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Feedback Bias? How AI Adjusts Replies Based on Race and Gender, Research Finds
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"content": "\u003cp>The research behind the influential “science of reading” movement was built over decades through federally supported research spanning cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, linguistics and classroom studies.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Education research organizations say a proposed 100-page sweeping overhaul of federal grant rules, which would add a new review by political appointees, could make it harder to produce similar important bodies of evidence in the future. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB) says its proposed changes are intended to strengthen accountability, transparency and oversight of taxpayer-funded grants. The \u003ca href=\"https://www.regulations.gov/docket/OMB-2026-0034\">May 29 proposal\u003c/a> would revise the rules for issuing and overseeing grants, including those awarded by the Department of Education and the National Science Foundation, two major sources of federal education research funding. OMB wants the final rule to take effect by Oct. 1, according to the proposal.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But in letters submitted to OMB on July 13, the deadline for public comment, education research groups argued that some provisions could have unintended and harmful consequences by narrowing the questions researchers study, giving political considerations too much influence in funding decisions and disrupting research already underway. The education groups are asking not only for changes, but for the entire overhaul proposal to be withdrawn. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Objections specific to education research were detailed in three letters from the \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Nat-Acad-Ed-OMB-Comment-Education-and-Science-Associ.pdf\">National Academy of Education\u003c/a>, signed by 19 other education and science organizations; the \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/AERA-response-on-OMB-federal-grantmaking-FINAL.pdf\">American Educational Research Association\u003c/a> (AERA); and the \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/KA-Comments-on-OMB-Rule.pdf\">Knowledge Alliance\u003c/a>, a group representing about 20 organizations that conduct education research.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">\u003cstrong>Could researchers study differences in student outcomes?\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>One of the most significant concerns raised by education researchers involves studies that examine whether educational outcomes differ among student groups.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The proposed rule would prohibit federal funds from supporting research related to what the administration calls “unlawful diversity, equity and inclusion” activities and would restrict funding for what are known as “disparate impact studies.” These analyze whether policies that might appear neutral produce different results for different groups.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The National Academy of Education, in a \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Nat-Acad-Ed-OMB-Comment-Education-and-Science-Associ.pdf\">letter\u003c/a> signed by 19 other education and science organizations, warned that the rule could ban studies examining racial or ethnic achievement gaps, and whether educational interventions help some students more than others.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Whether a reading intervention works differently for English language learners, whether a discipline policy falls more heavily on students of color, whether a gifted education program under-identifies students with disabilities — these are not fringe questions,” the organization wrote. “They are central empirical questions of education policy research.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Researchers also pointed to possible conflicts with existing education laws and programs that require demographic analysis. For example, the roughly $17 billion federal program for high-poverty schools known as Title I requires states and districts to examine student outcomes by race, disability status, income and English learner status in order to identify and support struggling groups of students.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The proposed rule does not explicitly prohibit all such analysis. But researchers argue that the language around diversity, equity and inclusion and “disparate impact” is broad and vague enough to create uncertainty and discourage researchers from proposing important studies.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">\u003cstrong>Who decides what counts as valuable research?\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Education researchers also object to proposed changes that would increase political involvement in grant decisions.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The proposal would require agencies to consider alignment with federal priorities, which could change from administration to administration, and the “national interest,” which is undefined. It also states that political appointees are to review all grants before they are issued. Research organizations argue that this requirement could reduce the role of independent scientific review, when subject experts evaluate proposals based on quality, rigor and feasibility.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Researchers also worry that the Trump administration’s push for “gold standard science” in the proposal is undefined and could favor some methods over others. Education research is not as straightforward as testing the effectiveness of a new drug and often uses a variety of approaches — including surveys, interviews and sophisticated data analysis that attempt to replicate an experiment without randomly assigning students to a program or a style of instruction. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Among other changes, the OMB proposal calls upon agencies to give preference to grant proposals with low overhead costs, which disadvantages large research universities. It would also cut federal funding for attending conferences and publication costs, unless specifically approved. Researchers would be required to provide written justification for each request to receive grant funds, adding to their regulatory paperwork. Education research organizations objected to all of these proposals. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The White House proposal emphasizes supporting research that can yield immediate results or breakthrough innovations. In response, the Knowledge Alliance pointed to the science of reading as an example of why real progress requires patience.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Researchers would be less likely to pursue important long-term questions that are critical to creating the foundational knowledge needed for scientific breakthroughs,” \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/KA-Comments-on-OMB-Rule.pdf\">wrote Rachel Dinkes\u003c/a>, president of the Knowledge Alliance. The science of reading “reflects the accumulation of evidence over many years and across multiple administrations, which has been pivotal to improving student outcomes in reading.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">\u003cstrong>What happens when research is interrupted?\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Education research groups also raised concerns about the consequences of suspending or terminating grants after studies have begun.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The National Academy of Education warned that interruptions could be especially damaging for longitudinal studies, which depend on consistent data collection over time. Losing a year of data collection, the group argued, could permanently damage a study’s value.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Researchers also pointed to effects beyond universities. Federal research grants often fund partnerships between researchers and schools, provide professional learning or pay for interventions for students. The consequences of abrupt terminations are fresh in education researchers’ minds. When the Department of Education terminated dozens of research studies in 2025, for example, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/04/14/nx-s1-5345870/trump-doge-students-disabilities\">1,600 high schoolers with disabilities\u003c/a> lost services. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Restrictions on international research partnerships were another concern. Researchers argued that broad limits on foreign collaborations could affect U.S. participation in international assessments such as PISA and TIMSS, which help policymakers compare U.S. student performance with that of other countries.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The Trump administration’s proposal to overhaul how the federal government awards and oversees grants is drawing fierce opposition from scientific societies and research organizations across many fields, from medicine to climate science. These comments from the education research community are just three among \u003ca href=\"https://www.regulations.gov/docket/OMB-2026-0034\">496,775\u003c/a> that have been submitted. A \u003ca href=\"https://www.medpagetoday.com/washington-watch/washington-watch/122175\">July 14 article in MedPage Today\u003c/a> explained that research organizations intentionally flooded the OMB with comments to respond to, hoping to either slow the rule-making process or create an administrative record that could be used in future lawsuits to challenge the rule. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>OMB did not respond to questions about the objections raised by education researchers.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-education-omb-comments/\">\u003cem>education researchers’ objections to a proposed overhaul of federal grants\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The National Academy of Education, in a \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Nat-Acad-Ed-OMB-Comment-Education-and-Science-Associ.pdf\">letter\u003c/a> signed by 19 other education and science organizations, warned that the rule could ban studies examining racial or ethnic achievement gaps, and whether educational interventions help some students more than others.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“Whether a reading intervention works differently for English language learners, whether a discipline policy falls more heavily on students of color, whether a gifted education program under-identifies students with disabilities — these are not fringe questions,” the organization wrote. “They are central empirical questions of education policy research.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Researchers also pointed to possible conflicts with existing education laws and programs that require demographic analysis. For example, the roughly $17 billion federal program for high-poverty schools known as Title I requires states and districts to examine student outcomes by race, disability status, income and English learner status in order to identify and support struggling groups of students.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Researchers also pointed to possible conflicts with existing education laws and programs that require demographic analysis. For example, the roughly $17 billion federal program for high-poverty schools known as Title I requires states and districts to examine student outcomes by race, disability status, income and English learner status in order to identify and support struggling groups of students.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The proposed rule does not explicitly prohibit all such analysis. But researchers argue that the language around diversity, equity and inclusion and “disparate impact” is broad and vague enough to create uncertainty and discourage researchers from proposing important studies.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The proposed rule does not explicitly prohibit all such analysis. But researchers argue that the language around diversity, equity and inclusion and “disparate impact” is broad and vague enough to create uncertainty and discourage researchers from proposing important studies.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Education researchers also object to proposed changes that would increase political involvement in grant decisions.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The proposal would require agencies to consider alignment with federal priorities, which could change from administration to administration, and the “national interest,” which is undefined. It also states that political appointees are to review all grants before they are issued. Research organizations argue that this requirement could reduce the role of independent scientific review, when subject experts evaluate proposals based on quality, rigor and feasibility.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Researchers also worry that the Trump administration’s push for “gold standard science” in the proposal is undefined and could favor some methods over others. Education research is not as straightforward as testing the effectiveness of a new drug and often uses a variety of approaches — including surveys, interviews and sophisticated data analysis that attempt to replicate an experiment without randomly assigning students to a program or a style of instruction. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Among other changes, the OMB proposal calls upon agencies to give preference to grant proposals with low overhead costs, which disadvantages large research universities. It would also cut federal funding for attending conferences and publication costs, unless specifically approved. Researchers would be required to provide written justification for each request to receive grant funds, adding to their regulatory paperwork. Education research organizations objected to all of these proposals. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Among other changes, the OMB proposal calls upon agencies to give preference to grant proposals with low overhead costs, which disadvantages large research universities. It would also cut federal funding for attending conferences and publication costs, unless specifically approved. Researchers would be required to provide written justification for each request to receive grant funds, adding to their regulatory paperwork. Education research organizations objected to all of these proposals. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The White House proposal emphasizes supporting research that can yield immediate results or breakthrough innovations. In response, the Knowledge Alliance pointed to the science of reading as an example of why real progress requires patience.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“Researchers would be less likely to pursue important long-term questions that are critical to creating the foundational knowledge needed for scientific breakthroughs,” \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/KA-Comments-on-OMB-Rule.pdf\">wrote Rachel Dinkes\u003c/a>, president of the Knowledge Alliance. The science of reading “reflects the accumulation of evidence over many years and across multiple administrations, which has been pivotal to improving student outcomes in reading.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Education research groups also raised concerns about the consequences of suspending or terminating grants after studies have begun.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The National Academy of Education warned that interruptions could be especially damaging for longitudinal studies, which depend on consistent data collection over time. Losing a year of data collection, the group argued, could permanently damage a study’s value.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Researchers also pointed to effects beyond universities. Federal research grants often fund partnerships between researchers and schools, provide professional learning or pay for interventions for students. The consequences of abrupt terminations are fresh in education researchers’ minds. When the Department of Education terminated dozens of research studies in 2025, for example, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/04/14/nx-s1-5345870/trump-doge-students-disabilities\">1,600 high schoolers with disabilities\u003c/a> lost services. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Restrictions on international research partnerships were another concern. Researchers argued that broad limits on foreign collaborations could affect U.S. participation in international assessments such as PISA and TIMSS, which help policymakers compare U.S. student performance with that of other countries.