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.

Reporters love to tell “how I got that story” stories about landing an exclusive interview or being in the right place when news happens. American Public Media’s Emily Hanford, though, is hard-pressed to identify a specific moment or event that set in motion her project of the last several years—a high-profile series of radio documentaries and reports on how America’s public schools teach kids to read. Collectively, these efforts amount to the most significant body of work produced by an education journalist in the last few decades. The effects of Hanford’s reporting are undeniable: shifts in classroom practice, countless school-district curriculum adoptions, and legislation in nearly every state in the country aimed at advancing instruction grounded in “the science of reading.”

Hanford’s job afforded her an opportunity rare among education journalists: hours of time to spend in schools observing teachers and students. “I spent a whole lot of years in a lot of classrooms,” she recalls. “I would just put a microphone on a kid or a teacher and follow them throughout the day. When you make documentaries, you put in all these hours of just trying to see something unfold in search of a scene or a moment that illustrates a point.”

Hanford describes many of her early efforts as “low-impact,” but over time those hours of following kids and teachers around prompted her to reflect on what they were actually accomplishing. “I feel like I went to school from 2008 to 2018, and in the back of my mind I was always thinking, ‘What are the kids really learning here?’”

A report on remedial education in college brought her in contact with students who, by their own admission, couldn’t read or write very well, which made Hanford curious how it was possible to get so far in school lacking in such basic skills. “It’s not as if they didn’t deserve to be there,” she explains. “It was pretty clear to me from talking to them and their instructors that they were bright people.” If there was an aha moment that launched her investigation into reading, it was interviewing one such student who told Hanford about her dyslexia. Subsequent conversations with researchers and advocates in the dyslexia community opened Hanford’s eyes to “a huge body of cognitive-science research on reading and how it works. It helped me understand that those kids’ troubles were connected to something larger that was affecting all kids,” she recalls. Dyslexic kids “are the most screwed when there’s not good instruction, but a whole lot of kids get screwed.”

In 2018, Hanford traveled to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to report on a school district that seemed to have cracked the code on reading instruction. From 2015 to 2018, the percentage of kindergarteners at or above the DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills) benchmark reading score soared to 84 percent from 47 percent. The explanation? Bethlehem Area School District administrators had begun training teachers to teach reading in a completely different, research-backed way. The report and podcast that came of this, Hard Words, made waves around the education world and beyond, winning the Education Writers Association’s inaugural Public Service Award. Since then, Hanford has continued her crusade, finding school after school where kids have been harmed by poor curriculum and instruction and fundamental misunderstandings about reading and how to teach it.

Hanford is a rarity in education reporting, in that her work focuses almost exclusively on classroom practice rather than education policy, politics, or personality stories. With this specialty, she has struck a rich vein of ore and, perhaps unwittingly, written a playbook for other education journalists. At the very least, her methods and focus raise an intriguing question: are there similar stories waiting for enterprising education journalists to pick up and run with the way Emily Hanford has done with the science of reading?

Hiding in Plain Sight

In no way does it minimize Hanford’s effort or impact to observe that, from the perspective of reading researchers and literacy experts, her work wasn’t news per se. America’s “reading wars” have been waged longer than most of their current combatants have been alive. In 1955, Why Johnny Can’t Read–And What You Can Do About It by Rudolf Flesch brought attention to the insufficient “look-say” method of “Dick and Jane” readers. A Nation at Risk reported in 1983 that “some 23 million American adults are functionally illiterate by the simplest tests of everyday reading, writing, and comprehension.” More recently, the National Reading Panel’s 2000 report “Teaching Children to Read” martialed explicit evidence that systematic phonics instruction is more effective at teaching kids to read than instruction that does not include phonics.

Nor was every education journalist asleep at the switch. In 2007, Education Next published Barbara Feinberg’s withering assessment of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project and its founding guru, Lucy Calkins (see “The Lucy Calkins Project,” features,  Summer 2007). Ten years ago, Alexander Nazaryan, a former teacher, penned a New York Times op-ed titled “The Fallacy of ‘Balanced Literacy.’” Sol Stern of the Manhattan Institute wrote dozens of articles and op-eds as far back as 1997 criticizing unsound literacy instruction in New York City schools and championing the work of E. D. Hirsch Jr. In 2014, Tim Shanahan, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Education at the University of Illinois Chicago, wrote an authoritative takedown of leveled reading, pointing out that there was virtually no evidence supporting it. “I don’t believe that these experts have intentionally misled teachers,” he wrote, “but that they were so sure they were right that they misled themselves.” Hanford says she read all of these “hugely helpful” articles while developing her work; another inspiration she cites is the 2017 book Language at the Speed of Sight by Mark Seidenberg, retired professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin Madison.

Hanford’s achievement, then, was not in discovering the weaknesses in popular approaches to teaching reading but in making their flaws accessible to lay readers and listeners—getting them invested by humanizing the story, quantifying the cost to students of subpar instruction, and explaining in vivid detail the intersecting impulses and interests that made it possible for reading instruction to go so wrong for so long. But even this doesn’t fully account for the galvanizing effect of her podcasts Hard Words (2018) and Sold a Story (2022). When studying schools from afar, it’s easy to view bad reading scores as the fault of bad teachers. If you increase spending on teacher training, and the improvement is still not there, then there’s even more blame to unload on them. Decades of education reform and associated media coverage largely accepted this judgment. But Hanford’s reporting flipped this assumption on its head, creating a permission structure for teachers to be seen (and, critically, to see themselves) as unwitting victims of poor training and inadequate curricula—not the indifferent, incompetent, or union-protected layabouts of common caricature, reluctant to change and unmoved by low reading levels or achievement gaps between groups of students. This flipped perspective helped catapult Hanford into the limelight. Sold a Story was the second-most shared show on Apple podcasts in 2023. It earned an Edward R. Murrow award, an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia award,  and a nomination for the Peabody, among the oldest and most prestigious awards in broadcasting.

Indeed, the contrast between Hanford’s framing and major-media coverage of education over the past two decades helps explain how her work broke through where earlier, similar efforts failed. Recall that in 2008, TIME magazine put Michelle Rhee on its cover holding a broom, symbolizing her intention to “sweep” bad teachers out of classrooms in Washington, D.C., the school district she ran as chancellor. Rival magazine Newsweek was even less nuanced. Its 2010 cover story blithely asserted that the key to saving American education was simply (and simplistically) “we must fire bad teachers.” These high-profile pieces of education journalism tacitly assumed that teachers knew what to do and that poor results represented incompetence or failures of will.

Those assumptions were also baked into test-based accountability policies and largely unquestioned in the media reports and documentaries like Waiting For Superman that marked the No Child Left Behind era: show me bad student outcomes and I’ll show you bad teaching. In Hanford’s telling, teachers are less the sinners than those sinned against—literally “sold a story” by schools of education, commercial publishers, and a rogues’ gallery of self-interested gurus including Calkins, Marie Clay, and Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, among others. The Bethlehem school district adopted the motto “When we know better, we do better” as an acknowledgement of past mistakes and a commitment to future students. Hanford showed that teachers cannot be held solely accountable for decades’ worth of false and largely unquestioned premises embedded in so-called best practices and functionally enshrined in education policy. Vindication for the misplaced blame was evident in teachers’ responses to Sold a Story—Ariela Young, a teacher from Florida, wrote to Hanford and said, “As I was listening, I kept saying—oh my goodness, this is me! I am angry! I am frustrated! I hope to pass on the knowledge I have gained to my fellow teachers and to keep looking forward.” The contrast with two decades of finger-wagging at teachers for poor performance can hardly be overstated.

If the measure of education journalism is its influence on classroom practice and public policy—and other journalists—Hanford’s impact is unmatched. As improbable as it may sound, the minutiae of reading instruction have become national news. In August of 2022, TIME published Belinda Luscombe’s “Inside the Massive Effort to Change the Way Kids Are Taught to Read.” A couple of weeks later, The New Yorker weighed in with “The Rise and Fall of Vibes-Based Literacy,” effectively mocking the ineffective “cueing” strategies at the heart of the failed instructional practices that had supplanted phonics-based lessons in elementary schools. In April 2023, after Sold a Story was released to critical praise, the New York Times chimed in with a piece called “‘Kids Can’t Read’: The Revolt That Is Taking On the Education Establishment.” Other prominent outlets to cover the issue include PBS (“Why More U.S. Schools Are Embracing a New ‘Science of Reading’”); New York Magazine (“Did New York City Forget How to Teach Children to Read?”); and Slate (“The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Kids’ Schools”).

The impact on public policy has been even more pronounced. In July 2023, the Shanker Institute published a report titled “Reading Reform Across America,” which tracked evidence-based and science-of-reading-based legislation from 2019 to 2022, overlaying neatly on the years in which media coverage of the science of reading reached its zenith. The report found 272 bills containing the word “phonics,” 146 containing the word “evidence,” and 40 containing the phrase “science of reading.” Legislation aimed at changing classroom practice spanned 45 states and the District of Columbia—all in the years following Hanford’s Hard Words. Shanahan describes a “Hanford effect,” which has transformed the way we talk about reading. “I looked up the term ‘science of reading’ in LexisNexis over a period of years,” he said. “In a typical year during the 2000s it came up about 4 times a year. Then Emily posted her first documentary that used the term and voila, it was showing up about 150 times!”

Finding the Next Sold a Story

The impact of Hanford’s exploration of reading instruction invites a thought exercise: if the weaknesses of common literacy curriculum and instruction have been known for decades to education researchers, dyslexia advocates, and some number of practitioners—and if those weaknesses have been waiting for effective public-service journalism to break through and galvanize a public-policy response and drive changes in classroom practice—are there other facets of classroom practice ripe for the same treatment?

Let’s consider the conditions and characteristics that enabled Hanford to devote the time and energy necessary to produce her body of work. Again, her job as a documentary journalist means producing “long lead” work with many hours of unstructured observation time in K–12 classrooms—an advantage few daily print or broadcast reporters can match in the face of daily deadlines. “I have the kind of job where I can read like crazy and dig into research,” Hanford adds. “And I tend to be a pretty fast reader.”

Education reporters rarely enjoy that kind of unfettered access to classrooms, and even when they do, they often lack the experience to be shrewd judges of teaching and learning. This almost certainly explains why so much education reporting tends to focus on policy, politics, and out-of-school issues, which can be produced with little or no classroom time or experience. A review of the Education Writers Association’s annual Fred M. Hechinger Grand Prize for Distinguished Education Reporting gives an idea of the type of reporting currently in favor and most likely to garner attention. The most recent winner, “The Price Kids Pay” by Jodi S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards of ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune, was a series of pieces on Illinois police ticketing students for classroom misbehavior. Other recent winners include “How Missouri became a safe haven for faith-based boarding schools” by Laura Bauer and Judy Thomas of the Kansas City Star, and “Racism at the Virginia Military Institute” by the Washington Post’s Ian Shapira. Jacques Steinberg’s New York Times series on 3rd-grade reading, titled “Room 3-223,” was the most recent Hechinger prize–winning piece covering curriculum and instruction. It was published in 1997. The relative glamour and accessibility of political hot topics and policy fights in education has taken center stage, while the arguably more consequential business of curriculum and instruction remains under-covered and largely undiscussed. Hanford’s work revealed the scope and scale of these types of issues when they go ignored for decades. For reporters inclined to dig further into them, the door is wide open.

If hiding-in-plain-sight pedagogical issues spark the interest of ed journalists, then those journalists will need the kind of support that Hanford received, particularly in time and funding. Fellowships offered by universities and foundations can afford journalists the resources required for high-impact investigative reporting like Hanford’s—but, like recent Hechinger Prize winners, many of these fellowships are more likely to invest in politics and policy controversies than in-depth coverage of classroom practice. Though the Spencer Foundation’s “large” research fellowships in education reporting purport to “span a wide range of topics and disciplines,” five of the seven most recent awardees are centered on identity or inequality. Only two of the eleven recipients in the Education Writers Association’s 17th class of reporting fellowships focused on curriculum adequacy. Sparking change in instructional practice requires deep engagement and thorough attention to research. The success of Sold a Story should lead fellowship judges and philanthropists to support education journalism that seeks the classroom access Hanford enjoyed and the discerning eye she developed.

Reporters looking to follow this playbook must also be prepared to defend their work against sometimes strident criticism from “experts.” Critics have complained that Hanford’s reporting, and the burgeoning interest in the science of reading it helped trigger, risk creating the perception that phonics instruction alone is the key to raising strong readers. Her reports “do not provide a comprehensive examination of all aspects of a reading program,” observed Tim Shanahan, “but I don’t think we should expect them to do so, and I don’t accept that her identification of this problem prevents anyone from teaching other essential aspects of reading.”

The most obvious next act for education journalism is a deep-dive into reading comprehension, how it is taught and tested. Enterprising reporters will find a rich irony here: if decoding (phonics) is a skill that’s been insufficiently taught, reading comprehension isn’t a skill at all. Yet generations of educators have been trained to teach it like one, relying too heavily on instruction in reading strategies that ostensibly can be applied to any text. A walk-through of elementary school classrooms will often reveal posters encouraging children to make predictions and inferences, visualize what they’re reading, and employ tips and tricks like “determine the author’s purpose” or “make connections” by relating a text to their lives, other texts, or the world around them. Such displays hint at a mistaken belief that comprehension is a transferable skill like riding a bike: once you learn to pedal and balance, you can ride virtually any bike. Reading comprehension is much more complicated, heavily dependent on students’ vocabulary and background knowledge specific to a text—a reality that schools often neglect. (Doug Lemov, author of Teach Like a Champion 3.0, begins to scratch that reading-comprehension itch in his article “Why Are Books Disappearing from English and Reading Classrooms?” features, Summer 2024.)

The nature of reading comprehension implies the need for a school curriculum that is rich in vocabulary and that valorizes knowledge-building across a wide variety of subjects, using a wealth of challenging texts. If education journalists were to probe, they might find surprisingly little attention given to curriculum and a near-reckless indifference to ensuring a student experience that is coherent and cumulative—an experience that builds knowledge and skills within and between grades. Contrary to popular belief that public school curriculum is top-down and aggressively monitored, nearly all U.S. teachers—99 percent of elementary teachers; 96 percent in secondary school—draw upon “materials I developed and/or selected myself” in teaching English language arts. And unfortunately, these supplementary materials have been shown, more often than not, to be of questionable quality, low rigor, and unlikely to build content knowledge.

Reporters who view education through a social-justice lens might find their base assumptions being challenged as they dig deeply into a topic such as reading comprehension. Fashionable thought and practice dictate that school curriculum should reflect students’ cultures and prior experiences. However, this well-intended impulse might do more harm than good if it limits access to the language, contexts, and background knowledge that literate speakers and writers assume their readers possess: historical and literary allusions, cultural references, and idiomatic language. As E. D. Hirsch Jr. has argued, “public education has no more right to continue to foster segregated knowledge than it has to foster segregated schools.”

