As is typical for edtech hype, the initial burst of enthusiasm for artificial intelligence in education focused on student-facing applications. Products like IXL, Zearn, and Khan Academy’s chatbot Khanmigo could take on the heavy lifting and personalize instruction for every kid! Who needs tutors, or even teachers, when kids can learn from machines?

Thankfully, the real-life limits of AI instruction surfaced quickly, given how hard it is for non-humanoids to motivate children and teens to pay attention and persist through hard work for any length of time (for example, see “The 5 Percent Problem,” features, Fall 2024). The apps are still popular, but it’s not clear that AI will crowd out live human instruction anytime soon.

If AI can’t replace teachers, maybe it can help them get better at their jobs. Multiple companies are pairing AI with inexpensive, ubiquitous video technology to provide feedback to educators through asynchronous, offsite observation. It’s an appealing idea, especially given the promise and popularity of instructional coaching, as well as the challenge of scaling it effectively (see “Taking Teacher Coaching To Scale,” research, Fall 2018).

While these efforts seem tailor-made for teachers looking to improve, there are clear applications across the spectrum of effectiveness. Like bodycams worn by police, video recordings and attendant AI tools could open a window into every classroom, exposing poor performers to scrutiny and helping to keep bad behavior in check.

Apps for observations

Video-based observations are not new. The underlying, pre-AI idea is for teachers to record themselves providing instruction, choose some of their best samples, and upload those clips to a platform where an instructional coach or principal can watch and provide feedback. Indeed, this model was an important innovation of the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project launched in 2009 by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (see “Lights, Camera, Action!” What Next, Spring 2011).

Edthena is one company that has built out a coaching-via-video-feedback service. Its founder, Adam Geller, started as a science teacher in St. Louis before moving on to the national strategy team at Teach For America. At the time, the organization was looking for a way to provide more frequent feedback to its corps members, given growing evidence that the best professional learning comes from educators regularly reviewing, discussing, and critiquing instructional practice together. It’s hard for instructional coaches or principals to visit every teacher’s classroom with much frequency, but recorded lessons allow anyone to observe and deliver feedback anytime from anywhere. That gave Geller an idea, which he later turned into Edthena.

For more than a decade, Geller claims, his platform has narrowed the “feedback gap” dramatically. Research studies find that video coaching via Edthena can improve teacher retention, competence, and confidence. Still, it is a large investment in staff resources. After all, coaches or administrators must find time to watch the videos and offer feedback, and there are only so many hours in the day.

Enter AI. Edthena is now offering an “AI Coach” chatbot that offers teachers specific prompts as they privately watch recordings of their lessons. The chatbot is designed to help teachers view their practice relative to common professional goals and to develop action plans to improve.

To be sure, an AI coach is no replacement for human coaching. An analogy might be the growing number of mental health chatbots on the market, many of them based on cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which can help patients reflect on their own thoughts and feelings and help them see things in a more constructive way. In the same way, Edthena’s AI Coach is helping teachers engage in “deep reflection about the classroom teaching,” Geller says. And because the AI tool is responding to teachers’ own self-evaluations, and not the lessons themselves, it’s relatively straightforward to train.

Gathering data for self-improvement

If Edthena is about “deep reflection,” then TeachFX is about hardcore data. The app captures audio recordings from the classroom and uses voice recognition AI to differentiate between teacher and student speech during lessons. Teachers receive visualizations of class time spent on teacher talk, student talk, group talk, and wait time to assess student engagement, as well as more sophisticated analyses of verbal exchanges during class. It’s like a Fitbit for instruction.

TeachFX founder Jamie Poskin, a former high school teacher, got the idea while interviewing a school principal as a Stanford University graduate student. They discussed the challenge of providing feedback to teachers, especially new ones. Recording lessons was intriguing, they agreed, but when could principals find the time to watch the videos? The principal wondered, what if AI could be trained to look for the indicators of good practice—the teacher “moves” that are universally applicable regardless of grade level or subject matter?

The first version of TeachFX focused on a single metric: teacher talk versus student talk, based on voluminous research evidence that the more kids talk during direct instruction, the more they tend to learn. And though classrooms can be cacophonous (especially elementary ones), the technology could readily distinguish between teacher and student voices. Not only were such analyses doable, according to internal company data, but also just turning on the TeachFX app helped teachers more than double the amount of student talk during class. According to the company, almost 80 percent of teachers in a typical implementation use the tool on a recurring basis.

Over time, as the technology has improved, the platform added more metrics aligned with evidence-based best practices. For example: What proportion of a teacher’s questions are open-ended? How long is she waiting for students to answer? A study by Dorottya Demszky and colleagues published in 2023 found that teachers receiving feedback from TeachFX increased their use of “focusing questions,” which prompt students to reflect on and explain their thinking, by 20 percent.

A role for AI in evaluation?

It’s one thing to use AI to provide constructive, no-stakes feedback to teachers about their instructional practice. But what about incorporating it into formal performance evaluations?

Nobody I talked to liked that idea.

Thomas Kane of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who ran the MET project, said, “AI could make it easier for teachers to get more frequent feedback, without the taint of a supervisory relationship.” But introduce that “supervisory relationship,” and you lose teachers’ willingness to give these technologies a try.

Indeed, neither company founder I spoke with was eager to see their tech used for teacher evaluations. As TeachFX’s Poskin told me, “You want teachers to learn and grow.” The more often teachers upload recordings to the platform, the better. Yet formal evaluations usually only happen every few years. They are the antithesis of constructive feedback.

That said, leaders of both companies welcome teachers’ deciding to use their recordings, or the data and “reflection logs” derived from them, in coaching sessions or formal evaluations. In all cases, the key is leaving those decisions to teachers and letting them keep control of the process and data.

To me, these apps sound like great tools for conscientious teachers eager to improve—as Geller and Poskin no doubt were. But it strikes me that teacher motivation to use them as intended must be an issue, just as it is for students. Teachers are crazy-busy, and apps like these are, ultimately, extra work.

To their credit, some districts provide incentives, such as counting the time teachers spend using the apps against professional learning requirements or allowing recordings to stand in for weekly classroom walkthroughs. Those are steps in the right direction—but we shouldn’t expect uptake to be universal. To me, it seems likely that the worst teachers, who arguably would have the most to gain, are the least likely to engage with these sorts of technologies.

From bodycams to classroom cams

I don’t think it would be crazy, then, for someone to develop a version of this idea that is less about helping well-meaning teachers get better, and more about holding the small number of ineffective teachers accountable. Our schools have long faced the “street-level bureaucrat” problem, coined by political scientist Michael Lipsky in 1969. The idea is that some government services depend so much on the judgment and discretion of people on the ground that it’s hard to evaluate their work or hold them accountable. Teaching is one of those fields; policing is another.

In the world of law enforcement, dash cams and bodycams have changed the equation by providing a clear record of police officers’ interactions with the public, for good or ill. No doubt this has spurred all manner of questions and challenges, such as when to release footage, how to interpret it, and what is admissible in court. Bodycam mandates have garnered some support along with serious concerns about privacy and reliability. But there’s little doubt that police brutality and misconduct face greater scrutiny now than in the past.

So why not bring the same line of thinking into public schools? Put cameras and microphones in every classroom. Turn them on and keep them on. Send the recordings to the cloud and let machine learning do its thing (with strict privacy and security protocols in place, of course). If AI already can differentiate between good and bad questions, surely it can tell principals or department chairs if a teacher starts instruction late and ends it early, or shows movies every Friday, or allows kids to roam the hallways, or makes no effort to stop them from cheating on tests. If such technology could stop the most egregious forms of bad teaching, it might provide a significant boost to student achievement.

Alas, given education politics, that will probably remain just one wonk’s dream. In the meantime, let’s use AI to help as many motivated teachers as possible go from good to great.

Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and an executive editor of Education Next.

When it comes to digital technology, educators and school systems haven’t historically been fleet of foot. But artificial intelligence is partially bucking the trend. Many teachers are embracing it, even as school systems follow form and are moving slowly, or barely at all.

Among the myriad ways school systems can respond, there are two obvious poor choices. On one end of the spectrum, they could turn entirely away from AI—which districts like New York City, Los Angeles, and Seattle initially moved to do. On the other, they could rush to use AI for its own sake rather than for a clear educational purpose. There’s plenty of pressure to put AI in the classroom—both from vendors hawking AI products and superintendents wanting to show bold leadership. It would be all too easy for districts to jump on the AI trend and repeat the mistakes of the past. Remember fads like open classrooms in the 1970s and whole language in the 80s?

AI isn’t like CD-ROMs—it’s a rapidly evolving, transformational technology. School systems should act quickly but strategically to find a sensible, educationally sound path. The best policies will integrate AI with intentionality and help students and schools make progress over the long haul.

What’s the best way forward? Don’t focus on AI. Focus on the problems that matter—and see where AI can help.

Initially Adrift

District responses to AI have been all over the map, and many districts have lurched from one approach to another. Several big-city districts banned ChatGPT almost immediately after it was launched in November 2022. But months later, most had rolled back their bans and instead started to encourage the use of AI.

For example, Walla Walla Public Schools in Washington State initially banned ChatGPT. Then, the district repealed the policy and trained its teachers in how to use AI tools.

“[I was] a little bit red-faced, a little bit embarrassed that we had blocked [ChatGPT] in the spring,” Keith Ross, the district’s director of technology and information services, told a local-news outlet. “[It] really shed light that we need to not wait on this and get moving and find out how to supply the tool to the students.”

