A University of Southern California published Monday surveyed roughly 1,700 parents and 364 students ages 13 to 17 last fall. Researchers used the annual to analyze students’ cellphone use and their , along with parents’ perceptions of the restrictions. At least have some form of ban or limitation on cellphones during instructional time.

About 98% of students attend schools with cell phone restrictions, according to the study. Some 76% of teens and 93% of parents said they support some type of ban. 

But the researchers found that students still use their cellphones in school. About two-thirds of teens at schools with complete phone bans said they use their device during the day, including in class, and more than half of students whose school restricts cellphones during instructional time don’t follow the rules.

“The results are pointing towards both parents and teens wanting to have at least some form of restrictions on cell phone use in classrooms — neither are reporting major downsides,” said Anna Saavedra, one of the study’s researchers. “(Students and parents) are really supportive of the restrictions and they even support making rules stronger. Part of the challenge has been that even though schools have these rules, teens are telling us that they’re breaking them.”

Most students reported two categories of cellphone bans: either prohibiting use for the entire day or only during instructional time. Nearly 75% of teens said that no matter the policy, their school still lets them keep their phones with them. Some 5% said their school doesn’t permit cellphones on school property. 

The study also found that teens use their phone in school for an average of 1.5 hours a day regardless of the type of ban. That matches other that found students ages 13 to 18 spend an average of 70 minutes on their smartphones during the school day, typically using social media or gaming apps. 

Restricting cellphone use only during class instruction is a rule that 68% of students and 53% of parents support. About 24% of teens and 7% of parents said they would prefer no restrictions.

Overall, 42% of teens and 76% of parents said their schools’ rules are “just right.” About 48% of students and 8% of parents thought they were too strict. Half of students said their school’s rules were different and stricter than the previous year’s. 

Most teachers enforce phone policies, according to the study. Nearly two-thirds of students said their teacher gives a verbal warning if someone breaks the rules. Other common consequences include taking the device away for the rest of class or for the entire day; notifying parents; giving detention; or requiring a parent to pick up the phone.

Though the rise of smartphones has been linked to negative student outcomes like poor academic achievement, the teens and adults surveyed by USC said they don’t believe cellphone policies have much of an effect. The majority said the rules had no impact in areas such as sense of community, relationships with teachers and bullying or fighting. The majority of students also said there was no effect on academic performance, making friends or their likelihood of attending school.

About 28% of the teens said the rules made the classroom learning environment better, while 26% said they made it worse. One-third of students said the policies improve academic integrity or reduce cheating, while 19% said the opposite.

A recent University of Pennsylvania of 20,000 educators found that stricter cell phone policies are associated with more positive outcomes reported by teachers. Nearly half of schools in the study have a “no show” rule — where students can have their phones if they keep them out of sight — but this policy isn’t as effective as more restrictive rules. 

“The stricter the policy, the happier the teacher and the less likely students are to be using their phones when they aren’t supposed to,” said University of Pennsylvania Professor Angela Duckworth about the data. “We’re also finding that focus on academics is higher in schools that do not permit students to keep their phones nearby, including in their backpacks or back pockets.”

Disclosure: The Overdeck Family Foundation provides financial support to ����Ӱ��.

The increases, while modest, are being driven by Republicans. Greater percentages of GOP voters say they want students to study social safety net programs like welfare and Medicaid. While there’s still a partisan divide on such topics, 51% of Republicans support students learning about income inequality, compared to 46% in 2021. Support among Democrats held steady at 87%.

“People are supportive of schools teaching about controversial topics from multiple perspectives,” said Morgan Polikoff, a University of Southern California education professor and co-author of the study, drawn from a sample of 4,200 adults, including almost half with school-age children. “They don’t want teachers to be putting their thumb on the scale in terms of one perspective being better than the other.”

The shift comes even as Americans of all political stripes give schools low marks on preparing students to be good citizens, with just 29% offering them an A or B grade. 

But the increasing support among Republicans for teaching issues frequently labelled divisive surprised researchers, suggesting that many conservatives don’t necessarily want to limit what children learn in school — a frequent criticism lodged by critics on the left. Most have either banned or considered legislation outlawing the teaching of what Republicans consider divisive concepts. the mandates have silenced teachers interested in presenting a full account of American history, including its darker chapters. 

The survey also shows Republicans want more attention paid to current events, such as the benefits and challenges of Medicare and Social Security (69%, up from 62% in 2021). The share of Republicans who believe schools should teach about racism also increased, from 54% to 58%. 