Doug Lemov is currently at work on a book on “the science of reading post-phonics.” He cites “the overwhelming importance of fluency” as a subject that deserves closer scrutiny. When students are not fluent readers, they read less, and when they do read, their working memory is devoted mainly to figuring out what the words say, not what they mean. Lemov, who has visited thousands of classrooms in his career, also cites the role of attention in reading and learning as a topic that’s ripe for investigation. “Reading is an act of managing your own attention and sustaining a state of concentration,” he said. Quiet is essential to thinking and learning, “but we almost build schools to be distraction machines,” he observed. “It’s almost like we’re oblivious to the research.”

The greatest lesson from Hanford’s reporting, and the thing that made Hard Words and Sold a Story at once gripping storytelling and impactful journalism, is more subtle yet more easily replicable by education journalists across all media. To put it bluntly, the critical theme was the failure of experts. Indeed, the “villains” of Hanford’s exposés were the experts. Lucy Calkins was a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College. Irene Fountas is on the faculty of Lesley University. Gay Su Pinnell is an emerita professor at Ohio State. For reporters, skepticism is a virtue. When it comes to covering the classroom, it’s essential. But effective investigative reporting will require journalists to cultivate a wider network of sources, including parents, advocates, and researchers—particularly cognitive scientists and others who study learning—rather than reflexively deferring to credentialed experts in education whose thumbprints are all over failed pedagogies and curriculum.

Emily Hanford’s stellar work has made it clear that uncovering misconceptions embedded in common classroom practices is fertile ground for education reporters to work, but it’s unlikely reporters can mount such an effort on their own. News outlets must see this kind of work as valuable and support it accordingly. Philanthropists and support organizations must recognize that journalistic probes of what happens in the classroom have greater impact than the personality and politics stories that the media currently tends to favor. And above all, education reporters need to make it their business to study the ins and outs of teaching and learning and go deeper than covering school board meetings and budgets. There is so much for children to gain through the sustained and enterprising efforts of journalists.

Robert Pondiscio is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of How the Other Half Learns (Avery, 2019). Riley Fletcher is a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute.

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

Pondiscio, R., and Fletcher, R. (2024). How to Be the Next Emily Hanford: Journalism has driven a generational shift in how reading is taught. Similar stories are waiting to be told. Education Next, 24(3), 14-21.

Vladimir Kogan is a professor in The Ohio State University’s Department of Political Science and (by courtesy) the John Glenn College of Public Affairs.

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

Kogan, V. (2024). Are Student Surveys the Right Tools for Evaluating Teacher Performance? Education Next, 24(2), 32-37.

In the ever-shifting world of school choice, what began as a homegrown charter-school network’s small experiment in microschooling stands out as unique—and as a uniquely promising model for replication.

Gem Prep, a network of seven brick-and-mortar K–12 charter schools in Idaho, anchored by a longstanding and high-performing online school, launched an experiment called Learning Societies at the start of the 2022–23 school year. Two publicly funded Learning Societies opened in August 2022, one in the hamlet of Emmett, 30 miles northwest of Boise, with 22 students in grades 1–5, and the other in Lewiston in northern Idaho, with seven students in grades 1–5.

The basic idea is this: Some parents who, for a variety of reasons, hesitate to send their children to a traditional brick-and-mortar school have neither the time, inclination, or temperament to homeschool or to monitor a full-time online program. Learning Societies provide an intimate environment where kids, supervised by professional educators, learn online and in small, in-person groups for six hours a day. Gem Prep leaders describe it as a sweet spot between traditional schooling and at-home online learning. It is particularly well suited to rural areas.

While the inaugural year in both Learning Society locations was filled with challenges, those challenges produced valuable lessons that Gem Prep leaders are confident will strengthen the program going forward, as it expands to new locations and more grade levels.

I spent the Learning Societies’ inaugural year tracking their progress for Bluum, a Boise-based nonprofit that acts as a funding intermediary and local champion of entrepreneurial education ventures. I visited each center twice, once early in the school year and once toward the end, and checked in frequently with teachers, parents, and Gem Prep administrators.

It’s a testament to the underlying strength of the academic program that, even as the Learning Societies struggled with operational and procedural snafus, especially in the first few months, parents stuck with the initiative, with very little attrition.

Though online schools in general have been justifiably criticized for poor academic results, Gem Prep Online stands out as an exception. Thirty-five percent of its students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, more than in the state as a whole (27 percent). Yet Gem Prep Online, with a homegrown curriculum refined over more than a decade, regularly outperforms state averages in student achievement. In fact, in 2021–22, the online school boasted the state’s highest performance on the Idaho Reading Indicator, which is administered to students in grades K–3.

Most Learning Society students came either from schools in a low-performing rural district (Emmett) or had been homeschooling. In both Emmett and Lewiston, most students entering the program had been working significantly below grade level, with only 18 percent of incoming students scoring at the proficient level on the fall state-mandated reading assessments.

Learning Societies have the potential to achieve a happy medium that combines the strengths of both homeschooling (or online learning from home) and a traditional brick-and-mortar school. The idea for the program developed among Gem Prep staff and leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic, when everyone was forced for a time into remote learning.

For some families, where parents had no choice but to leave home for work, this posed an almost insurmountable problem. Their children were home, learning remotely, but the younger ones needed adult supervision to navigate online systems.

In some places across the country, including Idaho, families formed informal “pandemic pods”—essentially parent-run learning cooperatives. But, Gem Prep leaders wondered, what if a school staffed by professional educators could provide a similar service across the state, even after the pandemic ended?

Thus were Learning Societies born.

“By several measures, Gem Prep Online is a top school in the state,” said Jason Bransford, Gem Prep’s CEO. “The ability to access that for families who don’t have a full-time adult in the home I think is really a powerful and compelling part of the Learning Societies story.”

The Origins

What would later become Gem Prep Online launched as a statewide virtual charter school in 2004 as the Idaho Distance Education Academy. Gem Innovation Schools, as the organization is officially known, opened its first brick-and-mortar school in 2014 in the city of Pocatello.

Today, Gem Prep operates Gem Prep Online as well as six physical schools in Pocatello, Meridian, Meridian North, Meridian South, Twin Falls, and Nampa. All of them currently or will soon serve students in grades K–12. A campus is scheduled to open in Ammon in 2025. The early success of both Gem Prep Online and the first brick-and-mortar school attracted major investments from Bluum, the J. A. and Kathryn Albertson Family Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of the Charter School Programs. At full enrollment, the Gem Prep Network of Schools will serve 4,600 students statewide.

Gem Prep schools are known for their academic rigor, their high performance, and their philosophy of earned student autonomy. As students progress through the grade levels, they are encouraged to take increased ownership of their learning.

By the time they are in the final two years of high school, many Gem Prep brick-and-mortar students rarely appear on campus. Often, they work independently online, and some attend in-person college classes. Many students take advantage of their scheduling flexibility to participate in internships, jobs, or other activities.

When the Covid-19 pandemic struck, Gem Prep Online’s enrollment swelled by 40 percent, as parents sought options that would keep their students learning at grade level, or at least from not falling too far behind. The pandemic-era shift to online learning gave public-school parents across Idaho an opportunity to see inside their children’s classrooms for the first time. A significant number did not like what they saw. Either they felt the pace of learning was too slow, or that the values being espoused by educators did not align with those of their families, or some combination of the two.

In some communities, groups of parents began forming their own learning co-ops, and some reached out to Gem Prep to see if the charter network, with its long track record of rigorous online learning, might help.

This led Bransford and his team to hatch the idea of Learning Societies. “We realized that we had large Gem Prep schools in some of the biggest cities in Idaho, and then we had Gem Prep Online that you could do from your home. But we didn’t have anything in the middle, and we decided Learning Societies filled a need in society,” he said.

Gem Prep Online only works for families who have a supervising adult at home. Learning Societies, as originally conceived, would provide that supervision for families where parents had to work outside the home.

For the concept to succeed, Gem Prep would have to ensure that these microschools, offering a mix of online and in-person instruction, hewed to the same rigorous education provided at both Gem Prep Online and the network’s brick-and-mortar schools.

Homeschoolers were a group that was likely to be attracted to Learning Societies, especially because many such families might value the assistance of education professionals who could help their children learn without pushing values that are antithetical to the family’s own.

While this proved true from the outset, there was also some potential misalignment, which Bransford and his team moved early to correct.

“Former homeschoolers saw this early on as halfway between traditional schooling and homeschooling, and I don’t see it that way,” Bransford said. “They wanted maximum flexibility, but many of their students had severe academic gaps. And that’s not how we operate. We believe in excellence, then flexibility.”

Gem Prep adheres to the same philosophy of earned autonomy as its brick-and-mortar counterparts. As students move through the grades and demonstrate their ability to take ownership of their learning, they are granted more freedom to direct it themselves, using the Gem Prep Online curriculum.

While Learning Societies welcome all students whose families chose to enroll them, the program particularly suits students motivated to become self-directed learners, said Adam Bruno, a Gem Prep administrator who manages the program.

“Our scholars need to have the innate drive to complete their assignments in a high-quality manner or at least the desire to develop this skill,” Bruno said. “One of our early lessons is that those ‘running from something’—they only chose Gem because they didn’t like the local district—struggled more than those ‘running to’ our model of rigorous self-directed learning. The model can work for any scholar, but there has to be total family buy-in to become a self-directed learner and achieve college readiness.”

Beginning with the 2023–24 academic year, Learning Societies have expanded into the upper grades, where the earned-autonomy concept should increasingly come into play. This should relieve some of the pressure on Learning Society leaders and staff, who have found simultaneously supporting and overseeing the daily work of students in multiple grade levels to be one of the program’s biggest challenges.

Learning Societies in the Microschooling Ecosystem

What makes Gem Prep’s Learning Societies unique is that the microschooling movement largely consists of private enterprises with varying levels of formal structure, which means, among other things, that parents must pay tuition. “The public sector is rarely involved in microschooling, so it is fascinating to see the government sector respond,” said Don Soifer, co-founder and CEO of the Las Vegas–based National Microschooling Center.

Soifer described the Learning Society model as “a novelty in this space.” As microschools have evolved, they have generally fallen into three categories, none of which fits what Gem Prep is attempting. The first category comprises independent schools that Soifer described as similar to pandemic pods. Parents intend to keep them small—the average size is about a dozen students—and have no desire to scale them up.

The second category, which is rarer, consists of “partnership” microschools, generally organized by an employer. Soifer cited a series of microschools he helped run for the city of North Las Vegas during the pandemic. The initiative was funded entirely by city dollars, and the schools were set up in recreation centers, libraries, and other city-owned facilities. To qualify, families had to withdraw from the local school district and become homeschoolers.

The third category is what Soifer calls provider networks. These are companies established to open microschools in school-choice-friendly states that have authorized Education Savings Accounts or other voucher-like programs. He cited Acton Academy, Prenda, and KaiPod as leading examples of microschooling provider networks.

“The provider will do everything you need to get up and running using their model,” Soifer explained. “It becomes easier for somebody who doesn’t want to wrestle with the regulatory stuff, and the business stuff, and the licensing, and designing the teaching and learning.”

Soifer said Great Hearts Academies, a charter network that operates classical academies in Arizona, Florida, Louisiana, and Texas, has moved into the online space and could soon consider a model similar to Learning Societies. For the moment though, Gem Prep’s Learning Societies stand alone.

Lessons Learned in Year One

Gem Prep’s experiment therefore merits close scrutiny. Several key lessons have emerged from the Learning Societies’ first year in Emmett and Lewiston. These ideas should prove useful going forward, particularly with two initiatives launched in 2023–24, a new Learning Society in Payette and the expansion of grades in Lewiston and Emmett through high school.

Communicate clearly to families from the outset exactly what a Learning Society is and how it operates. Families interviewed for this article in Emmett and Lewiston throughout the 2022–23 school year were universally happy with the academic progress their students made. “They were just so far behind, and they have made so much progress. It’s amazing,” said one Emmett mother, who moved her children to the Learning Society from a local public school. “I want to cry when I see how far they’ve come.”

Not all families, however, started with a clear understanding of how the program was intended to function. For example, some parents didn’t realize that the Learning Societies were primarily an extension of Gem Prep Online, rather than a small school with mostly in-person instruction.

Others initially thought of the Learning Society as a kind of drop-in center to be used at their convenience rather than a structured day that required regular attendance. Bransford said Gem Prep will be clearer about the network’s philosophy going forward.

“If a student is performing really well, we want to provide maximum flexibility and freedom. But if the student is struggling, we double down and provide more interventions and support,” he said.

Hire experienced educators who feel comfortable with significant autonomy. Initially, Gem Prep leadership envisaged staffing Learning Societies with a leader who had at least the equivalent experience working with children as a public-school paraprofessional, along with a second adult, most likely a parent, to help out as needed. For the program to work financially, there couldn’t be more than one paid adult for every 20 children. Parent volunteers would have to supplement the paid staff where needed.

Experience proved, though, that a successful Learning Society requires an experienced teacher, not just a paraprofessional. In Lewiston, with an enrollment of seven students in grades 1–5, leader Lois Bly was a veteran Gem Prep teacher. One parent volunteer also had a teaching license and helped out at least one day each week. Bly proved to be the model of a Learning Society leader. Not only did she have both a teaching background and Gem Prep experience, but she also had the temperament to navigate the rocky road of a start-up.

Such was not the case in Emmett, where the leader for the first few months was a parent who, before taking on the role shortly before school started for the year, had been a stay-at-home mom for 15 years. Because Emmett had more students than Lewiston, she had a full-time assistant, a young man with very limited teaching experience. By October the leader had stepped into a part-time role, and by the holiday break she had resigned and withdrawn her children from the Learning Society.

Her replacement, a young woman with a modest amount of teaching experience in public schools in another state, lasted through the school year, but she became disenchanted after just a few weeks and notified Gem Prep she would not be returning for the following school year. She felt that the systems and structures in place were insufficient for the task at hand and that students were being short-changed as a result.

In many ways, the program in Emmett was held together by the close-knit parent community, who, despite the Society’s leadership issues, saw their children making strong academic progress.

While some of the challenges in Emmett were caused by insufficient preparation on Gem Prep’s part, the bigger issue was expecting too much from the people initially hired to do the job, educators who lacked the experience and attributes required to succeed as a Learning Society leader.

Gem Prep’s Adam Bruno described what he has learned about the kind of person who can flourish as a leader. In addition to classroom experience, he said, the individual needs “adaptability, flexibility, and chillness; that ability to go with the flow, step in where they’re needed, take coaching, and generally be able to roll with things, because there’s just so many things that come at you out there that you maybe can’t anticipate.”

Equally important, he said, “if it’s somebody who knows Gem Prep, that is really helpful.”

In 2023–24, all three Learning Societies are being led by experienced Gem Prep teachers who also, Bruno believes, have the attributes needed for success.

Ensure that there are enough supervising adults that students don’t fall through the cracks. If parents had one consistent concern throughout the first year, especially in Lewiston, it was that the adult workload in the Learning Societies was overwhelming, bordering on impossible, for the number of paid staffers. A particular challenge for staff was having to fill multiple roles simultaneously: instructor, facilitator, tech trouble-shooter, and coordinator between online teachers and students.

