Across the expo floor and in session after session, I saw cutting-edge tools promising hyper-personalized learning, systems designed to tailor learning to each student’s unique path with near surgical precision. Press here, click there, and voilà: a customized roadmap to success.

But as I flew home, two questions stuck with me: Are we focusing so narrowly on the individual that we overlook the power of the group as a sum of wonderful individual parts? And are we overengineering AI’s potential by assuming precise interventions are required when it could be used to foster growth and connection.     

AI holds real promise to create efficiencies in school operations, freeing educators and administrators to more effectively instruct and manage, but we miss the moment if we use it mainly to isolate learners instead of helping a group of learners engage meaningfully with content and with each other. Group dynamics do, and always will, matter, no matter the classroom or school type.

I’ve spent most of the past two decades in education, as a teacher, advocate, and now co-founder of a digital platform used in schools across Scandinavia and the U.S. Personalized learning has disrupted outdated models and brought welcome flexibility. But in my conversations with teachers and principals, from New Orleans to Copenhagen, the biggest barrier isn’t delivering content. It’s classroom and school dynamics that get in the way of both teaching and learning.

Even the most engaging lesson plan can fall flat if students don’t feel connected. School communities often have a culture of their own, but they aren’t immune to the broader dynamics happening around them. Learning — real, neuron-building learning — requires vulnerability. And vulnerability feels risky when you don’t feel seen by your peers. That’s true no matter your age. We all want to be seen, but no one wants to feel exposed, especially when wrestling with a difficult concept.

Just as students must apply knowledge to demonstrate mastery, why do we assume that building the so-called “soft skills” essential to careers and life — like empathy, collaboration, and self-efficacy — requires adult-led interventions? What if, instead, we empowered students to shift classroom dynamics by engaging directly with one another?

We’ve all seen how well this can work: most obviously in team sports, but also in thoughtful group projects and school traditions that create shared meaning. That’s why it’s puzzling that so many edtech solutions rush toward complexity without first exploring more organic ways to elevate insights from students themselves.

In one recent example, my team learned from a 5th grade class that “school” continuously showed up for them as a “top negative” after multiple anonymous AI-powered “check-ins.” After engaging in a low-stakes, fun 10-minute challenge, in which the AI-enabled platform guided a class through a silly “Round Robin Fairytale” activity, allowing students to work together to create a narrative. Students were laughing and interacting across well-worn social groups. During their next check-in, students were far more positive, and the teacher remarked to us how much more effectively she was able to transition the group into her instructional block after that. 

And this isn’t just a classroom issue. It’s a societal one. We have some of the most powerful communication tools in human history, able to connect us across continents in seconds!  Yet we’re struggling to coordinate, to understand each other, and too often just to solve problems together. This disconnection breeds anxiety, isolation, and mistrust. 

On the other hand, we can all picture classrooms that are thriving. You can feel it: the energy, the collaboration, the lightbulb moments. A thriving blended learning environment hums with life when each student gets what they need and the whole group grows stronger together.

That’s why I believe the most powerful application of AI in education today isn’t personalization. It’s facilitation. Not replacing human connection but making space for it.

Imagine using AI not just to track mood or behavior, but also to enhance shared dynamics in a class, giving students the language and structure to reflect together, support one another, and co-create solutions. That could help educators and students together see more clearly what’s happening in the room and act with more intention, without feeling exposed.

Used wisely, AI can free up time, elevate insight, and support teachers in building the conditions where students feel they belong, so that real learning can take root. And when one student needs support, they can look not just to an adult, but to each other.

In an age of distraction and division, the most radical use of AI in schools may not be surgical precision, but collective attunement, so that growth toward proficiency isn’t an experience in isolation but in community.

In the process, the Kansas City nonprofit has become synonymous with a research technique known as “co-design,” which says innovation should begin not with outsiders offering solutions, but with those trying to solve problems for themselves.

Leanlab took shape after its founder, a former teacher named Katie Boody Adorno, began studying how education systems work. The child of community organizers with roots in Puerto Rico, Boody Adorno had taught for five years and realized that education could learn from the way her parents’ efforts worked.

“It was surprising to me how much we excluded community voice in the education sector,” she said, “and how unimaginative we were in that sector. It was still very top-down bureaucratic, and it wasn’t particularly effective.”

Leanlab began life as a kind of tech incubator, evolving into a quietly influential organization that helps ed tech developers work with educators to evaluate their products in real classrooms. 

From there it has moved into several different aspects of research, partnering with University College-London to co-found the , a hub for researchers, policymakers, philanthropists and tech investors to work together. One of its most found that of 1,640 tech tools in schools, just 11% are evaluated externally.

Last summer, Leanlab also partnered with 20 school districts, charter schools, microschools and afterschool programs to create something called the . It works with educators, helping them research their most pressing questions. And it pays teachers $50 per hour for their work implementing the research. The focus, Boody Adorno says, is on solving real-life problems in their classrooms. In the process, teachers are also trained in research techniques.

In an interview with ����Ӱ��, Boody Adorno stressed the importance of co-design and her belief that technology is changing schools rapidly — so rapidly that large-scale, randomized control trials, which can take years to design and implement, are no longer a good fit for many research questions.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: You talk about being the child of community organizers. When you talk about “community voice,” what are you thinking? 

Katie Boody Adorno: I was a middle school teacher in both public schools and charter schools. This was during the No Child Left Behind era, 2008 to 2013. It was a very test-driven culture that was very bureaucratic. You had a lot of big administrators from central office or the state department of education telling you what you needed to do. You had scripted curriculum. You had pacing guides that were very assessment-driven. We also were dealing with massive school closures in the city.

All of this felt very “done to” communities. You were literally told what you were going to teach, how you were going to teach it, if your school was going to stay open or not. Teachers didn’t have a say in this. Building leaders didn’t have a say in this. Parents didn’t have a say. Certainly not our students! And then we were shocked when, year over year, we were seeing pretty dismal results — or when the tests came back and said, “Your schools are not performing on par with more affluent or white schools.”  

Let’s talk about how Leanlab came about. Were you still teaching at the time? Had you moved out of the classroom?

I taught for five years. I’d moved to an instructional coach role, where I still was teaching one class. I had gone back to graduate school to become an administrator and I was on that career trajectory. I was in a charter school system and I really thought I wanted to be a school leader. But the more I was exposed to the system, the more skeptical I was becoming. I now had the opportunity to slice the data from a higher-level viewpoint and I was just like, “Man, this isn’t working. We’re not seeing transformation for our kids. But it’s not because we don’t have teachers who are working really hard.”

We had a brilliant staff, but it was unsustainable. We were burning teachers out. Our kids were going to school, at that point, six days a week. Even when we were getting strong test results in the state exam, it wasn’t translating into life outcomes for our kids. I became pretty disillusioned, but really committed to the future of our kids. 

At the same time, you were getting to know the startup community in Kansas City? 

I got the chance to attend a couple of events and two things struck me: The way they talked about the innovation process was so much more human-centered and actually aligned to community organizing principles. It was really this notion of elevating end-user insights, designing with who you’re serving, which was something that we never really talked about in education.

The other piece was just the radical innovation. Now it’s kind of a trope and we laugh about it, this idea of disrupting systems. But this was a decade ago, when this language was just coming out. And it struck me as really, really interesting: There’s another way to think about education that we haven’t talked about. I started hosting pop-up events to teach educators how to go through these innovation processes. I was trying to organize at a really grassroots level, bringing together educators, researchers, community leaders to think about what it would mean to begin prototyping new things that could accelerate student outcomes. 

When you say “prototyping new things,” you mean products?

In those early days, it really was all over the place. Oftentimes it was technology products. Oftentimes it was new school models, new programs or curricula. But the idea would be: Start first with a problem that your community is identifying. It could be, “Hey, we’re really struggling on basic literacy. We’re really struggling with students feeling safe at school.” Whatever it is, start first by validating that from the community itself that’s experiencing that pain, and then begin prototyping a new solution. 

Fast-forward 10 years: When you look at what you’re doing now, what do you see?

We got pretty good at building commercially viable ventures — a lot of these companies were going on and scaling and making money. But we weren’t solving the problem of knowing if they were actually moving the needle for students across the board. And when we looked at the sector about five years ago, we realized very few tech solutions had any evidence that they were accelerating learning outcomes for kids or even demonstrating any evidence that they were beneficial to students.

So that’s when we underwent another pivot, just before the pandemic, where we said, “We have great relationships with these local schools. We have emerging respect from this entrepreneur community. What does the world look like where we actually bring in researchers more seriously, deepen our relationships with schools so that we can run more in-depth trials?”

The end goal here is that we actually want to see outsized impact. We want technology to actually live up to its promise of accelerating student outcomes beyond what we’ve seen. At that point, we brought in an internal research team. We flipped our business model. So we charge for-profit ed tech companies. We grant money — we believe in unrestricted grants — to schools, and offer market rate stipends. We typically pay teachers $50 an hour. 

Let’s talk about co-design. I’d like to hear a little bit about that process.

Co-design is really interesting because it’s become buzzy. People are throwing it around a lot and there’s not a lot of understanding of exactly what it means. When you design solutions or technologies in a silo with a technologist developer and a company that doesn’t have access to the realities of a school environment, it cannot be very beneficial. And unfortunately, this has happened a lot in the ed tech sector because typically these technologies are selling to administrators but delivering to students. So oftentimes they don’t think about the design for students or teachers because the customer is not the user. Co-design has come to be used as colloquial lingo around what it means to elevate the user’s perspective and give feedback to the product or solution when it’s being developed, so that it actually benefits them.

Let’s talk about these problems that actual educators identify. What have been some of the hits? 

There’s no clear winner, but I would say across the board, folks are still very concerned about learning loss, primarily post-pandemic, primarily in literacy and math. We’re thinking about solutions that target upper elementary literacy and math, particularly in literacy, where a lot of schools have now gotten for the Science of Reading, but our older kids might have been left out. So those kids are still struggling with basic concepts.

Social-emotional learning or well-being — whatever geography allows you to say — is still a huge priority. That’s also now become educator well-being. Teaching with technology is a big one, particularly with AI, “What is safe? What is reasonable? How do we prepare the workforce to do that?” And then college and career readiness and preparation for an ever-changing workforce. People call that different things: real world learning and experiential learning, portrait of a graduate, college readiness. But it’s this idea of, “How are they getting prepared for the future?”

Are there products, for lack of a better term, that people would recognize that have come out of all this work? Or is it too early to talk about that? 

No, it’s not. We’ve done 80 studies. And prior to that, in our five years of doing research and development, we worked with small startups that are just getting off the ground. Folks that are federally funded. We’ve done a lot of research for a tool called Sown to Grow, based out of the Bay Area. They’ve gone on to do really great evidence-based work around cultivating a culture of increased belonging and well-being and social-emotional learning. And we work with big incumbents on new products, like Logitech, McGraw-Hill and others. 

So do you become their research arm? What can you do for McGraw-Hill that they don’t already have in-house? 

What we functionally do is match them with schools and we have a third party R&D team that will help them figure out if their product is working. And we align all of our evaluation to the federal criteria for evidence. So if they really want third-party evidence, we can be the one that does that. What’s unique about us is that we’re really nimble. We’re one of the only research firms that’s connected to a school network. So we’ll say, “Hey, let’s put this in front of a diverse student or school audience. Let’s get feedback.”

So you’ve kind of gone from being an incubator to being an ?

We’re an R&D firm that’s much more nimble and focused exclusively on co-design and technologies. We’re uniquely positioned where we’re different than AIR or . We’re not really doing randomized controlled trials (RCTs). We’re not doing what we believe is maybe an outdated mode of research. We’re really trying to elevate school community insights and take an iterative approach.

I’ve been writing about education research for 25 years, and when people complain about it, most often the complaint is, “You’re not doing an RCT. That’s the gold standard.” To hear somebody like you say, “Hold on a second, that’s not the best format” is striking.

RCTs are a pain in the ass to do for actual educators. Any educator, ask them if they think it’s equitable to randomly implement a solution that you think is going to be really effective for their kids, but assign it randomly, withhold it randomly and try to implement a cohesive curricular framework around that. That’s just really hard to do and raises some interesting ethical questions. The other piece is that we’re just in an age of technology vastly outpacing our traditional R&D systems. If you do a traditional RCT, it might take you a year and a half to recruit the number of participants you need to engage in that study. The intervention has completely changed by that point — and it’s going to change again by the time you get the findings back. So how helpful is that for the field?

Disclosure: The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Walton Family Foundation provide financial support to Leanlab and ����Ӱ��.

In early 2021, the district was back in school after closing for the pandemic, but my teachers were fried. We serve approximately 1,300 students in four schools and three off-campus sites, including a program for 18- to 22-year-olds with a high level of special needs and pre-K-12 programs for those with social-emotional disabilities and autism. We were all waiting to see if we would get a vaccine for the coronavirus, and everybody was a mess.  

To help teachers de-stress, I took a 200-hour teacher training in mindfulness, social-emotional learning and yoga with . Educators can integrate these practices into their classrooms and use them to support their own mental and physical health. Everyone who completes the course is certified to teach yoga, so when I finished, I offered my stressed-out teachers a class on Fridays. We met in the library. Everybody spread out and brought their own mat, giving us enough physical distance that we could take our masks off. 

When the first six-week session was done, all 10 teachers said they wanted to continue — and learn to teach yoga themselves. Today, the district has about 46 educators who are certified Breathe for Change facilitators, and our program serves a dual purpose. It helps the teachers help themselves, which empowers them to build a culture of care and trust with their students. And it benefits our students in a variety of ways.

The schools where teachers regularly implement these strategies have seen a significant decrease in chronic absenteeism. At Colegrove Park Elementary, the rate dropped 11% last year, which put the school in the top 10 for attendance statewide. In recognition of this achievement, Colegrove Park was awarded a from the NBA champion Boston Celtics.

One teacher told me that since she started using mindfulness strategies in her fourth-grade classroom, “I haven’t had a significant disciplinary referral this year.” That’s huge in a district where 71% of the students are identified as high-need. As a former science teacher, I love this kind of qualitative evidence that the program is working. 

At Drury High School, one creative teacher came up with the idea of giving students facing discipline a choice: They could sit in detention or participate in mindfulness and yoga practice. So many took her up on it that the school started offering yoga regularly for all students. 

I asked the football coach to co-present with me to all the teaching assistants, and to see him stand there and say, “I know you need this, because I need this,” was amazing. He talked about his football players and said, “I need them in the zone. And for me to get them into the zone, they have to quiet their mind and be fully present to me so they can hear me and understand what I expect from them.” That was a very powerful moment.