Recent surveys of teachers and administrators reveal similar contradictions. In an EdWeek Research Center survey conducted in late 2023, about one in five teachers said their district lacked clear policies regarding AI products, and the same share reported that students are not allowed to use it. That same survey also found that more than half of teachers believe that AI usage in school will grow next year.

A survey of district technology leaders by edtech company eSpark in November 2023 found that only 4 percent of districts had a formal, documented policy governing the use of AI. Thirty-nine percent of respondents said their districts were working on one, but 58 percent said their districts had yet to start developing such a policy. Meanwhile, 87 percent of district technology leaders reported they participated in a webinar or presentation about AI in schools in the past 6 months. Some 52 percent said their teachers were independently incorporating AI into their practice, but only 9 percent said they were doing something systematic with AI.

It’s no wonder why. The AI product landscape is teeming with new options for teachers to try, and few have been thoroughly evaluated by their districts. The barriers to entry to creating an AI education startup are extremely low right now—even if the sustainability and impact of such efforts are open questions. According to Reach Capital, a venture capital firm specializing in education companies, there were at least 280 education tools that “incorporate generative AI as a core engine of their product” as of September 2023. More are emerging every month, and many offer “freemium” access so that teachers can try them for free.

Along with ChatGPT, free AI tools for teachers like MagicSchool and Ethiqly have become integral to the daily work of Rachel Morey, who teaches English Language Arts at Walnut Creek Middle School in the suburbs of Erie, PA. She has used these programs to “brainstorm lesson plans, write tests, create worksheets, adapt texts to meet the needs of diverse learners,” she said, as well as to support students in writing essays and delivering feedback. One of the biggest appeals of AI, she said, is how it helps her save time.

Tools and Guidance Emerge

How can districts close the policy and practice gap? An important first step is safeguarding sensitive student and teacher data and ensuring that clear guidelines are in place regarding plagiarism and academic work. These are separate issues from how schools actually use AI and draw on sophisticated technological and legal expertise. Right now, rather than focusing on detailed specifics—which is almost impossible given how quickly AI is evolving—districts need to level-up and focus on key principles to help educators, students, and administrators use AI-powered products responsibly.

These are complex questions, but districts do not need to figure it all out on their own. In October 2023, the Consortium for School Networking, a professional association for school technology administrators, and the Council of the Great City Schools jointly published a “K–12 Generative AI Readiness Checklist.” The detailed questionnaire covers AI readiness from a half-dozen views, including leadership, data, operational, and legal readiness, and was developed in partnership with Amazon Web Services.

That same month, TeachAI published its “AI Guidance for Schools Toolkit.” The initiative was created by more than 60 individuals, governments, and organizations, including Code.org, ETS, the International Society for Technology in Education, Khan Academy, and the World Economic Forum. Its three-part framework for implementing AI in schools, which starts with guidance and policy to address the risks to learning that AI poses, notes that “the first step should be ensuring that AI use complies with existing security and privacy policies, providing guidance to students and staff on topics such as the opportunities and risks of AI, and clarifying responsible and prohibited uses of AI tools, especially uses that require human review and those related to academic integrity.”

States have gotten in the game as well. The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, for example, released guidance that prods districts to “review current EdTech providers deploying generative AI to vet their safety, privacy, reliability, and efficacy, to determine if they are appropriate to be used for your school, and which users they will be open to based on their Terms of Service and school or district policies.” Ohio published a five-part AI Toolkit for school districts, which it created with the aiEDU nonprofit organization.

Principles to Design a Path to Progress

Despite the slow pace of district-level policies, it’s also reasonable to worry that districts may move too quickly and rush to use AI without intention, just to say they are doing something with it. According to Scott Muri, superintendent of Ector County Independent School District in Texas, “What’s missing from [several of the frameworks and conversations] around AI is the vision. What are we trying to do or achieve? Where are we going?”

As education thought leader Tom Vander Ark said, “Schools need to shift the primary question from ‘how do we do integrate AI into our school’ to ‘what does great learning look like and how can we use AI to support that? And what kind of work can students do with smart tools?’”

The Readiness Checklist framework thankfully starts there, as the first question asks, “Does the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) align to achieving your district’s mission, vision, goals, and values?” This isn’t a rhetorical question. The answer may be no.

The risks here are great. Far too often, districts base edtech questions on a search for technology for its own sake. School systems should not frame their efforts as an “AI initiative” unless the focus is how to prepare students for a world with AI or to make sure that schools know how to safeguard against its downsides. Instead, leaders should follow a tried-and-true design thinking process to successfully innovate and put AI to its best use.

That means starting with the problem the district needs to solve and the goal it seeks to achieve. Leaders should ask, is what they’ve identified a priority? Some problems relate to serving mainstream students in core subjects, while others arise because of gaps at the margins, such as not offering a particular elective. Both areas are worthy of innovation. But schools shouldn’t embrace a classroom technology unless it’s saving teachers time, extending their reach, or deepening their understanding of their students.

With the problem or goal identified, school systems then need to be specific about what success would look like. How would they know if they had made progress? What’s the measure they would use?

From there, the focus should be identifying the student and teacher experiences needed to make progress toward the goal. And only then should schools consider the physical and virtual setup to deliver those experiences. In other words, the “stuff”—the content, curriculum, analog and digital technologies, including those powered by AI—should come at the end of the process, not the beginning.

By considering a potential role for AI within this greater context, schools can avoid succumbing to a short-lived fad without sitting on their hands and watching the world pass them by. In these early years of our AI-powered futures, the goal should be measured investments that will stand the test of time.

Michael B. Horn is an executive editor of Education Next, co-founder of and a distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, and author of From Reopen to Reinvent.

This article appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Horn, M.B. (2024). AI Is Officially Here, There, Everywhere, and Nowhere: Districts playing catch-up can still adopt sound policies for artificial intelligence. Education Next, 24(3), 80-83.

In a little more than a year, freely available artificial intelligence technology has evolved from generating half-right passages of slightly awkward text to creating artistic original images, generating error-free computer code, and even passing an MBA exam at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. If a user-friendly computer assistant like ChatGPT can already do all of that, AI seems poised to upend traditional work practices and hiring patterns—even when it comes to knowledge-economy jobs.

There are signs that high school and college students around the world are anxious about AI and this uncertain future. While educators fret about plagiarism, cheating, and how to use AI to improve instruction, students are wrestling with more fundamental questions about what they are learning and why. They are looking at the fast-changing world and wondering if their coursework is properly preparing them for the workplaces of tomorrow.

“We’ve seen an increase in… nervousness around students. All of us have moments in school when we’re like, ‘When are we ever going to use this?’,” said Keeanna Warren, CEO of the Purdue Polytechnic High School network of university-affiliated charter schools. “And so now with ChatGPT, students are asking themselves about that with everything. ‘You’re teaching me to write an essay? When am I ever going to use this? You’re teaching me to make a presentation? We’re never going to use this.’ And then they take it to the next level, ‘What am I going to do?’”

At a recent panel discussion at Harvard University about students’ perspectives on generative AI, law student Yusuf Mahmood said he has serious concerns about how well the school is preparing future lawyers to use AI tools for work, especially at big firms. Musicology graduate student Siriana Lundgren said that introductory-level research courses need to change to keep pace with AI’s rapid rise.

High school students share these same worries. Sam Cheng, a junior at Design Tech High School in Redwood City, Calif., said in an interview that AI is just one more technology causing schools to be out of step with what students need. “This problem has been around for a really long time of students feeling like school isn’t preparing me for the real world,” Cheng said. AI, in his view, only adds to that pervasive problem.

Attitudes and Impacts

Despite common assumptions to the contrary, students don’t appear to like or use AI more than parents and teachers. A 2023 survey by the Walton Family Foundation found that 61 percent of parents and 58 percent of K–12 teachers report favorable views of ChatGPT compared to 54 percent of students aged 12–17. Teachers are more likely to use ChatGPT than students, at 63 percent compared to 42 percent.

Recent graduates report feeling threatened and worried by the rise of AI, according to the 2023 edition of the Cengage Group’s annual “Employability Report.” Among 1,000 graduates who had finished a degree or non-degree program in the past month, roughly 46 percent said they felt threatened by AI, and 52 percent said it made them question their preparedness for the workforce.

Meanwhile, workers are voicing the same worries. A 2023 Gallup survey found that 22 percent of U.S. workers are concerned that technology will make their jobs obsolete. That’s a rise of 7 percentage points since the 2021 survey, in a measure that had changed little since Gallup started tracking it in 2017. It’s striking that the increase is due almost entirely to a rise in anxiety among college-educated workers, which suggests that those trained for the knowledge economy don’t feel all that secure.

Although many believe that AI will likely be most powerful when it complements humans, not replaces them, students aren’t wrong to ponder whether schools are preparing them for the futures that will still exist when they leave school. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, because of generative AI “almost 12 million occupational changes will need to take place between now and 2030, with over 80 percent of those jobs falling into four occupations: customer service, food service, production or manufacturing, and office support.”

While students worry about tomorrow, their teachers are applying AI in the classroom today (even if that’s just to check for cheating or plagiarism). But schools have not yet grappled with the broader issue of whether or how curriculum should change.

“I’m concerned that my schools aren’t embracing AI or teaching us how to use it,” said Jared Peterson, a senior at Allen High School in Allen, Tx. “For example, all eight of my teachers have warned us that we can’t use AI for any of our schoolwork. Only one of the eight has encouraged us to experiment with AI, but not on schoolwork. … [And] one of my teachers did a presentation on both the benefits and the dark side of AI technology, but focused more on the dark side of AI.”