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The Trump administration’s proposal to overhaul how the federal government awards and oversees grants is drawing fierce opposition from scientific societies and research organizations across many fields, from medicine to climate science. These comments from the education research community are just three among \u003ca href=\"https://www.regulations.gov/docket/OMB-2026-0034\">496,775\u003c/a> that have been submitted. A \u003ca href=\"https://www.medpagetoday.com/washington-watch/washington-watch/122175\">July 14 article in MedPage Today\u003c/a> explained that research organizations intentionally flooded the OMB with comments to respond to, hoping to either slow the rule-making process or create an administrative record that could be used in future lawsuits to challenge the rule. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-education-omb-comments/\">\u003cem>education researchers’ objections to a proposed overhaul of federal grants\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "Critics say the White House proposal could curtail studies of achievement gaps and long-term research.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The research behind the influential “science of reading” movement was built over decades through federally supported research spanning cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, linguistics and classroom studies.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Education research organizations say a proposed 100-page sweeping overhaul of federal grant rules, which would add a new review by political appointees, could make it harder to produce similar important bodies of evidence in the future. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB) says its proposed changes are intended to strengthen accountability, transparency and oversight of taxpayer-funded grants. The \u003ca href=\"https://www.regulations.gov/docket/OMB-2026-0034\">May 29 proposal\u003c/a> would revise the rules for issuing and overseeing grants, including those awarded by the Department of Education and the National Science Foundation, two major sources of federal education research funding. OMB wants the final rule to take effect by Oct. 1, according to the proposal.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But in letters submitted to OMB on July 13, the deadline for public comment, education research groups argued that some provisions could have unintended and harmful consequences by narrowing the questions researchers study, giving political considerations too much influence in funding decisions and disrupting research already underway. The education groups are asking not only for changes, but for the entire overhaul proposal to be withdrawn. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Objections specific to education research were detailed in three letters from the \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Nat-Acad-Ed-OMB-Comment-Education-and-Science-Associ.pdf\">National Academy of Education\u003c/a>, signed by 19 other education and science organizations; the \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/AERA-response-on-OMB-federal-grantmaking-FINAL.pdf\">American Educational Research Association\u003c/a> (AERA); and the \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/KA-Comments-on-OMB-Rule.pdf\">Knowledge Alliance\u003c/a>, a group representing about 20 organizations that conduct education research.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">\u003cstrong>Could researchers study differences in student outcomes?\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>One of the most significant concerns raised by education researchers involves studies that examine whether educational outcomes differ among student groups.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The proposed rule would prohibit federal funds from supporting research related to what the administration calls “unlawful diversity, equity and inclusion” activities and would restrict funding for what are known as “disparate impact studies.” These analyze whether policies that might appear neutral produce different results for different groups.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The National Academy of Education, in a \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Nat-Acad-Ed-OMB-Comment-Education-and-Science-Associ.pdf\">letter\u003c/a> signed by 19 other education and science organizations, warned that the rule could ban studies examining racial or ethnic achievement gaps, and whether educational interventions help some students more than others.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Whether a reading intervention works differently for English language learners, whether a discipline policy falls more heavily on students of color, whether a gifted education program under-identifies students with disabilities — these are not fringe questions,” the organization wrote. “They are central empirical questions of education policy research.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Researchers also pointed to possible conflicts with existing education laws and programs that require demographic analysis. For example, the roughly $17 billion federal program for high-poverty schools known as Title I requires states and districts to examine student outcomes by race, disability status, income and English learner status in order to identify and support struggling groups of students.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The proposed rule does not explicitly prohibit all such analysis. But researchers argue that the language around diversity, equity and inclusion and “disparate impact” is broad and vague enough to create uncertainty and discourage researchers from proposing important studies.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">\u003cstrong>Who decides what counts as valuable research?\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Education researchers also object to proposed changes that would increase political involvement in grant decisions.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The proposal would require agencies to consider alignment with federal priorities, which could change from administration to administration, and the “national interest,” which is undefined. It also states that political appointees are to review all grants before they are issued. Research organizations argue that this requirement could reduce the role of independent scientific review, when subject experts evaluate proposals based on quality, rigor and feasibility.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Researchers also worry that the Trump administration’s push for “gold standard science” in the proposal is undefined and could favor some methods over others. Education research is not as straightforward as testing the effectiveness of a new drug and often uses a variety of approaches — including surveys, interviews and sophisticated data analysis that attempt to replicate an experiment without randomly assigning students to a program or a style of instruction. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Among other changes, the OMB proposal calls upon agencies to give preference to grant proposals with low overhead costs, which disadvantages large research universities. It would also cut federal funding for attending conferences and publication costs, unless specifically approved. Researchers would be required to provide written justification for each request to receive grant funds, adding to their regulatory paperwork. Education research organizations objected to all of these proposals. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The White House proposal emphasizes supporting research that can yield immediate results or breakthrough innovations. In response, the Knowledge Alliance pointed to the science of reading as an example of why real progress requires patience.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Researchers would be less likely to pursue important long-term questions that are critical to creating the foundational knowledge needed for scientific breakthroughs,” \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/KA-Comments-on-OMB-Rule.pdf\">wrote Rachel Dinkes\u003c/a>, president of the Knowledge Alliance. The science of reading “reflects the accumulation of evidence over many years and across multiple administrations, which has been pivotal to improving student outcomes in reading.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">\u003cstrong>What happens when research is interrupted?\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Education research groups also raised concerns about the consequences of suspending or terminating grants after studies have begun.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The National Academy of Education warned that interruptions could be especially damaging for longitudinal studies, which depend on consistent data collection over time. Losing a year of data collection, the group argued, could permanently damage a study’s value.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Researchers also pointed to effects beyond universities. Federal research grants often fund partnerships between researchers and schools, provide professional learning or pay for interventions for students. The consequences of abrupt terminations are fresh in education researchers’ minds. When the Department of Education terminated dozens of research studies in 2025, for example, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/04/14/nx-s1-5345870/trump-doge-students-disabilities\">1,600 high schoolers with disabilities\u003c/a> lost services. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Restrictions on international research partnerships were another concern. Researchers argued that broad limits on foreign collaborations could affect U.S. participation in international assessments such as PISA and TIMSS, which help policymakers compare U.S. student performance with that of other countries.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The Trump administration’s proposal to overhaul how the federal government awards and oversees grants is drawing fierce opposition from scientific societies and research organizations across many fields, from medicine to climate science. These comments from the education research community are just three among \u003ca href=\"https://www.regulations.gov/docket/OMB-2026-0034\">496,775\u003c/a> that have been submitted. A \u003ca href=\"https://www.medpagetoday.com/washington-watch/washington-watch/122175\">July 14 article in MedPage Today\u003c/a> explained that research organizations intentionally flooded the OMB with comments to respond to, hoping to either slow the rule-making process or create an administrative record that could be used in future lawsuits to challenge the rule. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>OMB did not respond to questions about the objections raised by education researchers.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Artificial intelligence is often promoted as a way to make teachers more effective by helping them write lesson plans, generate classroom materials and provide feedback to students in seconds. But one of the first randomized trials testing AI in real classrooms found that it can also undermine learning. Students whose teachers were given access to an AI teaching assistant felt less motivated to learn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The damage was especially pronounced among students whose teachers were already weaker instructors, as measured by their performance before the experiment began. Their students also scored lower on standardized final exams, the researchers found.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Teachers, just like students or coders, might be using AI as a crutch,” said Alp Sungu, lead author of the study and an assistant professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. “Instead of doing the actual work, they’re using AI to delegate the task, and that lowers the quality of their teaching.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A draft of the study, “\u003ca href=\"https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7007339\">Generative AI Can Harm Teaching\u003c/a>,” was released online in June and has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. It echoes Sungu’s widely discussed 2024 research on how \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/kids-chatgpt-worse-on-tests/\">students’ use of AI is harming learning\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Students use AI as an answer machine, not as a tool for learning, and therefore it harms learning,” said Sungu. “Here, I think teachers are potentially using AI as a material generating machine for homework, lecture notes, lesson plans, syllabus. Instead of improving their own output, they’re using AI as a replacement with very minimal interaction, and therefore the quality of output is not good enough.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sungu’s experiment, conducted with fellow University of Pennsylvania researchers, including educational psychologist Angela Duckworth, followed 193 teachers and more than 2,800 middle and high school students in a private school chain in Turkey during the spring of 2025.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Teachers were randomly assigned either to receive access to a ChatGPT-based teaching assistant customized to Turkey’s national curriculum or to continue teaching as usual. Over 10 weeks, teachers primarily used the tool to generate lecture notes, assignments and exams.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Students whose teachers had access to the AI tool rated their classes as less enjoyable, less interesting and less important than students in the control group. The decline in intrinsic motivation was modest, but larger among students of those teachers who had already been heavier AI users before the experiment began.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Average academic achievement did not change overall. But among teachers whose students had lower marks before the experiment — a proxy for lower-performing teachers — student achievement and confidence both declined. Academic achievement was measured through externally administered standardized exams, ruling out the possibility that these teachers had different grading standards.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The study cannot explain exactly why teaching quality deteriorated. Researchers did not observe classrooms or analyze the AI-generated materials teachers used. But Sungu suspects that teachers may have been giving up one of their most effective tools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When you start using AI-generated material, you’re losing your personal voice,” said Sungu. “It might be technically good enough, but it doesn’t really carry your own style. If everything is very uniform, it just becomes a bit more boring.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One possible explanation for the weaker academic performance among students of low-performing teachers, Sungu said, is that stronger teachers treat AI output as a first draft, revising and adapting it to their classrooms. Weaker teachers, he suspects, may be more likely to use AI-generated material as is.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This study is not a clean comparison between teaching with and without AI. Teachers in the control group were free to use other AI tools, making this a comparison between access to a customized AI assistant and whatever teachers chose to do on their own. If anything, Sungu said, these findings might be understating the risks of teachers relying heavily on AI-generated materials.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, Sungu cautions that it would be a mistake to conclude that “AI is terrible and will ruin education.” He sees a different lesson: Access to AI technology alone does not improve teaching.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The challenge is to help teachers use AI in ways that preserve human judgment and creativity. That will require teacher training programs, guardrails and better interfaces.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“As of right now, how teachers are using it organically, there is something to be worried about,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sungu says he personally uses AI in his university teaching to create interactive games and polls that would otherwise take too long to build. “When I first get the output, it just looks great,” he said. “And then, if I don’t immerse myself in it, the examples, the numbers don’t make sense. I end up spending an equal amount of time to improve the output or calibrate it to my class.