Equally if not more vexing was having to help students across many different grade levels. The youngest students needed constant handholding to use the technology properly and stay focused, which parents believed sometimes left the older students without adequate support.

The need for sufficient staff will undoubtedly pose one of the biggest challenges in creating successful Learning Societies going forward. Because Gem Prep now recognizes that the program requires experienced professional teachers, personnel expenses will be higher than originally anticipated. Those increased costs will make it tough to decrease the student-to-adult ratio below the current 20 to 1. But, Bransford said, an experienced, confident Gem Prep teacher can handle high ratios—assuming the program is dialed in and that leaders are well trained for the role.

Be quick to adapt as circumstances warrant (for example, by extending the school day). When the two Learning Societies launched, they operated with a five-hour day, from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. Parents felt that this was insufficient and left students with a burdensome amount of work to complete at home. Gem Prep listened to the feedback and offered a “highly encouraged but optional” sixth hour, from 1 to 2 p.m., at the start of the second semester. Virtually everyone took advantage of that opportunity.

This kind of flexibility was a hallmark of Gem Prep’s approach during the inaugural year of Learning Societies, and that trait will serve the program well as it moves forward. Expansion and growth will bring new, unanticipated challenges, and the program’s ability to pivot and adapt will be critical to its continued success.

Find the right mix of online learning, live work with the leader, and independent study. As the year progressed Gem Prep made several changes to how Learning Societies used their time. Initially, the bulk of a student’s day was spent either in live remote lessons with a Gem Prep Online teacher, or working independently on their computers. Little time was spent in small groups working with an adult in the room.

“A parent called it an Internet café, and that was a fair description,” Bruno said.

Parents, educators, and students all found this frustrating at the outset. “Our kids need that in-person time, and that’s something our teachers just don’t have time to do,” one mother said in October. But by November, she said she was seeing more of an effort by staff to pull out small groups and work with them on lessons.

Bruno said that as currently conceived, elementary students will spend about 45 minutes of the day in a live, online lesson with a teacher. Up to 90 minutes will be spent working in the classroom with the leader or an aide. The rest of the day will be spent working independently or in small groups on lessons or projects, with time also built in for meals and recess.

“What I probably didn’t frame as well as I could at the outset, even for myself, was how do we keep the best parts of Gem Prep Online and bring it into a hybrid concept?” Bruno said. “And then, on the other hand, how do we bring the best parts of our brick-and-mortar schools into that mix? When we get that locked in, we will be really strong.”

Student Progress

Parents I interviewed were satisfied with the progress their children made in 2022–23. Students entered the Learning Societies with significant deficiencies in reading ability. By spring, 58 percent of students were reading at a proficient level, up from 18 percent the previous fall. In just the first year, these students had shown strong academic growth across all demographics.

Across the two campuses, on the normed ISIP reading assessment, part of the Istation online reading program, nearly half (48 percent) of all Learning Society students scored at least 20 percentage points higher in May than they did on their initial test in September. And 43 percent of students exhibited similar growth on the math assessment over the same time span.

By the end of the school year, 84 percent of 3rd through 5th graders were proficient in English language arts as measured by the state’s standardized test, and 66 percent were proficient in math. Those levels are significantly above statewide averages.

It’s not surprising, then, that two of the three Learning Societies operating in 2023–24—Emmett and Payette—began the year with close to full enrollment of 40 students at each site, while Lewiston has doubled its enrollment from the first year and is just under its capacity of 20 students.

Looking to the Future

Gem Prep administrators have entered the second year of Learning Societies confident that they have hit on a potentially transformative concept. They are eager to expand the program to other parts of the state at a deliberate, cautious pace. Ideally, they would like to add one to two new Learning Societies each year in areas of the state that lack access to a brick-and-mortar Gem Prep School or to other choices.

A few factors will determine whether this growth is feasible. First, there needs to be a critical mass of parents committed to placing their children in a Learning Society, which is a new and unfamiliar structure for most people.

Second, Gem Prep has to locate affordable space to rent or buy that fits the needs of a small school and meets the required building and safety codes. Inadequacies in the Emmett space in 2022–23 caused some challenges that continued throughout the year.

Third, every Learning Society needs a leader who has the attributes described earlier in this article. Ideally, a leader should be an experienced educator who either has worked in the Gem Prep ecosystem or is familiar with the network and its operating principles and philosophies.

“We’re really excited about the future of Learning Societies and what they can provide for Idaho families,” CEO Jason Bransford said. “We’ve learned a lot, and we still have a lot to learn, but the potential is clear.”

Alan Gottlieb is a Denver-based education writer and co-founder of Chalkbeat. 

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

Gottlieb, A. (2024). The Rise of Learning Societies: A small experiment in rural Idaho holds big promise for student success. Education Next, 24(2), 14-21.

Across classrooms, schools, and communities, American students are far more diverse than their teachers. Some 79 percent of U.S. teachers are white compared to 44 percent of students. As a result, students of color are far less likely to have a same-race teacher than are white students, a phenomenon that has attracted the attention of philanthropists and policymakers alike.

Foundations have made big investments in building the Black teacher pipeline, and across the country, policymakers in states like North Carolina, California, Maryland, Massachusetts, and New York have launched initiatives to recruit and retain more diverse public-school teachers. The issue of underrepresentation in credentialed professions like teaching was referenced by the Biden White House in the 2023 Economic Report of the President, and the U.S. Department of Education recently awarded $18 million in grants to support and expand teacher-training programs at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, which prepare half of the nation’s Black teachers.

These efforts are rooted in the widely accepted idea that students of color benefit academically when they are taught by a same-race teacher, known variously as race-matching, racial pairing, same-race assignment, ethnoracial matching, and racial congruence. The evidence base supporting initiatives to diversify the teacher workforce stems from a 2004 study of elementary-school students in Tennessee (see “The Race Connection,” research, Spring 2004). It found that when students were randomly assigned to classrooms led by a same-race teacher, their math and reading achievement improved by 3 to 4 percentile points. In the years since, a significant body of research has accumulated on the effects of race-matching, particularly for Black students.

But some policy pundits are quietly raising questions about race-matching, including asking if the evidence has been over-hyped and oversold. Just how rigorous is the research purporting to show student-teacher race-match benefits? Do the benefits hold up in studies across multiple locations and with different student populations? How urgently should school and system leaders actively prioritize attracting a more diverse pool of teacher candidates?

I decided to take stock of the literature and findings to date. While a helpful meta-analysis and synthesis of this literature already exist, they are behind paywalls at academic journals and only describe studies that came out before 2019. The prominence of race-matching in policy conversations and the pace at which new research is being published necessitates an update for 2023.

A Review of Race-Matching Research

I begin by reviewing 12 studies weighing the claim that teacher race-matching boosts students’ academic outcomes. These were published between 2004 and 2023 and are based on state data sets from Tennessee, Texas, North Carolina, and Florida; results from several large school districts, including Los Angeles Unified; and federal longitudinal data collected by the National Center for Education Statistics. I only consider studies that use a standardized measure of student achievement and exclude studies that do not disaggregate findings by student race/ethnicity or do not report standardized effect sizes or the information required to calculate them.

Not every study reaches the same conclusion, but this doesn’t necessarily mean the research is “mixed” or “inconclusive.” Rather, these varied results may be a function of differences among the studies themselves, such as their research design and the context in which they were conducted, as well as whether their data fully reflect the experiences of students and teachers in the classroom.

Consider how data is collected and coded. Research to date has used the broad racial classifications found in standard administrative datasets to code students and teachers a “match.” A Cuban teacher and Mexican student may be considered matched if they both report Hispanic ethnicity, despite not sharing identity markers like nationality, first language, country of birth, or cultural traditions. More sophisticated measurement methods are currently being proposed and tested that will allow for more fine-grained and sophisticated “matches” in future studies, but these are not part of the literature so far.

Consider as well how the relatively smaller numbers of non-white teachers affect the frequency and likelihood of white and non-white students having a same-race teacher. Some 79 of all K–12 teachers are white, about 9 percent are Hispanic, and 7 percent are Black, federal data show. For most white students, having a same-race teacher is not a novel experience. Instead, it is the continuation of having yet another same-race teacher in a sequence of mostly or all same-race teachers. By contrast, many students of color may only have a same-race teacher once, if at all. Among U.S. 5th graders in 2015–16, 55 percent of Black and Hispanic students had never had a same-race teacher in elementary school, federal data show, while 55 percent of white students had had a same-race teacher five or six times.

Estimates of race-match effects for white students are therefore likely influenced by the phenomenon of “diminishing marginal utility.” Economists often compare this to drinking a refreshing cold glass of lemonade on a hot day: the second, third, and fourth glasses just don’t offer the same satisfaction as the first! This insight might help explain why we see a clearer pattern of positive and significant effects for Black students than for white students. Thus, we should bear in mind that studies reporting a null overall match effect may be dominated by the experiences of white students. Readers might find more useful data in studies that separately report findings for students of other races and ethnicities.

Insights and Caveats

The 2004 experimental analysis based on randomized class assignments in Tennessee elementary schools, conducted by Stanford University economist Thomas Dee, remains the strongest evidence on this topic. Dee focuses on students in kindergarten through third grade and compares the academic performance of students with a same-race teacher to that of students whose teacher is of a different race. He reports race-matching benefits in math and reading of 13 percent of a standard deviation, or between 2 and 4 percentile points, for both Black and white students. These causal effects are larger than any of the estimates from studies using non-experimental designs. However, Dee’s study involves a relatively disadvantaged student population in a southern state in the 1980s, which limits its contemporary relevance.

Luckily, a more recent study by David Blazar also employs an experimental approach to study how race-matching affects student outcomes. His 2021 analysis looks at test scores as well as behavior and indicators of social-emotional development for 1,283 students in 4th and 5th grade in four U.S. districts on the East Coast. He finds even larger effects on test scores of about 20 percent of a standard deviation when students are taught by same-race teachers. Blazar also follows these students for up to six years, finding that the positive test score impacts he observes in elementary school persist when the students attend high school.

Other studies use a range of quasi-experimental approaches and focus variously on metro-area, statewide, or federal datasets. Although nationally representative surveys conducted by the federal government are appealing in terms of representation, state administrative datasets offer two notable benefits. First, the sheer volume of data confers a major advantage in sample size. Second, the diversity of contexts offered by statewide studies allows researchers to test if findings about the teacher race-match phenomenon are consistent across multiple locations.

For example, researchers Paul Morgan and Eric Hengyu Hu analyzed longitudinal federal education data in a 2023 study and issued the broad declaration that “U.S. elementary school students do not particularly benefit from being taught by teachers of the same race or ethnicity.” But one cannot conclude that from a single study.

Their test-score analysis compares students to themselves over time to see if teacher race-match predicts achievement changes. This is a well-executed study, using an analytic approach that is commonly used in state-level studies, but it has some limitations, including significant missing data and an inability to control for differences in teacher quality between those students experiencing and not experiencing teacher matches.

Effects on Student Outcomes

To make sense of this wide-ranging literature, I look at findings for Black and/or Hispanic students across multiple dimensions (see Figure 1).

Test Scores: I first look at the 12 studies that are based on standardized test scores in math or English Language Arts, disaggregate findings by student race or ethnicity, and report standardized effect sizes. These all employ either an experimental or quasi-experimental research design, both of which allow researchers to estimate causal impacts.

Half of these studies find positive and statistically significant effects for Black students in math. Research from Tennessee, Texas, North Carolina, and Florida shows that Black students have higher math scores in years when they are assigned to a Black teacher, with effect sizes ranging from 2 percent to 13 percent of a standard deviation. The positive effects in math are more pronounced among Black elementary-school students. We have less evidence of race-match effects for Black high-school students, and two samples of high-school students show slightly negative effects. In reading, Black students also appear to benefit from Black teachers, with effect sizes ranging from 1 percent to 13 percent of a standard deviation. There are no studies showing negative match effects in reading for Black students of any age.

Nine studies meet the inclusion criteria for Hispanic students in math. Of these, four report positive and statistically significant effects on test scores, ranging from 2 percent to 12 percent of a standard deviation, while one study from Florida finds a negative effect of 1 percent of a standard deviation in math. In reading, most studies report null effects for Hispanic students. A single study in Texas reports a positive effect of 10 percent of a standard deviation, while studies of students in Florida and Los Angeles report negative effects of 10 percent and 1 percent of a standard deviation, respectively.

Beyond Test Scores: Looking beyond these 12 studies, researchers also have examined teacher match effects on a wide range of non-test score outcomes, including student contentment in school, suspensions, absenteeism, enrollment in advanced courses, gifted and talented assignment, high school graduation, and college enrollment (see Figure 2). Studies across a broad range of locations report a range of statistically and substantively significant findings, including by student subgroups. For example, in 2017 Brian Kisida and I looked at data from six school districts across the country and found that students assigned to a same-race teacher are happier in class, more likely to report feeling cared for by their teacher, and more likely to consider going to college.

A 2017 study by Stephen B. Holt and Seth Gershenson found that elementary-school students in North Carolina were 15 percent more likely to experience a school suspension if assigned to an other-race teacher. This effect was especially large when looking at data for non-white boys, who were twice as likely to be suspended if assigned to a white teacher.

Gershenson also co-authored two other studies based on the same randomized class assignment data from Tennessee that Dee used in his 2004 analysis. In 2021, Long Tran and Gershenson found that Black students with Black teachers are 26 percent less likely to be chronically absent, based on a difference of 3.1 percentage points. A 2022 study authored by Gershenson and Cassandra M.D. Hart, Joshua Hyman, Constance A. Lindsay, and Nicholas W. Papageorge found that Black students who are taught by a Black teacher in the early elementary grades are 9 percentage points more likely to graduate from high school and 6 percentage points more likely to enroll in college. The authors also looked at North Carolina data from 2001–2014 and replicated the Tennessee findings. The effects on graduation are larger than the modest test score gains would lead one to expect, indicating that changes in a standardized test scores may not capture the full benefits of race-matching for students of color.

Jeffrey Penney has also analyzed Tennessee data. In a 2023 analysis, he found that students with below-average academic performance experience the largest boost when assigned to a race-matched teacher. In a 2017 study, Penney found that exposure to a same-race teacher is more beneficial if it occurs earlier in a student’s education.

Additional Considerations

What about the less-likely circumstance where a Black student has multiple Black teachers? These results don’t show compounding effects; rather, it appears that having just one Black teacher as opposed to none is what’s driving the observed impacts on academic and non-academic outcomes. Providing Black students with a race-matched teacher at some point during elementary school may not require a dramatic increase of teacher candidates of color in the immediate term. Currently, some 45 percent of Black elementary-school students in the U.S. are never taught by a Black teacher between kindergarten and fifth grade. The main task is to change that number from zero to one, which means that policymakers need to pay attention to the distribution of teachers of color, not just their overall numbers.

