected 10 to 20 percent of students and staff will get tested for COVID-19.

“The decision on whether to reopen a school building to students will be based on the UFT’s 50-item safety plan,” Mulgrew told UFT members in an email sent Tuesday. “School buildings or rooms that do not meet safety standards will remain closed.”

Families and teachers interviewed by ����Ӱ�� said that while they found the announcement encouraging, they had a number of outstanding questions. Most doubted whether the added week and a half would be enough for the district’s roughly 1,800 schools to safely reopen on time.

Farah Despeignes, a former teacher and the president of District 8’s Community Education Council in the Bronx, was skeptical about whether the Department of Education will have made much progress on long-standing issues central to teacher and student safety — including ventilation and problematic school configurations — by Sept. 21.

“These issues will not have disappeared,” she said. “Maybe [the DOE] will have made dents. But these issues are real; they are structural. There are a lot of issues that are not going to be resolved by the 21st.”

Despeignes’s family is one of 360,000 that have opted into remote-only learning this fall. She found it somewhat reassuring that the mayor, who until Tuesday was insisting that reopening Sept. 10 was best for the city, and Chancellor Richard Carranza are listening to parent and teacher concerns.

Despeignes said she spends much of her time these days dropping in on school town halls held by principals in her district, where she’s noticed that many parents are surprised to learn that school reopening will look very different this year, given COVID-19 protocols.

Mike Loeb, a seventh-grade science teacher at the Urban Institute of Math, a middle school in Despeignes’s district in the Bronx, shared some of her concerns.

As his school’s UFT representative, Loeb has been fielding questions from other teachers about the building’s ventilation system — a position for which he recognizes he’s vastly underqualified. “I’m not an expert in that field,” said Loeb. “I don’t have an answer as to how we know if it’s good air.” He hasn’t yet received his school’s ventilation report from the UFT.

Loeb is also worried about personal protective equipment and other supplies, given recent budget cuts. Teachers have been informed that they’ll have all the masks and hand sanitizer that they need for the year, he said, “but there’s little trust in the DOE that they’re going to execute on that. What’s going to happen come Nov. 30? Are we still going to have the supplies we need?”

Both Mulgrew and Mark Cannizzaro, president of the principals union, acknowledged the tight schedule and the challenges that remain.

The plan was among “the most aggressive policies and greatest safeguards of any school system in the United States of America,” Mulgrew said, adding, “It is not going to be easy. We now have another difficult road to go down: the amount of work that is going to have to be done over the next couple of weeks, just to get all of our schools prepared and ready to go.”

“The task before us is monumental,” echoed Cannizzaro. “It is incumbent on the DOE to seize this time in support of school leaders so that these additional days will provide a much needed opportunity to implement necessary safety protocols, program classes, and align all school staff towards critical goals for this unimaginable school year.”

City Councilman Mark Treyger, who chairs the Education Committee, said in a statement that the delay was needed but came without a commitment of new funding to implement the safety standards and meet the needs of vulnerable students and families.

Nearly 73 percent of the city’s public school students , 20 percent have disabilities, and 13 percent are English learners.

“What we have today is far from what we need to ensure that the inequities of remote learning are not perpetuated and deepened in this school year,” he said. “There are well-publicized concerns around how hybrid learning will meet the needs of students with disabilities, students in temporary housing and multilingual learners, among others. There are many unanswered questions around child care and how working parents are supposed to make hybrid learning functional.”

Since the pandemic struck in March, 20-year-old Sarshevack Mnahsheh, a 2017 graduate of the Urban Assembly School for Applied Math and Science in the Bronx, has been helping his siblings with their schoolwork. These days, things are starting to feel a bit more relaxed for his family, he says. He tries to spend as much time as he can playing basketball outside. His younger siblings are excited to go back to school, he says. They’re relieved that they’ll get to see their friends and that they won’t be hanging out, bored, at home as much.

Still, he has mixed feelings about schools reopening. “I don’t think students should be going back because of the corona situation,” he says. “Going back enables people to get sick —��everyone from their different spaces bringing it to one place. It’s weird to me that things are opening up so fast.”