The Question of Curriculum

Some forward-looking educators, however, believe that the opportunities associated with AI—and the influence those opportunities should have on curriculum—are more important topics of conversation.

According to Martin West, academic dean at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and editor-in-chief of Education Next, when generative AI burst onto the scene, faculty at his school identified three areas to tackle. First, define a policy on appropriate use to address concerns about cheating. Second, redesign assignments to give students experience using AI in productive ways. And third, consider how course learning goals need to change. Harvard faculty believe that students should be prepared for a professional world where AI use is not just permitted, but expected.

This last priority is ultimately the most important, West said, but it is also the most daunting, which shouldn’t be much of a surprise. After all, rethinking standards and curriculum was fraught even before AI. Just witness how hard it is to alter the K–12 history curriculum or the heated debates in California around what is taught in math.

Yet this is precisely the conversation that needs to take place, said Paul J. LeBlanc, president of Southern New Hampshire University, one of the largest universities in the country. In a recent essay written with Forward College founder and CEO Boris Walbaum, LeBlanc noted that machine learning will be used for many procedural jobs, such as basic accounting and administration, but workers whose work surpasses results from AI will prosper. “Therefore, universities must drastically raise the cognitive bar for students. Less accumulating knowledge and more metacognition: that is, the fundamentals of interacting with knowledge. Learning will move from worrying about what one knows to how one knows it.” In Inside Higher Ed, LeBlanc wrote that the threat posed by AI to high-paying, seemingly secure knowledge economy jobs calls for a paradigm shift and wholesale changes across institutions. “Curricula across a wide range of fields are being rendered out of date at this very moment; we just don’t know in what ways yet.”

Not everyone agrees. If the widespread availability of knowledge means that learning knowledge is no longer important, wouldn’t the emergence of tools like Google and Wikipedia more than two decades ago already have caused that shift? After all, as technology writer Ben Thompson has observed, “It’s important to keep in mind that ChatGPT is a large language model, not a knowledge repository. It has no knowledge of right or wrong, or truth or untruth; it is simply predicting the next word.”

Or, consider this perspective from computer science professor Charles Lee Isbell Jr., an interactive AI expert who is University of Wisconsin–Madison provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs. In response to those who point out that occasionally ChatGPT “hallucinates” and starts “making things up,” he noted: “It’s always making things up. It just so happens that the things that it makes up sound reasonable most of the time.”

And as E.D. Hirsch has previously argued, Google clearly didn’t end of the importance of mastering knowledge. “The Internet has placed a wealth of information at our fingertips,” Hirsch wrote. “But to be able to use that information—to absorb it, to add to our knowledge—we must already possess a storehouse of knowledge.” The ability to think critically relies on having factual knowledge in a given domain.

This observation points to a middle ground of how curriculum may need to change.

New Roles for Knowledge and Experience

One of the biggest changes in work will be knowing how to work alongside generative AI tools, according to Ryan Craig, an author and managing director of Achieve Partners, an education-focused investment firm. To do that, workers will have to know which prompts and questions will generate the right outcomes. And knowing what to ask will require subject-matter expertise. Or, as Craig said in a recent blog post:

If your job’s in claims management, you need to have some understanding of how the insurance industry works and its lexicon. If you’re a digital marketer, you need to know industry-standard platforms, tools, and metrics. Underscoring all this is an ability to understand the subject matter. As specialized LLMs [large language models] evolve for every industry and job function (and likely for each industry-function pairing), experience and pattern recognition will become even more important.

But subject-matter expertise won’t be enough. Individuals will also need to learn how and when to ask the right questions. And that requires a sense of why they are asking the questions they are and what problems they are trying to solve.

Craig’s argument boils down to this: given the rapidly changing nature of work, traditional academic learning from static content is unlikely to make the grade. Instead, academic learning needs to become much more tightly integrated with real work experience given the unpredictable interdependence between the two right now. He noted that a 2023 IBM report on AI predicted, “AI won’t replace people, but people who use AI will replace people who don’t.” Craig concludes: “As a result, keeping students penned in classrooms will impede career launch. While digital transformation has already put a premium on learning-by-doing, AI will make work experience mandatory for every learning journey.”

What does that mean in the classroom? According to Cheng, the California high-school junior, it’s less about teaching “how to use AI” and more about how to take the information and skills that they’ve learned and use them with AI to think critically, creatively, and consciously. “Then even when we’re out of school, even when new technology comes around, we’ll have a toolkit for how to interact with it,” he said.

Beckett Miller, a senior at Design Tech, concurred. “It’s important to have enough knowledge about things and how things work,” he said. But then he argued it’s important to learn how to use tools like AI with conscientious intention. He cited the example of using ChatGPT to help him iterate far faster on an essay he was writing, which ultimately helped him deepen and clarify his thinking, as well as improve the communication of his ideas.

To create opportunities that are connected more tightly with the workplace, high schools could source projects from actual employers as part of the curriculum through companies like Riipen, which pairs college students and curriculum-related internships and jobs. Schools also could allow students to take part in curated internships and externships as part of the regular school year, like the Summit Public Schools charter network in California and Washington State has done with its expeditionary learning blocks. Schools could also turn to organizations like the CAPS Network, which organizes onsite, work-based learning experiences for high school students, to integrate career and technical education for all students. Or schools could offer apprenticeships, akin to what Coweta County in Georgia is doing for sophomores through the Georgia Consortium for Advanced Technical Training. And when schools want to teach about AI itself, they could use up-to-date online courses from places like Coursera rather than seek to reinvent the wheel.

AI is more than a homework helper or fast-track to cheating. It is a transformative tool, and students know it. These sorts of innovations could start to address the concerns of students like Peterson, who worries that high schools “are more focused on cheating and stopping AI usage than on how they can use AI to make education better.”

Michael B. Horn is an executive editor of Education Next, co-founder of and a distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, and author of From Reopen to Reinvent.

This article appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Horn, M.B. (2024). Artificial Intelligence, Real Anxiety: How should educators use AI to prepare students for the future? Education Next, 24(2), 72-75.

It’s understandable. The education world is awash in articles trying to figure out what artificial intelligence is going to mean for schools and students (see “AI in Education,” features, Fall 2023). But before we get too focused on the latest technological breakthrough, let’s not pretend that we have figured out how to cope with the previous one. Over the last decade, smartphones have become commonplace. Today, 95 percent of American teenagers have a supercomputer in their pocket.

Jonathan Haidt, Jean Twenge, and others have brought necessary attention to the likelihood that smartphones and social media are partly to blame for the teenage mental health epidemic gripping our nation. It’s not a watertight case, because it’s nearly impossible to prove a causal relationship with a phenomenon as ubiquitous as this one.

What scholars can say is that the sudden rise in teenage anxiety and depression, suicidal ideation, and suicide all happened at the same time that teenagers’ adoption of smartphones passed the 50 percent mark—around 2012 or 2013. They can also show that the children most likely to engage in heavy use of smartphones and social media—girls, especially liberal girls—also experienced the greatest increase in mental health challenges. And they can point to other countries that show similar patterns.

My purpose here is not to evaluate this evidence, though I generally agree with Haidt that we should adopt the precautionary principle and assume that phones and social media are likely doing real damage to our kids. Then we should act accordingly.

My immediate question, however, is whether phones and social media might also be behind the plateauing and decline of student achievement that we’ve seen in America, also starting around 2013, long before pandemic-era shutdowns sent test scores over a cliff.

I don’t believe this was the only cause of our achievement woes in the 2010s. As I’ve argued before, I believe the Great Recession was also to blame, both because of its impact on families’ home circumstances, and because of the sudden and significant budget cuts that followed in 2013 and 2014, especially in high-poverty schools. Kirabo Jackson has been particularly persuasive that these spending cuts had a measurable negative impact on achievement (see “The Costs of Cutting School Spending,” research, Fall 2020). Another potential factor was a shift away from school accountability; in 2012 the Obama administration softened the consequences for low test scores targeted by the No Child Left Behind Act. Then in 2015, and Congress replaced it with the Every Student Succeeds Act.

But I do think we need to take the smartphone hypothesis seriously. Especially because, unlike the Great Recession or the pandemic, these trends are not receding in the rearview mirror. Indeed, adolescent phone use continues to rise. If it is one reason that students aren’t learning as much as they did in the pre-smartphone era, that’s a problem we need to grapple with.

So what’s the evidence? First and foremost, as mentioned above, the timing lines up (see Figures 1 and 2). We see smartphone ownership really taking off among adolescents in middle and high school around 2013. That’s also when median achievement on the 8th-grade math test in the National Assessment on Educational Progress (NAEP) peaked. It’s fallen modestly ever since. For our lowest-performing students—those at the 10th and 25th percentiles—the declines were more dramatic.

Another piece of evidence comes from Catholic schools, which serve as a plausible control group for the smartphone hypothesis (see Figure 3). Catholic-school students also take NAEP math and reading tests. But they are not directly impacted by changes in education policy such as the shifts in federal school-accountability rules or cuts in public-school spending. So if Catholic schoolkids also saw achievement declines around 2013, which in fact happened, especially in reading, that could be an indication that something outside education policy is to blame.

But there is also some conflicting evidence. The drops in achievement in the 2010s tended to be for our lowest-achieving students, who are disproportionately poor, Black, Hispanic, and male. And yet, as we know from the studies that Haidt and others point to, phone and social media use was most concentrated among middle-class girls (at least initially). So that doesn’t match up.