The young adults in our 18- to 22-year-old transition program have also been heavily involved. Many of these students are unable to communicate verbally and will always need some level of supervision in their lives. Teachers use yoga breathing techniques to help calm students who become agitated, and the physical movements provide a form of exercise for those who struggle with physical fitness and control.

The program has also grown beyond the district, through partnerships with other community groups and local nonprofits. For example, we offer a free community yoga class at the library twice a week, which primarily draws senior citizens. The class has a limit of 15 people and is always full. I have seen regular attendees progress from not being able to touch their toes to doing full Sun Salutations. Just after the pandemic, I did a session at the library for parents while their kids went off to a reading. It helped them relax and become more comfortable being around other people again. And I’ve done modified yoga sessions for breast cancer survivors, who often lose mobility in their upper body. We have also partnered with the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts to develop a graduate-level course for educators in social-emotional learning, and we have a map to provide evidence-based curriculum for all grade levels. 

For next year, my goal is to step back from leading this initiative and have our core group of certified instructors implement practices in the classroom and train their colleagues. I’m getting to the point in my career where I’m thinking about the legacy I will leave to this district that I’ve loved and served. These yoga and mindfulness practices will be an important part of that.

Great leaders are nurtured, not born. They arise from a combination of education, mentorship, encouragement and practical experience. Service learning — an approach where students apply academic and civic knowledge and skills to address real community needs — provides young people with the vital hands-on experiences needed to develop leadership skills. These include investigating real community issues, designing effective programs and implementing those solutions in real life. Such real-life experiences immerse students in curiosity, creativity and empathy — all of which are essential for effective leadership. Programs that provide service learning can help develop these skills and empower young people to effect positive change in their schools and neighborhoods.

One such program was launched in 2022 by the for students in grades 6 to 12. This program invites teams of at least two students, plus an adult mentor, to create service-learning projects in one of four focus areas: education equity, community health, environmental justice or civics and democracy.

Teams take a deep dive into an issue affecting their community by investigating, exploring and understanding specific needs to identify a meaningful and impactful project to take on. Since its launch, the program has served 1,420 students across 29 states and 71 schools and organizations, fostering essential leadership skills and values, and empowering young people — with their boundless energy, creativity, and passion for change — to lead from an early age. 

Developing projects based on community needs hones collaboration skills with peers and local partners. It builds young people’s understanding of systemic issues and root causes, fosters a sense of civic responsibility, taps into empathy and offers opportunities for action and advocacy.

Across the nation, students have used service learning to tackle issues like water conservation, recycling and distracted driving. One student team in New York investigated the negative impacts of the overuse of social media by teens. They developed a “” campaign, which encourages teens to disconnect from social media and technology for five hours on Fridays in an effort to improve mental health and self-esteem. The team’s efforts resulted in , sparking important conversations in St. Lawrence County about social media’s impact. Upon presenting their campaign to their local , over 100 community members signed up to participate.

Another student team from northern California focused on the lack of financial education resources among underprivileged communities. They developed a and offered free in-person and online for kids between the ages of 7 and 11. These efforts can help families start to build generational wealth, close economic gaps and ease financial instability. 

A team from New Jersey known as H20 Heroes embarked on a mission to investigate access to water in places around the world where it is scarce. They found that women and girls are predominantly responsible for collecting water in households where there is no indoor plumbing. In rural India, for example, women and girls walk an average of 2 miles daily, often bearing the heavy burden on their heads. This not only leads to severe health problems, but prevents them from pursuing employment and education, reinforcing the cycle of poverty. In response, the students committed to raising funds to support Wells on Wheels, an initiative that provides water households in India. The leadership team hosted a Water Summit for fifth- and sixth-graders in their school districts, ran a fund-raising contest and sold reusable water bottles.

demonstrates that students engaged in service learning exhibit improved self-esteem, academic performance, civic engagement and social skills. For instance, during the pandemic, student leaders from Chicago collaborated with a local health organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on a to help stop the spread of COVID-19 in the Latino community. One student who spoke to the leadership council about the experience remarked, “I realized that youth can be a force for global change. This experience opened my eyes to the daily issues affecting our world.”

Such experiences have the power to create the next generation of leaders this nation needs; leaders who respond to the challenges of the world while embodying values like empathy, integrity, transparency, respect and commitment.

Now, more than ever, teens need to be empowered with the education, mentorship and opportunities needed to become the transformative leaders the nation urgently requires. Delaying leadership education until college or adulthood risks wasting young people’s potential. The question is not whether America can afford to invest in the leadership development of today’s youth, but whether it can afford not to.

Solving chronic absenteeism involves tackling big structural problems like transportation and infrastructure. But we also have to make our schools places where young people want to learn. Too many teens, in particular, had negative feelings about school even before the pandemic. Yale researchers conducting found most teens spent their days “tired,” “stressed,” and “bored.” Fewer than 3 in 100 reported feeling interested while in school.

Decades of research prove that students learn more when they experience high levels of academic engagement and social belonging in school. That’s why XQ developed grounded in the science of teaching and the importance of cultivating caring, trusting relationships within schools. These principles are being used to rethink the traditional high school experience in across the country to make learning more relevant and engaging for the needs of this generation.

Our partnerships are still new. But so far, we’re finding graduates from our first 17 schools have more interest in their classes and a stronger sense of belonging at school than their national counterparts. More than three-quarters of the XQ class of 2023 — which includes 17 high schools — said they were at least somewhat interested in their classes. And 52% of the XQ class of 2023 felt like they belonged “completely” or “quite a bit” at their school, versus only 40% nationally.

I spoke with four students from XQ schools across the country to hear what makes a difference in creating high schools young people want to attend. They are: Evan Bowie, Class of 2024 from Ron Brown College Preparatory High School in Washington, D.C.; Karisse Dickison, Class of 2024 from Elizabethton High School in Elizabethton, Tennessee; Henry Montalvo, Class of 2025 from ��í�����ܱ��Dz� in Santa Ana, California; and Lillian Roberts, Class of 2024 from Brooklyn STEAM Center. 

Create Bonding Activities

has fewer than 200 students, but Henry Montalvo didn’t know most of them when he started there as a ninth grader. That small size helped him adjust to the Santa Ana high school, but he also credited bonding activities. One called Community Week provides an opportunity for students to celebrate, pause and reflect. Students create their own schedules based on available sessions. Montalvo said they may lead the sessions alone or partner with teachers for non-academic, fun classes on topics like putting on a thrift shop and even Pokémon card-collecting.

“It’s just basically a time to come together as a community,” he said of the most recent event this past spring. “Sometimes you write a letter to yourself, and then they give it to you at the end of the year so you can reflect on it.” 

Evan Bowie said teachers at , an all-male district school in Washington, D.C. that’s part of the partnership, also look for creative ways to help students bond. Students might be asked, for example, to stand or move their desks into circles and answer a question like, “What’s your affirmation today?” Or, “How was your weekend?” He said sometimes it can feel like you’re being put on the spot, but it works.

Bowie said if he answered with, “‘It was boring.’ They’d be, like, ‘You got to give a real answer.’” The upshot: “It just pushes the student to think a little bit better.”

Want to learn more about how to create innovative teaching and learning in high schools? Subscribe to the , a newsletter that comes out twice a month for high school teachers.

Seek Student Feedback

Check-ins like this can also happen more formally, as they do at the The program takes students from several local high schools for mornings or afternoons, five days a week, offering them concentrations in career pathways including cybersecurity, design and engineering, filmmaking and more. Brooklyn STEAM Center is in the Imagine NYC

Lillian Roberts chose culinary arts as her concentration. She enjoys how teachers meet with students quarterly. She said they ask how students feel about their classes, which includes “the way they’re teaching, if you have any input.” There are also student-led town hall meetings where students can give feedback anonymously on “things that you might not feel comfortable with.”

Bowie said his teachers at Ron Brown College Preparatory High School also solicit feedback on a weekly or monthly basis, depending on the instructor. They’ll ask questions like, “What went well this week? What can I improve on? What ways can you improve your grade?” Bowie said students are also asked to rate the classes on a scale of one to five stars and provide suggestions for how to make a class better, such as including more hands-on activities or more Socratic seminars instead of written assignments.

Make Personal Connections

is located in northeast Tennessee, an area that has struggled for years with the loss of manufacturing and the opioid epidemic. It was selected as an XQ Super School largely because of its teens’ proposal for more student-centered learning to benefit the community.

Karisse Dickison, who graduated this year and is heading to college, described a close relationship with school librarian Dustin Hensley — who regularly talks to students about what they’re reading and their extracurricular activities. When Dickison helped start a group dedicated to ending gun violence, she said Hensley would ask her about related events in the news.

“It was just nice to have him reach out and make sure that I knew what was happening in the world,” she said.

Bowie also valued a personal connection with English teacher Teresa Lasley, who encouraged him to apply to Georgetown University, where he’s attending this fall. He recalled her showing the class a video about how Black students didn’t feel welcome at the prestigious school. When he spoke with Lasley, he said she told him he doesn’t have to work extra hard to prove he belongs. “Going to Georgetown means you’re adding more to Georgetown,” he remembered her saying. “It’s better for them than it is for you. You belong. You already have it in you.”

He said that exchange allowed him to “be seen,” and that he’s witnessed similar exchanges between other students and teachers.

At Brooklyn STEAM Center, Roberts recalled one guidance counselor who reached out after he saw her crying. “And then we set up weekly meetings just to have someplace to talk about what’s happening,” she said. But at her other high school, she thought guidance counselors seem to focus more on “purely more academic things.”

Leave the Building

Students at all four schools experience internships, work-based learning and partnerships with community organizations, which they said make classwork feel more relevant. 

Montalvo said teachers at ��í�����ܱ��Dz� helped him land internships at a congressional campaign and with a law firm. He said these outside experiences lead to presentations in class. At Brooklyn STEAM Center, Roberts earned an OSHA 10 as well as a New York Food Protection Certificate, and joined a class trip to Italy to study cuisine. 

Dickison worked on social media and advertising at a local nonprofit. Some classes at Elizabethton High include project-based learning, such as one in which students helped solve a cold case involving a serial killer (their work became the subject of the hit podcast this year). ��í�����ܱ��Dz� also offers , which Montalvo said makes classes feel more interesting. In his first year, he recalled how he and another student in his English class interviewed local environmental justice experts about lead contamination and the lack of green space, then made a presentation to their school and invited the greater community.

All three students who graduated this year are going to college in the fall, and Montalvo plans to go to college after graduating next year; he wants to be a lawyer. In our senior survey, 72% of XQ students in the class of 2023 planned to attend college, illustrating a great example of students remaining engaged in school beyond their high school years. 

But a sense of belonging and engagement can only happen with student input. “School is about ‘�ɾ��ٳ�’ not ‘�ڴǰ�,’” Roberts said. “Everything is with the students. It’s not for the students. You have to do everything with the students in mind.”

Disclosure: is a financial supporter of ����Ӱ��.

Those guesses are surely correct at least sometimes. But what if they were right more often? Could it help schools put more students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds on a path to economic security? 

To find potential answers to these questions, the Urban Institute, where I lead the Center on Education Data and Policy, recently launched the . This year, we will in innovative research and development through our first request for proposals. The goal is to help educators understand which skills in schools are most strongly associated with long-term success, through research linking students’ competencies to upward mobility and by building new, easily collectable measures. An example of this could be a metric for career preparedness encompassing job-preparation and technical abilities.

It is important to first define how we view “mobility” through the context of this work, as we are using a of the term developed by the Urban Institute:  

• “Economic success: When a person has adequate income and assets to support their and their family’s material well-being.
• Power and autonomy: When a person has the ability to have control over their life, to make choices and to influence larger policies and actions that affect their future.
• Dignity and belonging: When a person feels the respect, dignity and sense of belonging that comes from contributing to and being appreciated by people in their community.”

An example of the types of work that Urban institute seeks to fund is in the area of noncognitive factors such as teamwork, grit and communication, which have been identified as predictors of wages and other positive life outcomes. A potential project could link data on noncognitive factors in school-age students at many schools to adult economic outcomes and compare variations among schools against economic mobility. 

To take it a step further, research could seek to determine whether a student’s noncognitive factors are more predictive of mobility if they are measured by a teacher of the same race.

A second objective is to expand the universe of mobility measurements. For example, has demonstrated that a student’s percentage of friends with high socioeconomic status is a key correlate of upward mobility for people with lower socioeconomic status. A potential project under this RFP could develop a new measure of social capital that could be collected in PK-12 schools. A proposed study might consider how the measure works in rural versus urban areas, and how it should incorporate school and neighborhood segregation.

Identifying the pre-K-12 skills that matter most for lifetime success takes a long time, between developing new measures, collecting data on them in schools, waiting many years for students to reach adulthood and connecting all the needed information. But the advantages to having this evidence are too great to ignore, and the current landscape is too bleak: Students who grow up in the poorest 20% of families have a of remaining poor as adults.

This is not to say that those pre-K-12 skills are the sole causes of, or potential solutions to, . Students face barriers that affect their ability to learn, such as substandard and inadequate health care, and that diminish the fruits of their labors after they leave school, such as and . This is why we are pushing all our grantees to consider individual students’ circumstances both in and beyond school. 

Today, most schools largely rely on the same measures of student success they’ve used for decades, such as reading and math scores, attendance and graduation rates. If our initiative is successful, schools in 2034 will regularly measure a set of skills that drive economic mobility and consciously work to improve them. That could make a real difference helping all students thrive after graduation — and put more low-income students on a path to economic security.

Whole-child education models are those that expand the ambit of schools beyond a traditional academic focus. While a range of whole-child models have been explored since at least the Progressive Era, use of these models has expanded greatly over the past twenty years.

Because nearly all children in the United States attend public schools, it can be a tempting place to provide near-universal access to programs and resources. However, for various reasons, some families and educators are wary of a more expansive role for schools in children’s lives beyond academic training. In the Hoover Institution’s report “,” I review several examples of whole-child reforms that have become popular over the past few decades: community schools, school based health centers, wraparound service models, and social emotional learning curricula. 

While some models have proven effective at shifting child outcomes in certain settings, none have yet been proven — at large scale, using high-quality causal research methods — to be a silver bullet that can overcome the challenges many children face today in terms of improving academic outcomes. Though they may have other positive impacts on their own, without related investment in academic reforms, they are unlikely to be the panacea for the low academic performance that plagues children in the United States. Thus, at the end of my brief, I close with recommendations for policymakers to think carefully about implementation of these models in their own contexts.

• Whole-child education models are becoming better known in the United States

• Their adoption in some public schools provides an opportunity to see which models contribute to academic success.