The central importance of teachers’ effectiveness cannot be overstated. Studies from Tennessee, Florida, and others explicitly control for a measure of teacher effectiveness (measured in the prior years) so that any race-match effect can be isolated from generic teacher quality. Even studies that don’t appear to account outright for teacher quality in their empirical model are analyzing censored samples in which all participants have met a minimum performance bar. That is, almost all studies on this topic are focused on teachers that have already been hired by traditional public schools and would be required to meet their state’s certification or licensure standards. A policy responding to this evidence that scaled up teacher hiring without regard to some measure of effectiveness or quality would not be well advised. Instead, policymakers must do the hard work of getting effective Black and Hispanic teachers into classrooms.

Finally, of particular note is the suggestive evidence that race-match effects appear to be larger in charter schools than traditional public schools. This could be a function of the student population, the context in which they operate, the governance distinction, or any of these factors in combination.

However, it may also be a function of the leadership and instructional cultures of some charter schools. Almost 30 years since the establishment of the first charter school, an accumulation of rigorous research points toward specific practices associated with their outsized gains in student learning, particularly in urban centers. One overlooked dimension of this literature is the role of teacher-student race-matching, which is arguably related to the greater flexibility charter schools have when hiring teachers. Not only do Black students benefit more from having a Black teacher if they attend a charter school relative to their Black peers in traditional public schools, but Black students attending charter schools also are significantly more likely to experience having a Black teacher. Reasons might include differences in school culture, curriculum, teacher training, and charter school leadership styles. A better understanding of these differences and race-matching impacts may positively inform traditional teacher training programs and professional development at traditional public schools.

What Drives the Diversity Boost

Several theories have been proposed to explain the race-match phenomenon. These generally fall into two categories: (1) potential race-match benefits are due to changes in the student’s disposition, attitude, outlook, and behavior; or (2) potential race-match benefits are due to differences in the teacher and how they interact with and design learning experiences for students.

Student-focused theories include stereotype threat, which is the idea that a student’s individual performance is influenced not just by their intelligence and motivation but by the way their group is perceived by the larger culture. It’s a phenomenon that has been studied and replicated in more than 300 laboratory experiments. Another theory is that of role modeling, which suggests students of color may feel more motivated and work harder to impress the trusted adult leading their classroom if that person reflects their racial and cultural identity.

Teacher-focused theories, on the other hand, point toward the potential for a shared cultural understanding with students, the possibility the teacher will serve as a “warm demander” of their students and that they will use more effective, engaging, and culturally-affirming pedagogical strategies.

When designing learning experiences for their students, teachers who share common values, traditions, and communication styles could more readily design engaging lessons that are aligned with students’ community identities and home lives and help them feel a stronger sense of belonging at school. While culturally relevant pedagogy can be a fuzzy concept to nail down, there have been several recent, high-quality studies with encouraging findings.

For example, a causal study of the African American Achievement Program for high-school boys in Oakland, California, found significant reductions in drop-out rates. Another analysis looking at a 9th-grade ethnic-studies curriculum in San Francisco found it increased student attendance by 21 percentage points, grade-point average by 1.4 points, and credits earned by 23. A follow-up analysis showed longer-run positive impacts, including increases in high-school graduation and college enrollment.

We also might expect that increasing teacher diversity could reduce the possibility of discrimination in student discipline. In a 2019 study, for example, researchers look at disciplinary records in New Orleans to compare punishments among Black and white students who are involved in the same incident. They find evidence, although modest in effect size, that Black students consistently receive harsher punishments than white students. This amounts to Black students being 1 to 2 percentage points more likely to receive a longer suspension compared to their white peers for similar behavior.

We also have evidence that white teachers tend to have lower academic expectations for students of color. In early elementary school, teachers rate their perceptions of students’ academic skills in English and math significantly lower if they don’t share a racial match. Black students are referred to gifted and talented programs at lower rates than otherwise similar non-Black students and also are substantially less likely to be referred when taught by non-Black teachers. Research also finds that white teachers have more negative perceptions of Black students. A study looking at classroom dynamics found that Black and Hispanic students are 1.5 times more likely to be described as “frequently disruptive” and 1.7 times more likely to be characterized as “consistently inattentive” by white teachers compared to school years when they were assigned to a teacher who shared their racial or ethnic characteristics. At the high-school level, teachers generally expect 58 percent of their white students to go on to college compared to 37 percent of Black students (see “The Power of Teacher Expectations,” research, Winter 2018).

In a broader sense, having more diverse teachers on staff might act as a check against majority-race teachers in a school making assumptions about students who find themselves in the minority. This dynamic could influence overall teacher behavior, increase student-faculty understanding, and challenge expectations across the school. Teachers of color might also better understand how to develop strong relationships and communication channels with parents and caregivers of students of color. Most likely, there is a combination of phenomena at work, and it is probably the interplay between them that explains why representation appears to matter to the degree that we’ve seen.

Closing the Representation Gap

Despite much talk, countless initiatives, and a growing body of credible research over the past 20 years, efforts to close the representation gap largely haven’t worked. Policymakers with an interest in this issue will have to think more creatively about which approaches are likely to shift the composition of the educator workforce meaningfully. Recent research and survey data offer some clues about strategies to pursue.

The primary and underlying challenge is the legacy of past inequalities in educational opportunity. In 2016, some 14 percent of American undergraduate students were Black, compared to 19 percent Hispanic and 56 percent white. While the rates of graduates pursuing teaching are similar—between 9 and 11 percent for all races—the overall number of graduates of color with an education degree is small. In a 2022 nationwide survey of teachers and school leaders, for example, teachers of color reported that lowering the costs of becoming a teacher and building inclusive school cultures would encourage more candidates of color to become teachers. But, on the whole, reforms aimed at attracting more college graduates into teaching are coming too late in the pipeline. Broadening educational opportunity for young students of color is the most surefire way to diversify future teachers.

To take action now, policymakers and districts can focus on principals, who make hiring decisions and shape school cultures that can retain or repel diverse teachers. About half of all principals responding to the 2022 survey reported needing more time during their training to learn how to recruit and retain diverse teachers and build a positive school climate. Districts and state education leaders can provide training to school leaders already on the job. They also can intentionally recruit and hire more non-white principals, who currently account for 22 percent of all school leaders. Evidence from Tennessee and Missouri finds that non-white principals increase the proportion of same-race teachers in their school by between 1.9 and 2.3 percentage points.

Leaders also can address the race-based teacher retention gap. Non-white teachers, and particularly Black teachers, are more likely to move schools or leave the profession than their white colleagues, federal data show. Nationwide, 85 percent of white teachers stayed in their jobs between 2011–12 and 2012–13, compared to 78 percent of Black teachers and 79 percent of Hispanic teachers. Meanwhile, 10 percent of Black teachers left the profession altogether compared to 8 percent of white and Hispanic teachers, respectively. Policymakers and district and school leaders need to understand and address the contributing factors; for example, benefits like loan forgiveness and managerial priorities that build inclusive professional communities both could boost retention.

In looking at effectiveness with non-white students, new research indicates that teachers of any race who are trained at Historically Black Colleges and Universities are especially successful with Black students. This is especially the case with Black males. While these programs prepare half of all teachers of color in the United States, they account for a relatively small share of teachers overall. Researchers, teacher trainers, state and district education leaders, and advocates should study these programs to learn how their pedagogy, culture, and learning experiences prepare teachers to work with students of color.

While diversifying the teacher workforce is a worthy and urgent goal, growing the expertise and ability of the teachers already working in the classroom, guiding them to engage thoughtfully with students of color, and encouraging them to improve those students’ learning outcomes effectively are immediate imperatives. From a practical perspective, leading training programs and effective charter schools would seem ready sources of insight. From a research perspective, evaluating the practices of educators who effectively improve student outcomes, as well as looking at intentional educator-student matching through initiatives such as My Brother’s Keeper, can provide essential insights.

Anna Egalite is an associate professor at North Carolina State University, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and an editor at Education Next.

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

Egalite, A. (2024). What We Know About Teacher Race and Student Outcomes: A review of the evidence to date. Education Next, 24(1), 42-49.

Ten minutes after class starts, a student flings open the door, struts in, and yells, “What’s up, bitches?”

If this kind of conduct is familiar to you, you don’t need a primer on how behavior has become worse—much worse—since students returned to school post-pandemic. Chances are you’ve observed just what the data from the National Center for Education Statistics report: 84 percent of school leaders say student behavioral development has been negatively impacted. This is evident in a dramatic increase in classroom disruptions, ranging from student misconduct to acts of disrespect toward teachers and staff to the prohibited use of electronic devices.

Bad behavior “continues to escalate,” said Matt Cretsinger, director of special services for the Marshalltown Community School District in Iowa. “There are more behavioral needs than we’ve ever seen. . . . It’s a shock to teachers.”

Student behavior is “definitely worse” post-pandemic, said Mona Delahooke, a pediatric psychologist. “There are much heavier stress loads that teachers and students are carrying around.”

And it’s not as if discipline weren’t a problem pre-pandemic. “The numbers tell the story,” said student-behavior specialist Ross Greene. “We’re suspending kids like there’s no tomorrow; we’re giving detentions even more than that. We’re expelling to the tune of 100,000 students a year.” Greene added that corporal punishment is at 100,000 instances a year, restraint or seclusion is close to that, and school arrests tally more than 50,000 a year.

Through the nonprofit organization he founded in 2009, Lives in the Balance, Greene and his colleagues train schools in his Collaborative & Proactive Solutions model and advocate for the elimination of punitive, exclusionary disciplinary practices in schools and treatment facilities.

In a small but growing number of schools, teachers and administrators are drawing on Greene’s advice to change how they handle misbehavior. Pointing to hundreds of research studies that say students who respond poorly to problems and frustrations are lacking skills, these schools are actively looking to end punitive discipline, take the focus off student behavior, and train their staffs to recognize—and avoid—situations likely to cause bad behavior. If something is triggering outbursts from students—simply asking them to sit quietly at their desks or giving them a surprise quiz, for instance—teachers might be better off finding other ways to accomplish what is needed.

Not blaming children for their outbursts requires a paradigm shift that, according to some practitioners, is long overdue.

Stuart Ablon, the founder and director of Think:Kids in Massachusetts General Hospital’s department of psychiatry, said simply, “We must move away from thinking students do well if they want to, to students do well if they can.”

Delahooke has her own go-to phrase: “Children don’t throw tantrums; tantrums throw children.”

And Robert Sapolsky, a noted neuroendocrinology researcher and Stanford University professor, goes even further when he traces how various factors—ranging from neurons and hormones to evolution, culture, and history—factor into a person’s behaviors. “Biology is pretty much out of our control, and free will looks pretty suspect,” he said.

The Staying Power of Behaviorism

While these beliefs about student behavior and the growing number of schools adopting these disciplinary methods may seem new, leaders such as Ablon say they’ve been pushing this model for 30 years. And even though some schools are changing their practices, getting people to end their reliance on the punishments and rewards of behaviorism has proven difficult.

Behaviorism—the notion that behavior is shaped by conditioning via environmental stimuli (rewards and punishment)—was a popular theory in the early and mid-20th century. The irony, Ablon said, is that even when the idea was most in vogue, it was not effective. Punishment may put a stop to a certain behavior, but the effect is only temporary.

“It’s not only ineffective; it actually makes matters worse,” Ablon said.

A report that examined how discipline could alienate students from schools found that “when responses to student behavior fail to account for student perspectives and experiences, youths can experience feelings of alienation and disconnection.” Another study that looked specifically at why attempts to influence adolescent behavior often founder proposed the hypothesis “that traditional interventions fail when they do not align with adolescents’ enhanced desire to feel respected and be accorded status; however, interventions that do align with this desire can motivate internalized, positive behavior change.”

Part of the problem is that even when people agree that suspensions and other punishments aren’t working, they fall back on these patterns if they lack an alternative, according to Greene.

“The old mentality is dying hard,” Greene said. “People know a certain way of doing things. They have structures in place [that reinforce those practices]. You’ve got to replace what you’re doing with something; there can’t be a vacuum.”

“The research is pretty clear about what works and what doesn’t,” said Cretsinger. “There’s a significant delay between research and school practice.”

A 2021 study by the American Institutes for Research concluded that out-of-school suspensions for middle school students “actually had a negative effect on . . . students’ future behavioral incidents.” These students were also more likely to be suspended in the future, the study found.

While the study did not report the same effect for high school students, it did conclude that severely disciplining these older students “does not serve as a deterrent for future misbehavior.”

“Our educational system is in the dark ages when it comes to understanding behaviors,” said Delahooke. “That’s the bottom line.”

A Different Approach

That’s where this new strain of programs comes in. Greene is the originator of the Collaborative Problem Solving approach, but he now refers to his model as Collaborative & Proactive Solutions. The name change occurred when he left Massachusetts General Hospital. Since that time, the hospital has disseminated a variant of Greene’s original model under the name Collaborative Problem Solving without his consent. The hospital’s program is led by Greene’s former trainee, Ablon.

These programs began when their creators started looking at the causes of student misbehavior. Neuroscience “understands that humans are driven by a subconscious [need] to feel safe,” said Delahooke. “When we see big behavioral problems such as kids kicking, screaming, running around, those behaviors we’re viewing as stress responses, not attention-seeking.”

The causes of misbehavior, Greene said, stem from weaknesses in one of four areas: flexibility and adaptability, frustration tolerance, problem-solving skills, and emotion regulation. During the remote-learning days of Covid-19, children missed the opportunity to build on these developmental skills, which led to more behavior challenges when they returned to school.

But exactly how does this knowledge of behavioral dynamics translate to the classroom? Let’s return to the example that began this story. Ablon used this event—the student bursting into class late and making a disruptive comment—to demonstrate how a teacher could respond to an incident. Ablon said this example described a student who was having a hard time shifting from A to B as she changed classes.

He suggested that instead of handing out an office referral or other punishment, the teacher should run through a three-point checklist. First, the teacher should try to empathize with the student. “I know empathy is becoming an endangered species,” but if teachers can externalize the problem from the child, they won’t see the student as the problem, he said.

Because this student is obviously not ready to learn, try to find out why they feel the way they do by asking questions, he added. You can even tell the student, “I know there must be an important reason you’re not sitting down and doing your work. So it’s okay.”

And because you can’t reason with a disregulated student, Ablon coaches staff not to force a behavior change on the student but instead to share their own perspective only after they understand the student’s viewpoint. The third step is for the teacher to assess the problem and see if they can brainstorm a solution with the student. (This step might well require that another staff member—perhaps an instructional aide—be available to keep the rest of the class on task, advocates say.)

Ablon cautions specifically against having a teacher or other staff member use power or control, because that will likely re-traumatize the student. You must give the student control, but not sole responsibility, he added.

Greene was clear that while school staff’s attitude toward punishment needs to change, they won’t achieve positive results unless they have a new structure to follow. Even though a lot of schools consider their policies to be “trauma-informed,” he said, many of them are still doling out suspensions and other punishments.

“I know changes have taken place when some things [in schools] are missing,” Greene said. When disciplinary tactics such as office referrals and suspensions are greatly reduced, he believes, it means the school has structured itself so those outcomes aren’t the default methods anymore. In these cases, school officials are no longer focusing on the behavior of students but rather on identifying the expectations that children are having a hard time meeting, he noted. And they are engaging with students to solve those disconnects.