Before I conclude with the obligatory call for more research, it’s worth pondering what mechanisms could link smartphone and social media use to lower student achievement. Most obvious are problems around attention, as students’ brains adapt to the rush from “likes,” YouTube videos, TikToks, and other platforms, and then struggle to listen to (much less read) slower-moving and less-vivid presentations, such as the ones they are likely to encounter in class and homework. (Our poor teachers!) Or it could be phones’ impact on mental health; it’s hard to learn when you’re anxious or depressed.

There’s also the issue of sleep (see Figure 4). This is cited in the mental health literature, too, as we know that kids sleep less today than before phones and social media entered the scene, and we also know that there’s a relationship between less sleep and poor mental health.

But so too is there a relationship between less sleep and less student learning. After all, sleep is when the brain works much of its magic, forming connections and cementing ideas in long-term memory. Plus, it’s hard to learn when you’re tired, and it’s really hard to learn when you stay home from school because you have been up much of the night. So there is an angle here that also connects with our chronic absenteeism crisis.

What to make of all of this? If we return to the precautionary principle, the least we can do is try to encourage parents to curb their tweens’ and teens’ phone and social media use. Educators can do their part by setting and enforcing classroom rules that phones be turned off or at least stowed away, unless there’s a compelling instructional reason to use them—though that is admittedly an uphill battle (see “Take Away Their Cellphones,” features, Fall 2022). Abolition is likely impossible, though some legislative proposals to make it harder for kids to access social media apps until they are 16 might help. But schools could certainly encourage parents to limit screen time to a reasonable number of hours per day, be much tougher about earlier bedtimes, and require kids to dock their phones outside their bedroom during sleeping hours. There’s a strong foundation of research to back up any effort to protect and promote students’ sleep, which may help ease some uncomfortable conversations (see “Rise and Shine,” research, Summer 2019).

Indeed, more sleep might be the killer app that could make a huge difference—both for students’ academic achievement and mental health. It’s a good reminder that as we contemplate the future impact of AI on schools and society, what likely matters most aren’t the machines we use but the attention we give to our children’s timeless human needs.

Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and an executive editor of Education Next.

This article appeared in the Winter 2024 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Petrilli, M.J. (2024). Anxiety, Depression, Less Sleep… and Poor Academic Performance? A decade of smartphone dominance and negative NAEP trends. Education Next, 24(1), 76-79.

Immediately following the announcement of the Supreme Court’s decision outlawing the use of race in college admissions (see “High Court Decision in College Admissions Case Has K-12 Implications”), the Biden Administration released a U.S. Department of Education plan to “promote educational opportunity and diversity in colleges and universities.” It includes forthcoming guidance to higher education institutions on how to use still-lawful practices to promote diversity, particularly new “measures of adversity” that consider what applicants may have had to overcome. The department also will consider expanding data collections and transparency around admissions factors and convene an “educational opportunity” summit to bring colleges and universities together with students, advocates, and researchers to discuss a way forward.

That’s all well and good, but it’s worth noting what was left off the department’s laundry list: anything having to do with k-12 education. That’s a huge missed opportunity and one that the administration should urgently work to address. One of the most effective ways to boost college diversity is by building broader, more inclusive paths to educational excellence. And that work starts in kindergarten.

Imagine if, instead of or in addition to looking at adversity and other proxies for race, our nation dedicated itself to creating a more diverse pipeline of high-school graduates with the ability to do advanced-level work. Imagine a world where college admissions offices didn’t rely on loopholes and complicated backdoor policies to create diverse student populations. Imagine that the top high-school students in the United States were already racially and socioeconomically representative of our great nation—without the need for affirmative action of any kind.

A Stubborn Gap in “Excellence”

Sadly, we are a long way from that today. On virtually any measure, there’s an “excellence gap” among students coming out of 12th grade. Students reaching the highest levels of performance—whether measured by test scores, grade-point average, or the number of Advanced Placement courses—are more likely to be Asian or white than Latino or Black. This excellence gap means that white and Asian teenagers are disproportionately represented among the top 10 percent of U.S. students, while Latino and Black students are significantly underrepresented.

Closing this gap will not be easy. It is related to a complex mix of social and historical conditions, including the impact of centuries of systemic racism, sharp socioeconomic divides between racial groups, and big differences in school experiences, family structures, and parenting practices. But frankly, as a nation, we’ve never really given it the “old college try.” If we focused on what schools can do to recognize and nurture excellence in all students, instead of just trying to work around the gaps at the end of their high-school careers, we could make significant progress toward the inclusive college campuses we all want to see.

That’s the message from an important new report from the National Working Group on Advanced Education, an ideologically and racially diverse set of scholars, policymakers, and practitioners convened by the think tank that I lead. Its most important message: Rather than wait until kids are leaving high school to try to even the playing field, we must start in kindergarten to identify the most academically talented students of all races and backgrounds and give them the support they need to excel.

The working group makes three dozen recommendations for states, schools, districts, and charter networks, with specific opportunity-building actions that start in the earliest grades and continue through high school. It is a clear roadmap for building this wider, more diverse pipeline of advanced students.

The first step is called “frontloading,” a type of enrichment provided to young children before they are old enough to be assessed for advanced learning opportunities like gifted and talented programs. Because poor children tend to come to school with limited vocabulary and less knowledge about the world compared to their more affluent peers, they typically earn lower scores on most traditional academic assessments—even if they have the intellectual horsepower to take on rigorous academic work. High-quality enrichment programs can help young students build knowledge and vocabulary to improve their reading skills and get them on the path to success.

The next step is to use “universal screening” to find every single child who could benefit from enrichment, acceleration, and other advanced learning opportunities. Schools and districts can use valid and reliable assessments—such as IQ tests, diagnostic exams, or state achievement tests—to identify all kids with the potential to do advanced-level work. That’s a big change from how many school districts do things today, which is to ask parents or teachers to nominate children for their gifted programs (or later, Advanced Placement courses). It’s not hard to see how that approach can bring with it racial and socioeconomic biases. Affluent, college-educated parents tend to be more aware of these programs and know how to advocate for their kids. And classroom teachers, however fair-minded, might overlook some talented students because they don’t fit a stereotype of a high achiever.

Opportunity Starts in Elementary School

Once students are identified as highly capable, they need the programs and opportunities that can help them realize their potential. School-based programs that do this can take many forms, but most share several key features: They allow students to study and engage with academic materials more broadly and deeply than the typical class, including doing above-grade-level work. They allow students to skip an entire grade if that’s what a child needs and can handle. And once students get to middle and high school, they automatically are enrolled in honors and Advanced Placement classes. In other words, no more gatekeeping that tends to dissuade kids on the bubble from giving these tougher classes a shot.

Doing this work and doing it well will take leadership and commitment from district and charter network leaders. Educators will have to view greater equity in education as crucial—and not just for their lowest-achieving students, but also for their highest-achieving ones. They will have to reexamine how a student’s potential is measured, and when. And they will have to focus on supporting more students to excel, including by looking closely at how students are identified to participate in advanced coursework and enrichment programs. The absolute worst thing schools could do is to eliminate advanced learning opportunities, like gifted and talented programs or honors classes, which have disproportionate white and Asian enrollments that mirror the “excellence gap.” True equity demands that we mend, rather than end, such programs—and extend these opportunities to many more kids.

Universities might object that there’s not much they can do about k–12 educational practices. But that’s simply not true. Institutions of higher education can make sure that their schools of education prepare future teachers and school leaders to recognize and serve every student who can do advanced-level work, especially students from low-income families. And universities can lend their expertise and money to local school districts and charter networks that need assistance in putting these kinds of initiatives in place.

The Biden Administration should widen its action plan to include the k-12 system. Starting in kindergarten isn’t the fastest way to college diversity, but it is probably the sturdiest.

Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and an executive editor of Education Next.

This article appeared in the Fall 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Petrilli, M.J. (2023). Building Diverse College Campuses Starts in Kindergarten: In the wake of the Students for Fair Admissions decision, an urgent call to take on the “excellence gap.” Education Next, 23(4),

Just as there’s no one-size-fits-all way to educate students, perhaps there’s no one-size-fits-all-way to get them to school either.

That’s the argument behind HopSkipDrive, a startup that is seeking to complement and redefine the traditional bus model of taking students to school. Instead of kids making their way to the pre-determined route of a 72-passenger school bus, HopSkipDrive creates customized pick-ups in cars and vans based on individual students’ needs. It’s a rideshare-like model with similarities to and major differences from Uber and Lyft.

The company provides an app that connects families and students with highly vetted drivers, all of whom are also experienced caregivers who either currently have a child at home or have cared for children in the past. They use their personal, pre-approved cars to drive students to and from school or after-school activities, while families and the contracting agency—such as a school, welfare office, or group home—can track the car’s movement in real time. Rides are scheduled well in advance but can be changed with a few hours’ notice.

When three parents launched the app in 2015, “it had nothing to do with school transportation,” said Chief Executive Officer Joanna McFarland, a cofounder and mother of two. “It really had to do with creating options for full-time working moms and families like mine, who were really struggling to just make the logistics of running a family work.”

But safely transporting kids turned out to be a widely shared challenge. Today, Los Angeles-based HopSkipDrive contracts with schools, districts, counties, and nonprofit partners in eight states and Washington, D.C., with a focus on meeting the transportation needs of students who fall outside traditional school-bus norms.

A Widespread Problem

The initial idea for HopSkipDrive was hatched at a child’s birthday party, and the original intended market was parents like McFarland and her cofounders, who wanted to get their kids to after-school activities safely without interrupting their own workdays. But company leaders soon realized there was a broader need for more flexible student transportation options, fueled by phenomena such as open enrollment within districts, students attending out-of-neighborhood “choice” schools, the less-predictable needs of students experiencing homelessness, and varied start times within districts. Within about two years, HopSkipDrive started to work with counties and school boards that were struggling to meet transportation needs because of a growing shortage of bus drivers.