• However, they are a part of the topic of child welfare, not the entire picture.

In the past couple of decades, there has been a renewed interest in the idea that schools should expand their ambit to address a wider range of student needs around health and well-being. Often this is described as a focus on development of the “whole child” rather than just the academic aspects of child development.

Of course, promotion of a wider ambit for schools beyond the academic sphere is at least a century old, as is the debate about whether it is optimal. The intellectual leaders of the Progressive Era, in the nineteenth century, sought to bring a broader focus to education systems than the traditional academic one. This included various ways of engaging the whole child, some of which are similar to the models covered here, particularly the social and emotional learning curricula and community school models that have skyrocketed in popularity in the past several years.

Similarly, the roots of whole-child reforms that are focused on improving children’s physical health are deeply embedded in US education history. As early as 1850, states began requiring immunizations and sometimes hosted immunization clinics in schools, where there was easy direct access to children. Also, the beginning of what we now know as the standard school nurse model began in 1902 as a pilot program aiming to insert healthcare into schools in order to improve chronic absenteeism by managing easily treatable illnesses and focusing on prevention. Each of these foreshadowed the more recent creation and rapid expansion of school-based health centers, which insert healthcare providers directly into schools with the goal of improving academic and overall well-being.

Recent decades have seen a renewal in the popularity of whole-child models. To some extent, this renewed interest is partly a backlash to what many perceived as the laser focus of the No Child Left Behind era on student test score performance. The difficult periods of the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic also contributed to this shifted focus. The recent version of this movement has also been helped by increased emphasis on the complex relationships between education, health, housing, and other social dimensions across a range of academic disciplines and policy spheres.

This whole-child movement in schools has taken many forms, some of which I describe in more detail below. Across all its forms, the theory of change driving whole-child reform has two main parts. First, many students struggle academically because their basic needs are not met. Second, supporting these basic needs directly by bringing healthcare and/or social service resources into the school itself will overcome the access barriers that some children face, particularly poor children, thereby increasing their ability to thrive academically and socially.

To some extent, this theory of change pervades the entire US education system. Almost all districts in the country provide some form of nonacademic care to students through the school nurse, school counselors, or expanded offerings like universal vision screening programs. And many provide extracurricular activities or partner with community organizations in a variety of ways. What differentiates the whole-child models of reform here from the standard public school environment is the broader range of services provided and the depth of engagement between the school and community partners.

Intuitively, the first part of this theory of change makes some sense. How can a child learn if they suffer from an ongoing undiagnosed disease or disorder that prevents them from attending school regularly, concentrating in class, or participating fully in the community around them? How can a child learn if they feel isolated in a community, are surrounded by violence, and lack strong support inside and outside of school?

There is little direct causal evidence to support this theory of change, and there are plenty of anecdotes about children thriving despite incredibly challenging experiences during childhood. Yet a majority of parents would agree that children thrive most when their basic needs are met. However, as with all aspects of childrearing, there is debate about which “needs” require fulfillment for children to thrive. Furthermore, there is debate about whether schools are the best provider of health and social services to support children.

For decades, people have debated whether schools are the most effective places to solve the deep-rooted societal problems, like poverty, that leave many children with their basic needs unmet. Some people see schools as the great equalizer, holding them uniquely responsible for the achievement and well-being of all students, regardless of their backgrounds or the social forces determining those backgrounds. Others argue that systemic poverty, isolation, violence, poor health, and other ills have such a strong role that schools cannot be responsible for overcoming them.

Because nearly all children in the United States attend public schools, it can be a useful place to provide nearly universal access to programs and resources. However, for various reasons, some families are wary of a more expansive role for schools in children’s lives beyond academic training. Some have concerns about the differences between their own values and beliefs and those promoted in the school environment, as is the case with the recent backlash among social emotional learning programs. Others have concerns about whether school employees have the bandwidth and expertise to provide an expansive range of high-quality care; instead, they suggest that a focus on academic knowledge would allow school employees, like teachers, to be more impactful. Still others distrust the push for schools to focus on issues beyond academics because of concerns about greater intrusion into the private lives of families.

In “A Nation At Risk +40,” I review several examples of whole-child reforms that have become popular over the past few decades. After describing the general framework of each, I explore research into each model’s effectiveness. Most have been described as effective by the literature, but this assertion is generally based on research that is largely theoretical, comprises mixed methods, or is conducted either at a small scale or without the types of carefully constructed comparison groups that are essential for determining causal impacts. I focus on summarizing the subset of this literature that meets the Tier 1 or Tier 2 standard of the US Department of Education for strong or moderate evidence of effectiveness from either an experimental or a quasiexperimental design study (What Works Clearinghouse 2020).

Further, since many areas of research have shown patterns of effective programs in small studies that have limited effectiveness when taken to scale, I place particular emphasis on the relatively few studies that have analyzed the effectiveness of programs with large numbers of students across multiple school settings. 

While some have proven effective at shifting child outcomes in certain settings, none have yet been proven at scale, using high-quality causal research methods, to be a silver bullet that can overcome the challenges many children face today. Importantly, when looked at in total and given the scale of the existing research, the lack of conclusive evidence of a clear positive causal effect of these reforms on children’s academic achievement casts doubt on the theory underlying these reforms. Though they may have other positive impacts, on their own and without attention to academic reforms they are unlikely to be the panacea for low academic performance that plagues children in the United States. 

Thus, at “A Nation At Risk +40,” I close with recommendations for policymakers to think carefully about implementation of these models in their own contexts. . 

Maria D. Fitzpatrick is a professor of economics and public policy in the Brooks School of Public Policy at Cornell University. She is co-director of the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect, research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and an affiliate in the CESifo Research Network. Her research focuses on child and family policy, particularly education. 

See the full Hoover Institution initiative: .

Chris Riback: Hotep, thanks for coming by the studio.

Hotep: Thank you for having me, Chris, it’s a pleasure.

Chris Riback: What is Black Lion and Cubs?

Hotep: So Black Lion and Cubs is a family friendly anime series, more of a culture and art movement that I created, centered around a father and his two children. It’s something that was motivated by fatherhood. Because I became a father four years ago and my children were excited about some of the things I was sharing with them that I grew up on in the 80s. I decided that I could create what they were seeing in a way that was fashioned to represent characters that looked like them and that was also more family friendly, because a lot of the cartoons and anime back then and today were a little too violent.

Chris Riback: Yes, a lot of violence.

Hotep: Yes, a lot of violence.

Chris Riback: And what are the themes that you carry through the narrative? What are some of those lessons that you want to pass on to your cubs?

Hotep: Being a former teacher myself, I’m studied in the things necessary for human development. And one of the big things that I’ve come to understand that’s important is confidence, self-esteem, belief in oneself, all the things that we call in education now, social-emotional learning. Competency, right, that competency. So I wanted to teach those types of lessons to my children at a very early age and help them grow up and develop those types of competencies. It was something that Frederick Douglass said that struck me the most. He said, “It’s easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” And that statement resonated a lot with me, not only as an educator, but now as a father, making sure that I build them strong so that we don’t have to do the repair work that we hear in society, all the mental health and the self-care. All that’s a reactive response to something that could be proactively built in a human being.

Chris Riback: What are some of the episodes in Black Lion and Cubs?

Hotep: So I have two series, two separate series that have already been developed. The first one is called Valley of the Kings. Valley of the Kings is centered around Black Lion and his cubs as they travel throughout North Africa on behalf of the Pharaoh of Upper Egypt, who has sent them to find his queen who has been captured, if you will, kidnapped by the king of Lower Egypt. And so, they’ve been warring for some time, and now the queen is caught up in the middle and Black Lion and cubs have been deployed to help find her. So they traveled to a lot of historical locations in North Africa between Nubia and Egypt.

The second series is called, Sands of Time. Sands of Time is a more interplanetary story where the heroes, once again are called upon by the family of the kingdom of Upper Egypt, but this time the queen. The king of Upper Egypt has fallen ill and now she sends them across the universe to find the ingredients to make a mystical elixir-

Chris Riback: Wow.

Hotep: … to come back and bring him back to health.

Chris Riback: Now you mentioned previously that your kids right now are four and two-years-old.

Hotep: That’s correct.

Chris Riback: So the two-year-old, we’ll forgive him or her if they haven’t seen it. But has your four-year-old seen any of the shows?

Hotep: Oh, yes, both of them have.

Chris Riback: Both of them have.

Hotep: Both of them have.

Chris Riback: How did they react?

Hotep: Oh, they love it. I mean, because first and foremost, the characters are fashioned after them, if you will, so they can relate in the fact that. And they’re named after my children, so that’s number one.

Chris Riback: What are their names?

Hotep: Salahdin and Osaro are their names. So we have Super Salahdin and Awesome Osaro, are the two cubs. So while some kids today know of the newest singers or rappers, or athletes, my children don’t know who these people are, but they know who King Khufu was or King Ramses. They know about Nubia and Egypt, so real historical places and people that is going to bring them a closer awareness to their own culture and history. And so even my two-year-old, to that point, He, “That’s King Ramses,” or, “That’s King Khufu.” He knows it. Or, “That’s a pyramid, a sphinx.” He knows these words and knows these items even at two.

Chris Riback: Well, you’re also quite an entrepreneur. Where can people see the anime, see your work? And what other reaction do you get outside of your immediate family?

Hotep: Oh, well that’s why I’m excited to be here. I wasn’t sure outside of the family what kind of response I would get, but I had the pleasure of being distributed, my cartoon being distributed on a streaming service known as Black Education Station. It’s a streaming service, much like Netflix and Disney, but it’s been created by Black people and all the content features Black people in a prominent role. And so, on Black Education Station they’re in the forefront. They’re the hero and-

Chris Riback: They’re the protagonist.

Hotep: They’re the protagonists. And there’s no ads. The great thing about Black Education Station-

Chris Riback: Oh.

Hotep: … there’s no ads, different from YouTube, if you will. So my cartoon is distributed exclusively on that network. But outside of that, being here at a conference like this and being able to share with people Black Lion and Cubs and test the market, if you will, the response has been overwhelming. It’s almost as if people have been starved or are thirsty and when they see the characters and the beautiful artwork, they’re like, “Oh, my God, my child watches anime and you don’t see in the anime space, you don’t see many African-American characters or Black characters.” And so for people to see that the response has been overwhelming. I tell people that I’m working on making Black Lion and Cubs the next biggest thing since Dragon Ball Z.

Chris Riback: Well, I know Dragon Ball Z. I have a kid who was of the age when that was particularly popular. Let me say, if you can be half as popular as Dragon Ball Z, that would be an incredible accomplishment.

Hotep: Well, Chris, I’m grateful to you to have this kind of opportunity to share with your audience and others that it exists, it’s here, it’s an alternative. And like you said, if I make it halfway there, my brother, I’m doing well. Doing well.

Chris Riback: Feels to me like you’re doing okay. And even if we didn’t think so, it sounds like you’ve got at least two cubs who think you’re doing pretty well.

Hotep: My brother. Yes, sir. And that’s what it’s all about. That’s what it’s all about.

Chris Riback: Thank you for coming by and talking with us.

Hotep: Thank you. Thank you.

Thousands of miles from home, the group of new New Yorkers walks a few hundred steps.

Attached to a trilingual church and food bank, the campus of VOICE, a K-8 charter school, has become a refuge for newcomer families seeking asylum and new lives from mostly Spanish-speaking countries including Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Peru, as well as Pakistan and Egypt, among others.

“Many of them are living in temporary housing and struggling to find work. The families are under a lot of pressure … It’s just a huge amount of change,” said VOICE social worker Kim Moglia.

Through the Long Island City school’s proximity to temporary housing and a growing reputation among families, the school is serving 267 migrant students this year, the most of any charter school in New York state, according to federal Title III funding. 

Today, the population comprises nearly a third of VOICE’s student body, and staff are urgently finding ways to support the students and their families living in eight neighborhood shelters and others in Manhattan and parts of Queens.

But legal experts and child advocates warn a new city policy after 60 days will jeopardize the types of connections being built at schools like VOICE, the most stable place in their lives right now.

“The idea that in the middle of the school year, they would be transitioning housing and then having to start all over again — it worries us,” principal Franklin Headley said. 

“They would have to make new friends, new relationships with the teachers … We have the momentum, even in these first two months, to continue with the children that have come to us,” he added. 

Throughout New York City, an estimated 21,000 migrant students have joined the public school system since last summer, according to the Department of Education. In the latest waves, nearly all children have been younger, in K-3 grades or not yet school aged, educators and social service staffers told ����Ӱ��.

While there is room — DOE school enrollment declined by more than 120,000 students in the last five years — the newcomers are experiencing some of the highest levels of need. 

Even with the housing concern mounting, VOICE staff has continued to look for ways to work with the new students. To learn from schools serving similar populations, staff traveled cross-country to San Diego over the summer, and are now finishing installation of large washer-dryers for families to use to encourage attendance and remove the financial burden.

School-wide, required music classes help with language acquisition. Newcomers who are struggling are paired with a buddy who speaks their native language. In hallways, it’s not uncommon to hear whispered Urdu and Portuguese. Teachers regularly use keywords, explanations and translated materials in Spanish. 

Staff have also taken to small innovations — altering seating charts so newcomers build friendships and teachers can spot if anyone is struggling; bringing in a led by retired players; using the app Language Line to translate messages to families about progress; hiring an art therapist full time.

At VOICE, some students are getting their first introduction to the classroom. 

“You hear with your eyes” 

Noticing that many are starting without prior schooling or written literacy in their native languages, ELL teacher Jasmine Calderon leads small groups to build on foundations.

Here, a group of 10 first graders practice saying and writing the letter “p,” as they work through the alphabet to begin phonics, how letters interact with each other to make sound.  

Because many newcomers aren’t yet used to school life, she gently reminds them to tune in, singing their names and instructing them to pat their heads as they watch and listen for the sound of “puh” in her sentences. 

“We’re moving our bodies in a certain way, there’s visuals there for you … You’re going to start to connect what you hear with what you see,” Calderon said, explaining how she helps students see the importance of watching her closely, especially if they don’t understand the words.

 “I tell them all the time, ‘you hear with your eyes.’” 

Building blocks for new language

Across the hall, in a second-grade classroom, a row of books greets students as they walk in, including Dear Primo: A Letter to My Cousin, about two boys growing up in the U.S. and Mexico.

Settling into desks for a career planning activity, students dream of being rock stars and astronauts. When language feels out of reach, they draw.

Posters and tools to support reading and writing acquisition deck the walls: sentence starters, strategies that can help make sense of vowel sounds.  