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s not a time saver,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-ai-in-teaching/\">\u003cem>AI in teaching\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sungu’s experiment, conducted with fellow University of Pennsylvania researchers, including educational psychologist Angela Duckworth, followed 193 teachers and more than 2,800 middle and high school students in a private school chain in Turkey during the spring of 2025.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Teachers were randomly assigned either to receive access to a ChatGPT-based teaching assistant customized to Turkey’s national curriculum or to continue teaching as usual. Over 10 weeks, teachers primarily used the tool to generate lecture notes, assignments and exams.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Students whose teachers had access to the AI tool rated their classes as less enjoyable, less interesting and less important than students in the control group. The decline in intrinsic motivation was modest, but larger among students of those teachers who had already been heavier AI users before the experiment began.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Average academic achievement did not change overall. But among teachers whose students had lower marks before the experiment — a proxy for lower-performing teachers — student achievement and confidence both declined. Academic achievement was measured through externally administered standardized exams, ruling out the possibility that these teachers had different grading standards.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The study cannot explain exactly why teaching quality deteriorated. Researchers did not observe classrooms or analyze the AI-generated materials teachers used. But Sungu suspects that teachers may have been giving up one of their most effective tools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When you start using AI-generated material, you’re losing your personal voice,” said Sungu. “It might be technically good enough, but it doesn’t really carry your own style. If everything is very uniform, it just becomes a bit more boring.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One possible explanation for the weaker academic performance among students of low-performing teachers, Sungu said, is that stronger teachers treat AI output as a first draft, revising and adapting it to their classrooms. Weaker teachers, he suspects, may be more likely to use AI-generated material as is.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This study is not a clean comparison between teaching with and without AI. Teachers in the control group were free to use other AI tools, making this a comparison between access to a customized AI assistant and whatever teachers chose to do on their own. If anything, Sungu said, these findings might be understating the risks of teachers relying heavily on AI-generated materials.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, Sungu cautions that it would be a mistake to conclude that “AI is terrible and will ruin education.” He sees a different lesson: Access to AI technology alone does not improve teaching.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The challenge is to help teachers use AI in ways that preserve human judgment and creativity. That will require teacher training programs, guardrails and better interfaces.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“As of right now, how teachers are using it organically, there is something to be worried about,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sungu says he personally uses AI in his university teaching to create interactive games and polls that would otherwise take too long to build. “When I first get the output, it just looks great,” he said. “And then, if I don’t immerse myself in it, the examples, the numbers don’t make sense. I end up spending an equal amount of time to improve the output or calibrate it to my class.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s not a time saver,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-ai-in-teaching/\">\u003cem>AI in teaching\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003ca href=\"https://url.us.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/UYcjCxklQwfPWYpKI8fLfy3nUU?domain=hechingerreport.org\">screen time\u003c/a> was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/earlychildhood/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletter\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When Jodi Carreon’s son returned to school full time after the pandemic, she expected teachers would roll back the use of the laptops they had relied on while students were home. But soon after her son started second grade, Carreon realized he was still using a Chromebook throughout the day.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then the teacher sent a note home: Her son was playing Minecraft and watching YouTube instead of doing his work. Could Carreon urge him to focus?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In my mind, I was like, ‘What do you expect? He’s 7 years old. Of course he’s going to want to play games,’” said Carreon, whose experience prompted her to later create the California-based advocacy group San Marcos Unified School District Parents for Intentional Tech.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Adults have a hard time and struggle to pay attention on devices. It’s unrealistic to expect a child to do so,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For years, districts have promoted one-to-one devices as a way to boost learning, provide tailored lessons for differing academic needs and offer enrichment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But parents and teachers say even the youngest students are finding ways past any blocks adults try to put on school devices to play games, watch videos and message friends on school-issued devices.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Interviews with more than 45 parents, educators and experts across the country, as well as recent surveys with parents and educators, describe the many ways elementary students are using devices in class: watching YouTube videos of \u003ca href=\"https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bpUt2jebkLeBUJbe76JizxhOc5OdGqUH/view\">soccer matches\u003c/a> or playing games featuring \u003ca href=\"https://www.abc4.com/news/local-news/student-plays-five-nights-at-epsteins-game-at-school/\">Jeffrey Epstein\u003c/a> or a \u003ca href=\"https://www.independent.com/2026/04/01/santa-barbara-students-exposed-to-trauma-on-school-tablets/\">“corpse-like grandmother”\u003c/a> who chases players with a bloody baseball bat. Third graders have used Google Docs to compile inappropriate memes and images and message each other throughout the school day, and a second grader searched for a \u003ca href=\"https://www.cbsnews.com/baltimore/news/roye-williams-elementary-child-searches-explicit-content-school-internet-policies/?fbclid=IwY2xjawRhxu9leHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETE1eUNXa3BWSkVCM1lXQXY2c3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHqeYUVWnHob5-G53rxdPiQpPnOLAZPe4LPnLU3RojNIpJiAIBqBy-aNzneWO_aem_yJyP4e4uuU307XNOdKJGww\">sexually explicit term\u003c/a> and was shown a Wikipedia page — with pictures.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_66433\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 890px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-66433\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/07/EC-screen-distraction-2.jpg\" alt=\"Screen grab of an online game\" width=\"890\" height=\"617\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/07/EC-screen-distraction-2.jpg 890w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/07/EC-screen-distraction-2-160x111.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/07/EC-screen-distraction-2-768x532.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 890px) 100vw, 890px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Parents across the country have reported their students playing a game called “Five Nights At Epstein Island” online, in which players try to survive several nights on Jeffrey Epstein’s island.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>All of this occurred in districts that had filters, safeguards and systems in place meant to block such content.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Related: Young children have unique needs and providing the right care can be a challenge. Our free \u003c/strong>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/earlychildhood/\">\u003cstrong>early childhood education newsletter\u003c/strong>\u003c/a>\u003cstrong> tracks the issues\u003c/strong>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bryn Prusky, a second grader in Pennsylvania’s Lower Merion Township, said her friends “just drift off into a video game and start doing something else that they’re not supposed to be doing” instead of classwork. It isn’t hard to find the games — they’re usually “just there,” she said, already downloaded on the computers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some parents and teachers are now asking if the benefits of classroom tech are worth the costs in distraction and energy spent policing its use.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The problem is in the way the machine works. As soon as you give me unfettered access to programs and the internet, … I’m going to go right down that path, and learning goes away,” said Jared Cooney Horvath, a neuroscientist and author of “The Digital Delusion,” which argues that educational technology harms learning. “It doesn’t matter the size of the screen or the fact that the school bought it and stamped ‘educational’ on it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the New York City borough of Brooklyn, fourth grade teacher Martina Meijer only gives her students Chromebook time during small group reading rotations. But within minutes of sitting down with a computer, some of her students are navigating to video sites. Some wear headphones to listen to audiobooks, which also blocks Meijer from knowing exactly what they’re doing when she’s working with another group.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I always try to monitor what they’re looking at,” Meijer said, “but my eyes can’t be everywhere.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kids have been off task and distracted in school long before Chromebooks or iPads existed. But some parents and experts say devices only make it easier to engage in non-academic, inappropriate and even dangerous content.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This is especially challenging for young children whose brains, self-regulation skills and self-control are still developing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Let’s say you hand a child a pen and you’re like, ‘This pen can write, it can turn into a magic wand, it can turn into a knife, it can fly, it can change colors. But only use it as a pen, OK?” said Deanie Eichenstein, a California-based clinical psychologist who is one of the leaders of the advocacy group Schools Beyond Screens. “It’s silly.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>John Bellis, the parent of a preschooler and a third grader in Lower Merion Township, said his son got in trouble earlier this year after he successfully guessed a classmate’s password, logged into one of the student’s online accounts and changed the profile picture to a poop emoji.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s not like they’re doing crime, but they’re goofing around and they’re not learning,” Bellis said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many teachers say devices have added challenges to their classrooms. Fifty-six percent of more than 1,200 educators surveyed \u003ca href=\"https://www.edweek.org/technology/chromebooks-or-cellphones-which-are-the-bigger-classroom-distraction/2025/05\">by Education Week\u003c/a> last year reported that off-task behavior on computers is a “major source of distraction that cuts into students’ learning time.” Teachers said computers and tablets are more distracting than cellphones, which more than 20 states have banned in schools. And 70 percent of \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/upshot/teachers-survey-chromebooks-class.html\">350\u003c/a>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/upshot/teachers-survey-chromebooks-class.html\"> educators\u003c/a> surveyed by The New York Times last year said school-issued devices distract from learning and engagement in class.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One North Carolina district found in an audit of student screen use, screen time spent on distraction added up to \u003ca href=\"https://archive.is/WK6bF\">31 lost instructional days\u003c/a> each year, according to The Wall Street Journal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Teaching in an era of devices has been frustrating, said Meijer. “It’s reducing the children’s stamina, the children’s attention span and creating this dopamine hit need.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Related: \u003c/strong>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/ipads-in-kindergarten-youtube-videos-at-snack-time-parents-are-pushing-back-on-screen-time-in-the-early-grades/\">\u003cstrong>IPads in kindergarten, YouTube videos at snack time: Parents are pushing back on screens in the early grades \u003c/strong>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In classrooms across the country, it’s largely up to teachers to monitor devices. Many say it’s become all-consuming.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The onus is always put on the shoulders of the teachers,” said Molly Esquivel, who teaches sixth grade in California. “You need to monitor the kids, you better be watching them, you better be surveilling them,” she added. “You introduced this problem, and the problem is now the teachers’ problem.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Teachers don’t always have a choice, however: Some are required to prepare their students to take state tests on computers, and other districts are locked into contracts with ed tech vendors that mandate a certain level of use.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Districts vary in the degree they lock down student computers. Some districts, for example, have fully blocked access to sites like YouTube, while others allow it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some districts have adopted monitoring programs that allow teachers to see student screens and get notified when a student is off task. Parents say even when it’s available, however, not all teachers use it. In Westchester County, New York, parent Lucy Collins said her oldest child, who is 11, knows which of his teachers use monitoring software and which don’t. Her son regularly tells her how tempted he is to e-mail friends, play games and watch YouTube while at school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Even if my kid was more focused, if you look up and see someone else on a laptop on something fun or distracting, that’s a distraction to him as well,” Collins said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even the creators of blocking programs are constantly needing to evolve in response to determined children. Brian Larkin, the director of product management for the blocking program GoGuardian, said students are using proxy servers to bypass filters and blocks, and are hiding games inside of school-appropriate websites.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That’s how bad it’s gotten,” Larkin said. The company recently started using artificial intelligence to proactively block those workarounds for districts and give educators more ways to limit content.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Related: PROOF POINTS: \u003c/strong>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/kindergarteners-who-may-become-heavy-screen-users/\">\u003cstrong>10,000-student study points to kindergartners who may become heavy screen users\u003c/strong>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In recent months, motivated by concerns over device use, wasted time and these effects of screen time, some districts have moved away almost entirely from technology, especially in the earliest grades. Los Angeles Unified was the largest to do so in April, but others have taken similar steps to completely remove or cut back on devices in class, including districts in \u003ca href=\"https://www.chalkbeat.org/2026/03/25/screen-free-school-in-michigan-banned-chromebooks-to-help-students-read/\">Michigan\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://www.wtae.com/article/canon-mcmillan-schools-end-chromebook-use-for-youngest-students/71223113\">Pennsylvania\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.fourstateshomepage.com/news/local/oklahoma-school-district-ditching-chromebooks-for-traditional-classroom-methods/\">Oklahoma\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sixteen states have introduced legislation focused on evaluating ed tech products and setting limits for \u003ca href=\"https://www.distractionfreeschools.com\">students’ screen time\u003c/a>, including Alabama, which created screen time rules for early childhood classrooms, and \u003ca href=\"https://documents.house.mo.gov/billtracking/bills261/sumpdf/HB2230P.pdf\">Missouri\u003c/a>, which sought to require districts to set limits for screen time in elementary school. And in May, the U.S. surgeon general \u003ca href=\"https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/us-surgeon-generals-advisory-warning-on-the-harms-of-screen-use.pdf\">issued a warning\u003c/a> about screen time and encouraged schools to limit screen use to “enable distraction-free teaching.