After the abrupt closure and eventual reopening of schools due to Covid-19, those shortages grew more severe. Many districts initially furloughed drivers during school-building closures, and many of those drivers did not return to the job after schools reopened. A 2021 survey by the National Association for Pupil Transportation found that every region of the country was experiencing driver shortages, and at least two-thirds of districts had altered service as a result. Some 51 percent of respondents described shortages as “desperate.”

With fewer school-bus drivers, districts have consolidated routes and lack back-up options when a driver calls out sick. Some districts in Georgia cut bus service for students attending charter schools or schools of choice. Service gaps have caused many students to arrive late or miss school if their parents and neighbors are unable to carpool on the fly. Some state and district leaders have gotten creative in their responses to the problem: Massachusetts called on National Guard troops to drive students, and Washington, D.C., launched a free school-bus driver training program for city cab drivers.

HopSkipDrive, which initially laid off much of its staff and launched an adult ride option during the pandemic, proved another ready solution—and one that had been designed by parents with children and family needs in mind.

“Caregivers on Wheels”

HopSkipDrive rides are performed by what the company calls “CareDrivers”—adults who are vetted both for their experience with children and driving abilities. CareDrivers must have five years of caregiving experience as parents, guardians, nannies, teachers or paraprofessionals, or in other childcare roles. They submit to a 15-point certification process, which includes a fingerprint-based background check, motor vehicle history search, and ongoing monitoring for new driving infractions. The driver must use a vehicle that is less than 10 years old and seats four to seven passengers. New drivers go through a live orientation with a member of the HopSkipDrive team.

The company facilitated more than 400,000 rides for children and families in 2021, with a group of more than 4,000 active CareDrivers serving about 350 school districts. Over 2 million children have been driven safely over the company’s brief history. These rides totaled more than 7 million miles in 2021, and 99.7% concluded without a safety-related issue. In all, HopSkipDrive rides have traveled more than 20 million miles to date, with no critical safety incidents.

The company keeps close watch on drivers during rides. Using telematics—the long-distance transmission of digital data—HopSkipDrive tracks the whereabouts of drivers and children. It also checks for unsafe driving behaviors by monitoring phone usage, speeding, acceleration, hard braking, and hard turning. This technology provides visibility without installing in-vehicle cameras, which pose privacy concerns. In addition, the company also provides districts and parents with backup drivers in case of a last-minute cancellation, as well as real-time location updates.

Other innovators in this space use similar driver vetting and real-time location tracking via apps, but with different focuses. For example, Zum contracts with schools and districts to modernize routes and fleets, enhance efficiency, and provide carbon-neutral transportation in cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. TaxiMom offers a subscription-based transportation service for families in the Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston markets.

Part of the Transportation Puzzle

HopSkipDrive is not looking to replace the school bus. In a densely populated area, filling a 72-passenger bus is still the most efficient way to get students to school. Facilitated ridesharing is instead one part of a more comprehensive transportation solution for school districts, two-thirds of which own their fleet of buses.

But the company does look like a disruptive innovation relative to the school bus. It is bringing a more affordable and customizable technology-based solution that isn’t as good as the status quo, judging by historical measures of performance, to non-consumers for whom the alternative is nothing at all. In this case, HopSkipDrive is using technology to reach students who previously had no district-provided ride or who were over-served by a large school bus in a lightly populated area.

For example, one of HopSkipDrive’s larger partnerships is with the Aurora Public Schools in Colorado. The district uses HopSkipDrive to provide school transportation for about 70 students who are experiencing homelessness, are in foster care, or have special needs or disabilities that make riding a school bus challenging.

“These are kids who don’t fit neatly on a school bus route or kids who are highly mobile and moving frequently,” McFarland said. “If you are a child in the foster system who moves placements at 10:30 at night, you can’t reroute a school bus to get that child to school. And yet HopSkipDrive can get them to school the next day with no change in schooling. And we know that every time a child moves—and the average child in foster care might move three to five times a year—that might mean switching schools. Credits don’t transfer. It can take several weeks to change schools. What one district teaches in fourth grade, another district teaches in fifth grade… We have federal mandates to fix that, but transportation is one of the biggest barriers. And a service like HopSkipDrive really helps districts provide transportation for those hardest-to-serve students in a really flexible way.”

At Rocky Mountain Prep, a charter school in Colorado, the arrangement works differently. There, HopSkipDrive helps specific students who are struggling to get to school, buying time for the school and families to develop longer-term solutions to the attendance challenge. In one instance, Rocky Mountain Prep provided HopSkipDrive to a parent who had recently given birth to help get her older child to school for a few weeks.

HopSkipDrive may also lead to better optimization of school transportation in the longer run, said McFarland.

“Some of our more innovative districts are really starting to think in a much more holistic way, and we are helping them really think about: ‘What does your fleet size need to look like? How many buses do you need? How many drivers do you need?’” she said. “Because we’re operating in this world of shortages, but when you think about it as a utilization problem, maybe the number of bus drivers that we have is actually sufficient. Maybe we can … save money and use that money to increase bus driver salaries and retain drivers.”

Driving into the Future

The question for any transportation innovation now is whether it can scale. Regulation will play a role.

Many states have antiquated regulations around who can drive students to schools, according to McFarland. For example, Massachusetts requires a driver to have a certification that is close to a commercial driver’s license—a rule designed for safety back when a school bus was the only transportation a district would have provided for students to get to school. Similarly, many districts require their own unique background checks for potential drivers, a roadblock for vetted CareDrivers who want to drive for multiple districts.

States are updating their laws, however, to make room for new transportation solutions. A 2021 Maryland law allows districts to transport students in vehicles other than official school buses, and new regulations in Georgia permit the use of “alternative vehicles” for students who receive special-education services, are in foster care, or are experiencing homelessness.

The ultimate solution seems to be to update transportation regulations to focus on outcomes—namely safety and reliability—instead of inputs. That means setting a baseline for safety consistent with different vehicle types and using technology to enforce safety and create accountability.

Looking beyond once-in, once-out traditional school busing will be especially important in states where educational options are proliferating, through charter schools, education savings accounts and micro-grant programs, microschools, and other flexible and innovative schooling arrangements. Today, somewhere between 1.1 and 2.1 million students are enrolled in microschools or learning pods, for example.

But these options aren’t real choices if students don’t have a way to get there.

“We see over and over again, parents would choose a particular school for their kids, but they don’t enroll in that school because it’s across town or it requires two hours on a public bus or they just can’t get their kids there,” McFarland said.

Some states aren’t just modernizing their transportation regulatory framework, they are seeking to spur innovation. The Arizona Transportation Modernization Grants Program, for example, awarded $19 million in its first year to 24 schools and nonprofit education agencies with novel transportation solutions. That included the Black Mothers Forum, a nonprofit that operates microschools in Tempe and South Phoenix, which developed a community carpool app and provided transportation for all students. And it included Tolleson Union High School District, which contracted with HopSkipDrive to create a hub-and-spoke model to provide transportation to out-of-district students that want to attend one of its specialized programs.

The models are different, but the goals are the same: Reduce the time in transit for students and get them to their educational options on-time, safely, and ready to learn.

“You might have a bus that is full in the morning but in the afternoon is empty because kids are doing different activities,” McFarland said. “So, when you start to think about that, you can open up so many opportunities both inside and outside the classroom. Just thinking a little bit more holistically and a little bit more creatively.”

Michael Horn is an executive editor of Education Next, co-founder of and a distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, and author of From Reopen to Reinvent.

This article appeared in the Summer 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Horn, M.B. (2023). Beyond the Big Yellow Bus: Can transportation apps reinvent how students get to school? Education Next, 23(3), 76-79.

A fiscal cliff now looms before schools. Economists and CEOs expect a recession. Most federal funds from Covid-era relief bills—which are currently adding about 8 percent to districts’ annual per-pupil spending, on average—will run dry by 2024. Enrollments will likely decline in most places, given the smaller birth cohorts that are now making their way through our schools. All of that is almost surely going to add up to real drops in overall revenue for many school systems by mid-decade.

This happened before, not so long ago. During the Great Recession, Democrats in Congress and the Obama White House in 2009 enacted a relief package that pumped $100 billion into U.S. schools to hold them harmless from expected state and local budget cuts—but only over two years. When Republicans won the midterms in 2010, the writing was on the wall: a fiscal cliff was coming. Many of us warned districts to prepare, but such pleas were unheeded. School districts did what they always do when funds are low—they laid off the youngest teachers first, cut tutoring and other “extras,” and eliminated teacher coaches and the like. And as a result, according to scholars such as Kirabo Jackson, student achievement took a major hit (see “The Costs of Cutting School Spending: Lessons from the Great Recession,” research, Fall 2020).

We find ourselves here once again. The question now is whether the situation will have a happier ending this time around.

True, there are important differences. In the wake of the Great Recession, the U.S. unemployment rate soared to 10 percent, and schools could be very choosy, teacher-wise. As Martin West and his colleagues illustrated, teachers hired during such downturns have tended to be more effective (see “How the Coronavirus Crisis May Improve Teacher Quality,” research, Fall 2020). That made it all the more tragic when districts were forced by state laws and local teacher union contracts to use “last in, first out” policies when handing out pink slips.