In third grade, students break down plots into beginning, middle and end in graphic organizers, a tool teachers have utilized more frequently to help build fluency.

“Even if they’re not at the point where they’re reading the words,” Calderon said, “at least they’re engaged in some type of work. We found that having them draw something was more engaging than just giving them the book and taking observational notes.” 

The power of music 

The new population has pushed VOICE, founded in 2008, to emphasize music, singing and social-emotional learning, to find a renewed purpose in its mission. 

In required music classes, which supports language acquisition, students shed the nerves that can accompany things like reading aloud.

“You don’t have to be thinking about producing language, you’re just singing along, and then work on pronunciation and things like that there. You’re not taking the same kind of risk as constructing a sentence,” Headley said. 

In a room brimming with guitars and laughter, students sing a good morning song featuring at least six languages. Alongside a refrain from their teacher’s guitar, they collectively sing out a common greeting:
“Valentina, Valentina, Valentina, how are you?” 

In a rhyming solo, Valentina responds: “I’m tired, I’m happy, and I hope that you are, too.” 

Soccer: A language of its own 

From choir to soccer practice, the school’s newcomer students are building social connections that transcend language barriers and help their ability to show up in the classroom.

For Jah, a seventh grader who speaks seven languages originally from Burkina Faso in West Africa, playing soccer brings him back to some of his favorite memories. VOICE helped him with the largest barrier: buying turf shoes.

Migrant student athletes perform better in-season than out, according to Matt Coleman, middle school and athletic director. Eighth-grade leaders help translate plays for their teammates. The 15-minute walk back from the park is never silent. 

“They’re talking and that’s what I’m trying to get them to do, just communicate with each other,” he said. “If it’s in Spanish or English, it doesn’t really matter.”

To support alum that go on to play soccer in high school, athletic staff juggle calendars to make good on a promise to attend one of each of their games. 

The soccer program, open to students of any gender, and its connection to local parks and people is one way students find “opportunity within the community, which can get overlooked,” in brainstorming ways to support migrant students, said soccer coach Dominic Van Bussell.

Keeping culture in the room 

To Genesis Bolanos, who teaches at least 10 newcomers across two periods of seventh-grade math, using students’ home languages in the classroom is what makes all the difference, especially for kids who are sometimes only weeks into living in a new country. 

In her classes, students work with translated materials provided by the school, allowing them to focus on math without being penalized for their budding English literacy. 

Bolanos said the approach is too-often resisted. Her last Queens charter school wouldn’t allow students and staff to speak Spanish, which contributes to a “loss of shared culture.” 

Because VOICE encouraged teachers to try out ideas to support the newcomer population, like hosting a Hall of Nations to get to know foods and traditions from students’ home countries, Bolanos switched up the seating arrangements to lessen isolation. 

“In seating them together, they build their own friendships and have their own communities apart from adults, which is obviously what we want,” said Bolanos, a first-generation Ecuadorian-American.

Some newcomers, just a few weeks in, have started to ask to follow along with English materials, keeping their Spanish sheets as a reference point as they learn integers and foundational arithmetic. 

“This is just what newcomers deserve,” Bolanos said. 

“Something we couldn’t predict” 

Some newly enrolled VOICE charter families, after beginning a relationship with the school over the summer, were moved without warning cross-city to shelters in Jamaica, Queens just days before classes started, forced to find other schools.

“That’s something we couldn’t predict, that the city made a decision to start moving people,” principal Headley said. “… I didn’t understand why families would [be ordered to] leave this housing, which is close to the subway and close to facilities.” 

The practice of moving families with little notice has continued into the school year, according to . 

Mayor Eric Adams’s administration has limited migrant family stays in Manhattan hotel shelters run by Humanitarian Resource and Relief centers, home to about 15,000 students, to 60 days. The majority of families, staying in shelters run by the city’s Department of Homelessness Services, .

City officials did not return requests for comment.

, threatening to uproot them from their one place of stability.

That stability was so important to one VOICE family with four children, that they commuted to the school two hours each way after being moved to a Coney Island shelter, the southernmost tip of Brooklyn. 

“Those kids, including a kindergartner, wouldn’t give up,” Headley said tearfully. He and other staff ultimately traveled to Coney Island to help the family find a nearby school. 

The city’s 60-day policy stance, he added, will require schools to take on that kind of “placement work” after moves.

“If that’s what it takes, that’s the reality,” Headley said. “… We have to make sure that they’re OK — that they’re going to be some place where they feel comfortable and safe.”

All photos by Marianna McMurdock

One of my favorite sayings is the Noah principle: “no more prizes for predicting rain; prizes only for building arks.” 

Given the catastrophic pandemic of the past few years, it would be easy to focus on the devastating floods that inundated our schools and communities. The huge learning losses were just one consequence. The connection losses were just as significant, if not more so. 

These losses were particularly severe for adolescents, for whom peer relationships are central to identity development. 

They lost everyday interactions with their peers and the connections strengthened by cooperative learning techniques, extracurriculars, and clubs. That isolation, coupled with the loss of treasured high school rituals such as prom and graduation, contributed to a mental health crisis from which students are still recovering—a crisis of connection and belonging. The is clear: trusting relationships with peers and teachers are key to learning, but students’ connections were largely confined to their nuclear families during the pandemic. 

Now it is up to us to help remedy the damage—not by looking backward at the flood but forward to the future. 

As we move from observing the rain to building the ark(s), we must resist the temptation to “boil the ocean”—to think we must solve huge, seemingly intractable problems all at once. Instead of getting paralyzed by “recover from the pandemic,” “improve graduation rates,” or “increase college success,” break the challenge into doable, bite-size pieces and make things work. Let’s start by focusing on elevating the human connections that drive all learning. For the Urban Assembly, a school support agency in New York City, that means the following: 

Rebuild caring student-adult relationships in schools

When children and young adults develop their social-emotional skills, experience positive environments in the classroom, and have high-quality interactions with adults and their peers, they learn how to be successful in life. Relationships are key to learning, whether that’s a relationship to the curriculum, to their teachers, or even to a vision of themselves in the future. 

These relationships can take many forms, from direct instruction of relationship skills to systems and structures that create a predictable and supportive school climate and culture. Whatever the form, it’s important to see it as a fluid and individualized process. You can’t assess a basketball team only by looking at the final score and skipping the game. Yes, the score is important, but if you want to understand how well the team plays, you’ve got to watch the game and all the dynamics of teamwork on display.

That’s what it takes to understand student learning. For example, our (used in over 1,500 schools in New York City and more than 20 communities across the country) builds schools’ understanding of the social-emotional processes that help support student success in school and beyond. It’s not just about student work, just like it’s not just about the box score. It’s about the process, and the program helps make that process more visible to students and educators. 

Help leaders connect

At the Urban Assembly, we know that the answer to challenging times is community. That’s why we created Principal Learning Communities, where school leaders share best practices around solving problems and mitigate the isolation of leadership. We are creating a causal cascade of care that extends from school leaders to teachers and school staff, and ultimately to students. 

Offer students multiple pathways to postsecondary success

Not college for all, but postsecondary success for all, with relevant options for the broad diversity of learners. Some graduates will go on to two-year programs, others to four year colleges, others straight into careers. Our vision is to offer meaningful choices and provide solid preparation that lets students take advantage of those opportunities.

To that end, we have radically reimagined postsecondary preparation. Our Early Career and College Awareness explicitly introduces ninth- and 10th-grade students to selfdiscovery exercises and helps them learn about and engage with various career opportunities and educational pathways. At the same time, our programs help school counselors to provide ongoing student support.

Make education more relevant and meaningful

It’s time to reimagine what it means to be well-educated. Yes, understanding the enduring themes in Shakespeare’s plays will always lend insight into the human condition. But now, more than ever, we must help students connect those insights to the real world. All of our 23 schools, which we support in partnership with the New York City Department of Education, are organized around themes and collaborations with dozens of public entities and private companies such as Cisco, Northwell, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

Hands-on internships and apprenticeships are the norm. For example, students at the Urban Assembly School for Collaborative Healthcare can earn their medical assistant and EMT certifications by completing internships at Brookdale Hospital and St. Barnabas. One out of every five students graduates with an industry-recognized certification in addition to their high school diploma, and every student has a postsecondary plan that includes college.

At the Urban Assembly School for Design and Construction, every student is enrolled in an architecture or design pathway where they develop cutting-edge thinking and modeling skills that are in high demand from industries. Internships at the nonprofit and the create real-world opportunities for students to practice what they’ve learned. As a result, 100% of students who graduate have a postsecondary plan, and 75% of those plans involve opportunities in art, architecture, engineering, and construction. 

Urban Assembly schools, which serve all students, are designed to nurture students’ individual interests, build connections with mentors who work in fields they aspire to join, and give students access to the sense of purpose that will sustain them in school and in life. When students contribute to solving real-world problems, they can honestly say, “I, too, have something worthy to offer.”

Scale what works

Our social and emotional learning resources have been used in all public schools in New York City. Through , 1.2 million of the city’s students have access to DESSA, a strength-based social and emotional learning feedback tool. Plus, a guided intervention program helps educators provide targeted, highly responsive support to each individual student. 

As ark builders across the country help students recover from the pandemic, we need to embrace a bolder vision of schooling. School can be a central hub of our communities, a place of meaningful connections between students and adults, and a place that connects learning to the real world. That’s our vision, and that’s the future of learning.

See more from the Center on Reinventing Public Education and its .

As part of their work, researchers determined school’s effectiveness based upon its impact on students’ social-emotional development, test scores and behaviors. They concluded that the most effective schools provide a welcoming environment for students, an experience that shapes their later years. 

“High schools matter,” said Shanette Porter, senior research associate at UChicago Consortium on School Research and the study’s lead author. “And they matter quite a lot. How safe students feel — physically, socially, psychologically — how deeply connected they are to others, how much they trust their teachers and their peers matters.”

She said, too, that student voice is a powerful tool, one schools can use to design better, more effective systems: The biggest predictor of student outcomes in their study was what the students themselves said about their school experience. 

And the impact isn’t just social-emotional, Porter said. It influences trackable metrics such as test scores, high school graduation rates and college attendance, researchers found. 

“These things that feel soft are inextricably linked to these hard measures of learning,” Porter said.  

Researchers drew their data from six cohorts of 160,148 of eighth and ninth grade students who attended CPS between 2011–12 and 2016–17: 42% were Black, 44% were Hispanic and 86% received free or reduced-price lunch, a key indicator of poverty. The college attendance-related data came only from those who attended ninth grade for the first time between 2012 and 2014. They totaled 55,564 students. 

The study examined students’ administrative records — including those related to attendance and discipline — plus surveys provided by both children and teachers about their school’s climate, whether it had effective leaders, collaborative teachers, involved families, a supportive environment and ambitious instruction.

Students also completed a questionnaire focusing on their emotional health, connectedness to school, academic engagement, grit and study habits. 

The study found that students who attended a highly effective school — one ranked by the researchers as being in the 85th percentile based on their collected data and student and teacher survey responses — saw their test scores improve more than those at other CPS campuses. They noted, too, that attendance increased for this group while suspensions and disciplinary infractions dropped.

And the beneficial effects continued well beyond freshman year: Students who attended a school at that 85th percentile increased the likelihood of graduation by 2.41 percentage points and the chance of attending college within two years of graduation by 2.57 percentage points. They also were 20% less likely to be arrested on campus as compared to the average rate of arrest for all high schoolers in the district. 

A spokeswoman for the Chicago school system said it remains committed to social- emotional development: CPS has spent millions growing such offerings in recent years, based in part on a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention . The study found that in 2021, 10% of high school students attempted suicide one or more times in the prior year. 

CPS has hired 123 additional school counselors since 2021, placing the staff at its highest-need campuses. It also has expanded training and support for school-based counselors, social workers, and psychologists so they can implement small-group and individual social-emotional interventions, the spokeswoman said.

But the social-emotional learning tactics underpinning the positive results seen in Chicago Public Schools — and employed by many other districts around the country for several years — are now under attack from the far right. 

Members of the conservative parent group Moms for Liberty have labeled social-emotional learning, which can include lessons on self-regulation and relating to others, indoctrination, saying it leads to the idea that the country is  

They say it infringes on parents’ right to raise their children. Karen VanAusdal, vice president for practice at the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, known as CASEL, acknowledged the pushback. 

“Certainly there are groups like that that are trying to make social-emotional learning a political soundbite,” she said. “But … there are many more parents, educators and policy leaders who understand the importance of social-emotional learning. The work is continuing.”

VanAusdal said helping students develop skills outside academics is invaluable, especially now, in the wake of the pandemic, when so many are reporting mental health struggles. showed some consensus among parents: 66% said it’s “extremely or very important” that their children’s school teaches them to develop social and emotional skills. Twenty-seven percent said it was somewhat important, Pew reported.  

“This has always been a bipartisan issue,” VanAusdal said. “We want children to have healthy relationships. We want them to have the skills they need to achieve their career and life goals and be caring members of our communities — and we know social-emotional learning is the pathway to achieving that.”

These statistics illustrate the scope of the epidemic, but they don’t capture the first-hand experiences of the real people — friends, relatives, neighbors and crucially, children — who bear the weight of this crisis. They don’t capture what it’s like for a student to lose a parent, how that grief affects the child’s academic performance and ability to focus in school or how teachers support that student’s emotional health. As vice president of policy and advocacy for a leading dedicated to children’s well-being, I know how crucial it is for policymakers to understand that, in addition to being a health crisis, the opioid epidemic is also a social and emotional crisis that affects kids across the country. 

More than have been filed against pharmaceutical companies and distributors for their role in the opioid epidemic, yielding totaling $50 billion and counting. The first payments from suits against Walgreens, CVS, Walmart, Teva and Allergan will start to roll out to states as . 

How that money will be used is unclear. States receiving settlement dollars are required to allocate of the funds to opioid abuse remediation, but it’s up to lawmakers to determine what measures to invest in. This presents a novel opportunity for states to help lessen to children’s lives associated with the epidemic, like the loss of a parent. But it also creates an opportunity to help stop the crisis in its tracks by funding education programs systems like research-based curricula that teach social-emotional life skills, which have been shown to such as substance abuse and in adolescence and adulthood.

Recently, the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health partnered with a coalition of organizations — including physicians and specialists in addiction medicine, recovery, treatment and harm reduction — to create for using funds from the opioid litigation settlements. , “Invest in Youth Prevention,” highlights evidence-based social-emotional life skills programs as a key strategy to counter many of the .

Those risk factors include family history, mental or behavioral conditions, a history of trauma and feelings of social isolation or rejection. While nothing can fully eliminate these or other environmental risk factors, life skills programs are among the best solutions available to empower young people who face these challenges.