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But such moves are not universal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_66435\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-66435\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/07/EC-screen-distraction-3-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"People at a local government meeting\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1707\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/07/EC-screen-distraction-3-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/07/EC-screen-distraction-3-2000x1333.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/07/EC-screen-distraction-3-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/07/EC-screen-distraction-3-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/07/EC-screen-distraction-3-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/07/EC-screen-distraction-3-2048x1365.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Members of the Lower Merion Board of School Directors speak with a student at a school board meeting on Monday, May 11, 2026, in Ardmore, Pa. \u003ccite>(AP Photo/Joe Lamberti)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In Lower Merion Township — despite widespread parent advocacy and a petition signed by more than 600 parents in a district of 8,600 students — school leaders recently rescinded a policy that allows parents to opt out of the system’s one-to-one device program. “Our curriculum is delivered the way it’s delivered, and part of that curriculum is done with electronic devices,” said Frank Ranelli, the district superintendent, at an \u003ca href=\"https://whyy.org/articles/lower-merion-chromebook-students-parents-home-school/\">April school board policy meeting\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(Ranelli later \u003ca href=\"https://www.lmsd.org/about-lmsd/newsroom/article/~board/district-information/post/information-about-technology-and-device-use-in-lmsd\">told parents\u003c/a> the district would review the one-to-one policy in elementary school, strengthen web filters and provide teachers with “real-time control and oversight of student technology use.” One \u003ca href=\"https://6abc.com/post/chromebook-controversy-continues-lower-merion-school-board-votes-change-tech-policy/19306037/\">proposal\u003c/a> under consideration would remove devices in grades K-2)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The district already has a shaky history with technology: More than 10 years ago, the school board was sued for \u003ca href=\"https://time.com/7275031/spy-high-true-story-prime-video/\">spying on students at home through cameras on district-issued\u003c/a> laptops.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A spokesperson declined to answer questions about the district’s approach to technology or its decision to revisit its opt-out policy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To be sure, teachers say there are some benefits of devices in class. Assigning work on laptops and tablets is a way to guarantee kids will be quiet and kept busy while they attend to the needs of other students, especially when classes are large.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Erica Boyce, an elementary special education teacher in New York, said her students were especially excited to use a reading app provided by her district.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They really wanted to read, they were enjoying reading,” Boyce said. She said having students take assessments on devices saves her time on grading, allows her to see what she needs to reteach and helps her group students for mini lessons and extra help.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Related: \u003c/strong>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/biting-kicking-teachers-classroom-misbehavior/\">\u003cstrong>Biting, kicking, wandering the classroom: Teachers say there’s a rise in misbehavior among even the littlest kids\u003c/strong>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Michelle Rogers, an elementary reading intervention teacher in California who has taught kindergarten, first and fifth grades, has found devices are helpful with tracking data and giving children work at their level. But she thinks schools need a healthier balance and should bring back computer labs so device use is more intentional. “I have seen when it is not in a structured environment, it’s abused,” said Rogers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What could help, Rogers added, is more education for teachers. “We need better training, better guidelines and better knowledge of how to use all the apps in a way that’s going to be beneficial,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some proponents of devices in schools caution that states and districts shouldn’t move too fast and establish blanket policy changes that completely remove devices from schools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I just want to sort of help us all take a deep breath and not throw the baby out with the bathwater,” said Tracy Weeks, who leads education policy and strategy at the education technology company Instructure. “We want all children to be safe,” she added. “We want to put them in the best situation to learn,” but that doesn’t necessarily mean “arbitrary” time limits or bans on screens, she said. Instead, districts should prioritize ed tech that supports learning and show how they are keeping children safe, she added.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In California, Kelly May-Vollmar, superintendent of Desert Sands Unified School District and the board chair-elect for the Consortium for School Networking, a group for school ed tech leaders, said that more “structured, intentional” usage of tech in school can help cut down on distractions. “Inside the classroom, if there’s a problem, it’s not a screen problem, it’s a design problem,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If districts are going to keep devices, many parents want changes — less time on screens, increased protections, clear policies about screen time and a better sense of how their children are using the tools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Amy Swers, a Maryland parent of three, only found out her son was spending time gaming at his Montgomery County school when she reached out to his teachers for feedback near the end of sixth grade. (The district did not respond to multiple requests for comment).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When Swers asked if she could be notified when her son was distracted in class, the teacher responded that “contacting parents about gaming would mean we’d be sending emails all day every day.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Swers was floored. “Our school district, they’ve thrown their hands up and it’s like a hydra, it’s a three-headed monster that they don’t have any control over.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Contact staff writer \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/author/jackie-mader/\">\u003cem>Jackie Mader\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> at 212-678-3562 or \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"mailto:mader@hechingerreport.org\">\u003cem>mader@hechingerreport.org\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about screen time was produced by \u003c/em>The Hechinger Report\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/earlychildhood/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletter\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "Schools try to block kids from accessing dangerous content and games online but often fall short. Parents and educators say if devices are here to stay, districts need to have more control, transparency.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003ca href=\"https://url.us.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/UYcjCxklQwfPWYpKI8fLfy3nUU?domain=hechingerreport.org\">screen time\u003c/a> was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/earlychildhood/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletter\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When Jodi Carreon’s son returned to school full time after the pandemic, she expected teachers would roll back the use of the laptops they had relied on while students were home. But soon after her son started second grade, Carreon realized he was still using a Chromebook throughout the day.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then the teacher sent a note home: Her son was playing Minecraft and watching YouTube instead of doing his work. Could Carreon urge him to focus?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In my mind, I was like, ‘What do you expect? He’s 7 years old. Of course he’s going to want to play games,’” said Carreon, whose experience prompted her to later create the California-based advocacy group San Marcos Unified School District Parents for Intentional Tech.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Adults have a hard time and struggle to pay attention on devices. It’s unrealistic to expect a child to do so,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For years, districts have promoted one-to-one devices as a way to boost learning, provide tailored lessons for differing academic needs and offer enrichment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But parents and teachers say even the youngest students are finding ways past any blocks adults try to put on school devices to play games, watch videos and message friends on school-issued devices.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Interviews with more than 45 parents, educators and experts across the country, as well as recent surveys with parents and educators, describe the many ways elementary students are using devices in class: watching YouTube videos of \u003ca href=\"https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bpUt2jebkLeBUJbe76JizxhOc5OdGqUH/view\">soccer matches\u003c/a> or playing games featuring \u003ca href=\"https://www.abc4.com/news/local-news/student-plays-five-nights-at-epsteins-game-at-school/\">Jeffrey Epstein\u003c/a> or a \u003ca href=\"https://www.independent.com/2026/04/01/santa-barbara-students-exposed-to-trauma-on-school-tablets/\">“corpse-like grandmother”\u003c/a> who chases players with a bloody baseball bat. Third graders have used Google Docs to compile inappropriate memes and images and message each other throughout the school day, and a second grader searched for a \u003ca href=\"https://www.cbsnews.com/baltimore/news/roye-williams-elementary-child-searches-explicit-content-school-internet-policies/?fbclid=IwY2xjawRhxu9leHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETE1eUNXa3BWSkVCM1lXQXY2c3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHqeYUVWnHob5-G53rxdPiQpPnOLAZPe4LPnLU3RojNIpJiAIBqBy-aNzneWO_aem_yJyP4e4uuU307XNOdKJGww\">sexually explicit term\u003c/a> and was shown a Wikipedia page — with pictures.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_66433\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 890px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-66433\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/07/EC-screen-distraction-2.jpg\" alt=\"Screen grab of an online game\" width=\"890\" height=\"617\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/07/EC-screen-distraction-2.jpg 890w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/07/EC-screen-distraction-2-160x111.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/07/EC-screen-distraction-2-768x532.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 890px) 100vw, 890px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Parents across the country have reported their students playing a game called “Five Nights At Epstein Island” online, in which players try to survive several nights on Jeffrey Epstein’s island.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>All of this occurred in districts that had filters, safeguards and systems in place meant to block such content.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Related: Young children have unique needs and providing the right care can be a challenge. Our free \u003c/strong>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/earlychildhood/\">\u003cstrong>early childhood education newsletter\u003c/strong>\u003c/a>\u003cstrong> tracks the issues\u003c/strong>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bryn Prusky, a second grader in Pennsylvania’s Lower Merion Township, said her friends “just drift off into a video game and start doing something else that they’re not supposed to be doing” instead of classwork. It isn’t hard to find the games — they’re usually “just there,” she said, already downloaded on the computers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some parents and teachers are now asking if the benefits of classroom tech are worth the costs in distraction and energy spent policing its use.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The problem is in the way the machine works. As soon as you give me unfettered access to programs and the internet, … I’m going to go right down that path, and learning goes away,” said Jared Cooney Horvath, a neuroscientist and author of “The Digital Delusion,” which argues that educational technology harms learning. “It doesn’t matter the size of the screen or the fact that the school bought it and stamped ‘educational’ on it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the New York City borough of Brooklyn, fourth grade teacher Martina Meijer only gives her students Chromebook time during small group reading rotations. But within minutes of sitting down with a computer, some of her students are navigating to video sites. Some wear headphones to listen to audiobooks, which also blocks Meijer from knowing exactly what they’re doing when she’s working with another group.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I always try to monitor what they’re looking at,” Meijer said, “but my eyes can’t be everywhere.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kids have been off task and distracted in school long before Chromebooks or iPads existed. But some parents and experts say devices only make it easier to engage in non-academic, inappropriate and even dangerous content.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This is especially challenging for young children whose brains, self-regulation skills and self-control are still developing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Let’s say you hand a child a pen and you’re like, ‘This pen can write, it can turn into a magic wand, it can turn into a knife, it can fly, it can change colors. But only use it as a pen, OK?” said Deanie Eichenstein, a California-based clinical psychologist who is one of the leaders of the advocacy group Schools Beyond Screens. “It’s silly.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>John Bellis, the parent of a preschooler and a third grader in Lower Merion Township, said his son got in trouble earlier this year after he successfully guessed a classmate’s password, logged into one of the student’s online accounts and changed the profile picture to a poop emoji.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s not like they’re doing crime, but they’re goofing around and they’re not learning,” Bellis said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many teachers say devices have added challenges to their classrooms. Fifty-six percent of more than 1,200 educators surveyed \u003ca href=\"https://www.edweek.org/technology/chromebooks-or-cellphones-which-are-the-bigger-classroom-distraction/2025/05\">by Education Week\u003c/a> last year reported that off-task behavior on computers is a “major source of distraction that cuts into students’ learning time.” Teachers said computers and tablets are more distracting than cellphones, which more than 20 states have banned in schools. And 70 percent of \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/upshot/teachers-survey-chromebooks-class.html\">350\u003c/a>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/upshot/teachers-survey-chromebooks-class.html\"> educators\u003c/a> surveyed by The New York Times last year said school-issued devices distract from learning and engagement in class.