Ablon said he knows these methods are gaining acceptance, because when he talks with school officials, he doesn’t have to spend most of his time convincing them that a different mindset is necessary. “There’s not as much resistance to knowing behavior is skill, not will.”

But even with more schools adopting this mindset, he said, the new approach to discipline will not become mainstream unless schools of education incorporate the methods into teacher preparation. Only when that occurs will schools no longer need to retrain staff, Ablon added.

Teachers, for their part, often ask how they and other staff will be able to find the time to implement these one-on-one practices, especially when the rest of the class is sidelined as a teacher focuses on understanding a single student’s behavior.

Greene said he’s seen assistant principals volunteer to cover a class for a teacher, understanding that better-behaved students will ultimately decrease the amount of time the principal spends meeting with children who have acted out.

Ablon pointed out that if a student is struggling behaviorally, that individual is very likely disrupting the learning of others already. “If teachers can’t find time for a one-on-one conversation, which they often can’t, then there is a more significant systemic issue at that school.”

Schools Seeing Results

While accepting these concepts is a step forward, putting the theories into action takes work. Schools implementing any model that adheres to these basics will need at least a year to train staff, allow them to practice the methods, and provide coaching on their efforts.

And it is key that the school doesn’t overload initiatives, trying to implement multiple large programs at once, Ablon said. “These aren’t quick answers. It’s not a 45-minute session and now you have everything you need. It takes trial and error, real buy-in from leaders, and funding” for training teachers and adding staff to oversee classrooms while professional development takes place.

Even within a given school district, one school can have a vastly different experience from the others. That’s what happened with Woodbury Elementary School in Matt Cretsinger’s Iowa district. While all 10 of Marshalltown’s schools had access to Ablon’s program, Woodbury principal Anel Garza championed the approach and made sure it was followed in everything the school did, including day-to-day activities, staff meetings, and even parent-teacher conferences.

Woodbury is a rural, dual-language school where many of the students are new to the U.S., Cretsinger said. Over the course of two years, office referrals decreased by 36.5 percent, while students with two or more referrals dropped 49 percent. Restraints and seclusion nearly disappeared, with only two incidents in a school of 400. In the rest of the district, office referrals rose 143 percent during the same time, and Cretsinger said that in the district’s annual state-of-the-schools survey, Woodbury saw a 10-point increase in school safety and student emotional safety while every other school in Marshalltown posted lower scores than in previous years.

“We’re not letting kids off expectations,” Cretsinger said. “We’re trying to figure out why it’s difficult to meet a goal rather than assuming and applying a consequence. The hardest thing for educators is to stop assuming. We’re trying to let [students] share their concerns before we share ours.”

Cretsinger said when staff pushes back on these theories, pointing out that they all grew up without this system, and they turned out fine, he challenges them.

“Did we really turn out all right?” he asks, pointing to today’s substance-abuse statistics and rampant mental health problems.

Even though the elementary school started showing results after one semester of using Ablon’s program, Cretsinger said there are still naysayers and principals from other schools in the district that have not bought in the way Woodbury did.

Teacher Resistance

Michael J. Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, said he’s not surprised some teachers have pushed back against these programs, because discipline and classroom management have long topped the list of reasons teachers give for leaving the profession. “It’s particularly frustrating if you feel principals don’t have your back,” he said.

Petrilli said that while he thought this system could work if implemented perfectly, in a typical school with typical leaders and teachers, “it’s not hard to imagine this doesn’t get implemented well and leads to greater frustration among teachers. . . . If you do this and it goes wrong, then that’s a big problem.

“If your goal is to better serve kids who are being disruptive, I totally get that, but what are the consequences for their peers in terms of learning time, feeling safe, and school culture? I have empathy [for children who are acting out], but you’ve got to worry about the other 24 kids, too.”

And what do teachers unions think of this potential sea change in classroom practice? While the National Education Association supports the implementation of various behavioral programs, Harry Lawson Jr., the organization’s director of human and civil rights, said union members have complained that schools don’t offer them the proper training to make this kind of shift.

“It creates another level of frustration [that teachers] are being asked to do one other thing,” he said. “It can often feel as though there’s no longer a way for me as an adult to hold a student accountable. . . . We still exist in a punishment-driven society. [Some teachers feel] if there’s a behavior, there should be accountability.”

Brian Joffe, the director of children’s programs for the School Superintendents Association, said that handling student misbehavior is “not that far off from parenting,” so it’s not surprising that while some teachers favor collaboration and positive environments, others “lean more toward respect and order.”

“What they’ve leaned on in the past—that lever is being taken away,” he said. “They wonder, ‘What will I do in the next situation?’”

In Massachusetts, at the Academic Center for Transition in Worcester, program coordinator Thomas Lindgren said he faced “a lot” of pushback from staff and even students when he implemented Ablon’s system. The center is a therapeutic school that serves K–5 students who are struggling with social skills, emotion regulation, and meeting expectations.

From 2018–19 to this current school year, the school’s suspensions went from 55 to zero, Lindgren said. Restraints dropped from 98 to 2, and office referrals plunged from 4,036 to 580.

“I lost a couple of staff people because of this switch,” he said, but emphasized the measurable success his school has had with the program. Students seem happier, he added, and the school climate is calmer.

Skill, Not Will

Lindgren touched on an aspect of behavior management that isn’t frequently mentioned: that rewards can cause students as much stress as punishments. The center’s old system included a program that praised students for reaching certain goals. But he discovered misbehavior increased when the results were announced, because students were so anxious about the outcomes. He eliminated the praise program.

He also said the school does still have some adult-imposed restrictions on students, for actions such as fighting.

He summed up the changes under Ablon’s program simply. “The old way didn’t work. The new way does.”

While his experience at the Massachusetts school can be considered anecdotal, many studies show that addressing and building students’ social-emotional skills can result in better academic performance, fewer disruptive behaviors, and less emotional distress.

Recent studies have tried to zero in on exactly how students’ emotions affect their behavior. Although this work is still being defined, researchers are hoping to understand better how various teaching methods trigger reactions from children and how these reactions may improve or impair their ability to learn.

There’s even a belief that monitoring a student’s electrodermal activity (sweat glands) in real time may offer an early warning signal of an upcoming outburst. Delahooke said she knew a student who was harming other students, but officials hypothesized that it wasn’t intentional misbehavior. They got permission to fit the student with a wristband that measured his electrodermal activity, which is a good indicator of nervous system arousal. The wristband reported the student’s stress levels to a cellphone, and it showed that 50 to 90 seconds before every outburst, the student was in a stress response, suggesting that he wasn’t purposely choosing to engage in these bad behaviors. She said the school changed his individualized education plan to allow an aide to intervene before he acted out, taking him for a walk or asking him what he needed when his levels rose.

While acknowledging that schools aren’t going to outfit children with expensive wristbands, Delahooke said educators don’t need this fancy equipment. They can tell students’ stress levels by paying attention to their facial features, the tone of their voice, or even how fast a child is moving.

Asked if he was hopeful that this momentum toward less discipline and more understanding could continue, Ablon said he was, because of one specific example from past practice.

“We’ve done this before, with learning disabilities. We used to misattribute kids who were struggling to read and having a hard time decoding words until we understood dyslexia,” he said. It took schools a long time to shift people’s understandings and create methods to help these students instead of punishing them. “This is the same exact thing, just with behavior. If a student is struggling to read, teachers don’t take it personally. Those kids aren’t lazy; they lack skills. This is the same thing. These students lag in skills like problem-solving, flexibility, and problem tolerance.”

Wayne D’Orio is an award-winning education editor and writer.

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

D’Orio, W. (2023). To Fix Students’ Bad Behavior, Stop Punishing Them: Collaborative methods for handling misconduct make their way to the classroom. Education Next, 23(4), 50-55.

For more, please see “The Top 20 Education Next Articles of 2023.”

Effective teachers are a vital input for schools and students. Teachers can have important and long-lasting impacts on students’ learning, college attendance, and eventual earnings. They can also reduce teen pregnancy or incarceration. Attracting effective teachers into public schools and retaining them is thus a first-order policy goal. Changes in teacher compensation, for example across-the-board raises in salaries or pay plans that directly tie salaries to performance, are often proposed as ways to achieve this goal. The debate on these reforms, though, is very much open; some opponents argue that these changes would be ineffective because teachers are not motivated by money.

Empirical evidence on the effects of compensation reform is somewhat scarce. Most U.S. public school teachers are paid according to rigid schedules that determine pay based solely on seniority and academic credentials. In unionized school districts, these schedules are set by collective bargaining agreements. The near absence of variation in pay practices has prevented rigorous evaluation of the impacts of changes in the structure of teacher pay on the supply of effective teachers and on students’ success.

The dearth of variation in pay schemes was broken in 2011 when the Wisconsin state legislature passed Act 10. Intended to help address a projected $3.6 billion budget deficit through cuts in public-sector spending, Act 10 introduced several changes concerning teachers’ unions, school districts, and their employees. First and foremost, Act 10 limited the scope of salary negotiations to base pay, preventing unions from negotiating salary schedules and including them in collective bargaining agreements. This allowed school districts to set pay more flexibly and without unions’ consent, in principle detaching compensation from seniority and credentials. Act 10 also capped annual growth in base pay to the rate of inflation and required employees to contribute more towards their pensions and health care plans. Lastly, the new legislation made it harder for unions to operate. It requires local union chapters to recertify every year with support from the absolute majority of all employees they represent, and it prohibits automatic collection of union dues from employees’ paychecks.

The public debate over Act 10 has focused on whether the reform package was good or bad for students, schools, and teachers. The unions vigorously opposed the legislation, organizing protests and occupying the state capitol building. Republican Governor Scott Walker just as vigorously defended the legislation, which helped propel him to national prominence. For education policy scholars, however, what is undeniable is that the legislation was useful, because its implementation offered an opportunity to study its effects. In a series of studies, I have taken advantage of the changes to teachers’ labor markets introduced by the reform to shed light on the impact of flexible pay on teachers’ mobility and effectiveness, the gender wage gap among teachers, and whether most teachers would prefer higher salaries today versus more generous pensions when they retire.

Learning from Act 10

The provisions of Act 10 went into effect immediately. In practice, though, school districts acquired the power to use their newly acquired flexibility not simultaneously, but at different points in time. The two-year collective bargaining agreements reached between each district and its teachers union prior to 2011 remained valid until their expiration, and districts had been on different negotiation calendars starting from several years prior to Act 10. As a result, the timing of expiration was staggered across districts for reasons that were effectively random. This variation creates an opportunity to examine the impact of the end of collective bargaining over teacher pay.

Districts were free under Act 10 to decide whether and to what extent to use their newly gained flexibility to depart from salaries based only on seniority and academic credentials. To characterize these choices, I analyzed districts’ post-Act 10 employee handbooks, documents which list the duties and rights of all teachers and describe how they are paid. As of 2015, approximately half of all districts still included a salary schedule in their handbook and did not mention any other bonuses or increments; I call these seniority-pay districts. The remaining districts, on the other hand, did not list any schedule and often clearly stated that individual pay would be set as the district saw fit; I call these flexible-pay districts.

Using employment records on all public-school teachers in Wisconsin linked to individual student information on achievement and demographics from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, I first document how teacher salaries changed in flexible-pay and seniority-pay districts in the aftermath of the reform. After the expiration of districts’ collective bargaining agreements, salary differences among teachers with similar seniority and credentials emerged in flexible-pay districts, but not in seniority-pay districts. Before the passage of Act 10, such teachers would have been paid the same. These newly emerging differences are related to teachers’ effectiveness: Teachers with higher value-added (individual contributions to the growth in student achievement, as measured by standardized test scores) started earning more in flexible-pay districts. This finding is striking considering that school districts in Wisconsin neither calculate value-added nor use it to make any human-resources decisions. School and district administrators appear to be able to identify an effective teacher when they see one.

Does Flexible Pay Attract Better Teachers?

Changes in teachers’ pay arrangements after the expiration of the collective bargaining agreements changed teachers’ incentives to stay in their district or to move, depending on the teachers’ effectiveness and the pay plan in place in their district of origin. Because flexible-pay districts compensate teachers for their effectiveness and seniority-pay districts only reward them for seniority and academic credentials, teachers with higher effectiveness should want to move to flexible-pay districts, whereas teachers with lower effectiveness and higher seniority should want to move to seniority-pay districts.

The data confirm these hypotheses. The rate of cross-district movement more than doubled after Act 10, with most moves occurring across districts of different type (flexible-pay vs. seniority-pay). Teachers who moved to a flexible-pay district after a collective bargaining agreement expired were more than a standard deviation more effective, on average, than teachers who moved to the same districts before the expiration; these teachers also had lower seniority and academic credentials and enjoyed a significant pay increase upon moving. The effectiveness of teachers moving to seniority-pay districts, on the other hand, did not change. and these teachers did not experience any change in pay.

In addition to inducing sorting of teachers across districts, Act 10 led some teachers to leave the public school system altogether: The exit rate nearly doubled in the immediate aftermath of the reform, to 9 percent from 5 percent. Again, the characteristics of those who chose to leave differed depending on the pay plan each district chose after its collective bargaining agreement expired. Teachers who left flexible-pay districts were far less effective than those who left seniority-pay districts.

Changes in the composition of movers and leavers after collective bargaining agreements expired produced a 4 percent of a standard deviation increase in ex ante (i.e., measured pre-reform) teacher effectiveness in flexible-pay relative to seniority-pay districts. In flexible-pay districts, the effectiveness of teachers who did not move or leave also increased immediately after the reform, compared with teachers in seniority-pay districts, suggesting that teachers in flexible-pay districts increased their effort (Figure 1). Overall, changes in the composition and effort of the teaching workforce led to a 5 percent of a standard deviation increase in student test scores in flexible-pay districts relative to seniority-pay districts in the five years following the reform.

Taken together, these results suggest that higher pay can be an effective tool to attract and retain talented teachers.

It is worth stressing, though, that part of the gains enjoyed by flexible-pay districts came at the expense of seniority-pay districts, with implications for inequality in the allocation of teachers across students. Whether flexible pay undermines equity depends on which districts adopt flexible pay, which is in turn related to the characteristics of the districts’ students, the pool of teachers they employed pre-reform, and their budgets. For example, to attract its most preferred teachers under flexible pay, a district with a smaller budget and a larger share of economically disadvantaged students may have to pay too high a premium, which it cannot afford. The district may thus decide to stay with seniority pay to at least be able to fill its teaching slots.

In a separate study, Chao Fu, John Stromme, and I use post-Act 10 data from Wisconsin to explore this possibility. We conclude that a switch from rigid to flexible pay (like the one that occurred in Wisconsin after the reform) could reduce disadvantaged students’ access to more effective and therefore in-demand teachers. We also show, however, that properly designed bonus programs that redistribute state funds to districts serving large numbers of disadvantaged students could offset this effect.