A United Nations report echoes Johns Hopkins’ recommendations. The UN : Strengthening social-emotional skills is the most efficient drug prevention measure among children ages 6 to 11. The is clear that teaching kids the social-emotional skills they need to overcome challenges that could lead to opioid abuse in adulthood is as critical as providing substance abuse treatment and recovery services in affected communities. Simply put, life skills programs focus on that often drive young people toward drug abuse.

Giving kids the ability to manage emotions, develop healthy coping skills and solve problems in stressful situations can bolster their well-being by helping them develop a stronger sense of self, greater awareness of their social environment, increased capacity to manage strong emotions and an ability to communicate and connect with their peers, among other skills. that the more children and young people have these healthy social and emotional coping skills, the less likely they are to engage in risky behaviors such as substance abuse.

These skills are similar to those which often empower people in recovery from addiction: identifying emotional and environmental triggers that lead to drug abuse, fostering supportive communities and building positive, healthy behavior patterns. Given that begin in their teenage years, lawmakers in states receiving opioid settlement payouts need to prioritize substance abuse prevention in schools by using that money to provide districts with funding specifically to purchase research-based life skills programs.

Equipping future generations of children with the life skills needed to overcome the influences and effects of opioid abuse will save lives. While the settlements in these lawsuits are a sign of hope, ending the opioid crisis once and for all depends on state lawmakers’ willingness to invest in children’s well-being. 

Implementing programs that help students build social-emotional skills like communication, confidence and problem-solving requires commitments from the district level all the way to the individual classroom. But one major piece of the puzzle is often overlooked when schools think about how to implement SEL: family engagement.

that when families are involved in their children’s education, students attend school more regularly, stay in school longer and perform at higher levels. This is true for academics, when, for example, educators send home report cards, make phone calls with detailed academic updates and host curriculum nights to show what students are learning.

Engaging families in social-emotional learning is equally crucial to supporting children’s growth. SEL when it is reinforced , throughout the day, in different environments. So it is important for educators to prioritize the learning students are doing outside the classroom, and to consistently emphasize this priority to families, offering parents and caregivers the opportunity to help their kids build social-emotional skills outside of school. 

A recent Committee for Children concluded that 8 out of 10 parents support SEL in schools, and 3 in 4 agree that schools and families should work together to teach kids social-emotional skills. Still, many schools and districts are hearing skepticism and concerns about SEL. These findings should give educators the confidence to address misconceptions and clarify what SEL really is.

To do this, it is essential to create lines of open communication. Simply put, families want to know their voices are being heard in these conversations. It’s also important that educators frame SEL in language that families in the community understand and value, and that is free of obscure jargon. 

In some places, it might be more useful to refer to SEL in terms of life skills and emphasize their practical application in the workforce. Remind families that skills like social awareness and problem-solving are vital in every professional field, and that SEL can help build those practical abilities. Emphasizing the correlation between SEL and academic achievement or college acceptance can also be helpful.

Many families are rightly concerned about the learning loss that has happened as a result of the pandemic. It’s tempting to conclude that the only solution is to double down on core subject areas — math, science, reading and language arts — in order to mitigate those losses. But doubling down will go only so far, and families can benefit from understanding why. If kids don’t develop the fundamental skills that allow them to function not just in the classroom but in society, their academic gains may be harder to sustain in the long term. But when students can collaborate with peers, feel calm in emotional situations and think critically about things they’re experiencing in their classrooms, hallways, lunchrooms and sports fields, they’re better equipped to succeed both in and out of the classroom and far into the future.

Ongoing communication is critical to engaging families in this essential work. This goes beyond sending kids home with worksheets and asking for a parent’s signature. Instead, schools should try to create opportunities where families can participate in SEL with their children in meaningful ways. For example, teachers can provide some ideas for ways that families can practice social-emotional skills with their kids at home, or encouraging reminders to check in with their children about how they’re feeling at school, not just how they’re performing academically.

Connect with families regularly through social media or invite them to an online SEL forum. Distribute a newsletter in families’ home languages that focuses on SEL-related updates, activities, and school and community events. Provide a space for families to offer feedback (Google forms and surveys can be a great tool for this). Finally, keep communications brief but meaningful — the last thing families need is busy work.

A commitment to engaging families in SEL has to occur at every tier in the education system. If the responsibility falls on teachers alone, their efforts, valiant as they may be, will only go so far. If you’re an administrator, support your staff in this work. And if you’re a classroom educator, ask for buy-in from your leaders.

Helping kids build essential life skills, like confidence, decision-making and the ability to cope with difficult times, takes families and schools working together to teach kids what they need to thrive.

Joy is a that causes the release of two types of neurotransmitters in the brain: dopamine and serotonin. These chemical messengers cause us to smile, laugh or even jump for joy. But the feeling is not limited to physical response. When children experience joy, information flows freely and of what they learned. Teaching and learning that induce joy and result in joyful classrooms are integral to helping students thrive and should . Research reveals that certain conditions lend to students feeling joy in the classroom. In one documenting the emotions of first and second graders, students responded most positively to student-centered learning that allowed them to “shine as experts” by making their own choices.

With so many children and adolescents having suffered adverse effects to their , and well-being due to the COVID-19 pandemic, infusing joy in learning feels more critical and valuable than ever. What produces joy may be personal, but there are many research-backed strategies that, when incorporated into classroom activities, can lead children to experience joy and begin to cultivate it within themselves. 

Discovery: Learning activities that help children engage in independent discovery make them feel joyful, whether it’s reading a new word, unearthing a solution to a complex problem or experiencing an “aha” moment when something clicks. Further, when students figure something out for themselves, they are more likely to and feel more pride and confidence in themselves.

Identity: Individuals with a more mature sense of identity . Participating in activities that allow students to explore and , and feel their identities are being recognized and appreciated by others, yields joy and an increased sense of belonging. 

Connection: Feeling connected to others and oneself generates joy.he health and academic  benefits of are well documented. Designing activities in which children collaborate to complete a task and solve problems with their peers on their own terms helps them form, enjoy and sustain connections with one another.

Movement: Movement and physical activity have a positive effect and , along with , including cognitive functioning, behavior in school and even grades. Programs such as integrate physical activity into various aspects of the curriculum to keep children moving throughout the school day and experiencing the effects of joy.

Play: Play has the potential to bring all of the above together. Dr. Stuart Brown of describes it as “a state of mind that one has when absorbed in an activity that provides enjoyment and a suspension of sense of time.” Play is built into humans’ neurobiology, . It is essential to make sure kids have time and space to play every day.  

Embedding activities in the school day that elicit joy, such as those that incorporate discovery, identity, connection, movement and play, is invaluable. But great value also lies in asking children and adolescents directly what makes them feel joyful. This helps students recognize joy in themselves so they can cultivate and integrate it more fully into their lives. As educators, we need to answer the call to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing.

It was the year that Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s most prominent public health authority, declared that the country was “,” as COVID case rates plummeted from their Omicron highs. By the fall, President Biden was with that sentiment, noting that most people had laid down their masks and returned to something like normal. 

And around the possibility of winter surges in American schools, the most visible hallmarks of the COVID era have at last receded. The lurching progression from in-person to virtual classes is over, following an explosion of school exposures last winter. Mask mandates, social distancing, and endless disinfectant wipes are also predominantly a thing of the past, with virtually all children approved to receive vaccines. 

But in terms of the pandemic’s impact on education, it’s still only the end of the beginning. With each month, new findings emerge revealing more about what remote instruction did to learning and how families reacted. The potentially lifelong shadow the virus has cast over K-12 students — from how babies develop speech to what today’s adolescents will earn decades from now — is largely mysterious. 

Previous editions of this list have covered the wider world of education policy and research: issues like school financing, choice, accountability, and testing. This year, ����Ӱ�� is focusing exclusively on the lessons of the COVID era — one that is now passing from the scene — and the questions that remain in its wake.

Here, laid out in charts, maps, and tables, are 14 discoveries that changed how we think about schools in 2022.

The scope of learning loss

By the end of last year, a steady trickle of research had already begun to reveal the harm wrought by prolonged school closures and the transition to virtual instruction. But this fall brought the most definitive evidence yet of the scale of learning lost over more than two years of COVID-disrupted schooling: fresh testing data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, sometimes called the Nation’s Report Card, pointing to severe declines in core subjects. 

The unprecedented drop in math scores, which fell by an average of eight points for eighth graders and five points for fourth graders, was especially disturbing. But reversals in literacy were also notable, with sizable increases in the number of students testing below even the “basic” level of reading proficiency. What’s more, the results affirmed dismal findings from NAEP’s “Long-Term Trends” test — an earlier version of the exam that has been administered since the early 1970s — showing that the pandemic set back nine-year-olds’ performance in math and reading to levels last seen two decades ago. 

“We’re seeing a lot of that very long-term progress completely erased over the course of a couple of years,” said Dan Goldhaber, a University of Washington professor, of the long-term results.

As many experts warned, additional research has also made clear that the academic damage of COVID was not shared equally. NWEA, the nonprofit testing group whose MAP exam has proven an invaluable assessment tool throughout the pandemic, released a study in November indicating that already-wide achievement gaps in elementary classrooms have grown between 5 and 10 percent in the last few years. Those disparities grew, NWEA analysts specified, because of slumping achievement among struggling students. 

College entrance exams contributed yet another dispiriting perspective, with average scores on the ACT slipping below 20 for the first time since the presidency of George H.W. Bush. Only about one in twelve test-takers from low-income families met standards of college readiness across all of the test’s four subjects.

In 2022, researchers, educators, and the public discovered the full extent of what COVID did to K-12 learning. 2023 will provide a test of how quickly that learning can be restored — and how seriously we are approaching the problem.

The geography of remote learning

Multiple studies have identified a strong association between academic backsliding and time spent in remote learning. And while different states and districts switched back to in-person instruction at different speeds, a disturbing commonality emerged: The least-advantaged kids were usually the slowest to return to the classroom.

co-authored by experts at NWEA, the CALDER Center at the American Institutes for Research, and Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research used data from over 2 million students to show that — whether in states that reopened schools relatively quickly, like Florida, or those that stayed remote much longer, like Virginia — schools serving the highest proportions of low-income students spent the most weeks remote during the 2020–21 academic year. Notably, however, the socioeconomic gaps in exposure to virtual teaching were much larger among the group of predominantly blue states that tended to reopen more hesitantly. In those states, high-poverty schools spent more than two additional months in Zoom classrooms than low-poverty schools. 

Harvard economist and study co-author Thomas Kane observed that the greater prevalence of remote learning among poor students, who are already less likely to succeed academically than their better-off peers, could be an additional driver of achievement gaps for years to come. In an interview with ����Ӱ��, Kane said that the academic recovery interventions planned by school districts were “nowhere near enough” to compensate for COVID’s toll.

“Based on what I’m seeing, most districts are going to find that students are still lagging far behind when they take their state tests in May 2023,” Kane said.

But was the public convinced by the reams of detailed and well-intentioned research on the results of online learning? Public polling suggests that the answer is ambiguous. At least — albeit one conducted before much of the research on learning loss was released — indicated that Americans prioritized curbing the pandemic’s spread over keeping schools open.

Poorer districts lost the most

Few doubt that some amount of learning loss is linked to the hasty and unplanned adoption of remote instruction. How much is still ambiguous, however. released in October — devised by Harvard’s Kane and the eminent Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon, among others — leveraged a combination of state test scores and federal NAEP results to deliver a granular, district-by-district overview of the pandemic’s academic impact.

While the researchers found that academic performance in predominantly in-person districts held up much better than mostly remote districts within the same state, they also stipulated that school closures were not “the primary factor driving achievement losses”; some states that spent much of the pandemic open as usual, such as Maine, sustained far greater score declines than those that saw widespread closures, such as California. And beyond the question of remote-versus-in-person, it is clear that districts with greater concentrations of poor students experienced the worst academic effects over the last few years.

In districts where 70 percent or more of students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch, average math performance fell by 0.66 grade levels. By contrast, in districts where fewer than 39 percent of students qualified for free lunch, only 0.45 grade levels of math achievement were lost. Above all, the ultra-local look at test scores showed a startling amount of variation in how different school districts experienced the same event; in reading, almost 15 percent of all students were enrolled in districts where achievement actually grew during the pandemic.

Enrollment fell as families fled 

The pandemic left an impact on schools far beyond its blow to student achievement. Due to a combination of public dissatisfaction, increased mobility, and economic upheaval, families withdrew from their public schools in unprecedented numbers — as many as 1.5 million during the 2020–21 school year, or about 3 percent of all public K-12 enrollment, according to a 2021 report from NCES.

Further scholarly investigation has unearthed the important role that learning modality played in that flight. According to a comprehensive report from the conservative American Enterprise Institute, the districts that spent the most time remote throughout the first pandemic school year lost at least 500,000 more students than they would have if they had stayed open during that time. And in the period that followed, fewer students returned than did to districts where campuses mostly operated in-person. 

The findings suggested that widespread loss of students was not just “pandemic-related; it was pandemic-response related,” Nat Malkus, AEI’s deputy director of education policy, told ����Ӱ��’s Linda Jacobson. 

Meanwhile, enrollment trends detected this spring by the data company Burbio showed that major urban districts continued losing students through the 2021–22 school year. Only a handful of states examined by the organization during that time saw an enrollment increase of more than 1 percent compared with the previous year.

The youngest weren’t spared

While we’ve gained a better empirical understanding of how K-12 students’ lives and learning trajectories were altered by COVID, it will be years before we fully grasp the ways in which the youngest Americans were affected. But a provocative study of child development and language acquisition has already given cause for alarm.

Using LENA “talk pedometers” — a that measures the number of spoken interactions occurring in the vicinity of young children, as well as their own vocalizations — researchers at Brown discovered that babies born after July 2020 produced fewer vocalizations and demonstrated slower verbal growth than comparable children born before 2019. The younger group of babies also experienced slower growth of white matter — subcortical nerve fibers that facilitate communication between different regions of the brain — perhaps the result of hearing fewer words spoken and engaging less often with their caregivers. 

If the cognitive development of young learners was slowed by the extraordinary social isolation imposed by daycare closures and lockdowns of public spaces, it will produce unavoidable consequences for schools in the next decade.

Old before their time

Even as social and intellectual growth was apparently slowed for some infants and babies, psychologists warn that the compounded stress of the last few years may have harmfully accelerated the maturation process for older kids.