“Contrary to the conventional wisdom, there are still plenty of educational issues that garner bipartisan support in this polarized era,” said David Houston, an assistant education professor at George Mason University. “Finding these points of convergence is an important and necessary step toward building broad and durable support for public education in both red and blue communities and from one presidential administration to the next.”

Jonathan Butcher, a senior research fellow at the right-wing Heritage Foundation, said he prefers a “more conservative approach” to civics that would focus on the Constitution and structures like the electoral college. But he said it’s also “certainly justifiable” for schools to teach students how to interpret the news of the day — like why Democrats held up signs reading “Save Medicaid” during speech to Congress Tuesday night. 

“As we teach students about civics, they should understand how Medicaid came to be, what the relationship is between taxpayers and Medicaid,” he said. “Students should have enough background knowledge and an understanding of how policies have been formed that they can understand what was happening.” 

Teaching ‘with nuance’

Florida is among the red states that prohibit teachers from discussing topics like institutional prejudice or gender equity. bans educators from teaching that someone might be “inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive.” 

The law is “commonly known for restricting instruction,” said Stephen Masyada, director of the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship at the University of Central Florida. But he thinks that characterization ignores that the legislation also requires students to learn about “the ramifications of prejudice, racism and stereotyping on individual freedoms.” 

The state mandates lessons, for example, on the in 1920, when a white mob killed dozens of Black citizens and ran hundreds more out of town in a violent attempt to keep them from voting. 

Many conservatives want schools to address those topics “with nuance,” Masyada said, and to connect “the promises of the founding era” to overcoming oppression and bias. 

‘Very nationalistic’

Some current examples of civics education remain too liberal for many Republicans. “We the People: Civics that Empower All Students,” a in grades four through eight, was among the programs eliminated in the U.S. Department of Education’s sweeping cancellations of teacher preparation grants last month. The program equips teachers to focus on topics like the Bill of Rights, but also encourages civic engagement. Some conservatives argue that such projects emphasize liberal causes like abortion rights or climate activism. grantees “were using taxpayer funds to train teachers and education agencies on divisive ideologies.”

The USC survey shows that the percentages of Republicans saying schools should teach the contributions of women and minorities throughout history — topics that could be construed as promoting diversity, equity and inclusion — were relatively flat or saw a small decline. Among Democrats, however, there were increases.

“Everybody likes civic education, but they like it for different reasons,” said Marcie Taylor-Thoma, director of the Maryland Council for Civic and History and a former social studies coordinator for the state. Democrats, she said, think students should learn about their civil rights and “critically analyze what’s going on in our country.” But Republicans’ view of civics is “very nationalistic” she said.

There’s little disagreement, however, over teaching students about the U.S. Constitution. Ninety-three percent of Democrats and 95% of Republicans said it’s important for any civics curriculum to cover the rights and principles outlined in the founding document. It’s that many chapters of Moms for Liberty, a conservative advocacy group, have taken up in recent years, and a Trump executive order calls for schools to recognize annually on Sept. 17.

There was scant support in the survey for students participating in protests during school hours — only 24% liked the idea — but the largest partisan split was over reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Forty-four percent of Democrats support that tradition, compared with 84% of Republicans. Debates over requiring students to recite the pledge have erupted in recent years in and .

Given the negative attitudes of many respondents toward the role schools play in preparing students for civic life, researchers thought support would be higher for a common political proving ground: student government. But less than three-fourths of respondents favor student participation in school elections, like voting for student council leaders.

That finding was unexpected, said Anna Saavedra, lead author and a research scientist at USC’s Center for Applied Research in Education.

“Having a class president is a pretty standard part of most schools,” she said. “Seeing such low support was a little surprising. It’s a way for kids to practice voting, running a platform and participating in a democratic process.”

Polikoff said it’s not surprising that there are differences of opinion over activities like requiring community service as part of classwork (73% of Republicans compared with 80% of Democrats) or honoring veterans and military service (92% of Republicans and 78% of Democrats). Local context, he said, will continue to influence how deep teachers can take classroom discussions on potentially controversial topics. 

“I don’t think that we would expect that the civics curriculum is going to look exactly the same in rural Republican Wisconsin as it’s going to look in Oakland Unified [in California],” he said. “In both places, there is room for diverse perspectives. The reality is, every classroom is purple to at least some extent.”

‘A challenge to teach’

Some educators, however, still tiptoe around topics in the news.