More Pay for Male Teachers

An additional caveat for a pay approach that gives districts flexibility over teacher pay is that it may produce wage inequality across teachers with similar effectiveness but different demographic characteristics—for example, men and women. A pay plan that allows employers to adjust workers’ pay at the individual level introduces the opportunity for individual negotiations. However, research suggests that women are often reluctant to negotiate for higher pay, giving an advantage to men and creating or exacerbating gender pay gaps.

To test whether this dynamic emerged among Wisconsin teachers after Act 10, Heather Sarsons and I compare the salaries of male and female teachers with the same demographic profile, with the same seniority and academic credentials, and who teach in the same district, grade, and subject. We make these comparisons before and after the expiration of each district’s post-Act 10 collective bargaining agreement to see how the law affected gender equity. Prior to the passage of Act 10, strict adherence to seniority-based salary schedules meant that there was no gender wage gap among Wisconsin teachers. With the advent of flexible pay, though, a gender gap emerged that penalizes women (Figure 2). While small on average, the gap is larger for younger and less experienced teachers. If this gap were to persist over time, women would lose an entire year’s pay relative to men over the course of a 35-year career.

The gender wage gap associated with flexible pay also differs depending on the gender of school and district leaders. In schools with a female principal or districts with a female superintendent, the gap is virtually zero. In schools and districts run by men, the gap is substantial.

The emergence of a gender wage gap following the introduction of flexible pay suggests that gender differences in teachers’ willingness to bargain or their bargaining ability could be driving part or all of it. To shed light on bargaining’s role, we surveyed all current Wisconsin public school teachers. We asked respondents whether they have ever negotiated their pay or plan to do so in the future. We then asked teachers who declined to negotiate why they chose to do so. We asked those who did bargain whether they believed the negotiation was successful.

Survey responses indicate that women are systematically less likely than men to have negotiated their pay at various points in their careers or to anticipate negotiating in the future. The magnitude of the differences is substantial, suggesting that differences in bargaining could lead to a gender wage gap as large as 12%. In line with our wage results, gender differences in negotiating behavior are entirely driven by men being more likely to bargain under a male superintendent, whereas men and women who work under a female superintendent are equally likely to negotiate their salaries. When asked why they did not negotiate, women are 31% more likely than men to report that they do not feel comfortable negotiating pay. Differences in the perceived returns to bargaining and beliefs about one’s teaching ability do not explain why women are less likely to negotiate.

In short, our survey data point to gender differences in bargaining as a likely determinant of the gender wage gap. We also test for, and rule out, three additional explanations. The first is the possibility of gender differences in teaching quality: As districts use wage flexibility to pay higher salaries to more effective teachers, a gender gap could emerge if men are better teachers than women. Our data do not support this hypothesis: women’s value-added is slightly higher than men’s and controlling for it does not affect the gap. Furthermore, the returns to having high value-added after the introduction of flexible pay are positive for men, but not for women. A second possible explanation is job mobility. If women are less likely than men to move, they might be unable to take advantage of outside offers with higher pay. In our data, however, women are as likely as men to move. The third possible explanation is higher demand for male teachers from certain schools, for example those employing fewer men, those that lost male teachers immediately before Act 10, and those enrolling a higher share of male students. While the gender wage gap is larger in such schools, these differences only explain a very small portion of the total gap. Taken together, our results highlight how flexible pay, while possibly beneficial to attract effective teachers and incentivize all teachers to exert more effort, can be detrimental for some subgroups.

How Much Do Teachers Value their Pensions?

To date, most of the debate on how to design teacher pay to improve selection and retention has focused on salaries—that is, the compensation that teachers receive while active in the labor force. Yet, almost all U.S. public school teachers receive a large portion of their lifetime compensation in the form of defined-benefit retirement pensions.

Pension benefits are typically calculated using a formula that multiplies years of service, average salary over the final several years of the teacher’s career, and a “replacement factor” (e.g., 2.5 percent). On one hand, this makes pensions very generous for career teachers and thus extremely onerous for state budgets, to the point that the pension liabilities of current public-sector employees (approximately half of whom are teachers) were fully funded in only two states in 2018. Reforms to increase the solvency of these plans have thus been debated for years across many states. On the other hand, the use of defined-benefit plans implies that any changes to the structure and growth of teachers’ pay—especially towards the end of the career—would translate into changes in pension benefits.

To fully appreciate how salaries and pension reforms would affect the composition of the teaching workforce, it is crucial to understand how teachers value higher salaries vis à vis generous pensions. The multiple provisions of Act 10, which changed teachers’ salaries and future pension benefits with a staggered timing across districts, also allow me to study this question. First, as mentioned above, the legislation introduced flexible pay across districts after the end of each collective bargaining agreement. For the subsample of teachers already eligible to retire (those who are at least 55 years old and have at least five years of service), who enjoyed the most generous salaries before Act 10 because of salary schedules that rewarded seniority, this led to a 7.5 percent decline in gross salaries. Importantly, since pension benefits are calculated using a defined-benefit formula, this decline also translated into a 5.8 percent decline in future pension benefits for the average retirement-eligible teacher.

Second, Act 10 raised employees’ contributions to their pension plan from zero to approximately 6 percent of annual salaries, lowering employer contributions by the same amount (so that the total per worker contribution remained the same). Akin to the levy of a payroll tax, his provision lowered net salaries for all teachers and took place starting from 2012 in all districts.

To estimate the impact of these changes in compensation on teachers’ decisions about whether to remain in the classroom, I track teacher retirement rates across districts as these two provisions of the reform went into effect. Overall, retirement (defined as the share of teachers eligible to claim a pension, which in Wisconsin are those aged 55 and above with 5 or more years of service, who leave at the end of the year) rose to 34% from 15% after Act 10. The staggered timing of the changes’ implementation allows me to separate responses to changes in net salaries (due to the increase in contribution rates) from responses to changes in gross salaries and pension benefits (due to the introduction of flexible pay). I find that approximately 45% of the increase in retirement can be attributed to the decline in net salaries, whereas 55% can be ascribed to the fall in gross salaries and pension benefits.

Next, I test whether teachers’ response to a decline in salaries is equivalent to their response to the same decline in pension benefits, or if teachers instead react more strongly to changes in either form of compensation (which would be consistent with them having stronger preferences for it). The data reveal that teachers respond more to changes in current salaries than they do to equivalent changes in the value of their future pension benefits. This finding has an important implication for the design of teachers’ compensation schemes: shifting part of their lifetime compensation away from retirement towards employment (i.e., raising salaries and making pensions less generous) could significantly improve teacher retention.

Act 10’s Lessons

In sum, Act 10 offered a unique opportunity to understand what would happen to the teacher labor market if it were to become more similar to “standard” labor markets in terms of pay. This reform is still relatively recent; its long-run effects on the public education system in Wisconsin remain to be seen. In particular, careful study of its effects on the selection of new teachers and entry in the profession represents an important avenue for future research.

Taken together, however, the results of the studies conducted to date highlight how reforms of the structure of teachers’ pay can be a powerful instrument to attract and retain effective educators, which could have profound and long-lasting effects on students. Giving school districts autonomy over the design of pay and limiting the rigidity embedded in the use of seniority-based salary schedules can help administrators attract more effective teachers from other school districts—and, presumably, from outside of education. Yet, some of the findings call for caution when re-designing teachers’ pay arrangements: Flexibility can generate inequities across students in the effectiveness of their teachers, and across male and female teachers in the pay they receive.

Barbara Biasi is an Assistant Professor at Yale SOM and a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance. She is also a Faculty Research Fellow at NBER and a Research Affiliate at CEPR and CESifo.

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

Biasi, B. (2023). Wisconsin’s Act 10, Flexible Pay, and the Impact on Teacher Labor Markets: Student test scores rise in flexible-pay districts. So does a gender gap for teacher compensation. Education Next, 23(3), 26-31.

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.

Settle into a wooden seat in the auditorium of Boston Latin School. Before long, your eyes will notice the names, painted and carved into room’s high walls, of the alumni who have made history since the school was founded in 1635. Early attendees include Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, and Samuel Adams. Among the other graduates listed are philosopher and poet George Santayana, Class of 1882; political patriarch Joseph Kennedy, Class of 1908; composer Leonard Bernstein, Class of 1935; and Clifton Wharton, Jr., the first Black president of a major research university, Class of 1943.

Each year, 99 percent of Latin School’s senior class matriculates to four-year colleges, with scores of scholars earning admissions to Ivy League institutions and other highly selective universities. Countless alumni across eras attest that the rigor of BLS prepared them so that college actually felt, in some ways, easier and less intense. As an alumna of the school myself and having just completed my tenure as the school’s twenty-eighth headmaster (a term that changed to “head of school” in 2020) and first leader of color, I can affirm that this claim is supported by tens of thousands of success stories. Many of these tales of triumph feature students like myself, whose parents were born in other countries and knew nothing about the American college system, or students whose families have deeper roots in Boston but for whom BLS represented an elevator ride up from multigenerational poverty. For me, those accounts of changed life trajectories are a compelling counterargument to those in Boston and other places like San Francisco and New York who advocate eliminating exam schools in favor of entirely randomized assignments.

Boston Latin School is not only prestigious and historic, but it is also the largest secondary school in the city, serving more than 2,400 students in grades 7–12. If your loved ones have lived in Boston for even one generation, they know someone who graduated from or attended BLS for a period of time.

Until more recent years, the headmaster would assemble students in the auditorium on the first day of school and say, “Look to the left of you. Look to the right of you. Two of you won’t graduate.” When I took a seat as a 7th grader in 1989, things had softened. The speech had been modified: “Look to the left of you. Look to the right of you. One of you will not graduate.” By the time I returned to alma mater as headmaster in 2017, I’d inherited the new speech: “Look to the left of you. Look to the right of you. This journey is not going to be easy, so you will need to support one another along the way.”

Each decade in the modern era has brought positive changes that create more optimal conditions for students to thrive. In 1972, BLS went coed, as did its “sister” school, Boston Latin Academy (formerly Girls Latin School). In 2010, under Lynne Mooney Teta’s leadership, honors classes, which had served as unnecessary barriers to Advanced Placement courses and also to track a school that was already tracked by nature of its selective admissions status, were eliminated. The McCarthy Institute for Transition and Support was created in 2000 to facilitate services such as peer tutoring, Saturday Success School, and workshops for students and parents on topics including executive functioning and time management. BLS has tripled the size of its student-support team, growing its number of counselors, clinicians, and special educators. Seeking help when feeling overwhelmed slowly became something less stigmatized, though we still have a way to go.

BLS students groan about the nightly homework load (three hours on average), though the vast majority wouldn’t choose any other school as their second home. In fact, most spend more hours with us than they do with their families. Our more than 130 extracurricular clubs, 60 athletic teams, and 30 instrumental and choral groups keep them busy. When I was a student, the jazz band and show choir were my no-stress happy places, oftentimes serving as the motivators to get up for school after a late night of homework. Those groups are going strong today, along with the Junior Classical League, fencing team, myriad racial and cultural affinity groups, and hundreds of other activities that, as head of school, I would frantically try to drop in on and capture on my Instagram page.

For more than 50 years, admission to the school has been based on a standardized exam used in concert with report-card grades. During my era as a student, there was a federally mandated set-aside in the admissions process, assuring that at least 35 percent of each class would be Black and Hispanic. That policy was overturned in the late 1990s after a lawsuit. Following the elimination of this set-aside, the percentage of Black students declined significantly, even as Black and Hispanic students comprise the majority of the Boston Public Schools district.

Over the past three years, the confluence of the global pandemic and our nation’s racial reckoning pushed the district to action around the demographics of the city’s three exam schools, with much of the focus on Boston Latin School (in 2020, the school was 45 percent white, 29 percent Asian, 13 percent Hispanic, 8 percent Black, and 4 percent other/multi-racial, by the count of the school district, which uses those terms and categories). A temporary change to the admissions formula due to the inability to administer the standardized admission test during the Covid-19 pandemic ushered in the first students in generations who were admitted without an exam. These students all made the honor roll at their previous schools, though the effects of virtual school due to Covid-19 and the variance in curriculum by elementary school saw some of these young people struggling more than usual at first to find their footing at BLS. Online commenters began to chirp about whether these “sixies” (our term for 7th graders, meaning they have six years left to graduate) deserved a seat at the school, many of the commenters not even veiling their implication that the students’ racial identity and/or socioeconomic background made them less motivated, intelligent, or well behaved.

I had once been a young person whom many would have written off. I lived in the zip code that sent the lowest number of students to BLS. My mother was a single parent. With the support of my mom and grandmother, and through the opportunities afforded to me by Boston Latin School (including a scholarship that covered my undergraduate loans), I graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania in three years. The current team of educators at BLS refuse to write off anyone’s potential, ignoring the noise and focusing on the students. I am incredibly proud of the Class of 2027’s achievement in their first year, particularly those who worked to fill in content gaps through math-intervention classes and a daily after-school program instituted with federal pandemic-relief funds.

* * *

At the age of 21, I began my career as an English teacher at Boston Latin School. Before becoming the head of the school, I left for years of rich professional experiences elsewhere, including my first school-leader position as headmaster of Another Course to College (a small pilot high school within the Boston Public Schools), chief of staff for Boston Public Schools, and deputy chief of leadership development for D.C. Public Schools. The leadership experience that most informed my work as head of school at BLS was my role as principal at Eastern Senior High School in Washington, D.C. The student demographics at Eastern are strikingly different from those at BLS; Eastern’s student body is 99 percent Black. There are, though, more threads of commonality between them than you might imagine, or even than I initially did. The Eastern High School building and Latin School’s current building were both built in the 1920s—palatial structures with central marble staircases. Both schools also boast strong alumni networks that take great pride in the accomplishments of their institutions. However, Eastern fell on difficult times in the late 1990s, and by the time I assumed leadership in 2011, the school had experienced more than 10 school leaders in as many years. The district had phased out new cohorts so that it could reboot with just a 9th grade, and I had the opportunity to relaunch the school’s legacy with an incredible hand-selected team over the next four years.

Our team fought to prove that our students could and deserved to compete on every stage—whether that meant testing for the International Baccalaureate Diploma or slaying in national marching-band competitions. With those successes, I returned to BLS with the knowledge that a community as resourced and supported as ours had no excuses not to soar—rapidly and immediately. And then, in March of 2020, the world changed. Every school leader in America has had to employ new skills over these past two years (we should all earn honorary certificates in public health, for instance).

Eventually, while leading a premier school, I realized that many of the same leadership lessons I learned during my experience at a turnaround school still applied. Students need the same conditions, whether a school is high performing or under resourced. To act otherwise enforces a culture of low expectations.

First, a culture of urgency is essential. What I mean by “culture of urgency” is to unite all constituents around a mission and to be clear about where we currently fall short. Urgency does not mean to place so much pressure on teachers and staff that their longevity in the profession is unlikely. Often, in urban education, urgency is created from an incident. Boston Latin School received national attention in 2016 when Black students at BLS shared issues on campus that resulted in their feeling unseen and unheard. After this, we worked in partnership with the Boston Public Schools Office of Equity to build new systems for reporting bias-based incidents. We also engaged in whole-staff professional development and school-wide dialogues about race and equity. Our personnel committee worked intentionally to further diversify our staff so that more students saw themselves in the adults around them—we hired talented educators across racial, gender, and sexuality identities, including the first Asian American and openly LGBTQ+ assistant heads of school in the institution’s history. Hiring with diverse representation as a core value is not, as some would claim, putting identity politics ahead of education. Actually, it’s crucially important to educational success. We watched our students find outlets on staff when experiencing microaggressions, when seeking to institute new programming on campus, or when desiring a space to just be.