He hadn’t heard about the random testing, but he thinks his family won’t be very receptive to it. “Who knows how they’re testing, and what they’re gonna do,” he says. “It’s not something that’s immediately agreeable.”

Under the safety agreement reached with the UFT, any student who refuses to be tested will be required to attend school remotely, and any staff member who fails to comply with mandated testing will be placed on unpaid leave.

Students or staff found to have the virus must quarantine for 14 days. City tracing teams will be sent to their school immediately to do contact tracing. The presence of a COVID-19 case confined to one class will result in the entire class moving to remote instruction; more than one case in a school will mean that the entire school will move to remote instruction, until the contact tracing is completed.

Although Despeignes and other leaders in her district shared some concerns about parents not trusting the idea of mandatory testing in school, she thinks they can work to dispel that fear by raising awareness at the community level.

“Educating them and making sure they know — it’s such an important thing to do,” she said. Eventually, though, she believes, “I think parents will buy into it.”

 
Correction appended Aug. 27

The D.C. Public Schools system is scrambling to get laptops to thousands of students this week before the virtual start of the 2020-21 school year on Monday — but many parents remain in the dark as to whether their kids will have laptops and high-speed internet by then.

The district “is working to ensure new devices arrive at schools in time for the start of school,” a DCPS spokesman told ����Ӱ��. Schools Chancellor Lewis Ferebee reiterated this point at a Wednesday press conference, stating that “the expectation is that all of our device distribution begins and ends prior to the start of school.”

DCPS, he added, would begin the new academic year “strong.”

But although DCPS “to providing a device for any student who needs one,” advocates like Pranav Nanda, a lead organizer with the Ward 6 Mutual Aid Network and Serve Your City, say it’s become increasingly clear that the district’s 52,000 students are not all ready for Day 1.

The chancellor’s statements do “not give me any sense of confidence,” Nanda said. “What if a parent doesn’t find out about tech distribution this week — what’s the plan going forward for that?”

Sixty percent of 32,500 respondents to a DCPS have indicated a need for a device like a laptop at home; 27 percent said they didn’t have reliable internet.

Around the time Ferebee was speaking on Wednesday, a mother of three who struggles to pay $10 a month for a basic internet plan was sharing her fears of being disconnected near the White House. Another parent, Patricia Stamper, had decided to spend her own stimulus check on a tablet.

“If you need a device, you should have got it. If you need internet, it should have been provided,” she shouted over the rumble of construction nearby. “D.C. government should have been dropping it off at your door.“

D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson, who told ����Ӱ�� he’s spoken with the chancellor and Deputy Mayor for Education Paul Kihn about technology “over and over” for months, said cases in which students haven’t received devices appear unrelated to resource issues and are more likely “a deployment issue … that the distribution of [devices] has not been perfect.”

DCPS, which intends to operate fully virtual through at least Nov. 6, has said it’s investing $17 million in technology for remote learning. A DCPS spokesman confirmed Wednesday that the district currently has 45,000 devices — many pre-equipped with high-speed internet.

“The school system is pushing the equipment down to the school; the school then has to push it down to the teachers, who then push it down to the parents,” Mendelson said. “It’s possible there are some schools who are better at this than other schools.”

“It’s a big bureaucracy,” he added. “The head doesn’t always know what the tail is doing.”

The transition to all-virtual learning hasn’t been a seamless process for many school districts nationwide, though issues seem to be more linked than distribution. Cleveland’s school district, for example, recently learned it won’t be receiving 9,000 laptops by its first day on Sept. 8.

Advocates like Nanda believe D.C. and school leadership could have been more proactive in getting families online. Instead, he said, groups like Serve Your City are 200 backpacks with laptops and other school supplies to high-needs families, with more than 500 requests so far. Other families are taking to Twitter with complaints of just now learning that their child’s laptop may not fully satisfy the system’s requirements for virtual instruction.

City and school officials “had since March to figure this out,” Nanda said.

Delays are ‘not fair to our children’

A group of parents at Wednesday’s rally said they were still waiting for answers on whether they’d have a laptop and high-speed internet for the first day of school.

Patricia Stamper, a teacher at Miner Elementary School, said she recently spent her federal stimulus check on a tablet to ensure she wouldn’t have to share her work computer with her 5-year-old son again, like she did in the spring.