A slew of surveys highlight newly elevated levels of student stress, the product of public health worries, economic anxiety, and even domestic abuse. But a recently published offers proof that those factors actually changed the neurobiology of some adolescents. Examining MRIs of 128 matched subjects — half measured before and half after the pandemic began — a team of psychologists found that the group assessed after COVID demonstrated higher “brain age” than their chronological age and experienced faster growth in the amygdala and hippocampus, areas of the brain that regulate fear, stress, and memory.

Such sped-up aging has historically been seen in cases of household trauma and neglect, and its consequences can include decreased capacity across a range of intellectual functions. Follow-up scans are already planned to assess whether the process has been remediated.

Teachers under strain

Adults in schools have shown their own signs of exhaustion. In a survey of nearly 4,000 K-12 teachers and principals conducted by the RAND Corporation, about one-third said they intended to quit their jobs, a significantly higher proportion than it found during the chaotic pandemic months of early 2021. 

That figure almost certainly doesn’t betoken a future exodus from the profession; educators have historically been much more likely to say they intend to leave than to ultimately act on those plans. But it could mean that large numbers will stay in their jobs past the point of burnout, their effectiveness permanently dimmed. On average, the poll found that the teachers and principals were more than twice as likely to report experiencing frequent, job-related stress than other workers.

Teachers were also twice as likely as comparable adults to say they were not “coping well” with their stress. While the most commonly cited contributing factor was the task of addressing learning loss, some school employees also complained of staff shortages and the difficulty of managing their own childcare responsibilities. 

Social shuffle

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that young adults’ personal relationships, no less than their academic prospects, were fundamentally changed by months spent away from their peers. 

In some ways, those changes were positive: According to a June poll released by Pew, 45 percent of American kids between the ages of 13 and 17 said they felt closer to their parents after two years of disrupted schooling. But sizable minorities also reported feeling less close to friends, classmates, teachers, and extended family, a web of social connections that might have proven vital during a lengthy period of difficulty. 

Somewhat surprisingly for a survey administered over two years after the emergence of COVID, nearly 20 percent of the teen respondents said they had not attended classes exclusively in-person during the spring of 2022 (a time of somewhat elevated virus case rates). About two-thirds said they would prefer a return to entirely in-person schooling in the future.

Future earnings endangered

The downstream consequences of thwarted or deferred academic success are destined to include financial disadvantages; after all, today’s underserved pupils are tomorrow’s underprepared workers. But until the fall release of NAEP, it was difficult to produce a broadly shared measure of American students’ stifled progress. 

With the arrival of those scores, Harvard economist Kane — him again — and Dartmouth professor Douglas O. Staiger immediately calculated a projection of how much potential income could be lost due to diminished math learning among eighth-graders since 2020. Based on the historical correlation between math gains on NAEP and professional earnings growth, the figure they reached was astounding: $900 billion of future earnings, if the declines in learning were to remain permanent for all students in the United States.

“When there are improvements in scores, those kids coming out of school are going to have better outcomes later in life,” Staiger told ����Ӱ��. “And we can infer from this recent decline that all the cohorts in school now are going to do a bit worse than we expected.” 

The paper was one of a series of analyses focusing specifically on the drop in math knowledge, which appears to have been particularly significant. But the extended disruption to literacy instruction left a substantial mark as well, particularly among students at the beginning of their reading careers. Amplify, a curriculum provider, released data this fall showing that 4 percent fewer second graders and 8 percent fewer first graders are reaching grade-level reading goals than in 2019; meanwhile, almost one-third of third graders were assessed as needing “intensive intervention.”

Those bleak findings echo the results of Curriculum Associates’ i-Ready assessment, which revealed that the percentage of elementary students reading below grade level grew between 2021 and 2022. That subgroup of students, sometimes called the “COVID cohort,” is running out of time to get back on track.

Costs of recovery

The havoc inflicted by the pandemic is now an inescapable fact for schools, families, and public authorities to deal with. But what’s it going to take to surmount the considerable educational challenges and get kids back on track?

The federal government has allocated roughly $190 billion in relief funding to states for that purpose. But , that amount won’t be sufficient to get the job done. The true cost, they say, will fall somewhere between $325 billion and $930 billion, huge sums that include not only the pedagogical resources to restore lost learning opportunities from the last several years, but also the out-of-school interventions that power so much of the academic growth that goes on inside classrooms. 

There is no indication that anywhere near that level of funding — or even any further money at all — is coming. In the meantime, school districts are only required to spend 20 percent of their federal aid on learning recovery. 

Latino students take a hit

Children of all backgrounds were bruised by the effects of shuttered schools, but among them, Latino students are notable for having recently enjoyed sustained academic momentum. As their share of the national student body has increased to nearly 30 percent, they have also seen rising achievement scores and post-secondary outcomes compared with their parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

COVID put that progress on pause, according to from the advocacy organization UnidosUS. After leaping from 71 percent to 82 percent over the last decade, the on-time high school graduation rate for Latino students fell slightly in 2021. Worse still, the rate of college enrollment for Latino freshmen shrunk by 7.8 percent between the spring of 2020 and 2021. That figure bounced back somewhat over the next academic year — along with rates of college-going for most Americans — but still fell below the pre-pandemic norm.

The particular stumbles experienced by Latino kids have explanations that both precede the pandemic and are directly linked to it, the report found. Long before 2020, Latino households were less likely to report having a computer or high-speed broadband in the home. Meanwhile, Latino students were disproportionately likely to be enrolled in low-income schools, which were themselves more likely to stay remote longer during the pandemic.

Explosion of absenteeism

Along with the surge of full-on disenrollment from schools, a shocking number of K-12 students spent the last few years missing day after day of instruction. Just how many days of absence is difficult to know precisely, however, because of ambiguities in the way attendance figures were collected during the COVID era.

An released this fall indicated that over 10 million students were chronically absent (i.e., missing over 10 percent of the school year) in 2020–21. That would be an increase of more than 25 percent relative to the pre-pandemic norm, but from Johns Hopkins University and the nonprofit group Attendance Works, it is also very likely a serious underestimate. Because of challenges in knowing which students “attended” all of their virtual lessons (versus simply logging into Zoom and then logging off, for instance), statewide absence counts in the NCES figures sometimes vary widely from district-level reporting.

Based on the early release of more detailed 2021–22 figures from California, Connecticut, Ohio, and Virginia, the authors wrote, it is reasonable to predict that as many as 16 million kids were chronically absent last school year, a doubling of the pre-pandemic number. 

The teacher exodus that wasn’t

Were American schools plagued with teacher absences this year, or not? It was a question that captivated news sources, but also divided education experts, because it contained an even thornier question within it: If the supply of teachers remains mostly steady, but demand for them spikes, are they truly at a deficit?

In spite of widespread fears that veteran teachers were quitting in huge numbers as a reaction to the pandemic, no mass departure ever took place, according to a paper by Brown economist Matt Kraft. Turnover actually fell slightly in the summer of 2020 and stayed within the typical annual range the next year. But weak hiring during the first few months of the pandemic may have contributed to higher-than-usual vacancy rates, perhaps triggered by fears of Great Recession-style budget cuts that never materialized.

In fact, a windfall of federal cash followed instead, leading districts to add new jobs in late 2020 and 2021, and the resultant hiring spree has indeed made candidates for teaching positions hard to find. But even that phenomenon isn’t true everywhere, since numbers differ widely across state lines. According to a paper released this summer, Mississippi’s rate of vacancies per 10,000 students is more than 68 times higher than that of Utah. 

Hopeful signs

As the long legacy of COVID grew clearer, research in 2022 gave the education world plenty of reasons to worry. But it has also contributed some hopeful signs of renewed progress in schools. 

The good omens aren’t popping up everywhere, but some are to be found in state-level testing, which has resumed around the country after being suspended for at least the first pandemic year. According to Tennessee’s state exams, the number of students meeting or beating grade-level reading standards rose from 29 percent in 2020–21 to over 36 percent in 2021–22. In all, more than three-quarters of the state’s school districts reported reading scores higher than were seen in the pre-pandemic period. 

“We are seeing this broadly across the state, and across district types — urban, rural and suburban,” Tennessee Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn told ����Ӱ��’s Beth Hawkins. “We are really, really proud of what our districts have done.”

Several other Southern states have begun to make their turnaround, with Mississippi a particular standout. This of 2021–22 testing data showed average scores in math, English, and science nearing or exceeding 2019 levels, while performance on the U.S. history exam skyrocketed compared with 2020–21 (the first in which it had been given). Just as notably, — a state-mandated test that students must pass to progress to the fourth grade — fell by only .6 percentage points between 2019 and 2022. 

It’s no surprise that students need more support, both in terms of diagnostic measures like screening and proven interventions like evidence-based clinical therapies. For the past several years, they’ve endured unprecedented stress from the pandemic, a rise in violence and social unrest.

School-based social workers, counselors and other mental health professionals play a major role in helping young people manage stress and anxiety by modeling everyday coping strategies.

Teachers, too, can help by building a less stressful classroom environment. Since anxiety is the most commonly diagnosed mental health concern for youth, and because teachers play such a central role in children’s lives, it makes good sense for educators to focus on incorporating everyday anxiety interventions into their classroom routines. 

While the root causes of anxiety can’t be solved without targeted interventions like clinical therapy, there are strategies any teacher can use to reduce some of the symptoms. Even better, these can benefit all children in a classroom, not just the ones with a formal diagnosis of anxiety.

Reducing environmental factors that exacerbate stress or anxiety is a good place for teachers to start. The less noise and disruptions students experience, the fewer potential triggers children are likely to encounter. Teachers don’t need a master’s degree in social work or counseling to provide this kind of intervention. 

Sticking with a consistent classroom daily routine — from how students line up to how they participate in discussions — can build a sense of security. So can a simple change of tone. Instead of yelling down the hall, for example, a teacher can walk up to a group of lingering students and use an “inside voice” to tell them to go to class. In situations like this, it’s as much about delivery as the message itself.

It’s also ok for a teacher to hit the “pause” button when feeling frustrated or stressed. In fact, this can model for the class what it means to take 30 seconds to reset with five deep breaths that fill the lungs. Afterward, notice how the tone of voice has changed — and maybe the sense of agency too. By modeling breathing strategies, teachers are giving students the space to tap into their emotions and respond to them in a healthy manner.

Another practical step teachers can take is helping students tap into their sensory systems of sight, smell and sound. Students can take those few deep breaths while picturing a beautiful sunny day, or while remembering the smell of a favorite meal and how it made them feel. These types of interventions are easy to incorporate in a daily classroom routine, and can reduce young people’s heart rates and allow them to shift to a calmer state. Less stress for students means more focus on learning and interacting constructively with their peers.  

Being in nature has a positive effect on reducing blood pressure and a racing heartbeat. Amazingly, so can just looking at a picture of nature. So why not take a field trip to a local park or even the school grounds? Or decorate the classroom with pictures of towering redwoods or shimmering mountain lakes? Or even repurpose a desk or bookshelf to display rows of potted houseplants? Knowing why the greenery is there can help both students and teachers feel calmer.

Will a row of snake plants or a gallery wall of nature photos prevent classroom panic attacks? Probably not. But for many students, it can reduce feelings of anxiety and stress and allow teachers to focus on getting more powerful interventions to students who really need extra support.

At , we’ve known for decades want to learn and reduces negative behavior in the classroom. We’ve also known that adults can’t pass on those lessons unless they go beyond understanding them and actually use them.

Social-emotional learning is not new, and it has a well-established track record of helping children be better learners and happier, more confident human beings. It is built on a foundation of five core competencies and related skills:

• Self-awareness, which means understanding your emotions and how they affect your behavior
  
• Self-management, the ability to regulate your emotions and behavior as you work toward your goals
  
• Responsible decisionmaking, including taking ownership of both positive and negative results of those decisions
  
• Social awareness, or empathizing with others
  
• Relationship skills, such as communicating clearly, listening and cooperating

These concepts are not just for children. Adults in all walks of life would benefit from honing these skills — but especially teachers, as it takes a lot to manage the constant stress of managing a classroom, handling parents and satisfying school administrators.

In our program for educators, we tell them: When teaching social and emotional skills, actions are just as important as words. Children must be surrounded by supportive and engaging adults who consistently model how to take responsibility for their choices and actions, identify and manage their emotions, show empathy and deal with conflicts.

Clearly, SEL is . A new teacher who feels nervous or a sense of dread can use SEL to recognize those emotions and reframe how she uses them. For example, instead of focusing on the feeling of terror of starting an intimidating new job, she might reorient her nervousness to see it as an exciting new phase that will enrich her life with friends, opportunity and the reward of making a difference with children.

Still, some studies indicate teachers don’t feel they have a good grasp of SEL. As few as one in five reported in a ReadTheory.org that they felt “very prepared” to teach social and emotional learning concepts in the classroom. About half say in that survey that there is not enough SEL professional development offered at their schools.

Even so, educators of SEL. They see improved graduation rates and employment prospects for students, as well as less bullying and easier transitions back into the classroom post-pandemic. Teachers also reported in a Pennsylvania State University that they feel less of the stress that has many considering leaving the profession, are better able to deal with challenging students and are less likely to experience the type of burnout that cuts many careers short. The Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning that schools are more effective in teaching SEL when they practice it themselves and foster a positive atmosphere.

The same survey found that more parents are seeing the value of SEL and want their children to benefit from it, particularly as they relearn social skills that may have atrophied in the isolation of the pandemic. In my home life, I’ve used self-awareness and self-management skills to help my daughter talk about her nervousness when she was getting a flu shot. She used calming techniques, like deep breathing, to cope with her feelings. 

These life and learning skills are needed most in urban and low-income schools, which were more likely to move to fully online learning during COVID. Teachers said students’ lack of connection with one another and with the adults in their school damaged their sense of well-being.
Educators who have learned social and emotional skills themselves are better able to develop nurturing relationships with students, manage behavior in the classroom and regulate their own emotions. In general, they are and educators, and better role models for their students. So just as teachers should know how to balance a bank account or write a letter, they should know these crucial life skills — for their own good, and for the good of their students.

These challenges and inequities are exacerbated when schools do not fully recognize the social-emotional needs of students and the critical interdependence between these needs and academic success. Many students don’t feel a sense of belonging in their own classrooms and school communities. This is a particular problem among low-income children of color who often don’t feel reflected in the curriculum or seen by their teachers. And when students don’t feel seen, heard and valued, they are less likely to show up to school and stay engaged in the classroom. 

The pandemic has demonstrated the importance of balancing a drive toward academic outcomes with self-care. So it was heartening to hear Schools Chancellor David Banks and appoint Dr. Jawana Johnson, chief of school culture, climate and well-being, to lead this work. Now more than ever, developing a strong sense of community and belonging at school is crucial.