The calls for attention to our racial climate were just one of many jump starters of urgency that we experienced in recent years. Our administrators, faculty, and staff have responded promptly to many of these alarm bells even as the work is ongoing—increasing attention to students’ mental health, stepping up vigilance regarding campus safety and visitor protocols, and closing access gaps for technology, Wi-Fi, and comfortable places for students to study after school hours.

The challenge is that some of the areas that require attention are a little less loud at schools where all of the students pass state assessments and head off to college after graduation. Urgency is often an easier sell in “underperforming schools”—the threat of takeover or double-digit failure rates are powerful narratives for why drastic change must take place. However, at “high-performing schools,” a lack of urgency can lead to a feeling of being “good enough.” Yes, students are passing their classes, but are there gaps in performance for BIPOC students? For special-education students? For students whose families don’t speak English? Yes, students attend school daily and generally complete their work. Are they engaged in the content? Do they see connections between their coursework and the world around them? Is their experience with pacing, grading, and assessment similar, regardless of which teacher they’ve been assigned?

Instruction is the heartbeat of schoolwide change. Even a campus that has identified culture and climate as the key issues to address must deeply consider the place where students spend the majority of their time: classrooms. When educators apply for positions at BLS, our personnel committee institutes performance tasks and, in some cases, administers content assessments. Candidates for our inclusion teacher position write plans for how they would support special-education students with accessing a complex text and multistep writing assignment. Candidates for our assistant head of school role analyze performance data and share their steps to work with teachers and assess instruction to address the gaps. We held this same standard of rigorous application for vacancies at Eastern. There are some experts in a subject area who lack the pedagogical effectiveness to make meaning for students. There are also knowledgeable teachers who teach very well as long as every student does exactly what they’re supposed to. We need educators who are fair, flexible, responsive to feedback, and committed to their own growth in anti-racist practices. However, the urgency of now does not allow for educators who do not have the content background required to support students through the attainment of this same information, even if they’re “great with kids.” Districts should create pathways for those educators to become proficient in hard-to-staff content areas so that school leaders do not need to feel forced to choose between content knowledge and the ability to forge trusting relationships with students.

In deciding the courses that we offer to high-school students and in determining the most effective ways for the students to struggle productively with the material, we cannot ignore the fact that high-performing schools are steered by the expectations of selective colleges. These universities want to see their engineering majors take AP Physics, for instance. So at BLS we offer both AP Physics courses, the one in mechanics and the one in electricity and magnetism. We encourage our students interested in engineering to select one or both of them in junior or senior year, sometimes at the sacrifice of an elective they might prefer. Large universities regularly subject their freshmen to impersonal lectures in large halls, with their entire grade depending on a couple of high-stakes exams, so we recognize that there’s a place for students needing to practice taking in large amounts of information verbally and visually. Students learn to break that information down into outlines that they can study from later. We also run a week of final exams at the end of each school year so that students become accustomed to preparing for cumulative timed exams. Admissions officers strain to find ways to sort through students with similar GPAs, poring over evidence of leadership in their extracurricular activities as one potentially distinctive characteristic. So while BLS students are already strapped for time due to the six major subjects they take each year, they pile on deep commitments to their clubs, bands, sports, and part-time jobs.

Certainly there is self examination for BLS to do as a school, especially as surveys reveal students being perpetually sleep deprived and often managing anxiety. That same self reflection is also warranted at schools asserting that students don’t need (or “can’t handle”) homework, or schools that lack a pathway to calculus (or even pre-calculus) or spend an entire year on a single novel in English class in service of “meeting students where they are.” It is a fair criticism of intensely rigorous schools such as BLS that perhaps they are too driven by what external influences deem a “well-rounded” high-school experience. It is appropriate to examine nightly homework to see what is authentic practice of the material and what is unnecessary busy work that doesn’t advance learning. It is right to question whether the College Board drives the pacing of our classes to the point that, at times, depth may be sacrificed for breadth. But the BLS track record of not only getting students in to, but also getting them through, four-year colleges at rates far exceeding those of other urban high schools is real, and it crosses racial and socioeconomic lines.

Still, resting on laurels is not an effective leadership strategy for any school principal. Navigating the tension of high standards and flexibility, recouping lost instructional time from Covid, and ensuring social-emotional learning isn’t an afterthought require considerable time observing classrooms and working with instructional leadership teams. This is an area where I didn’t meet the goals I set for myself—often feeling the pull of returning emails that felt like emergencies instead of keeping to a set schedule of uninterrupted time on instruction.

How can districts help school leaders clear the decks to focus on the main thing? They should more actively borrow from charter-network practices of employing non-educators who are strong in their fields and placing them at school sites to support operations. At Eastern, I had a chief of staff who worked alongside me on community engagement as we fought to rebrand the school’s reputation on rapidly gentrifying Capitol Hill. At Boston Latin School, we have a director of operations whom we recruited back to alma mater (she’s a class of 1998 graduate) after a successful career in restaurant management. Coordinating in-school Covid testing for more than 1,000 students a day fell to her. At some other schools, principals were doing that work entirely by themselves, likely at the cost of their time in classrooms.

Stay true to one’s principles as a leader in the face of political landmines. Boston has a history of racism. While the physical violence of the desegregation era in the city is past, there are often reminders that beliefs last generations, and we are still feeling the daily impact of systemic and individual bias. Especially at schools where BIPOC students are the minority, leaders must deliberately elevate their perspectives and find spaces for them to lift their voices. At BLS, this came in the form of an annual Martin Luther King schoolwide celebration, cultural shows sponsored by groups such as Black Leaders Aspiring for Change and Knowledge (BLACK), Asian Students in Action (ASIA), and Talented and Gifted (TAG) Latino Club, and even a video produced by BIPOC students about their honest experiences at BLS that we watched schoolwide in an advisory block. Sometimes I fell short of the fortitude I needed in challenging moments. This spring, an educator displayed a piece of student work by a young person of color who wrote a poem for his civics class critiquing his predominantly white neighborhood, sparking ire from some BLS families and other residents unaffiliated with our school who were offended by the depiction of the neighborhood as exclusive and racist. While I didn’t, and still do not, believe it to be a wise decision to post the piece publicly, absent context or a space for readers to process or discuss the inevitable strong reactions to its content, and without the student’s explicit consent, I overcorrected in my apology for its display. I failed to state explicitly the student’s right to portray his perspective and experience as he chooses, and I neglected to commend our teachers for fostering the space where students could explore the biases in their own communities. While many conversations, follow-up actions, and additional activities occurred with the students themselves, my public statement on the issue will remain a regret, and it speaks to the danger created when a leader is overly conciliatory, something that can easily occur when you’re trying to keep everyone rowing in the same direction in a community with many different politics.

In every school context, the work must be grounded in love. In one of our most painful situations at Eastern, three of our students were shot and sustained non-life threatening injuries after getting caught in crossfire as we departed from a school basketball game. I remember calling my grandmother in Boston the night before our return to school, wondering what to say to our students after the collective trauma of what we’d survived. In her 90-year-old wisdom, she said, “Tell them you love them.” I don’t remember much about what exactly was said when we somberly assembled in the auditorium the following morning, but I remember our team articulating how much we loved our young people. We promised that we would do all we could to keep them safe. And they knew that there were limitations to what was in our power to do, but they believed and trusted in the community we’d forged.

Over the past five years, there have been so many hardships that our young people have endured. Isolation for over a year of their formative education. Watching, on cellphones, video of the murder of a man by law enforcement and then making decisions about if, when, and how they wanted to enter the national conversation. Struggling to feel safe in the wake of school shootings on a regular basis. Some of the crises were specific to the BLS community, such as the untimely passing of two students and a beloved staff member. At times, it felt like the only promise we could make students was to love them. And to love our students means to love their families. And to love our teachers. And to love so hard that sometimes you feel like you can’t lead anymore because you’re spent. But then you head to a Junior Classical League tournament and watch students in togas riding a homemade chariot, laughing and acting every bit their youthful age. And your cup fills again.

* * *

There are those who will inevitably say that advice from educators at Boston Latin School is nontransferable. Our school admittedly benefits from a significant endowment due to donations over the past century from generous alumni and families, an unusual privilege in the world of public education. This funding provides scholarships to our graduates and supports personnel and programming that enhance our students’ experiences in athletics, the arts, global travel, independent research, and internships. The annual additional amount that we receive from the Boston Latin School Association to support programming is approximately $1,000 per student. Even after counting those additional funds, Boston Latin School still has one of the lowest per-pupil allocations among Boston Public high schools. The attention around this funding creates a distraction and bolsters the idea that high-performing schools should be treated as anomalies that don’t offer any replicable practices. I walked into Eastern Senior High School on the first day of our relaunch, with the motto of Boston Latin School in my head (Sumus Primi: “We are first”), and told our students they were the best. Every single staff member gave their best in return. Five years ago, I walked into Boston Latin School and called upon leadership lessons from my tenure at Eastern to bring us through this tumultuous era. Maybe we should stop claiming that the roadmap is drastically different based on what the students in front of you look like and what their scores are. Instead, let’s hold sacred space for leaders across school types to share best practices, to walk in another’s shoes (and to walk through one another’s schools), and to keep our cups full.

Rachel Skerritt graduated from Boston Latin School in 1995 and served as its head from 2017 to 2022. She is a chief strategy officer at Attuned Education Partners.

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

Skerritt, R. (2023). What I Learned Leading America’s First Public School: A culture of urgency, grounded in love, is essential, at “high-performing” and “underperforming” schools alike. And try to find a way to refill your cup. Education Next, 23(1), 46-53.

After successive school years disrupted by shutdowns, isolation, and mass experiments in remote teaching, educators returned to school in Fall 2021 to find that our classrooms and students had changed.

In the first days of the return, perhaps, we didn’t see the full scope of the changes. Yes, most of us knew that there would be yawning academic gaps. Most of us understood then what the data have since clearly borne out: despite often heroic efforts by teachers to deliver remote instruction, the pandemic had caused a massive setback in learning and academic progress. The costs had been levied most heavily on those who could least afford it, and it would take months, if not years, to make up the lost time.

But at least we were all together again, even if we were all wearing masks. We were on the road back to regular life.

As the days passed, though, a troubling reality emerged.

The students who came back to us had spent long periods away from peers, activities, and social interactions. For many young people—and their teachers—the weeks and months of isolation had been difficult emotionally and psychologically. Some had lost loved ones. Many more had endured months in a house or apartment with nearly everything they valued—sports or drama or music, not to mention moments of sitting informally among friends and laughing—having suddenly evaporated from their lives. Even students who had escaped the worst of the pandemic were out of practice when it came to the expectations, courtesies, and give-and-take of everyday life. Perhaps as a result of this, their social skills had declined.

Our students looked the same—or at least we presumed they did behind the masks—but some seemed troubled and distant. Some struggled to concentrate and follow directions. They were easily frustrated and quick to give up. Many students simply didn’t know how to get along. The media was suddenly full of stories of discipline problems, chronic disruptions due to student distractibility, lack of interest, and misbehavior in the classroom, and historic levels of student absences. In schools where no one had ever had to think about how to deal with a fight, they burst into the open like brush fires after a drought. It didn’t help that many schools were short-staffed, with leaders struggling just to get classes covered and buses on the road.

The first post-pandemic year may well have been harder than the radically disrupted 18 months of rolling lockdowns and remote learning that preceded it. The jarring disruptions related to Covid-19 aren’t the whole story, however. What has happened to our students isn’t just the impact of a protracted, once-in-a-generation adverse event, but the combined effects of several large-scale, ground-shifting trends that predate the pandemic and have reshaped the fabric of young people’s lives. As we look forward, their combined effects should cause us to think beyond short-term recovery and to reconsider how we design schools and schooling.

An Internet Epidemic

The pandemic occurred amid a broader epidemic. Long before Covid-19, the psychologist Jean Twenge had found spiraling levels of depression, anxiety, and isolation among teens. “I had been studying mental health and social behavior for decades and I had never seen anything like it,” Twenge wrote in her 2017 book iGen.

This historic downturn in the well-being of young people coincided almost exactly with the dramatic rise of the smartphone and social media. More specifically, it coincided with the moment when they both became universal and being disconnected or an infrequent user was no longer viable.

As a parent, I experienced this firsthand. Even before the pandemic, I was desperately trying to manage my own children’s device usage, wary of how the time they spent on their phones was increasing while the time they spent reading and doing, well, almost everything else was decreasing. We wanted to limit social media as much as possible. But when friends plan where to meet up via Instagram messenger or some other platform, and when the key information for every soccer game—where, when, which uniform—is communicated via group chat, there is no choice but to join.

Research by Twenge and others found that teenagers’ media use roughly doubled between 2006 and 2016 across gender, race, and class. In competition against the smartphone, the book, the idea of reading, lost significant ground. By 2016, just 16 percent of 12th-grade students read a book or magazine daily. As recently as 1995, 41 percent did. Meanwhile, social media was on the rise. By 2016, about three-quarters of teenagers reported using social media almost every day (see Figure 1).

Those trends have only accelerated. A 2019 study by Common Sense Media reported that 84 percent of American teenagers own a smartphone. Parents are raising a generation that is both more connected and more disconnected than any before.

“The smartphone brought about a planetary rewiring of human interaction. As smartphones became common, they transformed peer relationships, family relationships and the texture of daily life for everyone—even those who don’t own a phone or don’t have an Instagram account,” Twenge and co-author Jonathan Haidt wrote in the New York Times in 2021. “It’s harder to strike up a casual conversation in the cafeteria or after class when everyone is staring down at a phone. It’s harder to have a deep conversation when each party is interrupted randomly by buzzing, vibrating notifications.” They quote the psychologist Sherry Turkle who notes that we are now “forever elsewhere.”

The average 12th grader in 2016, Twenge pointed out in iGen, went out with friends less often than the average 8th grader 10 years before. American teenagers were also less likely to date, drive a car, or have a job. “The roller rink, the basketball court, the town pool, the local necking spot—they’ve all been replaced by virtual spaces accessed through apps and the web,” Twenge wrote in The Atlantic. These virtual meetups are universally associated with less happiness for young people. “Those who spend an above-average amount of time with their friends in person are 20 percent less likely to say they’re unhappy than those who hang out for a below-average amount of time,” she wrote.

And that was long before Tik Tok and the latest round of social media platforms carefully designed to ensure obsession and the lingering anxiety that you really ought to be checking your phone; before the optimization of apps like Snapchat, with posts designed to disappear as soon as they are seen and therefore undiscoverable to an adult coming to a young person’s room to see what is amiss.