“As a parent, I don’t understand” the delays, said Stamper, who’d filled out DCPS’s tech survey. “[I enrolled my son] before school let out last year, so there’s no reason why my kid shouldn’t already have his laptop.”

Parent Patricia Stamper at rally:

On top of questions about distribution, there has also been confusion around whether devices families already have are appropriate for online instruction.

DCPS in mid-August outlining the laptop specifications optimal for its virtual learning platforms: 4 GB of memory — 8 GB preferably. A “highly recommended” touchscreen device for grades pre-K through second grade. A camera. Chromebooks and Kindle Fires, it warned, do not support “full versions” of some online applications.

Parent frustration online was swift.

“I suspect there are going to be a lot of parents who scrounged for a cheaper Chromebook (saw tons of parents checking them out at DCUSA Best Buy the other day) only to discover they aren’t suited for Teams/Canvas/MS Office,” . “It feels like DCPS is ill-prepared.”

It feels like DCPS is ill-prepared for this fall of remote learning. Yet they’ve known it was coming for months. Why no dry-runs of technology this week or next? Why the late teacher assignments? So many unknowns just a week before an unprecedented schoolyear. /end

— S. Davis (@whiteknuckled)

It’s “good” that the district released the guidance, said Grace Hu, a parent with Digital Equity in D.C. Education, which has been calling for a 1:1 student-device ratio. But she added that because DCPS “made a judgment call about what learning apps and what software” to use, officials “have an obligation to make sure everyone has a computer that can use that.”

A DCPS spokesman said the 10,000 devices the district distributed in the spring — and the 45,000 it has for this fall — meet the standards. Families “can contact their school to share that they are in need of a device if they previously indicated they did not need one,” he added.

Parent Michelle Blount, who also spoke at Wednesday’s rally, has devices for her second- and ninth-grader children. But unreliable internet, which hasn’t been fixed, severely hindered her 7-year-old autistic son’s ability to learn in the spring. She’s worried it’ll happen again.

Michelle Blount at the rally:

“If my 7-year-old is on his Zoom call and his teacher is no longer there, [our service lagging] kicks him out, the whole day is thrown off — he’s upset the whole day,” she said. “It’s not fair to us as parents, and it’s not fair to our children.”

She took a breath, glancing behind her where a group of young children were playing. “It’s just so frustrating for me.”

found that more than 20,000 D.C. children do not have access to high-speed internet. Deputy Mayor Kihn on Wednesday D.C. government has allocated more than $3 million to pay broadband/cable bills for high-needs families — an initiative that is in the process of launching.

Blount said she hasn’t heard anything about that yet.

“If it is [happening], they need to put it out there more,” she said.

Correction: An earlier version of this story quoted a parent whose child does not attend D.C. Public Schools. The quote was removed and the headline has since been changed. 

When the storm came ashore on Aug. 29, 2005, some neighborhoods in the city were submerged beneath 12 feet of water. More than 1,800 were killed by the surge and its aftermath; an estimated million Gulf Coast residents were displaced by the storm.

The city’s school system was left in ruins. More than 100 buildings were damaged or destroyed beyond repair, and the images that emerged from those derelict structures point to the magnitude of the challenge that awaited the city.

Fifteen years after one of the worst natural disasters in American history, here’s a look back at how Hurricane Katrina forever reshaped New Orleans schools.

AUGUST 30, 2005

AUGUST 31

SEPTEMBER

OCTOBER

NOVEMBER

2007

2015

In commemoration of the hurricane’s 10th anniversary, ����Ӱ�� commissioned a three-part documentary that spanned the first half of 2015. Founder Campbell Brown toured schools across the city, speaking with New Orleans students, educators, school advocates and district leaders about the decade of disruption that followed the storm.

2016

2020

Go Deeper: See our latest coverage of New Orleans schools amid the pandemic via our new special hub at ; get alerts for our latest Louisiana coverage by signing up for ����Ӱ�� Newsletter.

With Contributions from Meghan Gallagher

By the time engineers had pumped the last of the floodwaters out of the city on Oct. 11, some and an estimated $106 billion in damage done. Vast areas had been destroyed.