“It’s been a challenge to teach lately,” said Jenny Morgan, a veteran eighth grade U.S. History teacher in the West Salem, Wisconsin, district, which she described as “very, very Republican.” 

She’s tried to avoid discussing President Donald Trump’s and Elon Musk’s makeover of the executive branch, but she did recently teach a lesson on , which Trump is charging Canada, China and Mexico.

The discussion prompted a recent debate between two students on opposite sides of the political spectrum.

“The Democratic student was trying to explain why tariffs aren’t good and talked about how prices are going to go up. The other kid was saying ‘Oh no, they won’t go up,’ ” Morgan said. “It was just an interesting conversation between the two eighth grade boys. You could tell they were getting current events at home.”

Access to in-school mental health support varies dramatically along class and race lines, with Black and low-income families far less likely to report their child’s school offers counseling and other support but are more likely to use them than their affluent, white peers. 

Just 29% of Black families and 37% of low-income families report that their child’s school offers mental health services, compared to 52% of white families and 59% of the most affluent, according to the report released last week by University of Southern California researchers. Lower income families reported using in-school mental health services more than five times as much as those with the highest incomes. 

“We often talk about mental health struggles today with teens as kind of one issue and often in generalities,” said  lead author and USC researcher Amie Rapaport. “… I’m hopeful that differentiation will help inform interventions and services to help kids that are most in need.”

The survey of 2,500 families is the latest national attempt to show the “very clear link” between poor mental health and chronic absenteeism. Over one in five children considered chronically absent, missing 10% or more of a school year, experienced conduct problems, like losing temper or fighting with peers. About one in ten report emotional or peer struggles. 

Across the country, more than kids were chronically absent by the end of 2023. 

Researchers acknowledge the absences themselves may be creating more emotional distress, negatively impacting how students feel about themselves as learners. Regardless, the currently or on-track to be chronically absent students group struggled emotionally or behaviorally three to four times more than their peers with good attendance. 

“There are kids in need that aren’t being reached,” Rapaport said. 

Among all families, one in five would have used services had they been available, though Black and Hispanic families show the highest desire. Of all families receiving services, roughly 3 in 4 are “satisfied,” saying they help. 

Teen girls, between 13 and 17, struggled most with depression and anxiety symptoms, but Black and Hispanic girls appear to be struggling less than their white and Asian peers. Pre-teen boys, particularly Black boys, are experiencing the most conduct concerns, such as increases in fighting, lying, cheating, distraction, bullying and stealing, the report found, adding detail to recent CDC reports about increases in violence and bullying. 

The findings came as somewhat of a surprise to Rapaport, who expected mental health struggles to be more evenly distributed across age and gender; and because  student mental health was a priority for many districts nationwide in spending federal pandemic relief funds in the last few years. 

She explained the disparities may have to do with access to information and care – whether or not schools are adequately reaching parents about what resources are readily available, or curbing long waiting lists. 

 “Clearly, policy can help better target mental health supports to meet the needs of the children who could benefit from them the most,” the report stated, calling the patterns “unfortunate.”

“This is the biggest problem facing America,” Jens Ludwig, a University of Chicago professor, said flatly. Nonetheless, he told those assembled at the Washington, D.C., event sponsored by the , a think tank, “We do not have our hair on fire the way it needs to be.”

That disconnect is the subject of a new released Monday that further explores what many have labeled an “urgency gap.” To pinpoint the extent of the gap, the authors talked to parents about the signals they’re getting from teachers and schools about their children’s progress. Parents expressed little concern about lasting damage from the pandemic and typically thought their children were doing well in school — a view that researchers say is belied by dismal state and national test scores. 

The issue is “genuinely vexing,” said Morgan Polikoff, an associate education professor at the University of Southern California and the paper’s lead author.  

“Parents are overwhelmingly getting the message from grades and teachers that kids are doing fine-to-great,” he said. He attributes that upbeat outlook to how little parents pay attention to standardized test scores — the “external measures” that matter most to researchers. “We just never heard anything about standardized tests from the folks we interviewed.”

The 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress showed historic declines in math and flat performance in reading. According to this year’s spring test results, pandemic recovery remains elusive for some states. Several have continued to lose ground in reading and most have not surpassed pre-COVID performance in math. Last week’s release of international scores show U.S. students dropped 13 points in math between 2018 and 2022. 