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One North Carolina district found in an audit of student screen use, screen time spent on distraction added up to \u003ca href=\"https://archive.is/WK6bF\">31 lost instructional days\u003c/a> each year, according to The Wall Street Journal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Teaching in an era of devices has been frustrating, said Meijer. “It’s reducing the children’s stamina, the children’s attention span and creating this dopamine hit need.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Related: \u003c/strong>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/ipads-in-kindergarten-youtube-videos-at-snack-time-parents-are-pushing-back-on-screen-time-in-the-early-grades/\">\u003cstrong>IPads in kindergarten, YouTube videos at snack time: Parents are pushing back on screens in the early grades \u003c/strong>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In classrooms across the country, it’s largely up to teachers to monitor devices. Many say it’s become all-consuming.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The onus is always put on the shoulders of the teachers,” said Molly Esquivel, who teaches sixth grade in California. “You need to monitor the kids, you better be watching them, you better be surveilling them,” she added. “You introduced this problem, and the problem is now the teachers’ problem.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Teachers don’t always have a choice, however: Some are required to prepare their students to take state tests on computers, and other districts are locked into contracts with ed tech vendors that mandate a certain level of use.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Districts vary in the degree they lock down student computers. Some districts, for example, have fully blocked access to sites like YouTube, while others allow it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some districts have adopted monitoring programs that allow teachers to see student screens and get notified when a student is off task. Parents say even when it’s available, however, not all teachers use it. In Westchester County, New York, parent Lucy Collins said her oldest child, who is 11, knows which of his teachers use monitoring software and which don’t. Her son regularly tells her how tempted he is to e-mail friends, play games and watch YouTube while at school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Even if my kid was more focused, if you look up and see someone else on a laptop on something fun or distracting, that’s a distraction to him as well,” Collins said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even the creators of blocking programs are constantly needing to evolve in response to determined children. Brian Larkin, the director of product management for the blocking program GoGuardian, said students are using proxy servers to bypass filters and blocks, and are hiding games inside of school-appropriate websites.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That’s how bad it’s gotten,” Larkin said. The company recently started using artificial intelligence to proactively block those workarounds for districts and give educators more ways to limit content.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Related: PROOF POINTS: \u003c/strong>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/kindergarteners-who-may-become-heavy-screen-users/\">\u003cstrong>10,000-student study points to kindergartners who may become heavy screen users\u003c/strong>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In recent months, motivated by concerns over device use, wasted time and these effects of screen time, some districts have moved away almost entirely from technology, especially in the earliest grades. Los Angeles Unified was the largest to do so in April, but others have taken similar steps to completely remove or cut back on devices in class, including districts in \u003ca href=\"https://www.chalkbeat.org/2026/03/25/screen-free-school-in-michigan-banned-chromebooks-to-help-students-read/\">Michigan\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://www.wtae.com/article/canon-mcmillan-schools-end-chromebook-use-for-youngest-students/71223113\">Pennsylvania\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.fourstateshomepage.com/news/local/oklahoma-school-district-ditching-chromebooks-for-traditional-classroom-methods/\">Oklahoma\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sixteen states have introduced legislation focused on evaluating ed tech products and setting limits for \u003ca href=\"https://www.distractionfreeschools.com\">students’ screen time\u003c/a>, including Alabama, which created screen time rules for early childhood classrooms, and \u003ca href=\"https://documents.house.mo.gov/billtracking/bills261/sumpdf/HB2230P.pdf\">Missouri\u003c/a>, which sought to require districts to set limits for screen time in elementary school. And in May, the U.S. surgeon general \u003ca href=\"https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/us-surgeon-generals-advisory-warning-on-the-harms-of-screen-use.pdf\">issued a warning\u003c/a> about screen time and encouraged schools to limit screen use to “enable distraction-free teaching.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But such moves are not universal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_66435\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-66435\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/07/EC-screen-distraction-3-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"People at a local government meeting\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1707\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/07/EC-screen-distraction-3-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/07/EC-screen-distraction-3-2000x1333.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/07/EC-screen-distraction-3-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/07/EC-screen-distraction-3-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/07/EC-screen-distraction-3-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/07/EC-screen-distraction-3-2048x1365.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Members of the Lower Merion Board of School Directors speak with a student at a school board meeting on Monday, May 11, 2026, in Ardmore, Pa. \u003ccite>(AP Photo/Joe Lamberti)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In Lower Merion Township — despite widespread parent advocacy and a petition signed by more than 600 parents in a district of 8,600 students — school leaders recently rescinded a policy that allows parents to opt out of the system’s one-to-one device program. “Our curriculum is delivered the way it’s delivered, and part of that curriculum is done with electronic devices,” said Frank Ranelli, the district superintendent, at an \u003ca href=\"https://whyy.org/articles/lower-merion-chromebook-students-parents-home-school/\">April school board policy meeting\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(Ranelli later \u003ca href=\"https://www.lmsd.org/about-lmsd/newsroom/article/~board/district-information/post/information-about-technology-and-device-use-in-lmsd\">told parents\u003c/a> the district would review the one-to-one policy in elementary school, strengthen web filters and provide teachers with “real-time control and oversight of student technology use.” One \u003ca href=\"https://6abc.com/post/chromebook-controversy-continues-lower-merion-school-board-votes-change-tech-policy/19306037/\">proposal\u003c/a> under consideration would remove devices in grades K-2)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The district already has a shaky history with technology: More than 10 years ago, the school board was sued for \u003ca href=\"https://time.com/7275031/spy-high-true-story-prime-video/\">spying on students at home through cameras on district-issued\u003c/a> laptops.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A spokesperson declined to answer questions about the district’s approach to technology or its decision to revisit its opt-out policy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To be sure, teachers say there are some benefits of devices in class. Assigning work on laptops and tablets is a way to guarantee kids will be quiet and kept busy while they attend to the needs of other students, especially when classes are large.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Erica Boyce, an elementary special education teacher in New York, said her students were especially excited to use a reading app provided by her district.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They really wanted to read, they were enjoying reading,” Boyce said. She said having students take assessments on devices saves her time on grading, allows her to see what she needs to reteach and helps her group students for mini lessons and extra help.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Related: \u003c/strong>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/biting-kicking-teachers-classroom-misbehavior/\">\u003cstrong>Biting, kicking, wandering the classroom: Teachers say there’s a rise in misbehavior among even the littlest kids\u003c/strong>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Michelle Rogers, an elementary reading intervention teacher in California who has taught kindergarten, first and fifth grades, has found devices are helpful with tracking data and giving children work at their level. But she thinks schools need a healthier balance and should bring back computer labs so device use is more intentional. “I have seen when it is not in a structured environment, it’s abused,” said Rogers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What could help, Rogers added, is more education for teachers. “We need better training, better guidelines and better knowledge of how to use all the apps in a way that’s going to be beneficial,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some proponents of devices in schools caution that states and districts shouldn’t move too fast and establish blanket policy changes that completely remove devices from schools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I just want to sort of help us all take a deep breath and not throw the baby out with the bathwater,” said Tracy Weeks, who leads education policy and strategy at the education technology company Instructure. “We want all children to be safe,” she added. “We want to put them in the best situation to learn,” but that doesn’t necessarily mean “arbitrary” time limits or bans on screens, she said. Instead, districts should prioritize ed tech that supports learning and show how they are keeping children safe, she added.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In California, Kelly May-Vollmar, superintendent of Desert Sands Unified School District and the board chair-elect for the Consortium for School Networking, a group for school ed tech leaders, said that more “structured, intentional” usage of tech in school can help cut down on distractions. “Inside the classroom, if there’s a problem, it’s not a screen problem, it’s a design problem,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If districts are going to keep devices, many parents want changes — less time on screens, increased protections, clear policies about screen time and a better sense of how their children are using the tools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Amy Swers, a Maryland parent of three, only found out her son was spending time gaming at his Montgomery County school when she reached out to his teachers for feedback near the end of sixth grade. (The district did not respond to multiple requests for comment).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When Swers asked if she could be notified when her son was distracted in class, the teacher responded that “contacting parents about gaming would mean we’d be sending emails all day every day.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Swers was floored. “Our school district, they’ve thrown their hands up and it’s like a hydra, it’s a three-headed monster that they don’t have any control over.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Contact staff writer \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/author/jackie-mader/\">\u003cem>Jackie Mader\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> at 212-678-3562 or \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"mailto:mader@hechingerreport.org\">\u003cem>mader@hechingerreport.org\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about screen time was produced by \u003c/em>The Hechinger Report\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/earlychildhood/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletter\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>When ChatGPT arrived in late 2022, educators quickly asked whether students would use artificial intelligence to cheat, learn or simply get through homework more efficiently. Evidence is beginning to point toward a troubling answer: Many students appear to be completing assignments faster while learning less from them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This conclusion comes from one of the largest studies of how generative AI is changing student behavior and academic skills. Sina Rismanchian, a doctoral student at the University of California, Irvine, partnered with researchers at McGraw Hill to \u003ca href=\"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.21629\">analyze millions of student interactions with ALEKS\u003c/a>, an online math platform used by more than four million students a year, from fifth grade through college. Because ALEKS includes both low-stakes practice problems and college placement tests, the researchers were able to compare how students behaved and performed before and after ChatGPT’s arrival.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To isolate AI’s effects, the researchers compared two kinds of math problems that differ in how easily students can outsource them to AI: word problems and graphing problems.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Word problems can be copied and pasted directly into AI chatbots for instant answers. Graphing problems are far more cumbersome. A student would need to upload a screenshot and still recreate the graph inside ALEKS using its tools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After ChatGPT’s launch, student behavior and performance on the two types of problems began to diverge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Beginning in early 2023, students started spending less time on word problems while continuing to spend about the same amount of time on graphing problems. The gap widened every quarter. By the end of the study period, near the end of 2025, average time spent on word problems had fallen 31 percent among high school students and 27 percent among college students — from about four minutes per word problem to less than three. (Middle school students showed only a modest decline of 9 percent, and fifth graders showed essentially none.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The researchers believe those averages are being pulled downward by some students who spend only seconds on word problems because they’re using AI to answer them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The same pattern appeared in college placement tests. When the exams were taken without supervision, students spent much less time on word problems after ChatGPT’s release. During proctored exams, the time spent on word problems returned to historical norms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But time is only half the story. The more troubling finding is what happened to learning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many colleges allow incoming students to retake placement tests after practicing more math in ALEKS, giving them a chance to qualify for a higher-level course. Before ChatGPT, that practice generally paid off. After ChatGPT, students answered more word problems correctly during unsupervised practice sessions but performed substantially worse on those same kinds of problems when they later took a proctored placement test.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Historically, students answered about 80 percent of these word problems correctly on supervised placement tests. After ChatGPT’s introduction, that fell to about 60 percent — a roughly 25 percent reduction in the odds of answering a word problem correctly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Performance on graphing problems, by contrast, did not decline.