Pandemic Effects

Then in March 2020, virtually everything that might have competed with smartphones suddenly disappeared. A recent Common Sense Media study found that children’s daily entertainment usage of screens grew by 17 percent between 2019 and 2021—more than it had grown during the four years prior (see Figure 2). Overall, daily entertainment screen use in 2021 increased to 5.5 hours among tweens ages 8 to 12 and to more than 8.5 hours among teens ages 13 to 18, on average. These trends were even more pronounced for students from low-income families, whose parents were most likely to have to work in person and have fewer resources to spend on alternatives to screens.

At the levels of use that are now common, smartphones are catastrophic to the well-being of young people. As Twenge wrote, “The more time teenagers spend looking at screens, the more likely they are to report symptoms of depression. . . It’s not an exaggeration to describe [this generation] as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades.”

Indeed, the data also show spikes in teenagers’ mental-health problems during the pandemic, when just 47 percent of students reported feeling connected to the adults and peers in their schools. Some 44 percent of high-school students reported feeling sad or persistently hopeless in 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control. School factors had a significant effect on this data. Students who said they felt “connected to adults and peers” at school were almost 60 percent less likely to report persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness than those who did not—some 35 percent of connected students felt that way, compared with 55 percent who did not feel connected to school. The socioemotional distress students are experiencing is as much a product of the cellphone epidemic as it is a product of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In addition, all of that time on screens—even without social media—degrades attention and concentration skills, making it harder to focus fully on any task and to maintain that focus. This is not a small thing. Attention is central to every learning task and the quality of attention paid by learners shapes the outcome of learning endeavors. 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.

“Directed attention is the ability to inhibit distractions and sustain attention and to shift attention appropriately,” Michael Manos, clinical director of the Center for Attention and Learning at Cleveland Clinic, recently told the Wall Street Journal. “If kids’ brains become accustomed to constant changes, the brain finds it difficult to adapt to a nondigital activity where things don’t move quite as fast.”

The Trouble with Task Switching

The problem with cellphones is that young people using them switch tasks every few seconds. Better put, young people practice switching tasks every few seconds, so they become more accustomed to states of half-attention, where they are ever more expectant of a new stimulus every few seconds. When students encounter a sentence or an idea that requires slow, focused analysis, their minds are already glancing around for something new and more entertaining.

Though all of us are at risk of this type of restlessness, young people are especially susceptible. The region of the brain that exerts impulse control and self-discipline, the prefrontal cortex, isn’t fully developed until age 25. Any time young people are on a screen, they are in an environment where they are habituated to states of low attention and constant task switching. In 2017, a study found that undergraduates, who are more cerebrally mature than K–12 students and therefore have stronger impulse control, “switched to a new task on average every 19 seconds when they were online.”

In addition, the brain rewires itself constantly based on to how it functions. This idea is known as neuroplasticity. The more time young people spend in constant half-attentive task switching, the harder it becomes for them to maintain the capacity for sustained periods of intense concentration. A brain habituated to being bombarded by constant stimuli rewires accordingly, losing impulse control. The mere presence of our phones socializes us to fracture our own attention. After a time, the distractedness is within us.

“If you want kids to pay attention, they need to practice paying attention,” is how Dr. John S. Hutton, a pediatrician and director of the Reading and Literacy Discovery Center at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, put it in a recent Wall Street Journal article.

There is, in other words, a clear post-pandemic imperative for schools. The first step in responding to the dual crisis of learning and well-being is to set and enforce cell-phone restrictions. An institution with the dual purpose of fostering students’ learning and well-being cannot ignore an intruder that actively erodes a young mind’s ability to focus and sustain attention and also magnifies anxiety, loneliness, and depression. Cellphones must be turned off and put away when students walk through school doors. Period.

But cellphone restrictions are only part of the equation. Schools themselves will also require rewiring.

How do we do that? The answer isn’t simple. My colleagues at Uncommon Schools Denarius Frazier, Hilary Lewis, and Darryl Williams, and I have written a book describing actions we think schools should consider. Here’s a road map of some of the things we think will be necessary.

Rewiring Classrooms for Connectedness

Extracurricular activities and social and emotional learning programs can be significant factors in shaping students’ experiences. But we should also recognize that the classroom is the single most important space when it comes to shaping students’ sense of connectedness to school. Out of a typical school day, at least five or six hours will be spent in classrooms—the overwhelming majority of students’ time. If classroom practices do little to instill a sense of belonging, students will feel a weak connection to the primary purpose of school.

But just as important, building classrooms to maximize belonging cannot come at the expense of academic achievement. We are in the midst of a learning crisis of historic proportions too. Students’ lack of progress in science, math, and reading, their reduced knowledge of history, their lessened exposure to the arts—these will have lifelong costs. Teaching needs to be better, not diluted. Classrooms need to maximize belonging and learning. It can’t be one or the other.

Happily, we think this is eminently possible. I’m thinking of a math class taught by my co-author Denarius Frazier, the principal of Uncommon Collegiate Charter High School in Brooklyn, N.Y. During a discussion about trigonometry, two dozen students engaged vigorously and energetically with one another. That is, until the beautiful moment when a student named Vanessa, who had been speaking authoritatively about her solution to the problem, suddenly realized that she had confused reciprocal and inverse functions—and that her solution is dead wrong.

Vanessa paused and glanced at her notes. “Um, I’d like to change my answer,” she said playfully, without a trace of self-consciousness. Then she laughed, and her classmates laughed with her. The moment was beautiful because it was lit by the warm glow of belonging. And that was not accidental.

Consider the image below: Vanessa is speaking as her classmates listen and offer affirming gazes. Their eyes are turned to Vanessa to show encouragement and support. Their expressions communicate psychological safety, reassurance, and belonging. In fact, it’s hard to put into words just how much their glances are communicating—and each one is a little different—but these wordless expressions are as critical to shaping the moment as Vanessa’s own character and humility. This interaction fosters and protects a space in which her bravery, humor, and openness can emerge. A space where she feels important.

How someone acts in a group setting is shaped as much by the audience and the social norms that the speaker perceives as it is by internal factors. And here those perceptions are not accidental. Frazier has socialized his students to “track”—or actively look at—the speaker and to endeavor to keep their body language and nonverbal cues positive. In Teach Like a Champion 3.0, I call that technique Habits of Attention. It is a small but critical aspect of how classrooms can maximize belonging and achievement.

Students also validated each other in other ways throughout the lesson. When a young woman named Folusho joined the discussion, she started by saying, “Ok, I agree with Vanessa…” So often, after a student speaks in class, no one other than the teacher responds or communicates that the statement was important. But when a peer’s comment begins, “I agree with…” it says implicitly that what my classmate just said is important. Such validation makes it more likely that students feel supported and successful, and that the speaker will contribute to the discussion again.

Again, this is not a coincidence. Frazier has taught his students to use phrases like that and weave their comments together, so their ideas are connected and those who have contributed feel the importance of their contributions. That technique is called Habits of Discussion. Along with Habits of Attention, it helps connect and validate students as they learn.

In addition, as Folusho was talking, her classmates began snapping their fingers. In Frazier’s classroom, that means “I agree” or “I support you.” It was a powerful dose of positive feedback at the precise moment when she, like almost anyone speaking aloud to a group of people, was most likely to momentarily wonder, “Am I making sense at all? Do I sound stupid?” Folusho suddenly got a supportive response—the snapping told her, “You’re doing great! You’re family. Let’s go!”

Again, that was deliberately woven into the fabric of the classroom. The technique, called Props, establishes procedures for students to recognize when their classmates are doing well and send affirming signals without disrupting class.

All three techniques show how a teacher like Frazier can intentionally establish a culture that reinforces both academic endeavor and a much stronger sense of belonging. And though it looks organic, there’s nothing natural about it. It’s a deliberate rewiring of social norms to maximize positive outcomes. Some skeptics label these sorts of techniques coercive or controlling, but it’s hard to watch Frazier and his students and hold on to those suspicions. Engineering the classroom to ensure positive peer-to-peer norms is about honoring young people and creating an environment that not only maximizes their learning but also their belonging—the pervading senses that school is for me and I am successful here. It’s a rewiring of the classroom that requires hard work and doggedness on the part of the teacher. But it is nothing less than students deserve.

Rewiring Schools for Belonging

Rewiring a school for belonging involves rethinking many of the things we do, such as extracurricular activities. Nashville Classical Charter School provides an example of how schools might do this. In 2021, school leaders were reconsidering how its programs could intentionally build a sense of connectedness and belonging among students. Head of School Charlie Friedman and his colleagues decided to dramatically expand after-school sports programs, to allow students to explore their identities, build relationships with trusted adults, and perform in front of a crowd.

Nashville Classical extended tryout periods, to maximize students’ opportunities feel like part of a team. Leaders also offered stipends for coaching and encouraged their best community builders to coach, by explicitly valuing expertise at culture building alongside expertise at the sport. The school engaged audiences by inviting families to vote on a mascot and created an engaging game-day experience with a cheerleading squad, songs, and chants. This attracted a substantial audience, so student-athletes could compete in front of more people and fans could build community through gathering and cheering together.

It’s important to have high-quality extracurriculars that aren’t based on years of prior experience. It’s hard for a student to decide in grade 8 that they would really like to be a part of the basketball team if they haven’t already spent years playing. But that’s not true of the debate team or the Spanish club. Those activities should be as well run as any others, rather than a lonely space with obligatory supervision where the connections are peripheral at best.

Schoolwide rituals are also important to fostering a sense of belonging. For example, Frazier’s school has a regular meeting circle where the entire school is present. Students are publicly honored for their academic excellence or for being positive members of the school community.

Character education and social and emotional learning programs can also play a role. But my advice is to build a few priorities into the fabric of the school rather than buy a program to use in an isolated manner. Positive character traits should be “caught, sought, and taught,” according to my co-author Hilary Lewis. Gratitude is a great example. When students make a habit of concretely expressing gratitude to other people in the school community, it confers mutual benefits. Expressions of gratitude make the recipients feel more connected while also confering status on the giver, because their appreciation is a thing worthy of sharing deliberately.

And, as Shawn Achor explains in his book The Happiness Advantage, expressing gratitude regularly has the effect of calling students’ attention to its presence. Repetitive thinking causes a “cognitive afterimage” where we continue to see whatever it is we’re thinking about, even when we’ve shifted focus. In other words, if you continually share and expect to be sharing examples of things you are grateful for, you start looking for them. You begin scanning the world for examples of good things to appreciate and notice more of the good that surrounds you. Gratitude is a well-being builder.

Open-ended opportunities to relax and connect outside of the classroom also foster connectedness and belonging. At Cardiff High School in Wales, for example, school leaders filled a common area with games that are easy to join. They added chess boards, card tables with decks of cards, and even a ping pong table to create opportunities for engaging, positive social interaction in between classes.

Saying No to Cellphones

These innovations can be powerful—but not on their own. The pull of smartphones and social media apps designed to distract is bound to undermine any expression of support, after-school sport, or card table. The single most important thing schools can do is to restrict cellphone access for large parts of the school day. This 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. My personal preference is a simple policy: You can have your cellphone in your bag, but it must be turned off and cannot be visible during the school day. Not during lunch, not in the hall, not anywhere until after the last bell rings. If there’s an emergency and you need to contact your parents, you may use it in the main office. That’s it.

Schools must create blocks of time when students can work in a manner that allows them to rebuild their attentional skills and experience the full value of connected social interaction. They must also protect students’ opportunities to socialize with one another. Allowing students to use their phones as classroom tools (for quick research or as calculators, for example), or to leave them turned on (but with silent haptic notifications that distract nonetheless), or to turn them on during lunch or other learning breaks keeps them connected to their devices and disconnected from one another.

It won’t be easy, but it can be done. France has done it. The state of Victoria in Australia has done it. Some American public schools and districts have done it, in Missouri, Pennsylvania, Maine, and New York.

These bans are often followed by remarkable and instantaneous change. “It has transformed the school. Social time is spent talking to friends,” a teacher from Australia told my colleagues and me. “It is so nice walking around the yard seeing students actually interacting again, and no distractions during class,” said another.

The change, teachers told us, was quick—so long as you could get the adults to follow through. That is, if the rule was consistent and enforced, then students adapted quickly and were happy, even if they fought it at first. If the ban didn’t work, the problem was usually that some of the adults didn’t follow through. “Consistent enforcement from all = key,” one teacher explained in a note. “Can’t be ‘the cool teacher’.” The problem, of course, is that there’s a strong incentive to be “the cool teacher,” so schools must spend time making sure teachers understand the reasons for the rule and holding them accountable for supporting it.

School and district leaders should be prepared for doubts, skepticism, and pushback. We’ve seen this at the state level already. In 2019, lawmakers in four states proposed legislation to ban cellphones in school. But the bills, in Arizona, Maine, Maryland, and Utah, failed to advance. A rule that barred students from bringing cellphones into New York City public schools was ended in 2015, because then-Mayor Bill DeBlasio said “parents should be able to call or text their kids,” though individual schools may choose to limit phone access.

Two comments I often hear: “it’s an infringement on young people’s freedom” and “the role of schools is to teach young people to make better choices. We should talk to them about cell phones, not restrict them.”

The first response makes two assumptions: first, that there is no difference between young people and adults, and second, that there is no difference between the people who run a school—and therefore are responsible to stakeholders for outcomes—and the young people who attend the school. Both are mistaken. The purpose of a school is to give young people the knowledge and skills they require to lead successful lives. This always involves an exercise of social contract. We collectively give up something small as individuals and receive something valuable and rare in return as a group. It is impossible to run a school without this sort of give-and-take. Suggesting that we give students “freedom” to use cell phones whenever they want is trading valuable and enduring freedom that accrues later for a self-destructive indulgence in the present.

The argument that “schools should teach young people the skill of managing technology” is patently unrealistic. Schools are not designed to address, much less unravel, psychological dependence on portable supercomputers designed to disrupt and hold our attention. Teachers already have a daunting list of educational priorities. They are not trained counselors, and the school counselors on staff are in woefully short supply.

It’s magical thinking to propose that an epidemic that has doubled rates of mental health issues and changed every aspect of social interaction among millions of people is going to go away when a teacher says, “Guys, always use good judgment with your phones.” We’re not really wrestling with the problem if our response assumes that the average teacher, via a few pithy lessons, can battle a device that has addicted a generation into submission.

Restriction is a far better strategy. These efforts won’t be simple to execute, but the alternative is simply too damaging to students’ learning and well-being. Keep cellphones turned off and out of sight during the school day—and give students and educators a fighting chance to focus, reconnect, and build school cultures that nurture belonging and academic success.

Doug Lemov is founder of Teach Like a Champion and author of the Teach Like a Champion books. He is a co-author of the forthcoming book Reconnect, from which this essay is adapted. He was a managing director of Uncommon Schools, designing and implementing teacher training based on the study of high-performing teachers.

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

Lemov, D. (2022). Take Away Their Cellphones … So we can rewire schools for belonging and achievement. Education Next, 22(4), 8-16.

For more, please see “The Top 20 Education Next Articles of 2023.”