One way to do this is to develop school communities where students can show up each day as themselves, knowing they are valued, listened to and cared for. It’s in these safe and supportive environments that students learn, grow and fail safely. Only then can they connect in deep, meaningful ways with their classmates and teachers, grapple with challenges and work collaboratively to solve issues that affect their lives and communities. 

At NYC Outward Bound schools and the schools in our national partner EL Education’s network, we call this space Crew — borrowed from the phrase, “We are crew, not passengers” coined by Outward Bound founder Kurt Hahn. Crew is an advisory structure through which eight to 16 students meet together regularly with the guidance and individualized support of an adult adviser, or Crew leader, to foster a collective sense of belonging, engagement and compassion for one another. This creates an ethos of community that permeates the whole school. What does this look like day to day? Crews of students discuss current events, go on field trips, work on college applications and celebrate both big and small wins together. During the pandemic, when students couldn’t physically be together, Crew emerged as a particularly important lifeline and social-emotional support system over Zoom. 

In my first two months as CEO of NYC Outward Bound Schools, I’ve visited Crews in action at our 14 network schools and 49 new partner schools, seeing firsthand the learning that takes place and the love that extends beyond historical lines of division — race, culture, gender, economic status. In one particular Crew lesson, I witnessed middle school students lead discussions on race and equity, supported by an activity that had the kids choose a colored pencil that they thought best represented themselves and then see the beautiful multi-colored patchwork they created together.

Crew leads to more vibrant and connected school communities where students’ identities are affirmed and valued. But beyond anecdotal evidence, it’s important to examine two key student-level indicators — attendance and sense of belonging — that correlate strongly with academic outcomes and success. Research shows that students who report a stronger sense of community in their school are than those who don’t, and that kids who believe they have a voice in their school are seven times than those who do not feel that way.

Attendance is the most prescient indicator of — and in a , Crew was shown to have a statistically significant impact on attendance specifically resulting in a decrease in chronic absenteeism. There were half as many chronically absent students among the NYC Outward Bound Schools group than among the comparison group — 5.3% vs. 11.4%. Based on responses obtained from focus group interviews, overall perceptions of Crew were positive. Students and educators cited many benefits of Crew, including stronger relationships and community, academic and moral support, and family-school connections. Seventy-eight percent of students felt that their Crew leader cared about them. 

In a post-lockdown world, New York City schools — and school communities everywhere — can’t afford to go back to old ways that were not serving students. There is one way forward, and that’s to prioritize students’ social-emotional needs. Building strong school communities centered around belonging is essential to ensuring children don’t slip through the cracks and have the support they need to thrive academically, socially and emotionally.

Vanessa Rodriguez joined NYC Outward Bound Schools as CEO in January 2022. She has worked in education for more than 25 years, serving students in public, charter and alternative schools across the country. She started her career as a teacher in the Bronx.

In a time of political polarization, the nation’s Republican and Democratic governors agree on one thing: They want students in school.

“I want to be crystal clear: Students belong in school. We know it’s where they learn best,” said Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, one of 27 governors to echo that sentiment in recent weeks in their annual State of the State addresses.

FutureEd of 47 governors and partnered with ����Ӱ�� to convert our analysis into a series of interactive maps. Surprisingly, the most divisive issues of the pandemic, such as vaccine and mask mandates, got little attention in this year’s speeches. Instead, governors from both parties voiced support for such post-COVID priorities as increasing pay for teachers and vocational opportunities for students, and addressing students’ and educators’ mental health needs.

A partisan divide did emerge on teaching racial history and expanding parents’ rights to know what’s taught in classrooms — issues that many Republican governors embraced but Democrats largely avoided.

Sixteen governors pitched boosting teacher salaries, including giving across-the-board raises and increasing starting pay, making compensation a top priority across party lines. Some governors also talked about providing one-time or retention bonuses, particularly to address teacher shortages that some districts and charter school organizations are experiencing.

Hover over a given state to see the specific proposals for 2022: 

If you’re having trouble viewing the interactive maps, click here.

Governors in Missouri, South Carolina and Indiana proposed increases to the base salary of all new teachers. The governors of New Mexico and Alabama proposed 7 percent and 4 percent pay raises, respectively. And Iowa Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds announced that her state will use federal COVID relief funds to award a $1,000 retention bonus to teachers “who stayed on the job through the pandemic and who will continue teaching next year.” Many governors spoke of the pay initiatives as a way to applaud teachers for their work they have done over the last year, acknowledge that they deserve higher compensation and help keep them in the classroom, though research suggests that small bonuses rarely influence educators’ employment decisions.

Career and workforce programs also drew bipartisan support, with 24 governors calling for expansions at the high school and college levels. Delaware Gov. John Carney, a Democrat, announced plans to expand the state’s Pathways program to provide more workforce opportunities for interested middle and high schoolers. Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois pledged to create a Pipeline for the Advancement of the Healthcare Workforce that would invest $25 million in community colleges to recruit and train frontline health care workers. Republican Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee pledged $200 million to help double the state’s skilled workforce by 2026. And Missouri Gov. Michael Parson, a Republican, pledged $20 million to expand programming in the state’s 57 career centers. 

Thirteen governors endorsed expansions of social-emotional supports in schools, in many instances connecting students’ growing mental health struggles to the pandemic. New York Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul shared hopes to add more mental health professionals in schools to “heal the wounds inflicted during the isolation of remote learning,” and Whitmer announced similar plans to hire over 560 new school nurses, counselors and social workers in Michigan. Idaho Republican Gov. Brad Little pledged to invest $50 million to improve behavioral health care across his state. 

Thirteen governors proposed investments in early education, including expanding access to early learning opportunities, improving the quality of programs and implementing free, universal pre-K. Maine Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, pledged to invest $25 million in federal funds to expand access to early childhood education programs and $12 million to increase pay for child care workers. Colorado Democratic Gov. Jared Polis committed to implement “free, universal preschool” by 2023.

Many governors addressed the teaching of racial history — a political and ideological battleground of late — but nearly all were Republicans. Seven Republican governors promised to keep “critical race theory” out of their states’ classrooms, even though the topic is typically not taught in K-12 schools. While some explicitly mentioned efforts to pass legislation to accomplish that goal, others voiced concerns about what they said were the theory’s dangers, without making specific calls to action.

Mississippi Republican Gov. Tate Reeves spent several minutes in his speech promising to support anti-CRT legislation and asserting that “no school district shall teach that one race is inherently superior or that an individual is unconsciously or inherently racist because of how they are born. No child will be divided or humiliated because of their race.” Likewise, newly elected Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who signed an banning critical race theory in schools on his first day in office, proclaimed that schools “should not use inherently divisive concepts like critical race theory.” Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis was brief but to the point: “Our tax dollars should not be used to teach our kids to hate our country or to hate each other.” 

Among Democratic governors, the subject rarely came up. Only one — Delaware’s John Carney — mentioned teaching racial history in schools, highlighting a recently signed bill “ensuring that a robust, accurate, Black history curriculum is taught in Delaware public schools.”

Likewise, Democratic governors largely avoided the politically charged subject of parents’ rights. When they referenced parents, it was largely in the context of learning opportunities. Kansas Democrat Laura Kelly announced $50 million in Learning Recovery Grants that “will give parents the ability to sign their kids up for … whatever their child needs to close the learning gap.”

In contrast, 10 Republican governors framed parents’ rights in the context of teaching about race and exposure to inappropriate content in school libraries and curricular materials. Governors in three states — Florida, Georgia, and Alaska — specifically supported establishing or upholding a parents’ bill of rights, while many other GOP leaders advocated curriculum transparency laws. “Let’s require all that a child is taught, all curriculum and academic materials, be put online and available to search and review by every parent, grandparent and interested citizen,” Arizona Republican Gov. Doug Ducey said in his address to state lawmakers. Lee proposed a law that would ensure Tennessee parents know what materials are available to students in school libraries. Many other governors praised the importance of strengthening parents’ rights but presented no strategies for doing so.

In Idaho, Little proposed $50 million for new Empowering Parents grants to help parents cover the cost of computers, tutoring or other services to address their children’s educational needs. Eric Holcomb, Republican governor of Indiana, noted that the state will be releasing its Graduates Prepared to Succeed Dashboard so parents and community members “can have easy public access to robust data regarding school performance.” 

Half a dozen Republican governors voiced support for expanding school choice, about the same as in past years. These include three governors who suggested that funding should follow students to whatever school they attend, public or private, and three who proposed increasing investments to start new charter schools. Lee touted a plan to create new charter schools throughout Tennessee in partnership with Hillsdale College, a Christian college in Michigan. The schools would stress “civics,” he told Tennessee lawmakers. The president of Hillsdale College chaired former President Donald Trump’s 1776 Commission, established to promote “patriotic education,” partly in response to The New York Times’ 1619 Project, which examines inequities in American life through the lens of slavery.

Many governors used their State of the State addresses to call for greater investment in education. Governors in three states — Indiana, Michigan and Virginia — proposed what they called “record investments” in their K-12 systems. Polis wants to increase per pupil funding in Colorado by $1,000. Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee’s budget includes more than $430 million for new education facilities. Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and Hawaii Democratic Gov. David Ige want to restore budget cuts caused by the pandemic. 

While few governors mentioned the billions of dollars in federal aid they’ve received to help them respond to COVID-19, the federal funding undergirds many of the investments and policy initiatives outlined in their addresses. The question, at a time when many state leaders have been drawn deeply into cultural conflicts and partisan posturing, is whether governors will commit themselves, and the unprecedented federal resources available to them, to reversing the devastating consequences of the pandemic on students and student learning and to returning to the daunting task of educating every student to high standards. 

Bella DiMarco is a policy analyst at FutureEd, an independent, nonpartisan think tank at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. Nathan Kriha is a FutureEd research associate.

A new initiative from Noggin and its nonprofit partner Sparkler Learning helps young children explore emotions through music. Called , the endeavor seeks to support social-emotional learning for preschoolers and kindergarteners. As part of the initiative, Noggin released an album called Big Heart Beats, for which it commissioned songwriters and performers to create songs that both evoke a feeling and equip children to name it, talk about it and validate it. As a dad still traumatized by Wheels on the Bus sing-alongs a decade or more ago, I was pleased to discover that the Big Heart World songs are also more than listenable for the adults in the room.

The songs are collaborations with Noggin’s production team — led by Sean Farrell, senior vice president of content and strategy —which provides briefs to the artists and then makes suggestions. For example, Farrell might recommend changing multisyllabic words to something in the vocabulary of 2- to 6-year-olds. Noggin creates animated music videos for some of the tunes.

I spoke to the artists behind two Big Heart World songs and learned about their lives, careers and creative processes.

“The Sad Song”

Michael Levine, Noggin’s senior vice president of learning and impact, calls it the happiest sad song he’s ever heard. What’s up with the upbeat dance rhythms?

Ryan and Courtney Lofty, the act responsible for “The Sad Song,” explain that it is less about experiencing sadness than understanding sadness. The discovery that you share this emotion with others can be cause for celebration: “It helps to say out loud, ‘I’m sad (S-A-D), talking it through, with somebody.”

Based in Las Vegas, the couple specializes in children’s music that doesn’t sound like nursery rhymes. “We make songs the whole family can enjoy,” Ryan says. “With modern production instead of, you know, xylophone.” They also create music for Baby Shark’s Big Show! on Nickelodeon and love hearing Kimiko Glenn, as the title character, singing their songs. Seeing one of their productions come to life through animation never stops being a thrill.

In composing “The Sad Song,” they imagined something they would sing to their 3-year-old godson, Dylan, but Courtney says, “This is for us, too,” adding, “When we were kids, we didn’t have social-emotional education. And we could have used it.”

“It means a lot to us that we’re helping kids during the pandemic,” Ryan adds, noting the widespread isolation and emotional hardship of the past few years.

“Share a Smile”

Mireya Ramos and Shae Fiol from Flor de Toloache Zoomed with me from Puerto Rico, where they were living with Ramos’s parents during a COVID-imposed pause on their tour. The only all-female mariachi ensemble in New York City was formed in 2008. The name comes from a flower used in Mexican love potions. Flor de Toloache in 2019 and has teamed up with John Legend and salsa legend Rubén Blades. They’ve played themselves as a cartoon mariachi band on PBS Kids and appeared at the White House for Hispanic Heritage Month.

“Share a Smile” is about how to be a good citizen. “Share a smile / lend a hand / listen closely / take a stand.” Fiol says they wrote the song with her daughter Amel in mind, but “it’s also for our inner child.”

The mariachi-flavored music and the nonverbal vocalizing are just as important as the lyrics for capturing the spirit of togetherness. Appropriately, the best part our Zoom had no dialogue: I got to see Ramos and Fiol as they watched the new video of their song — featuring characters from the Nick Jr. programs Bubble Guppies and PAW Patrol — for the first time. The look on their faces revealed an emotion too powerful to put into words. But music could probably do the job.

As the nation’s schools approach the pandemic’s second year, educators are increasingly watching in their classrooms. 

Whether students have lost loved ones or struggled to reconnect with peers after months of isolation, educators report in behavior problems. U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a public health in December, referring to “alarming increases” in youth anxiety and depression. 

At the same time, the U.S. Department of Education has of how districts can use billions in new federal relief funds to address not just learning loss, but also students’ well-being.

Programs that aim to address those needs fall under the label of social-emotional learning, bringing topics such as decision-making, managing emotions and understanding others’ perspectives into the classroom. Even before the pandemic, districts devoted significant resources toward social-emotional learning, sometimes opening new departments to oversee implementation and teacher training.

The movement has long attracted supporters and critics. But now the field is facing unwanted scrutiny from those who argue discussions about feelings don’t belong in school, and have tied SEL — often incorrectly — to controversial lessons on race and equity. 

In this moment of heightened conflict, the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning — a hub for resources and research in the field — has hired a new leader. 

Aaliyah Samuel will try to bridge the divide as the organization’s new president and CEO. On Friday, she’ll for how the field can best respond to what she calls a “growing crisis around youth mental health, persistent inequities and divisive politics.” In a conversation with Timothy Shriver, the Collaborative’s board chair, she’ll address why she thinks the demand for social-emotional learning programs is greater than ever, despite the controversies.

Samuel started her career as an elementary special education teacher in the Hillsborough County, Florida, district. She worked at the National Governors Association and at assessment nonprofit NWEA before accepting a post in the U.S. Department of Education as a deputy assistant secretary last year.

David Adams, a member of the Collaborative’s board and the director of social-emotional learning at Urban Assembly, a New York nonprofit, called her “a consensus builder” who will be able to work with districts and parents so students aren’t “left behind because of partisanship.”