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>After ChatGPT’s release, students performed worse on word problems (AI-susceptible) during proctored exams, but answer more word problems correctly in nonproctored settings\u003cbr>\n\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_66423\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 512px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-66423 size-full\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/07/Rismanchian-et-al.png\" alt=\"Graph showing score gaps in exams. \" width=\"512\" height=\"186\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/07/Rismanchian-et-al.png 512w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/07/Rismanchian-et-al-160x58.png 160w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 512px) 100vw, 512px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The dotted line marks the public release of ChatGPT. Source: Figure 4, Rismanchian et al “Faster Completion, Less Learning: Generative AI Reduced Study Time on Math Problems and the Knowledge They Build,” June 2026 preprint.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>If students’ math skills had generally deteriorated because of pandemic learning loss, weaker high school preparation or digital distraction, graphing performance should have deteriorated too. It didn’t.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The study cannot definitively prove that students were using AI. The researchers couldn’t see what else was happening on students’ screens outside of ALEKS. But it’s difficult to think of another explanation. The changes appeared only in problems that are easy to outsource to AI, disappeared under supervision and grew steadily over nearly three years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What makes me nervous is that it’s not only about the word problems,” Rismanchian told me. “This cognitive surrender might be going on in writing, science, everything.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The paper, “\u003ca href=\"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.21629\">Faster Completion, Less Learning\u003c/a>,” was released in June 2026 as a working paper and has not yet been peer reviewed. Like any single study, it doesn’t settle the questions of how much students are using AI in their schoolwork, whether it’s harming learning and by how much. But it joins a growing body of evidence that generative AI is causing students to skip the brain work that leads to learning, and that this “cognitive surrender” is becoming commonplace.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A randomized experiment in Turkey found that high school students who used AI to help them study math ultimately \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/kids-chatgpt-worse-on-tests/\">learned less\u003c/a> than students who practiced without it. Anthropic, the maker of Claude, has separately reported that many college students appear to use AI to obtain answers and \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-offload-critical-thinking-ai/\">offload cognitive work\u003c/a>. Rismanchian’s earlier research, released in March 2026, documented \u003ca href=\"https://www.researchgate.net/publication/403013405_Artificial_Integrity_Concerning_Patterns_of_AI_Usage_Among_Undergraduate_Students\">troubling patterns of AI usage\u003c/a> in short response essays among undergraduate students at a large California research university.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That doesn’t mean AI always undermines learning. Carefully designed AI tutors have improved student achievement in controlled experiments by asking questions, personalizing instruction and withholding answers until students reason their way through a problem. But using AI this way should increase the time students spend on a problem, Rismanchian said. The ALEKS data show the opposite.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rismanchian doesn’t believe the answer is simply banning AI. Instead, he argues, students need to value learning enough to resist the temptation to outsource it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A recent RAND survey suggests many already recognize the threat to their brains. Students report worrying that AI is \u003ca href=\"https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA4742-1.html\">weakening their critical-thinking skills\u003c/a> while more of them admit using it for schoolwork.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Students are not entirely to blame. Even as many professors have warned students not to use AI to complete classwork, universities themselves have embraced the technology, often giving students free access to premium chatbots.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think we need to communicate to students that you should value your learning,” Rismanchian said. “If ChatGPT does it for you, then you haven’t learned it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rismanchian understands the temptation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>An international student, Rismanchian began using ChatGPT to help polish the English in his papers. The ideas were still his own. But after several months, he said, he noticed something unsettling.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I realized that I cannot write anymore,” he said. “I was losing my writing abilities.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So he stopped using AI to write.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He still uses it to code.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-ai-eroding-math-skills/\">\u003cem>AI use eroding math skills\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>When ChatGPT arrived in late 2022, educators quickly asked whether students would use artificial intelligence to cheat, learn or simply get through homework more efficiently. Evidence is beginning to point toward a troubling answer: Many students appear to be completing assignments faster while learning less from them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This conclusion comes from one of the largest studies of how generative AI is changing student behavior and academic skills. Sina Rismanchian, a doctoral student at the University of California, Irvine, partnered with researchers at McGraw Hill to \u003ca href=\"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.21629\">analyze millions of student interactions with ALEKS\u003c/a>, an online math platform used by more than four million students a year, from fifth grade through college. Because ALEKS includes both low-stakes practice problems and college placement tests, the researchers were able to compare how students behaved and performed before and after ChatGPT’s arrival.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To isolate AI’s effects, the researchers compared two kinds of math problems that differ in how easily students can outsource them to AI: word problems and graphing problems.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Word problems can be copied and pasted directly into AI chatbots for instant answers. Graphing problems are far more cumbersome. A student would need to upload a screenshot and still recreate the graph inside ALEKS using its tools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After ChatGPT’s launch, student behavior and performance on the two types of problems began to diverge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Beginning in early 2023, students started spending less time on word problems while continuing to spend about the same amount of time on graphing problems. The gap widened every quarter. By the end of the study period, near the end of 2025, average time spent on word problems had fallen 31 percent among high school students and 27 percent among college students — from about four minutes per word problem to less than three. (Middle school students showed only a modest decline of 9 percent, and fifth graders showed essentially none.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The researchers believe those averages are being pulled downward by some students who spend only seconds on word problems because they’re using AI to answer them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The same pattern appeared in college placement tests. When the exams were taken without supervision, students spent much less time on word problems after ChatGPT’s release. During proctored exams, the time spent on word problems returned to historical norms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But time is only half the story. The more troubling finding is what happened to learning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many colleges allow incoming students to retake placement tests after practicing more math in ALEKS, giving them a chance to qualify for a higher-level course. Before ChatGPT, that practice generally paid off. After ChatGPT, students answered more word problems correctly during unsupervised practice sessions but performed substantially worse on those same kinds of problems when they later took a proctored placement test.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Historically, students answered about 80 percent of these word problems correctly on supervised placement tests. After ChatGPT’s introduction, that fell to about 60 percent — a roughly 25 percent reduction in the odds of answering a word problem correctly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Performance on graphing problems, by contrast, did not decline.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>After ChatGPT’s release, students performed worse on word problems (AI-susceptible) during proctored exams, but answer more word problems correctly in nonproctored settings\u003cbr>\n\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_66423\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 512px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-66423 size-full\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/07/Rismanchian-et-al.png\" alt=\"Graph showing score gaps in exams. \" width=\"512\" height=\"186\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/07/Rismanchian-et-al.png 512w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/07/Rismanchian-et-al-160x58.png 160w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 512px) 100vw, 512px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The dotted line marks the public release of ChatGPT. Source: Figure 4, Rismanchian et al “Faster Completion, Less Learning: Generative AI Reduced Study Time on Math Problems and the Knowledge They Build,” June 2026 preprint.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>If students’ math skills had generally deteriorated because of pandemic learning loss, weaker high school preparation or digital distraction, graphing performance should have deteriorated too. It didn’t.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The study cannot definitively prove that students were using AI. The researchers couldn’t see what else was happening on students’ screens outside of ALEKS. But it’s difficult to think of another explanation. The changes appeared only in problems that are easy to outsource to AI, disappeared under supervision and grew steadily over nearly three years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What makes me nervous is that it’s not only about the word problems,” Rismanchian told me. “This cognitive surrender might be going on in writing, science, everything.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The paper, “\u003ca href=\"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.21629\">Faster Completion, Less Learning\u003c/a>,” was released in June 2026 as a working paper and has not yet been peer reviewed. Like any single study, it doesn’t settle the questions of how much students are using AI in their schoolwork, whether it’s harming learning and by how much. But it joins a growing body of evidence that generative AI is causing students to skip the brain work that leads to learning, and that this “cognitive surrender” is becoming commonplace.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A randomized experiment in Turkey found that high school students who used AI to help them study math ultimately \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/kids-chatgpt-worse-on-tests/\">learned less\u003c/a> than students who practiced without it. Anthropic, the maker of Claude, has separately reported that many college students appear to use AI to obtain answers and \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-offload-critical-thinking-ai/\">offload cognitive work\u003c/a>. Rismanchian’s earlier research, released in March 2026, documented \u003ca href=\"https://www.researchgate.net/publication/403013405_Artificial_Integrity_Concerning_Patterns_of_AI_Usage_Among_Undergraduate_Students\">troubling patterns of AI usage\u003c/a> in short response essays among undergraduate students at a large California research university.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That doesn’t mean AI always undermines learning. Carefully designed AI tutors have improved student achievement in controlled experiments by asking questions, personalizing instruction and withholding answers until students reason their way through a problem. But using AI this way should increase the time students spend on a problem, Rismanchian said. The ALEKS data show the opposite.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rismanchian doesn’t believe the answer is simply banning AI. Instead, he argues, students need to value learning enough to resist the temptation to outsource it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A recent RAND survey suggests many already recognize the threat to their brains. Students report worrying that AI is \u003ca href=\"https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA4742-1.html\">weakening their critical-thinking skills\u003c/a> while more of them admit using it for schoolwork.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Students are not entirely to blame. Even as many professors have warned students not to use AI to complete classwork, universities themselves have embraced the technology, often giving students free access to premium chatbots.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think we need to communicate to students that you should value your learning,” Rismanchian said. “If ChatGPT does it for you, then you haven’t learned it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rismanchian understands the temptation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>An international student, Rismanchian began using ChatGPT to help polish the English in his papers. The ideas were still his own. But after several months, he said, he noticed something unsettling.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I realized that I cannot write anymore,” he said. “I was losing my writing abilities.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So he stopped using AI to write.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He still uses it to code.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-ai-eroding-math-skills/\">\u003cem>AI use eroding math skills\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>For the past two decades, graduate students have been able to take out an unlimited amount of federal student loans to cover the full cost of their education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If they needed $60,000 a year, they could borrow $60,000 a year, year after year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Trump administration has a plan to change that by capping graduate school loans for many students at $20,500 a year, and $100,000 overall — effective July 1. (A federal court \u003ca href=\"https://thehill.com/homenews/education/5941405-federal-judge-blocks-loan-limits/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">temporarily blocked\u003c/a> a small piece of that plan, but the U.S. Education Department confirmed to NPR that loan limits will indeed begin July 1.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a year \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2026/06/10/nx-s1-5835633/student-loans-guide-education-changes-repayment-plan\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">packed with changes\u003c/a> to higher education policy, \u003cem>this\u003c/em> new loan limit is one of the biggest, and one of the most controversial.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon says the endgame is to force colleges to slash their tuition prices.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“College costs are just exorbitant. Students are burdened with debt…” McMahon \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2026/05/14/nx-s1-5815213/education-secretary-linda-mcmahon-house-hearing\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">told the House education committee in May\u003c/a>. “We really have to do something to bring down the cost of college.