Ludwig argues that U.S. students have made such little progress that the $190 billion Congress appropriated to address the COVID crisis is insufficient and lawmakers should find to fund high-dosage tutoring.  

“If we don’t remediate this pandemic learning loss, this cohort of 50 million kids will experience reduced lifetime earnings of something like $900 billion,” he said.

Those messages, however, don’t always get to parents. 

Given the gauntlet of tests schools administer, it’s easy for parents to get lost, said Meredith Dodson, executive director of San Francisco Parent Action, a group that advocated for schools to reopen and has recently pushed for improvements in the district’s reading program.

For many parents, “​​it’s hard to understand all the acronyms — this test versus that test, the state versus the national,” she said. “Parents just really want to trust their teachers. Is my kid on grade level or not?”

Even some parents who knew their children’s standardized test scores tended to put more stock in grades, Polikoff found. One parent interviewed for the study knew that a majority of students scored higher than her son on the NWEA MAP test in math. But, she said, “his knowledge is much greater than that” because he received a 3 on a scale of 1-3 on his report card, which “means they’ve achieved the mastery or whatever.” 

Researchers have documented  between grade point averages and , especially since the pandemic. from three organizations — EdNavigator, Learning Heroes and TNTP — showed an increase in B grades since the pandemic even among students who performed below grade level and were chronically absent.

‘Kids are not stupid’

Schools have also made it easier to do well, a vestige of pandemic-era incentives to get students to complete their work. Dan Goldhaber, director of the CALDER Center at the American Institutes for Research — and the father of two school-age children — said he’s increasingly “astounded” at how many chances students get to bring up their grades.

“Kids are not stupid,” he said. “They’re going to learn that, ‘No, I don’t need to study real hard for this test because I can just correct it after the fact.’”

It’s not a surprise, he added, that there’s been a lackluster response to some academic recovery efforts. A lot of districts have spent relief funds on less-effective remediation efforts, such as optional on-demand tutoring. And those companies typically get paid whether or not students improve or even use the service, according to . 

In response to disappointing results, some states and districts have shifted course. A few have with large online tutoring companies. Some have turned to “outcomes-based” contracts — in which tutors earn more money for better results. But others are sticking with . 

If districts are going to spend funds on tutoring, Goldhaber said, officials should “have some control over” which students receive the help and when it’s delivered.

He and Polikoff are among the experts urging educators to make test score data a much larger focus of their conversations with parents. And there’s some evidence that hard facts about students’ scores can be a wake-up call.

A November showed that among parents who knew their children were below grade level in math, improving those skills became their number one concern, more important than curbing the effects of social media and protecting them from bullies.

Being honest with parents starts at the top, said Nat Malkus, deputy director of Education Policy Studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. 

“Superintendents should not say, ‘We’re chugging along. We’re going to get there.’ They should say this is a huge problem,” he said at the Aspen event. Teachers, he added, need “political cover” to tell parents their children are behind. “It’s the truth and we need to deliver it.” 

But the news doesn’t always go over well. When Precious Allen, who teaches second grade at Betty Shabazz Academy, a charter school in Chicago, showed parents test results that indicated their children were a year or more behind, she said they grew “flustered” and complained about doing extra review sheets with their children after work. 

It was tough, she said, for them to “wrap their minds around” the data. She shared passages from that explains where children should be for their age to help parents understand how the pandemic threw their kids off track. “I had to bring a lot of science and research into it because sometimes the voice of a teacher is not enough.”

‘Worst possible time’

But not all educators believe assessments provide valuable or reliable information. Polikoff sees the separation between parents and the nation’s education scholars as part of a larger anti-testing movement that started brewing long . The pandemic pause on state assessments and accountability sparked a to limit the number of tests and try .

The Massachusetts Teachers Association, for example, is leading a to remove the state test as a graduation requirement, calling it “harmful.” The proposal drew sharp criticism from National Parents Association President Keri Rodrigues, whose organization trains parents to advocate for quality education.

“This is the dawn of a new era, where high school diplomas now become participation trophies,” she wrote in an . 

Testing critics complain that assessments take up too much instructional time and that the results rarely benefit teachers because they arrive after students have already moved on to the next grade. Others say high-stakes tests are racially biased against Black and Hispanic students. 

“There’s just very close to zero constituencies advocating for tests or that they matter,” Polikoff said. Republicans, he said, “want only unfettered choice” while the left is not defending the usefulness of tests “to ensure educational quality or equity.”