Samuel, a mother of two boys, whose youngest was in kindergarten when the pandemic began, said she’ll approach her new role not only as a policy leader, but as a mother. 

In a conversation with ����Ӱ��, she shared how her experience working with governors has prepared her to work across the political spectrum and help build understanding of how social-emotional learning programs can support academics and job preparation.

“I know all governors care about education and their economy,” she said, “and this is a way to address both.”

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: What role did social-emotional learning play in your early career?

Aaliyah Samuel: I cut my teeth teaching special education to 3- through 5-year-olds — at the time the label was emotionally handicapped kids. And that was my entrée point of seeing first-hand kids who really struggle managing their emotions, their inability to connect socially and how it impacted their academics. This was in 2001, and was the catalyst for me to go on and get my masters in special education.

You spent 10 months as deputy assistant secretary for local, state and national engagement at the Department of Education. What did you do in that role?

I traveled to about eight states, talking to parents, superintendents, school personnel of all kinds, bus drivers, food nutrition [staff], classroom teachers, local elected officials, governor’s offices, trying to understand, as schools were now reopening, what their challenges were. Consistently across all those cities, the one thing I heard was the impact of social-emotional learning, the impact of relationships on academics. A month before CASEL came to me about this role, an educator in North Carolina said to me, “Dr. Samuel, we’ve returned to school, but we haven’t returned to learning because we’re focusing on the relationships. We’ve just got to reestablish our relationships.”

Why did you leave?

I never even thought that I would be at that level. When we had initial conversations about me joining [the department], it was really, “Aaliyah, you know the national landscape, you understand the nuances, you are an educator, you are a parent. Help us engage those communities to really understand what the plan should be moving forward.” 

I committed to really help schools reopen. Anytime I’ve transitioned, it has been because of a belief that I’m answering a call to the field. When I left my post as a classroom teacher to [be] an assistant principal, it was because my administrator really felt that I could have greater impact on a school, not just my classroom. Going from principalship to national policy, it was the same thing. In education policy, so few of us are actually former educators or have that experience.

What was CASEL looking for in a new leader?

They really wanted a leader who understood the field, who came from the field. They were looking for diversity. To say that was not important would not be true. They absolutely wanted a person of color. But there were, I think, three things I brought that made them think, “This is why she’s the right leader.” 

First, was the right professional mix — the credibility at the local, state,and national levels as a policy influencer. Social-emotional learning has always been a bipartisan issue. How do we start to come back to the middle and think about the path ahead? 

Second was the fact that I understand what it’s like to be in a classroom and trying to teach a kid who cannot emotionally regulate themselves. And then, also as a parent. I am a mom with two boys of color in public school, who has a child with special health care needs. It’s important to not only talk about SEL when it comes to race and culturally relevant teaching, but also students with disabilities.

I am bilingual and a first-generation American. I’m a dual language learner. All of those things combined, ultimately, are why I’m here.

With some communities so divided over how schools implement social-emotional learning, how do you “get back to the middle” as you say? 

We need to strip out the politics and really get clear about who we’re serving and what our desired outcomes are — which, at the end of it, is to make sure that kids and educators are able to really recover from this pandemic. We have to recognize 53 percent of kids who are in public schools are students of color. The pandemic has forced us to look at things differently. We can’t not address cultural differences. We have to understand that the pandemic has disproportionately impacted communities of color. 

You mentioned your work with states and governors. Legislatures are in session, and already in some states, curriculum and the way teachers discuss social injustice and issues of race, gender and identity are dominating committee hearings. Does CASEL have plans to get involved at that level?

We have to think about policy, practice and research. How do we bring all three of those together so that.policymakers can really make the best decisions for their state? It comes to your point of clarifying what SEL is and what it’s not. As a former teacher, there was no way I was going to teach my kids without having strong relationships with them. And that’s part of SEL, having strong meaningful relationships.

I would challenge anybody to go into a classroom and see what it’s like to try to teach kids who are struggling socially and emotionally, who don’t feel connected to either their classroom, the school or their teachers. How do we really amplify the realities of stories about what’s happening in the field? We can’t allow politics to get in front of what practitioners know is fundamentally best for their students.

It’s an election year, and some Republicans are running on to root out educational practices they associate with critical race theory. Again, with your connections to NGA, what are your thoughts on that?

One of the things I learned while at NGA is there is not a governor anywhere who is not either a workforce governor, an education governor or both. Right now, this issue of SEL impacts both education and the workforce. Policymakers have perspectives and opinions on what needs to be done, but they’re also very open to listening, and I think my time at NGA will definitely serve me well in this role.

There are just conversations that need to be had. If we don’t really start to address what we’re hearing about the impacts to the workforce, we are going to lose students who don’t go back and finish their high school diploma. The impacts are not just in K-12 and are not just temporary. I was listening to a great piece that was talking about the young adults who have transitioned into the workforce from the pandemic, how the social impact is showing up in the workforce. They’re having a tough time being able to work in teams.

Does social-emotional learning need a new label, a new name?

This is something we struggled with at NGA. What do we call this? It’s something I think about when I’m on a walk. There’s certain language and vocab that works great when you’re talking to the choir. 

There are terms that physicians can use that the common person wouldn’t understand, but when they break it down a different way people are like, “Oh okay, I get what you’re saying.” 

We need to think about how educators are talking about it, how parents are talking about it, how policymakers are talking about it. Fundamentally, when you unpack it, there are some real commonalities.

We’re going to have to think about those thoughtful, productive, intentional conversations that we need to have to help us prioritize what’s best for students. I definitely have my ears perked up because there are multiple audiences that we are trying to bring along on this journey.

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The term SEL was coined in the mid-1990s, but “for as long as public schools have been around, public school educators have worked with the whole child to make sure that the child felt safe, secure and ready to learn,” said Michigan Education Association (MEA) President Paula Herbart. 

During a pandemic that isolated children and left over 3,000 children in Michigan a primary caregiver — with Black children accounting for 40% of impacted kids — state and education leaders emphasize that the need for social and emotional learning in schools is greater now than it ever has been. 

“It’s such a powerful thing for us as individuals to be able to identify and understand our own emotions, but then to also understand what are our options and what we can do with them in our relationships,” said state Rep. Felicia Brabec (D-Pittsfield Twp.), who also is a clinical psychologist. “These are really important life skills that we use as adults. It makes good sense to integrate this in schools, because there are lots of places where we talk about life skills, and this is just another life skill. This is important to be able to have successful future generations.”

The pandemic has especially affected young people and their social and emotional well-being. 

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, one conducted by Detroit Public Schools Community District in collaboration with the University of Michigan Transforming Research into Action to Improve the Lives of Students  (TRAILS) program and Youth Policy Lab, found that more than half of student respondents in DPSCD had experienced symptoms of anxiety or depression.

“The findings made it clear that DPSCD students were experiencing high levels of need around mental health even before COVID-19,” said Robin Jacobco-director of the Youth Policy Lab and an associate research professor in the U of M Institute for Social Research. “Given the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on communities of color, the need for mental health support for Detroit students is even greater now.”

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer the state’s more than $17 billion School Aid budget in July, which included $240 million over three years for school counselors, psychologists, nurses and social workers in high-need districts and an increase of $17 million to support school-based mental health programming.

The Michigan Department of Education included student health, safety and wellness as a goal in the state’s strategic education plan and set SEL for Michigan’s schools that focus on five key competencies: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills and responsible decision-making. 

Herbart said that the governor’s investment for K-12 education is a step in the right direction to address students’ social and emotional well-being, but there’s more work to do. 

“The problem is that for years of austerity, we let go of our social workers and we let go of counselors, as things that are nice but not critical. And when are they critical? In a pandemic or after a pandemic. And now we just don’t have people that have gone into those jobs in order to fill them,” Herbart said. “Now we’re seeing this crisis of a shortage of social workers, counselors, support professionals and behavioral specialists who help every student, not just students that have otherwise abilities.”

In February, Barbec introduced a bill to help address this issue.

would require school districts to staff one counselor for every 450 students in the district. The bill was referred to the GOP-led House Education Committee and hasn’t seen any action since. 

“It’s not that I think that one in 450 is where we should be. It’s not, but it’s a step in the right direction,” Brabec said. “I see all of the work that we get to do is often incremental. I’m going to continue to work with my Republican colleagues to see what needs to be changed in the bill and how we get to this final end goal.”

During the 2018-19 school year, Michigan had the second worst school counselor-to-student ratio in the nation, only behind Arizona, with one counselor for every 691 students. The American School Counselor Association recommends states have one counselor for every 250 students.

Despite SEL’s history in public school education and its importance during the pandemic, right-wing commentators, like Fox News’ , have started targeting it as the latest culture war flashpoint in schools. 

The politicization has had state-level effects in a few states. The Idaho Department of Education, which has championed SEL for years, is itself from the term because of how it’s been politicized. In Virginia, Parents Defending Education (PDE), a dark money group with connections to the Koch political network, is targeting the state’s Department of Education and local school districts for setting SEL standards. 

In Michigan, GOP gubernatorial candidate Ryan Kelley was critical of SEL earlier this month during the Newaygo Grassroots Dinner Party. Kelley SEL to Critical Race Theory, a graduate school-level concept focused on the history and ongoing effects of white supremacy in the United States.

“We’re talking about the Department of Education, the schools, Critical Race Theory, SEL. It’s all Critical Race Theory. It’s all there to divide this skin color to be less likely to succeed and this skin color should feel guilty because of whatever they did in the past,” Kelley said. “So I said when I’m elected governor and the Department of Education doesn’t want to get on board with getting rid of all of the divisive teaching …  I will happily and enthusiastically as governor sign an executive order that eliminates the Department of Education.”

State Rep. Darrin Camilleri (D-Brownstown Twp.), a former teacher, said that politicizing SEL is unnecessary and harmful for students.

“Teaching empathy and teaching kindness and teaching problem solving should not be political. It should not be used to divide an already toxic educational debate. Especially during a pandemic, we’re learning that there are so many more needs of our students that need to be met, for example, their emotional wellbeing and mental health,” Camilleri said.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Michigan Advance maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Susan Demas for questions: info@michiganadvance.com. Follow Michigan Advance on and .

“It’s bigger than just us,” she would say.

Because she could provide that safe place, fear, happiness, and relief showed up in artwork the students created for ����Ӱ��, when they were asked to illustrate the “best” and “most challenging” parts of the year. The drawings conveyed two distinct messages: First, the kids loved their friends, teacher, and community, and had suffered during remote learning. Second, they saw the value in safety protocols even though they hated the masks.

In this video, the students talk to reporter Bekah McNeel about their paintings and their pandemic school year. 

• Read more: The Second Pandemic — A Children’s Mental Health Crisis

The academic damage inflicted by the pandemic is still being measured, but early indicators are ominous. Exam scores collected periodically by states, cities, and nationwide testing organizations show that a large number of K-12 students have either stagnated or lost ground in their studies during the COVID era. School closures and prolonged doses of virtual instruction are usually identified as the culprit.

But since classes first went online last spring, parents and educators have been equally anxious about the pandemic’s impact on children’s inner lives. And while those worries have often focused on the developmental opportunities denied to kindergarteners and elementary schoolers, older students have also suffered while isolated from friends and teachers.

by the American Educational Research Association provides concrete evidence of the setbacks experienced by adolescents in remote learning. In a two-part survey conducted both before the emergence of COVID-19 and during its peak, high schoolers learning online said they were worse-off socially, emotionally, and academically than their peers learning in physical classrooms. The “thriving gap” between the two groups was more pronounced among older participants, the authors note.

The study was conducted by a group of authors at Temple University, Mathematica Policy Research, and the University of Pennsylvania, including prominent psychologist Angela Duckworth, a MacArthur Fellow best known for her writings on non-cognitive traits like grit. In an interview, Duckworth said that the post-COVID distancing “seems to have a deleterious effect in every aspect of thriving, in every way we were measuring it.”

“What we wanted to underscore was that there’s a consistent signal across these three domains,” she said. “We are finding this across social, emotional, and academic learning.”

The survey was administered through , a nonprofit research consortium Duckworth co-founded in 2013. The group’s Student Thriving Index measures self-reported ratings of student well-being and school routines, which students complete at the direction of teachers during class time. A sample of roughly 6,500 students across Florida’s Orange County School District participated in the survey both in February 2020, just before the pandemic shuttered campuses, and October 2020, after they had been given the choice of whether to return to in-person instruction. About two-thirds of participants chose to stick with virtual classes.

Students were enrolled in grades eight through 11 in the spring, but all were attending high school during the questionnaire’s second round. In both iterations, they were asked to assess themselves by multiple test items related to social relationships (example: “In your school, do you feel like you fit in?”), emotional state (“How happy have you been feeling these days?”) and academic engagement (“Compared with other things you do, how interesting are your classes?”).

After grouping test items into composite scores, the research team found that students learning remotely reported lower scores across all three categories when compared with their peers who had returned to school. On a 100-point scale, remote students scored 2.4 points lower socially, 1.7 points lower emotionally, and 1.1 points lower academically.

The “thriving gap” detected in survey responses was driven overwhelmingly by students in grades 10-12, while differences in response for ninth-graders did not reach statistical significance. The authors offer a few possible explanations for the disparity, which may result from the fact that freshmen are already dealing with a crucial transition to the high school environment and may not be as disturbed by separation from peers or adults that they haven’t yet had the chance to meet in person.

Duckworth and her colleagues note that the effects, while substantial, should be viewed with caution. Given that students weren’t randomly assigned to participate either in-person or virtual instruction, the responses collected may not point to causation. The team controlled for a range of variables in the student population, including age, gender, race and ethnicity, eligibility for free or reduced-price lunch (a common proxy for poverty), English learner status, and GPA. The population of students who returned to school buildings were disproportionately male, white, ineligible for free lunch, higher in social well-being, and lower in GPA.

After spending large chunks of two academic years learning from home, many students are preparing to return to in-person instruction on a full-time basis this fall. As part of the push, President Biden has warned of the “” impact of social isolation on students’ mental health. Even so, some families of retaining a virtual learning option for their kids in the future.

Duckworth said that while most parents are justifiably concerned about the recent disruptions to the academic and social-emotional growth of young children, high schoolers should not be neglected when tallying the pandemic’s toll.

“Adolescence is the most social period of your life — you are programmed to want to be with people outside your family, and usually you find ways to do that. For a lot of students, school is a haven where they feel the most themselves. We wanted to quantify what it’s been like for this age group, and this trend we saw…was consistent with the idea that the more you are in adolescence, the more difficult it is for you to be holed up with your family and not seeing other people.”