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With that goal in mind, Republicans used last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act to scuttle the program known as \u003ca href=\"https://studentaid.gov/understand-aid/types/loans/plus/grad\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Grad PLUS\u003c/a> and limit graduate loans. The thinking goes: Borrowers will choose cheaper programs, and expensive schools will have to cut prices to compete.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But many economists aren’t so sure it will do what Republicans say it will.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A decades-old idea\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The idea that there’s a connection between federal student loans and what colleges charge dates back almost four decades, to Feb. 18, 1987.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s the day then-Education Secretary William Bennett, under President Ronald Reagan, penned a scathing opinion piece for \u003cem>The New York Times\u003c/em>, titled “\u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/1987/02/18/opinion/our-greedy-colleges.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Our Greedy Colleges\u003c/a>.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In it, Bennett excoriated schools for tuition increases that outpaced inflation, and he argued that increases in federal student aid “have enabled colleges and universities blithely to raise their tuitions, confident that Federal loan subsidies would help cushion the increase.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His idea took hold, and economists have dubbed it “The Bennett Hypothesis.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The Bennett Hypothesis essentially says that, if you provide greater federal aid to schools, they will respond by increasing the price,” says Phillip Levine, a professor of economics at Wellesley College.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Almost 40 years later, Republicans are dusting off the Bennett Hypothesis to justify severe limits to student borrowing.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Graduate school is fueling the explosive growth of student debt\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>To be clear, current limits on \u003cem>undergraduate\u003c/em> loans aren’t budging – and haven’t budged in years. One reason: According to Levine, the net price for undergraduate programs – what families actually pay – has been pretty stagnant lately.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’ve seen at the undergraduate level for at least the last five years or so that college costs have actually been fairly flat,” says Preston Cooper, who studies higher education policy at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute (AEI).\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-embed npr-promo-card insettwocolumn\">\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\u003c/div>\n\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>But the cost of \u003cem>graduate\u003c/em> school has \u003ca href=\"https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/91016/price_of_grad_professional_school_0.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">increased considerably\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re at a point where almost half of the borrowing right now is among graduate students, despite them being a much smaller share of the overall population,” says Robert Kelchen, a professor of higher education at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Which brings us to Grad PLUS, which the Trump administration plans to shut down on July 1.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For two decades, Grad PLUS has worked as an add-on to the traditional loan program, allowing graduate students to effectively borrow as much as they needed – no limits or guardrails.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cooper says it’s not a stretch to think Grad PLUS helped fuel a rise in graduate school costs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Up to this time, it has been a very easy answer [for schools] to basically increase revenues a little bit every year by just raising the cost of graduate school tuition because they know that the federal government is going to have to give their students a loan for those extra costs.”\u003cem> \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>What the research shows\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>“Having essentially uncapped loans, I think, is not a great policy,” says Jeff Denning, an economist and professor at the University of Texas at Austin.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Denning was part of a team of researchers who studied the Grad PLUS program – to put the Bennett Hypothesis to the test. They wanted to know if, in Texas, the suddenly limitless font of Grad PLUS loans that began in 2006 contributed to graduate programs hiking their prices.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The short answer: Yes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31291/w31291.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">researchers wrote\u003c/a> that, for every additional dollar students received in loans, graduate schools increased their prices by $0.64 (after accounting for grants they gave out).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Republicans often cite Denning’s work as justification for ending Grad PLUS, arguing: If schools increased their prices nearly as much as federal aid increased, why wouldn’t the opposite be true? Less aid should lead to lower prices.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But it’s not that simple, says the University of Tennessee’s Kelchen, who has also researched the impact of Grad PLUS, specifically on business, medical and law schools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I did not find evidence” of a direct connection between federal aid and prices, Kelchen says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even Denning, when asked if the Bennett Hypothesis is true, says “it depends. I think there’s some evidence that this happens in certain circumstances, and there’s evidence that it doesn’t.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Bennett Hypothesis is “a logical conclusion,” according to Kelchen, “if you think that these graduate programs are massive profit centers.” Some are, he says. Some aren’t.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Medical school, for example, “is wildly unprofitable” for schools, Kelchen says. “It can take a million dollars of resources to produce one medical degree. So limiting borrowing is not going to reduce that cost.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Overall, he adds, evidence backing the Bennett Hypothesis “is largely mixed.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Levine says much of the increase in the cost of higher education over the years is attributable to a phenomenon known as “cost disease.” What’s that?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Well, over time, most businesses tend to become more efficient, Levine says, which helps them contain costs while boosting wages. But higher education doesn’t work that way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Since wages rise elsewhere, colleges need to keep pace to attract workers who could work elsewhere. In the end, costs rise to produce exactly the same product.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The half-dozen economists and higher education experts NPR spoke with did agree on one thing: Whatever its impact on prices, the Grad PLUS program, as a policy, was flawed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think there was broad consensus that the idea of letting graduate students borrow basically infinite amounts of money was not a good idea,” says Sandy Baum, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But, of the Bennett Hypothesis, Baum is skeptical: “There’s been lots of study of what causes increases in college prices and of the effects of increases in student aid. And most of them find that in some cases… in particular for-profit institutions, it’s true. But mostly it’s not true.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Instead, Baum argues, price hikes have been driven by a host of factors, from “cost disease” and student loans, to the rising costs of insurance, technology – even the cost of living.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Will ending Grad PLUS force colleges to cut prices?\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>So what should we make of Republicans’ current contention, that cutting student loans for graduate students will lead to lower prices?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>AEI’s Cooper agrees with ending Grad PLUS, but doesn’t expect an immediate drop in prices.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I don’t want to promise that, in the first year, everybody’s going to slash their costs, and, you know, it’s gonna be great,” Cooper says. “But I do think that this is going to create some pressure [on prices] over time.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kelchen at the University of Tennessee is keeping his expectations low.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I expect to see, at most, a small decrease in tuition as students may become a bit more price-sensitive and shop institutions a little bit more,” Kelchen says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Levine, at Wellesley, says dramatic price cuts are unlikely: “Is it conceivable that it could contribute to some small change in graduate student pricing? Maybe. … Colleges don’t just make up their prices. Colleges have costs, and it has to be the case that the revenue that they generate covers their costs.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even Denning, whose research found the clearest evidence of a connection between federal loans and college prices, says of these new loan limits potentially driving price cuts: “It certainly is possible. I’m not sure if it will happen. I do not have a crystal ball. I wish I did.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Denning points out that it’s hard to predict student behavior. The dramatic cut in federal loans could shift students to cheaper programs. It could also send them scrambling into the private loan market. After all, he says, while the new loan limits are roughly the same as they were in 2006, before Grad PLUS, they’re actually “much lower” because they don’t account for two decades of inflation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We needed loan limits,” says Baum at the Urban Institute, “but these limits are extreme.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As for the effect they could have on college prices, Baum predicts, “It’s not like prices are gonna plummet. They might rise more slowly.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And she worries the limits are going into effect so suddenly that they could put graduate school out of reach for some low-income students – a concern shared by Dominique Baker, an associate professor of education and public policy at the University of Delaware.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We have really robust evidence on what happens when we reduce access to financial aid,” Baker says, “and that is that students stop enrolling.” Especially lower-income students who may not have the kind of credit history to qualify for a private student loan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.peer-center.org/research/new-grad-limits-college-data-explorer\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Recent\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.philadelphiafed.org/-/media/FRBP/Assets/Consumer-Finance/Reports/student-loans-for-graduate-school.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">analyses\u003c/a> suggest these new limits will affect roughly 30% of graduate borrowers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In her testimony before lawmakers, Education Secretary McMahon repeatedly said that some graduate schools have already lowered their prices ahead of the big change.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>NPR followed-up with the Education Department to get a list of those programs, some of which are offering discounts through new scholarships. They include:\u003c/p>\n\u003cul class=\"rte2-style-ul\" style=\"margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; padding-inline-start: 48px;\">\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://blog.carey.jhu.edu/ft-ms-md-scholarship\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Johns Hopkins University\u003c/a> Carey Business School\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://graduate.lclark.edu/offices/admissions/paying_for_graduate_school/bridge-the-gap-scholarship/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Lewis & Clark\u003c/a> Graduate School of Education and Counseling\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Neumann University\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://business.purdue.edu/news/features/2026/tuition-reduction-announced-for-online-msgscm.php?TSPD_101_R0=08993c5290ab2000a7d2418599c40a5feab3e65ab49db145c014929bea86e73427501ab3c0e31e2308f7e629521430001d798a68441bbd76bc657b2081f17a2613d35c36a3a3a4ce745caf824e9468d8a47e8d7b0c6470bfcc75acea52c2db61\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Purdue University\u003c/a>‘s online Master of Science in Global Supply Chain Management\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://news.uci.edu/2026/05/06/uc-irvines-paul-merage-school-of-business-reduces-mba-tuition/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The University of California, Irvine\u003c/a>‘s MBA program\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://law.scu.edu/news-events/news/2025/santa-clara-law-launches-groundbreaking-pledge-scholarship-for-fall-2026-incoming-students.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Santa Clara University\u003c/a> School of Law\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Borrowers likely hope this short list gets longer – and fast.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Digital story edited by: Nicole Cohen\u003c/em>\u003cbr>\n\u003cem>Audio story edited by: Alex Goldmark and Nicole Cohen\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>For the past two decades, graduate students have been able to take out an unlimited amount of federal student loans to cover the full cost of their education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If they needed $60,000 a year, they could borrow $60,000 a year, year after year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Trump administration has a plan to change that by capping graduate school loans for many students at $20,500 a year, and $100,000 overall — effective July 1. (A federal court \u003ca href=\"https://thehill.com/homenews/education/5941405-federal-judge-blocks-loan-limits/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">temporarily blocked\u003c/a> a small piece of that plan, but the U.S. Education Department confirmed to NPR that loan limits will indeed begin July 1.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a year \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2026/06/10/nx-s1-5835633/student-loans-guide-education-changes-repayment-plan\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">packed with changes\u003c/a> to higher education policy, \u003cem>this\u003c/em> new loan limit is one of the biggest, and one of the most controversial.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon says the endgame is to force colleges to slash their tuition prices.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“College costs are just exorbitant. Students are burdened with debt…” McMahon \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2026/05/14/nx-s1-5815213/education-secretary-linda-mcmahon-house-hearing\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">told the House education committee in May\u003c/a>. “We really have to do something to bring down the cost of college.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With that goal in mind, Republicans used last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act to scuttle the program known as \u003ca href=\"https://studentaid.gov/understand-aid/types/loans/plus/grad\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Grad PLUS\u003c/a> and limit graduate loans. The thinking goes: Borrowers will choose cheaper programs, and expensive schools will have to cut prices to compete.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But many economists aren’t so sure it will do what Republicans say it will.