As in the pandemic today, the reopening of schools was an urgent issue. Families could not rebuild without a safe place to leave their children. Kids needed to be with other kids to continue to develop socially and to process the trauma they were experiencing. And in one of the lowest-performing school systems in the country, no student could afford lost learning.

Reams have been written about launched in the wake of the disaster to reform New Orleans’s schools. The state seized all but the top performers and contracted with nonprofit charter school operators to run them. No shortage of controversy still attends the experiment, but 15 years later, academic achievement, high school graduation and college attendance have all risen significantly.

the Tulane University-based Education Research Alliance for New Orleans shows that students who returned to the city’s schools in 2006 and 2007 lagged behind where they had been before the storm, as measured on state standardized tests, but surpassed 2005 achievement levels within two years.

Overall, in the decade after the storm, test scores had risen from the 50th percentile to the 66th. According to a 2018 alliance report, high school graduation rates increased by as much as 9 percentage points and college graduation by up to 5 points.

Today, many people working in New Orleans schools are survivors of the storm, educators whose life trajectories were shaped by their experiences trying to keep learning or teaching in the years after the disaster. Here, we offer the stories of five individuals, all of whom have tapped the resilience they developed during Katrina to address schooling in the time of COVID-19.

‘Katrina planted a seed’

Raven Matthews was 11 when Hurricane Katrina made landfall, threatening the New Orleans East neighborhood where she lived. Her dad, a school bus driver, called friends and family when the evacuation order went out and offered transport to anyone who could get to his house. Every seat on the bus was occupied by the time he turned the engine over, the yard full of cars.

The first stop was Pineville, a small city halfway between Baton Rouge and Shreveport. “We’d never heard of it before,” says Matthews. “He was just driving.”

The mothballed factory where evacuees were being sheltered made her mother nervous. It was filthy, the floor littered with sewing needles, and people in prison uniforms were wandering around. So they drove a little further northeast to tiny Deville, where they slept in a church.

“That’s when I started thinking, ‘Oh, something’s wrong,’” she recalls. “We’re not going home.”

They didn’t, for two years.

Matthews’s father drove the bus from town to town, dropping off passengers and staying a while wherever there were relatives to bunk with. The family lived in a hotel in Tennessee for two months before settling in Houma, a small city near the gulf coast.

At every stop, Matthews’s mother enrolled her in school. She was a good student, and the fact that her older brother and sister and her cousins attended with her helped buffer the discomfort of perpetually being the new kid.

When the family moved home to New Orleans nearly two years later, Matthews was supposed to be in seventh grade. She tested out, however, and was placed in eighth-grade classes. The school system’s bureaucracy — one of the nation’s most dysfunctional before the storm — was still in chaos, and Matthews didn’t take the state’s mandatory end-of-year exam. So when the next school year began, she was forced to repeat eighth grade.

Matthews wanted to follow her best friend to Sci High School, but at a school fair, her mother unwittingly enrolled her in a new public charter school, Sci Academy. When they realized their mistake, they decided the new school, with its promise of challenging academics and a path to college, was the better option.

At Sci — since renamed Abramson Sci Academy — Matthews had a Spanish instructor who captured her imagination. Lisa Maria Rhodes was animated and passionate, and Matthews started thinking about becoming a teacher. But first, she had to get through college — a journey that would be as bumpy as middle school.

Matthews first enrolled in the University of Louisiana Monroe, but she was homesick her entire freshman year. She transferred to Delgado Community College, a New Orleans two-year school that she knew had a notoriously low graduation rate and little student support. She tapped Sci’s alumni support network to cobble together a group of fellow graduates who held each other accountable for finishing.

After earning an associate’s degree in elementary education at Delgado, Matthews enrolled in Southeastern University, which operates a lab school where its student teachers can work. “I visited, saw it and fell completely in love,” she says. “I can do everything here.”

Once again, her best-laid plans fell apart. Her community college credits did not transfer — a common hurdle for low-income students — so she was looking at three more years of college instead of two. And she was told she would not be able to do her student teaching in the lab school.