The labor market is in a very different place today, with the unemployment rate at around 3.5 percent—the lowest rate in 50 years. Schools might be helping keep it that way. Districts are trying to hire vast numbers of teachers and staff to address the twin post-pandemic burdens of students’ learning loss and mental-health challenges—and to spend the federal largesse that they find sitting in their bank accounts. This hiring spree is encouraging some states and districts to lower their standards and onboard candidates who don’t meet basic requirements, while others are offering generous signing bonuses to help fill vacancies. So rather than getting to be more selective when choosing teachers, as was the case after the Great Recession, districts nowadays are practically begging people to take jobs.

Here’s what isn’t different: the federally funded spending spree won’t last. Combined with reductions in state revenue from a likely recession, districts are staring at the possibility of big funding drops after a short-term increase—the feared fiscal cliff.

So, how should schools prepare? Smart education economists like Marguerite Roza have urged districts to avoid putting lots of new people on the payroll (especially given the sharp drops in enrollment we expect to see in many districts, which will make higher staffing loads even less sustainable). Yet that advice is mostly being ignored, with schools going on a hiring bonanza.

Which means school districts will have no choice but to lay off a bunch of people when districts go over the fiscal cliff. That’s never easy, but it could yield some positive effects if schools are willing to differentiate between effective and ineffective teachers and other staff—and do what it takes to keep effective teachers on the job and lay off the ineffective ones before they get tenure and before budget troubles trigger “last in, first out” layoffs. That might be the biggest “if” in all of education.

Note that I’m not arguing that “last in, first out” must be eliminated. Sure, such a change would be great. But fights over quality-blind teacher layoffs have been raging for decades. This was the central issue in the unsuccessful Vergara v. State of California case, in which nine students charged that state laws prioritizing teacher seniority over job performance violated students’ rights to instruction by effective teachers. Yet the primary power of seniority to shape layoff decisions is a point on which powerful teachers unions (in California and elsewhere) are unyielding. Eighteen states still enshrine “last in, first out” in state policy, including seven where seniority is the sole factor in determining layoffs. Another 23 (plus Washington, D.C.) allow unions to bargain for it in local contracts. Only 10 disallow seniority to be a consideration. There’s been some progress at the district level in moving toward performance as the primary factor in layoff decisions, but over the past decade only two states have eliminated “last in, first out” rules. Changing all of this is somewhere between unlikely and impossible.

Thankfully, there’s another strategy that should be much more possible. For the next two or three years, districts should look carefully at the effectiveness of their new teachers and other staff and let go of their weaker ones immediately. That is allowable under every union contract in the country, though districts can’t dilly-dally, since tenure protections generally kick in after three or four years on the job.

If the school districts do wait and keep most of their new teachers on the payroll until they are forced to engage in layoffs in the mid-2020s, the practical effect will be to give ineffective teachers hired in 2021, 2022, or 2023 priority over more effective teachers hired in, say, 2024 or 2025. That will be bad for students, who will likely still be recovering from pandemic-era learning losses. And it threatens teacher-diversity efforts, given that many districts are getting better, over time, at recruiting teachers of color.

Schools can’t do much to avoid going over the fiscal cliff, but if they act now to prepare, they can make sure they keep their best teachers in the classrooms.

Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and an executive editor of Education Next.

This article appeared in the Spring 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Petrilli, M.J. (2023). Fiscal Cliff Could Force Layoffs of the Best Teachers: Possible recession and end of pandemic aid loom, demanding fast action on ineffective teachers. Education Next, 23(2), 60-61.

One of the hottest developments in education technology is schools banning technology.

After successive years of remote or hybrid learning, you might imagine tech-weary educators would be going after laptops and Zoom. But they are focused on cellphones, driven by three major concerns: students’ mental health, ability to stay engaged and learn during class, and struggles to focus for long stretches of time without task switching.

There’s an irony here. These bans are proliferating even as there are more useful, engaging, and instructionally sound mobile-learning applications than ever before. That suggests that cellphone bans, while useful in many school settings, shouldn’t be universal. We risk barring teachers, schools, and districts from productively using these apps to drive learning gains.

Where the Phones Aren’t

Some bans are blanket ones at the country or state level. In 2018, France passed a law that prohibited students under 15 from using phones, tablets, and smart watches in schools. The Australian state of Victoria bans phones in primary and secondary schools.

Some schools in the United States have taken similarly dramatic actions. Public schools and districts in Missouri, Pennsylvania, Maine, and New York State have instituted bans, often citing the devices’ ability to distract students from learning. And the Buxton School, a boarding school in Western Massachusetts, instituted a total ban on smartphones on campus after one of its students live streamed two others engaged in a fight. Students now are allowed “dumb” phones, but the constant alerts and capabilities of the smartphones are gone.

Other educators have counseled more moderate approaches to the same effect. Doug Lemov, author of Teach Like a Champion, wrote recently in Education Next that restricting cellphone use doesn’t “mean banning phones, it just means setting rules. These can take different forms, like setting up cellphone lockers at the main entrance, requiring students to use cellphone-collection baskets at the classroom door, or limiting use to cellphone-approved zones in the school building” (see “Take Away Their Cellphones” feature, Summer 2022).

One common method requires that students check their phones when they enter the school building. At several middle and high schools in and around Springfield, Massachusetts, phones are stored in a magnetic pouch that only educators can open until the end of the day. These metal pouches—like the one developed by Yondr, a San Francisco-based company founded in 2014—are commonly used at concerts and comedy shows to eliminate the distraction of mobile phones and allow people to engage fully in the experience before them. That same sales pitch has made pouches popular at many schools.

Although publications like the Boston Globe have editorialized in favor of these bans, not every school system is on board. Tragedies like mass school shootings in Uvalde, Texas, and Parkland, Florida, have given many parents pause about banning phones. The New York City Department of Education, for example, ended a ban on cellphones in schools in 2015, citing parents’ wishes to reach their children during the school day.

According to the federal education department, more than three quarters of public schools prohibited the non-academic use of cellphones during school hours in 2019–20. The phrasing suggests that in that number are schools that are outright banning phones, as well as those who have restricted phones but are consciously leveraging them for academic reasons.

Worries about Mental Health and Focus

Momentum to moderate cellphone usage stems from concerns about students’ mental health. American teenagers are experiencing a significant mental health crisis. According to the Centers for Disease Control, in 2021 44 percent of U.S. high-school students reported “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” in the past year—up from 26 percent in 2009. Visits to emergency rooms for mental health emergencies and attempted suicides are up as well.

What is causing the crisis is disputed. Many pediatric groups and researchers—most prominently psychologist Jean Twenge, the author of the book iGen—have cited correlations in the rise of social media and smartphone use with teenagers’ increasing depression and anxiety to suggest that excessive smartphone and social media use is damaging a generation. But the reality appears more nuanced. One set of studies published in Child Development, for example, used a randomized design to tease apart the emotional impact of receiving fewer likes on social media. It found that although all students suffered a relatively immediate disappointment, it was only teenagers who were more vulnerable to social rejection that suffered a more enduring and significant negative impact.

Still, as Atlantic writer Derek Thompson observed, Twenge’s point may be misunderstood. “Social media isn’t like rat poison, which is toxic to almost everyone,” he wrote. “It’s more like alcohol: a mildly addictive substance that can enhance social situations but can also lead to dependency and depression among a minority of users.”

The other challenge with social media that Twenge cites isn’t the social media itself, but that it replaces sleep and in-person social interactions to such a high degree. Although some have argued there are silver linings to this—such as declines in binge drinking and sexual activity among teens—the impact on adolescents’ loneliness may be contributing to their decline in mental health. And if isolation is the true driver, of course pandemic-related lockdowns and school closures likely contributed to and accelerated some of these trends.

During class, student cellphones present two pressing challenges for teachers: disruption when students use their phones for non-academic purposes during class, and teenagers’ struggles to maintain the deep focus that rigorous academics demand. Sustained attention is unlike many students’ more typical mode of frequent task switching, where they toggle between different apps, which frequent smartphone alerts encourage.

As Lemov wrote, “This is no small thing. … The more rigorous the task, the more it requires what experts call selective or directed attention. To learn well, you must be able to maintain self-discipline about where you direct your attention.”

A lack of practice in focusing could damage students’ abilities to learn and do difficult work, in other words. And some studies have suggested that cellphone bans lead to better learning. One study of high schools in the United Kingdom, for example, showed that schools that banned mobile phones had improved test scores on a year-end test.

It’s All About the Learning Model

Yet while these concerns have led to more cellphone bans, there also has been an explosion in useful learning applications for mobile devices. Think of Duolingo for learning language, or ABC Mouse for learning elementary school subjects, or Quizlet for checking understanding. The ability to learn nearly anything from a phone is better than it’s ever been for all ages of learners.

With the active learning methodologies at the heart of these apps, the learning opportunities on mobile devices are in many ways superior to many of the more passive, video- and text-based ones built for laptops and personal computers. Cellphones may distract from traditional lectures or whole-class instruction. But they also command and can hold individual students’ attention—a precious resource that fuels learning, even if that learning doesn’t look like what we’ve seen before. Phones also may get in the way of students mastering required academic standards, while also connecting students to the information about which they are most curious.

How to explain the paradoxes?

In many learning models, there simply isn’t a productive place for smartphones. But is that the fault of the phone or the model?

Take a case-study classroom, for example. In it, all students are expected to participate in a group discussion to work through a specific situation with a joint set of case facts. If students are instead paying attention to their own devices, the conversation suffers and student learning slows as well.