’The backlash against testing, he said, has come “at the worst possible time given the damage that’s actually been done.”

Conducted by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Maryland, the analysis of over 14,000 districts nationwide shows that in 2000, the average child from a poor family went to an elementary school where almost half of the students were defined as middle class. By 2015, that figure had fallen to 36 percent.

As the nation’s population grows, the shift — especially in the West and the South —means they are less likely to experience of racially and socioeconomically mixed schools, the study notes, including higher test scores, smaller racial achievement gaps and higher college enrollment rates.

The findings, according to the researchers, also carry broad implications for academic recovery efforts in the wake of the pandemic. 

A previous analysis by ����Ӱ�� showed disproportionate increases in chronic absenteeism among English learners, three-fourths of whom are Spanish-speakers. And data shows that Latino families were among those by COVID-related job loss and financial hardship, creating a larger challenge for schools serving high concentrations of Latino students.

“Deeper forces have sustained achievement disparities in recent decades, especially this worsening isolation of the poor from middle-class students,” said Bruce Fuller, a Berkeley sociology professor and lead author of the paper. “COVID-era learning loss is but a surface symptom of deeper ills that beset public education.”

“slowed desegregation efforts” in districts with large Black student populations and shifted attention toward improving schools in Black and Latino communities, the authors said. 

Now among Latinos, combined with the movement of Latino families to the suburbs, have contributed to racial isolation, they wrote.

“‘White flight’ from the public school system translates into resource flight from racially isolated schools,” said Feliza Oritz-Licon, chief policy and advocacy officer at Latinos for Education, a nonprofit focusing on teacher recruitment and education policy. She added that in racially isolated schools it becomes easy to “dismiss” Latino students as underperforming.

But not all districts have seen a decline in their white student populations. The chances that Latino children will interact with white peers at school are higher in the Midwest and Northeast. In fact, the researchers found 800 school districts where the white student population had not declined over that 15-year time period, even as the Latino student population grew. 

‘Under one school roof’

The Berkeley study builds on research by Sean Reardon at Stanford University, drew connections between racial segregation and large achievement gaps due to concentrations of Black and Latino students in high-poverty schools.

Pedro Noguera, dean of education at the University of Southern California, said rising segregation not only affects who students sit next to in class, but also broader support for public schools. 

“All of this is troubling. We have to get better at offering the kinds of programs that will attract affluent parents,” he said, noting that International Baccalaureate programs, Advanced Placement courses and other offerings “send the signal of a high standard. That’s what Latino parents want as well.”

Fuller and his co-authors wrote that without more inter-district choice programs, which would allow entree to higher-performing schools in wealthier neighborhoods, Latino students will continue to have fewer opportunities to attend integrated schools. 

A report released last year by Bellwether Education Partners explored additional obstacles to integration created by a lack of affordable housing in districts with higher performing schools; even if low-income families want to move into such school districts, housing options are scarce.

“Civic leaders and educators must expand ways of pulling the nation’s diverse children under one school roof,” Fuller said.

In 2020, the Century Foundation, a left leaning think tank, identified initiatives underway in school districts and charter school networks to increase integration. Some of the programs were voluntary, while others resulted from desegregation orders.

‘The country’s prosperity’

But Noguera said some charter schools predominantly serve Black students or Latino students, . 

By 2060, Latinos are projected to make up over one fourth of the U.S. population, according to Census Bureau , and Latino children currently account for of public school enrollment. 

Increasing the numbers of Latino educators is one way for districts to increase achievement, researchers at the Brookings Institution wrote in last year that focused on the Clark County School District in Nevada. They cited studies showing that Latino students are more likely to be placed in gifted programs and take Advanced Placement courses when their schools have more teachers that look like them.

Recruiting more Latino educators and giving Latinos a greater role in education policy is also a priority for philanthropist McKenzie Scott, who last week donated to Latinos for Education to support the organization’s work.

Latino educators are often assigned to high-need, racially isolated schools because they reflect the cultural backgrounds of students. But turnover is high, with many leaving the profession within four years, noted Oritz-Licon of Latinos for Education.

The organization’s October featured concerns from Latino educators, such as the cost of earning a degree and requests from administrators to provide translation services without additional compensation. 

Oritz-Licon called on schools serving Latino students to use relief funds for afterschool programs, academic support and parent engagement efforts since many high-needs schools might lack those services. 

“Latino students are American students,” she said. “Their educational outcomes should matter because as a growing population, their prosperity is the country’s prosperity.”