Exasperated, Matthews enrolled in the University of New Orleans, where she was able to graduate within a year — albeit without a teaching license. While she works toward a formal credential, she’s in her second year of teaching Spanish at Collegiate Baton Rouge, a high school in the same charter school network as her alma mater.

“Going through the hardship I went through with Katrina planted a seed,” she says. “Moving again and again, it set me up for college in a way it wouldn’t have otherwise. It trained me to get over the hurdles.”

The experience of being an evacuee, Matthews says, informs her teaching. “I want to be the teacher who says, ‘Keep going,’” she says. “I want them to keep looking for opportunities that will change their lives for the better.”

‘We were like lost boys’

Neil Williams had his senior year at Edna Karr High School planned out before it even started. In addition to prom and graduation, he and a friend had been tapped to do color commentary for the football season. He was on the student council and helped classmates raise money for a trip to China.

New Orleans’s academic year starts during hurricane season, but storms usually close schools for just a couple of days. When Katrina threatened, Williams packed up his homework and video games and headed to a friend’s house, imagining they’d barbecue and game all weekend.

“But then, all of a sudden, it turned into a monster storm,” he recalls. He and his friend Kevin ended up driving to Houston to stay with Kevin’s aunt. They watched and waited all weekend, finally getting word that back home, the levees had broken.

“It started to sink in that we’re not going anywhere anytime soon,” Williams says. His siblings and parents were scattered in other parts of Houston, Dallas and Arkansas, without reliable means of communication. So Kevin’s aunt enrolled him in high school in Sugar Land, a Houston suburb. Williams had his New Orleans school schedule with him, so he tried to sign up for the classes he thought he would need to take to earn a Louisiana diploma.

The house where he was staying was crowded, so when federal emergency officials offered Williams a hotel room, he took it. He got a job in the adjacent mall and was trying to track down his family when, on Sept. 21, it became clear Hurricane Rita would force mass evacuations in Texas. “People were just terrified,” he recalls.

Williams was trying to figure out how to evacuate from Houston when he heard from the family that owned a California ranch and summer camp he had attended a few years before. The family bought Williams a plane ticket and set him up in one of the two gigantic ranch houses at the Jameson Ranch Camp in Bakersfield.

One of his summer counselors was also a teacher at nearby North High School, so Williams started a new school — again — three days after arriving in California.

“At that point, I was just emotionally beat down,” he says. “I went to school and everything, but I was checked out.”

Williams’s old New Orleans school, Edna Karr, had been damaged in the hurricane, but it reopened by Thanksgiving. So he flew back to Houston and hitched a ride home with an uncle.

The family’s house was in ruins. The first floor was covered with six inches of muck and mold, and the second floor had been looted. He moved in with a great-aunt and worked the overnight shift for a company that cleaned stores.

“Everything after Katrina was just uncertain,” he says. “Before, I had a plan. It was like, graduate, go to college, get a job and buy a house. And after the storm, that was all upended.

“A lot of us, our parents were working remotely or in another city. We were like lost boys — a lot of people living in their parents’ houses alone or with their friends … We all had to become some level of adult at that point.”

Williams was relieved to graduate from Edna Karr in the spring of 2006, alongside 100 of his classmates and 50 students from schools that had been destroyed. “That was a really big deal to me, because the other schools I was at, I just couldn’t see myself with their tassels or their colors. I thought if I have to be here” — in Houston or Bakersfield — “I’m just going to wear purple and gold.”

After graduation, Williams enrolled at Alabama A&M University, a historically Black college in Huntsville, on a full scholarship. He was a decent student, but unhappy, and bounced around over the next few years, from Southeastern University to the Army National Guard and finally the University of New Orleans.

One of his teachers had gone to work for what would become FirstLine Schools, now a five-school network of public charter schools. After he graduated, FirstLine offered him a job. Today, he is the director of facilities and transportation for the entire network.

Using the experience he gained keeping systems operating smoothly in the guard to ensure that kids will be transported, fed and supported at school is more satisfying, he says.

“I had a lot of people who knew me, and I had an opportunity to go from student to colleague, and it felt good. I get to work side by side with people who taught me.”