Contrast that with a foreign-language class where all students work on personalized language modules on Duolingo, for example. They then put their phones away to participate in small-group conversations. (Even before smartphones, a version of this called “language lab” put individual students at headphone stations to work independently with the education technology of the day before rejoining group conversations.) The phone is central to the design of the learning experience. Of course, there’s a risk that students will work on tasks outside of the one assigned. But schools and teachers can use technology to block access to other apps or build on the social dynamics of the classroom to incentivize students to stay on task.

This phenomenon has been true with Internet-connected laptops as well. A 2016 study about a set of West Point classrooms showed that allowing computers when there wasn’t a key purpose for them diminished learning (see “Should Professors Ban Laptops?” research, Fall 2016). On the other hand, a blended-learning model like New Classrooms’ Teach to One relies on laptops to personalize math instruction for middle school students. Research has found students make outsized gains on math tests after successive years of participating in Teach to One classrooms.

One last argument for maintaining cellphones is that schools must teach students to use them responsibly. But many educators’ retort is that they are simply helping show students that there is a time and place for such devices—and school isn’t it.

In that respect, cellphone bans are following the larger trend of banning many things in schools—from books to speakers to certain kinds of speech or topics of debate. Cellphones may make for another easy bogeyman, but blanket bans are ill-informed and regressive. Though we might not see a big reversal in phone bans anytime soon, we should. Educators on the ground should choose for themselves when and whether to allow their students to carry cellphones to class, so they can leverage learning apps to help students make progress.

Michael Horn is an executive editor of Education Next, co-founder of and a distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, and author of From Reopen to Reinvent.

This article appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Horn, M.B. (2023). Ban the Cellphone Ban: Blanket policies ignore the potential of app-powered learning. Education Next, 23(1), 76-77.

At the end of high school, most graduating seniors are given their diplomas with a heaping side of platitudes, many of them patently preposterous. Such as, “If you can dream it, you can do it.” Or “You can be anything you want to be.” And especially, “With grit and determination, there’s nothing you can’t do.”

The problem isn’t encouraging young people to aim high or dream big. It’s pretending that each of us is a blank canvas. I can dream all I want of becoming the next Michael Jordan, but my five-foot-seven frame and general lack of coordination say otherwise. Better advice came from the Greeks almost 2,500 years ago: “To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.”

Socrates isn’t giving many graduation addresses these days. Yet this wisdom is at the heart of a new generation of aptitude assessments intended to help individuals, including middle- and high-school students, understand themselves better. These computer-based assessments, such as YouScience Discovery and the updated Ball Aptitude Battery, are designed to identify strengths and talents and point to how those might map onto promising careers. Such personal inventories could help accelerate the shift away from the “college for all” mania that has gripped American education for the past 30 years, toward a system more balanced between college and career.

An Activities Buffet

To be sure, most parents already expose their kids to lots of different activities to figure out what sparks an interest. Is my kid more of a team sports person, or someone who might prefer an individual pursuit, like playing the piano? Is their idea of a perfect day getting to hang out with friends, or sitting on the couch reading a book? When they are immersed in the world of screens, what kinds of games and activities most light a fire?

Similarly, American high schools offer a smorgasbord of sports, clubs, and other extracurricular activities to encourage experimentation and help students find a good fit. These also can help them gain some real-world skills and perhaps kickstart thinking about how they might apply their strengths and interests to a vocation. Still, the default assumed goal for teenagers is college, with or without a specific career in mind.

There are also more direct ways to help students explore career possibilities. I recall taking a diagnostic assessment in high school, more than 30 years ago, that was designed to help us figure out our job interests; such assessments were ubiquitous at the time. This particular questionnaire tried to ferret out whether we were more drawn to people, ideas, data, or physical objects. Would we prefer to spend our time in lots of brainstorming sessions, it would ask, or taking apart an engine? Then, based on our answers, it spit out a list of jobs that might be a good fit.

It was better than nothing, but it’s not hard to identify myriad problems with such an approach. First, we humans are great at deluding ourselves, all the more so when we are young. In my case, the results indicated a strong interest in ideas and people, and a clear disinterest in data and things. That wasn’t entirely off the ball—as the president of a think tank, I produce ideas for a living. Meanwhile, I can’t put together a piece of IKEA furniture to save my life. Truth be told, however, I’m more introverted than I wanted to admit to myself back then, and can only handle a certain amount of time around other people on any given day. And while I thought it was nerdy back then, I do enjoy a good spreadsheet.

Because of these self-delusions, that old diagnostic tool encouraged me to become a high-school history teacher—which I actually tried as a student teacher, and mostly failed. I enjoyed creating lesson plans, but I found it exhausting to be around kids all day and longed for some time alone. I hadn’t been honest with myself, or the test, about my interests or even my traits, and it showed. Personality inventories, like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, exhibit some of the same problems. Maybe you really are an introverted intuitive or an extroverted judger—or maybe that’s just a reflection of the person you wish you were.

Then there’s the problem of bias. It’s hard for kids to project a potential interest onto a career with which they have no experience. If you don’t know anyone who’s an engineer, engineering isn’t going to spark much interest. It’s like asking a kid if they might enjoy playing lacrosse when they’ve never even heard of it, much less seen someone playing it. Not surprisingly, then, the old-style interest inventories can steer poor kids away from certain high-paying jobs. They also tend to exhibit gender biases.

Aptitudes Versus Interests

A new generation of assessments promises a better approach. Instead of assuming that individuals already know themselves, it puts them through a series of exercises to gauge what they’re actually good at. Many are based on the work of the Ball Foundation, founded by Carl and Vivian Elledge Ball. In 1981, the couple published a set of 16 ability tests designed to identify aptitudes across a range of domains, such as analytical reasoning, short-term memory, eye-hand coordination, and vocabulary. Aptitudes, in the Balls’ way of thinking, can be thought of as an individual’s unique potential—“how quickly and easily a person will be able to acquire particular skills” and “the level of proficiency that the person can expect to reach, given comparable opportunities for training and practice.”

Now a new set of organizations is building on the Ball Foundation work, often with the help of artificial intelligence, to design assessments that they claim are highly effective at pinpointing people’s aptitudes and matching them to potential careers. Most are focused on employers, offering assessments that can be given to applicants to see if they are a good fit for a particular opening. But a few are targeting the K-12 world.

One such assessment is by YouScience, in use in 7,000 schools nationwide. Founded by serial entrepreneur Edson Barton, the company offers aptitude assessments for middle- and high-school students. The “snapshot” assessment for 7th- and 8th-grade students is designed to be more exploratory, while the “discovery” assessment for high-school students is more in depth.

My 14-year-old son and I both took the YouScience 90-minute “discovery” assessment, which the company prefers to call a series of “brain games.” Almost all of the items were nonverbal and designed to tease out “inherent talents,” as Barton put it—strengths that are independent from traditional measures of academic achievement. Right-or-left-handedness is a good analogy. As he explained:

We all have a dominant hand that we use. Whatever your dominant hand is, you end up being able to do things more naturally with it. It comes more naturally to write my name with my right hand. As I pick up painting, try to play the piano, that natural ability makes it easier for me to pick up on certain things using my right hand. That’s not to say I can’t use my left hand. I do it all the time. If I really focus myself, I could write just as well with my left hand as my right hand, but it’s painful, it hurts, it takes mental exertion. It’s a beautiful spot when aptitudes and interests and skills evolve into something wonderful.

Whether it’s possible to untangle aptitudes from achievements goes over the head of this particular columnist, but it’s an intriguing possibility.

The activities in the brain games varied. In one that supposedly tested my spatial visualization prowess, I was given a series of pictures of folded papers with holes punched into corners or other locations and asked where those holes would appear if the paper were unfolded. In a test of my idea-generation abilities, I was presented with a scenario out of science fiction (think alien landing) and asked to come up with as many ideas as possible for what it would mean for our society.

Another test measured my “visual comparison speed,” or whether I could spot discrepancies in pairs of digits, while others assessed my inductive reasoning abilities and sequential and numerical reasoning. Within minutes of finishing the exercises, the system generated a 35-page “strengths profile,” plus a list of well-matched careers.

The promise, according to Barton, is that students will see career paths for themselves that line up with their aptitudes and are free of the race, class, and gender biases that tended to plague old-style interest inventories. Because the assessment focuses on potential, rather than achievement, the results often tell kids about strengths in areas the children had thought were weaknesses.

The YouScience results, in particular, tend to identify lots of people who would have potential in STEM fields and other high-paying careers. For example, in a sample of 3,000 Tennessee students, just 9 percent of females expressed interest in technology careers like engineering and computer programming—but 64 percent have the aptitudes associated with those careers, at least according to YouScience’s assessment.

Indeed, my son and I were both surprised that several jobs popped up for us that were quite techy, even though we view ourselves as more history professor types. But maybe there’s something to it. I must have done OK on the sequential and numerical reasoning questions, at least in comparison to the typical high schooler, and as a result jobs like “economist” popped up for me. Though my teenage self may not have imagined it, it’s true that there are days when I like nothing more than to immerse myself in test-score data, looking for patterns that others might have missed. More important: The results have given my 14-year-old son some new possibilities to consider for himself.

The Problem With Potential

Understandably, YouScience strives to make the experience and the resulting “strengths profile” as positive as possible. The post-assessment report doesn’t harp on what kids are not good at and also doesn’t tell anybody that the best fit for them is an unskilled, low-wage job. The 500 careers in its database all require at least some post-high school training. The hope is that focusing on students’ strengths will motivate them to put in the hard work it will take to fulfill their potential, said Lesley Vosenkemper, the company’s vice president of strategic initiatives. “We know that motivation is a big part of achievement,” she told me. “If students see they have the ability, they may put in the effort.”