With his experience in Katrina and his stints in the military, Williams started thinking about the challenges a pandemic could pose in December, two months before the first U.S. case was documented. By the time schools were shut down in March, he had surveyed families about their technology needs and was figuring out how to keep custodians, bus drivers and cafeteria workers employed.

In an odd way, it has reinvigorated his passion for his work. Ever on the alert for potential future contingency plans, he’s looking for ways his schools’ distance learning experiences will enable FirstLine to better respond to future storms.

Managing upheaval, says Williams, is his superpower: “I went from being a pretty sure kid, who was confident where his life was going, to someone who just reacts to uncertainty.”

‘We have to keep moving’

The August that Katrina hit was showtime for Principal Sharon Clark. Her chronically underperforming city school had been taken over by the state-run Recovery School District, and on July 1, 2005, her middle school was granted permission to operate as a charter school.

Clark had argued that freed from the district’s notorious bureaucracy, her staff could turn Sophie B. Wright Middle School around. “It was now time to put our money where our mouth was,” she recalls. “Now we have no excuse for failure if we are responsible for every aspect of running our school, operating our school.”

By her lights, the timing of the switch to a charter was a blessing. Seeing that parents working on the city’s reconstruction needed a place to send their kids to school, she made a plan to enroll students in grades 4 to 8. She did not need to ask permission.

On Jan. 3, 2006, she was able to reopen Sophie B. Wright to 140 kids — many of them the children of first responders. Students were offered group counseling, and a pen-pal program was started so they could share their feelings in letters to kids in a school outside the state.

But Clark’s team stuck to their original school turnaround plan of rigorous academics. Even before the hurricane, the students were at risk, she says.

“As an educator, and as an African-American educator, I think it is important that we never dummy down curriculum or anything for our students,” she says. “We owe it to them to normalize the process of education no matter what, no matter if it’s a storm, if it’s COVID.”

There were no year-end exams in 2006, but by the following spring, 16 months after Sophie B. Wright reopened, academic achievement had leaped. In 2005, 41 percent of eighth-graders scored “unsatisfactory” in reading and 43 percent scored “approaching basic,” the two lowest categories. In 2007, 12 percent scored “unsatisfactory,” 46 percent “approaching basic” and 37 percent “basic.”

The school had no fourth-graders in 2005, but on the 2007 test, 71 percent scored “basic” or higher in reading and 80 percent in math.

As she reopened school for distance learning last week, Clark had the same goals. “I’ve learned through both of these processes, both of these situations,” she says. “Two to three years from now people forget, and they want you to be like before. There’s very little allowance or understanding or forgiveness. In my mindset, we have to keep moving for when that time comes and this goes away.”

‘You have to lead with love’

One of a handful of charter schools that existed before Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans Charter Middle School was a success story — so much so that the state Recovery School District asked its leaders if they would be willing to take over Samuel J. Green, a struggling pre-K-8 school.

“We said, ‘Of course we can,’” recalls Sivi Domango, now executive director of culture for all five FirstLine Schools public charter school campuses.

The effort was barely underway when the storm forced Domango to flee to Baton Rouge. She had been there two weeks when her higher-ups called and asked whether she would be willing to partner with a charter school in that city to open a temporary school on the second floor of the downtown arena that was serving as a shelter for evacuees.

“Our goal was to provide a sense of normalcy for children,” Domango says. “But we quickly realized it was about allowing their parents some time to organize their business, to see what their next move was.”

Upwards of 100 kids attended the makeshift school at the River Center, arrayed around library tables set up to suggest classrooms. “They all would get up in the morning and ride the escalator up to school,” she says. “Clearly, nothing was normal. They were sleeping on cots next to people they did not know.”

Before the storm, Domango had been dean of students at New Orleans Charter Middle School, a job that entailed discipline, among other things. Setting up a makeshift school in the arena forced her to change her approach.

“They say educators are superheroes, but underneath that cape we had also gone through a traumatic experience with our students,” she says. Domango’s home in New Orleans East was so far underwater that just the top of the roof can be seen in aerial photos of the flood.

When students did not show up on time for class in the temporary school, Domango could take the escalator down to find them. “But I had to restructure the way I interacted with them,” she says. “There were parents at the River Center who did not want to see me coming, because they were already stressed.