That’s all well and good, but I worry that this is yet another example of us in education not wanting to level with kids about what’s feasible for them based on their level of academic achievement. Aptitudes show potential, but people can only realize their potential if given the opportunity for training and practice.

Sadly, we know that many young Americans today do not have the opportunity to reach their potential. Difficult early-childhood experiences and poor instruction in elementary and middle school cause many students to arrive at high school desperately behind in basic skills. I worry that giving underprepared students a report about their aptitudes and career potential without shoring up the basics could amount to false hope. A student might be told, for example, that they have the aptitude to make a great computer engineer. What they won’t be told is that a failure to master math facts in elementary school, or a weak foundation in algebra, or inability to pass calculus amount to high barriers that will be difficult to overcome.

The lesson, as is often the case, may be that we need to start earlier. So let me offer a suggestion for anyone preparing to congratulate a kindergarten graduate. Please tell those little tykes’ parents that one of their most important jobs is to help their children figure out who they are and what they are good at. And that another critical job is to watch like a hawk for any signs that their children are struggling academically and, if so, to do something about it—the sooner the better. That’s the kind of message that might actually allow kids to reach for the stars.

Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and an executive editor of Education Next.

This article appeared in the Fall 2022 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Petrilli, M.J. (2022). First, Know Thyself. Then, Pick a Career Path: The potential of helping students see their potential. Education Next, 22(4), 84-87

It’s hard to decide which recent “metaverse” headline has felt more unreal.

On one hand, consider Facebook’s rebranding itself as Meta—a nod to the shared virtual spaces where the company believes its future lies. In this vision, large groups of individual users will meet in an immersive, simulated, digital environment, where they’ll work, study, create, and form relationships that mix avatars and real-world elements to varying degrees. On the other hand, there was Meta’s subsequent 60-second Super Bowl commercial, which featured an animatronic dog reuniting in virtual reality with its animatronic friends, and which cost the company an estimated $13 million.

Either way, both showed that the hype behind the metaverse is real, even if the metaverse itself does not yet actually exist. Within two months of Facebook’s transition to Meta, Google searches for “metaverse” increased by roughly 20 times and the term was mentioned in 12,000 English-language news articles. The year before, it had been mentioned just 400 times.

Educators excited about the future of technology haven’t missed a beat, and they’ve jumped on the metaverse bandwagon too. The Brookings Institution released a policy brief warning that “when education lags the digital leaps, the technology rather than educators defines what counts as educational opportunity.” The authors recommend that researchers, educators, policymakers, and digital designers should get ahead of the trend while the metaverse is still under construction.

What is the Metaverse?

The exact definition of the metaverse is still up for debate. The term was coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 science-fiction novel Snow Crash. The most widely used definition today is from venture capitalist Matthew Ball, who has boiled it down to seven elements.

In this understanding, the metaverse:

• Is always present and has no ending

• Can be experienced synchronously by multiple people

• Does not have a population cap and can be shared by everyone, while each individual retains their agency

• Can offer a fully functioning economy

• Can span both the digital and physical worlds, as well as open and closed platforms

• Is interoperable, so digital tools and assets from one app can be used in others

• Contains content and experiences created by a range of contributors.

According to technology writer Ben Thompson, the Internet satisfies all these requirements. “What makes ‘The Metaverse’ unique,” he writes, “is that it is the Internet best experienced in virtual reality. This, though, will take time; I expect that the first virtual-reality experiences will be individual metaverses, tied together by the Internet as we experience it today.”

There are active debates about this. Some wonder just how interoperable does the metaverse need to be. How important is it, for example, for a digital tool that works in one video game to be usable in a different application? Do we need standard protocols like those that apply to blockchain, or the open-source databases that form the foundation of the current “open web”?

As a result of the complexity, it’s easy to default to extended reality—virtual reality and augmented reality—when talking about the metaverse. But much as the mobile Internet has built upon the infrastructure of the Internet, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and others argue that the metaverse will simply be the successor to the mobile internet.

More Than Web 3.0

This isn’t the first time educators have gotten excited about virtual reality—nor the first time I’ve written about it in these pages (see “Virtual Reality Disruption: Will 3-D technology break through to the educational mainstream?” What Next, Fall 2016). Remember educators’ short-lived obsession with Second Life, the online platform in which people create avatars to navigate a 3-D online world? That excitement faded fast, and Second Life was laid to rest alongside many other educational fads.

What’s different this time around?

For starters, interest in the metaverse is rising amid a long, deeply disruptive pandemic that kicked off an unprecedented, rapid-fire deployment of virtual learning around the world. According to the Digital Learning Collaborative, in the 2018-19 school year, 375,000 students were enrolled in full-time, statewide virtual schools. By the 2020-21 school year, the number had nearly doubled to 656,000 students. That count does not include virtual schools run by local districts, which also grew dramatically during the pandemic. And many students enrolled in traditional brick-and-mortar schools now regularly learn online for parts of their day, either in school or at home.

That has smoothed over one of the main barriers to using virtual reality in class: the equipment. In the past, logging on to a laptop and wearing a virtual-reality headset were viewed as an intrusive ordeal. But the game has changed, according to Thompson. If students are doing significant amounts of work online already, why couldn’t they have a headset on for most of that time as well?

In this vision, a virtual-reality headset is just a workaday accessory, like a computer mouse. But with it, students can “walk” into different education seminars and co-working spaces for projects and experience a range of virtual-reality environments, learning applications, lectures, and more. Just as the rising popularity of now-familiar learning technology tools like laptops fueled the creation of online learning applications and environments, this dynamic, coupled with a broader interest in the metaverse, seems poised to spur the creation of more learning environments that take advantage of virtual reality and 3-D.

Under Development

There are dozens of metaverse-type experiments underway in K-12 education.

For example, American High School touts its virtual-reality offerings on its website. The accredited, private online school has operated since 2004 and enrolled more than 8,000 students in grades K-12. Later this year, students and teachers at Optima Classical Academy, an online charter school based in Florida, will meet as avatars in a social virtual-reality platform created for the school that its founder described as a “metaverse.” It is set to launch in August for students in grades 3-8, who will follow a great books curriculum. Women Rise NFT, a collection of unique pieces of digital art by artist Maliha Abidi, was formed with the ultimate goal of building a school in the metaverse to serve the 258 million children around the world who cannot access traditional schools.

Then there are plans to support educators through the metaverse. The company k20 launched the Eduverse, a “metaverse hub for educators,” to connect teachers and administrators in a shared virtual world, where they can learn, network, and advance in their careers.

Finally, there are an array of enablers and supplemental providers that provide virtual-reality experiences for students and educators. Companies like Labster offer virtual-reality laboratories and FluentWorlds allows students to learn English in a variety of virtual worlds. Kai XR offers “360 degree” virtual field trips and EDUmetaverse has over 35 virtual worlds that educators can use.

And consider Dreamscape Immersive, a virtual-reality company founded by computer scientists and former Disney leaders. While its main funders are from the entertainment world—major Hollywood studios, Steven Spielberg, Nickelodeon, and AMC Theaters, which is planning to co-locate Dreamscape virtual-reality experiences in some of its theaters—the company also has partnered with Arizona State University to create Dreamscape Learn. Its first offering, a series of virtual-reality labs called “Immersive Biology at the Alien Zoo,” was created by Spielberg and company CEO Walter Parkes as an alternative for conventional lab work in college-level Introductory Biology. A high-school course is planned for later this year.

And even Meta has a team dedicated to developing education applications in the metaverse.

Looking Ahead

As metaverse mania continues, three things appear true.

First, innovation theory suggests that the early successful instances that apply elements of the metaverse will be proprietary in nature. They will be optimized initially to maximize the performance and reliability of an immature technology at the expense of scale and interoperability. That immediately suggests a problem. Many of the instances that are called a metaverse won’t meet a key criterion of Ball’s definition: interoperability. Indeed, much of what passes for metaverse hype right now is still virtual reality clothed in new marketing language.

This may not be a bad thing, however, given concerns about whether the metaverse will be a safe and healthy place for children. Experiences in walled-off gardens—think Prodigy and America Online, not the whole of the World Wide Web—could be safer, at least initially, even though that might temporarily undermine the vision of innovating instruction or skill development through the blockchain or decentralized autonomous organizations.

Second, the metaverse seems more of a sustaining than a disruptive innovation for full-time virtual schools. Unlike disruptions, sustaining innovations improve the performance of an existing product or service to better serve users who already exist. Full-time virtual schools that have sometimes struggled to engage students would likely benefit from a more immersive, social experience. Combining their programs with the metaverse, as well as with in-person learning pods, could create a more robust and accessible schooling experience. Alongside the flexible models of learning that took root during the pandemic, such as pods and hybrid online and in-person programs, a socially rich, immersive metaverse could, eventually, disrupt traditional, brick-and-mortar schools.

Finally, metaverse applications can create educational experiences that are otherwise impossible in a traditional environment. Virtual reality can bring content alive with dynamic images and hands-on digital exploration. It can bring real people and knowledge from other parts of the world into classrooms everywhere. Consider the potential for science labs, language learning, internships, cultural exchanges, and field trips (see “The Educational Value of Field Trips,” research, Winter 2014).

When the metaverse comes to class, these are the areas where you’ll want to point your virtual-reality goggles.

Michael Horn is an executive editor of Education Next, co-founder of and a distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, and author of the upcoming book From Reopen to Reinvent.

This article appeared in the Summer 2022 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Horn, M.B. (2022). Meet in the Metaverse: A new frontier in virtual learning. Education Next, 22(3), 76-79.