“I couldn’t say, ‘Hey, why isn’t your son in school?’ I had to say, ‘Hello, good morning, how are you? How about we send this child up to school and I will sit with you and help you with whatever you are trying to figure out?’”

The storm destroyed New Orleans Charter Middle School and badly damaged Green. Domango was among a group of employees who made the trip home to see whether Green could be reopened. As they stood outside, a family came out of a house across the street to say neighbors were eager to move back but couldn’t until there was an open school.

The neighborhood association protested a plan to tear the building down, says Domango: “They said the neighborhood would not have come back if it weren’t for that school reopening.”

This past March, when the coronavirus forced FirstLine’s five schools to close, Domango herself was sick with the virus. When she recovered, her first goal was to plan ways to tend to students’ emotional needs in the new school year — to foster togetherness at a distance.

She can trace a direct line from her experiences in the River Center to the strategies she and FirstLine’s educators will use to nurture relationships in remote learning: “When a student is absent, I can’t go bang on their door right now, but I can use social media. I can go to a parent’s Facebook and say, ‘Hey, Ms. So-and-So, how can I help you?’

“You can have high expectations,” says Domango. “You can have high academic standards. But you have to lead with love. You have to show people you care.”

‘I was a refugee. That gives me certain soft skills’

Monday, Aug. 17, looked nothing like J’Remi Barnes imagined it would. It was the first day of his first year as the teacher in charge of a special education classroom at Collegiate Academies. He can still support students, virtually, in everything from money management to math, but he is acutely aware of the responsibility he now shoulders: “When it comes to this work, it’s all on me.”

Barnes was in third grade during Hurricane Katrina and has the disconnected memories of a child. He remembers his mother getting a call at the Texas hotel where they took shelter, informing her that his grandfather had had a heart attack in his flooded apartment building. He remembers that the way his grandmother hugged his mother at the airport was “just different,” but not which airport.

His family bounced around Georgia, where his stepfather had family. A quiet boy, Barnes worried that he was behind the other kids. “In third grade, they were talking about the difference between facts and opinions and doing multiplication,” he says. “If we did the tables right, we got to participate in a sundae party.”

He was relieved when his mother announced she was leaving his stepfather and they were moving back to New Orleans midway through sixth grade. Back home, his family dived back into church, where Barnes would spend entire weekends involved in activities, including competing with the drill team.

He taught himself to play piano, and then drums and guitar. On enrolling in Abramson Sci Academy, he started a club called Garage Band. He taught classmates to play various instruments, and the group would perform at school events.

Exposure to Georgia’s more challenging schools meant he was ahead when he got home, a fact he took pride in. “High school was tough, but I was grateful for it,” says Barnes. “I excelled. I was surrounded by teachers who were invested in my achievement. I was invested in my achievement.”

His success attracted the attention of the , a national program that identifies students and veterans with leadership potential and supports them, with scholarships and mentoring, in small cohorts at four-year colleges. The program matched Barnes and 10 other New Orleans graduates with Grinnell College, located in an isolated pocket of Iowa.

“The culture shock was surreal,” he recalls. “I had interacted with white people. The vast majority of my teachers [at Sci] were white. But I was used to people at school looking like me.”

In a discussion about refugees, a classmate made a comment that was, to Barnes’s ears, so devoid of empathy he wanted to hide. “Someone brought up Katrina survivors, and it just got me,” he says. “I didn’t want to single myself out as ‘that person.’”

He thought about quitting during sophomore year. Of the 11 students in his cohort, six graduated.

His freshman year, Barnes took an education class that sparked his interest in teaching. As good as his teachers had been, he recalls thinking, students in New Orleans needed more educators who look like them.

“They still don’t have so many Black role models,” he says. “I would love to be that person for students, if I can.”

Starting his teaching career in a pandemic is more than Barnes imagined, but it’s something he feels uniquely positioned to do. “I was a refugee. That gives me certain soft skills,” he says. “It taught me to think in a way other people can’t. I can create relationships within my class that allow for conversation in a better way.”

Lead Image: New Orleans, October 2005 — A destroyed classroom at St. Dominic’s school in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina left the school flooded. (Getty Images)