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A decades-old idea\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The idea that there’s a connection between federal student loans and what colleges charge dates back almost four decades, to Feb. 18, 1987.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s the day then-Education Secretary William Bennett, under President Ronald Reagan, penned a scathing opinion piece for \u003cem>The New York Times\u003c/em>, titled “\u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/1987/02/18/opinion/our-greedy-colleges.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Our Greedy Colleges\u003c/a>.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In it, Bennett excoriated schools for tuition increases that outpaced inflation, and he argued that increases in federal student aid “have enabled colleges and universities blithely to raise their tuitions, confident that Federal loan subsidies would help cushion the increase.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His idea took hold, and economists have dubbed it “The Bennett Hypothesis.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The Bennett Hypothesis essentially says that, if you provide greater federal aid to schools, they will respond by increasing the price,” says Phillip Levine, a professor of economics at Wellesley College.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Almost 40 years later, Republicans are dusting off the Bennett Hypothesis to justify severe limits to student borrowing.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Graduate school is fueling the explosive growth of student debt\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>To be clear, current limits on \u003cem>undergraduate\u003c/em> loans aren’t budging – and haven’t budged in years. One reason: According to Levine, the net price for undergraduate programs – what families actually pay – has been pretty stagnant lately.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’ve seen at the undergraduate level for at least the last five years or so that college costs have actually been fairly flat,” says Preston Cooper, who studies higher education policy at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute (AEI).\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-embed npr-promo-card insettwocolumn\">\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\u003c/div>\n\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>But the cost of \u003cem>graduate\u003c/em> school has \u003ca href=\"https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/91016/price_of_grad_professional_school_0.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">increased considerably\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re at a point where almost half of the borrowing right now is among graduate students, despite them being a much smaller share of the overall population,” says Robert Kelchen, a professor of higher education at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Which brings us to Grad PLUS, which the Trump administration plans to shut down on July 1.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For two decades, Grad PLUS has worked as an add-on to the traditional loan program, allowing graduate students to effectively borrow as much as they needed – no limits or guardrails.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cooper says it’s not a stretch to think Grad PLUS helped fuel a rise in graduate school costs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Up to this time, it has been a very easy answer [for schools] to basically increase revenues a little bit every year by just raising the cost of graduate school tuition because they know that the federal government is going to have to give their students a loan for those extra costs.”\u003cem> \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>What the research shows\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>“Having essentially uncapped loans, I think, is not a great policy,” says Jeff Denning, an economist and professor at the University of Texas at Austin.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Denning was part of a team of researchers who studied the Grad PLUS program – to put the Bennett Hypothesis to the test. They wanted to know if, in Texas, the suddenly limitless font of Grad PLUS loans that began in 2006 contributed to graduate programs hiking their prices.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The short answer: Yes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31291/w31291.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">researchers wrote\u003c/a> that, for every additional dollar students received in loans, graduate schools increased their prices by $0.64 (after accounting for grants they gave out).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Republicans often cite Denning’s work as justification for ending Grad PLUS, arguing: If schools increased their prices nearly as much as federal aid increased, why wouldn’t the opposite be true? Less aid should lead to lower prices.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But it’s not that simple, says the University of Tennessee’s Kelchen, who has also researched the impact of Grad PLUS, specifically on business, medical and law schools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I did not find evidence” of a direct connection between federal aid and prices, Kelchen says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even Denning, when asked if the Bennett Hypothesis is true, says “it depends. I think there’s some evidence that this happens in certain circumstances, and there’s evidence that it doesn’t.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Bennett Hypothesis is “a logical conclusion,” according to Kelchen, “if you think that these graduate programs are massive profit centers.” Some are, he says. Some aren’t.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Medical school, for example, “is wildly unprofitable” for schools, Kelchen says. “It can take a million dollars of resources to produce one medical degree. So limiting borrowing is not going to reduce that cost.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Overall, he adds, evidence backing the Bennett Hypothesis “is largely mixed.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Levine says much of the increase in the cost of higher education over the years is attributable to a phenomenon known as “cost disease.” What’s that?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Well, over time, most businesses tend to become more efficient, Levine says, which helps them contain costs while boosting wages. But higher education doesn’t work that way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Since wages rise elsewhere, colleges need to keep pace to attract workers who could work elsewhere. In the end, costs rise to produce exactly the same product.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The half-dozen economists and higher education experts NPR spoke with did agree on one thing: Whatever its impact on prices, the Grad PLUS program, as a policy, was flawed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think there was broad consensus that the idea of letting graduate students borrow basically infinite amounts of money was not a good idea,” says Sandy Baum, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But, of the Bennett Hypothesis, Baum is skeptical: “There’s been lots of study of what causes increases in college prices and of the effects of increases in student aid. And most of them find that in some cases… in particular for-profit institutions, it’s true. But mostly it’s not true.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Instead, Baum argues, price hikes have been driven by a host of factors, from “cost disease” and student loans, to the rising costs of insurance, technology – even the cost of living.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Will ending Grad PLUS force colleges to cut prices?\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>So what should we make of Republicans’ current contention, that cutting student loans for graduate students will lead to lower prices?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>AEI’s Cooper agrees with ending Grad PLUS, but doesn’t expect an immediate drop in prices.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I don’t want to promise that, in the first year, everybody’s going to slash their costs, and, you know, it’s gonna be great,” Cooper says. “But I do think that this is going to create some pressure [on prices] over time.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kelchen at the University of Tennessee is keeping his expectations low.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I expect to see, at most, a small decrease in tuition as students may become a bit more price-sensitive and shop institutions a little bit more,” Kelchen says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Levine, at Wellesley, says dramatic price cuts are unlikely: “Is it conceivable that it could contribute to some small change in graduate student pricing? Maybe. … Colleges don’t just make up their prices. Colleges have costs, and it has to be the case that the revenue that they generate covers their costs.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even Denning, whose research found the clearest evidence of a connection between federal loans and college prices, says of these new loan limits potentially driving price cuts: “It certainly is possible. I’m not sure if it will happen. I do not have a crystal ball. I wish I did.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Denning points out that it’s hard to predict student behavior. The dramatic cut in federal loans could shift students to cheaper programs. It could also send them scrambling into the private loan market. After all, he says, while the new loan limits are roughly the same as they were in 2006, before Grad PLUS, they’re actually “much lower” because they don’t account for two decades of inflation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We needed loan limits,” says Baum at the Urban Institute, “but these limits are extreme.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As for the effect they could have on college prices, Baum predicts, “It’s not like prices are gonna plummet. They might rise more slowly.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And she worries the limits are going into effect so suddenly that they could put graduate school out of reach for some low-income students – a concern shared by Dominique Baker, an associate professor of education and public policy at the University of Delaware.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We have really robust evidence on what happens when we reduce access to financial aid,” Baker says, “and that is that students stop enrolling.” Especially lower-income students who may not have the kind of credit history to qualify for a private student loan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.peer-center.org/research/new-grad-limits-college-data-explorer\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Recent\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.philadelphiafed.org/-/media/FRBP/Assets/Consumer-Finance/Reports/student-loans-for-graduate-school.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">analyses\u003c/a> suggest these new limits will affect roughly 30% of graduate borrowers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In her testimony before lawmakers, Education Secretary McMahon repeatedly said that some graduate schools have already lowered their prices ahead of the big change.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>NPR followed-up with the Education Department to get a list of those programs, some of which are offering discounts through new scholarships. They include:\u003c/p>\n\u003cul class=\"rte2-style-ul\" style=\"margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; padding-inline-start: 48px;\">\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://blog.carey.jhu.edu/ft-ms-md-scholarship\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Johns Hopkins University\u003c/a> Carey Business School\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://graduate.lclark.edu/offices/admissions/paying_for_graduate_school/bridge-the-gap-scholarship/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Lewis & Clark\u003c/a> Graduate School of Education and Counseling\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Neumann University\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://business.purdue.edu/news/features/2026/tuition-reduction-announced-for-online-msgscm.php?TSPD_101_R0=08993c5290ab2000a7d2418599c40a5feab3e65ab49db145c014929bea86e73427501ab3c0e31e2308f7e629521430001d798a68441bbd76bc657b2081f17a2613d35c36a3a3a4ce745caf824e9468d8a47e8d7b0c6470bfcc75acea52c2db61\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Purdue University\u003c/a>‘s online Master of Science in Global Supply Chain Management\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://news.uci.edu/2026/05/06/uc-irvines-paul-merage-school-of-business-reduces-mba-tuition/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The University of California, Irvine\u003c/a>‘s MBA program\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://law.scu.edu/news-events/news/2025/santa-clara-law-launches-groundbreaking-pledge-scholarship-for-fall-2026-incoming-students.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Santa Clara University\u003c/a> School of Law\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Borrowers likely hope this short list gets longer – and fast.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "After Years of Declines, Young Students Show Gains in Reading and Math",
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"content": "\u003cp>New federal test scores show younger students are making gains in reading and math — \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/09/09/nx-s1-5526918/nations-report-card-scores-reading-math-science-education-cuts\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">after years of declines\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think this is an optimistic release,” Matthew Soldner, acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, told NPR.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Results from \u003ca href=\"https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/2025/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the long-term trend (LTT) report\u003c/a>, released Wednesday, provide a national look at progress in reading and math for 9- and 13-year-old students. The tests, which students take on pencil and paper every few years, have asked many of the same questions since they were first given in the 1970s. The tests are part of the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) and are nationally representative of student learning. More than 30,000 students took the exams between October 2024 and March 2025.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-embed npr-promo-card insettwocolumn\">\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\u003c/div>\n\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Here are five takeaways from the results:\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>1. Nine-year-olds made some solid gains. \u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The younger students tested showed gains in both reading and math, “which is fantastic,” said Soldner. What’s notable is that students across the board improved their scores, including lower-performing kids.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It is just so encouraging,” he said. “Even though they’re performing below average, [they] are trending upward.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One possible reason for the overall improvement, the report points out, is the students’ age. They were 4 when the pandemic started in 2020 and didn’t begin school until after most places had returned to full-time, in-person instruction. That means they didn’t miss key lessons in literacy and math in the early years of elementary school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These students gave researchers hope about the potential that the nation can build back some of the slide \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2026/05/13/nx-s1-5812483/reading-math-scores-data\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">that began long before COVID-19\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>2. But 13-year-olds are hurting.\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The report paints a less optimistic picture about 13-year-olds. Compared to the last assessment, students showed no significant improvement in reading or math.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Scores in reading remain below where they were at the start of the pandemic on average, and that includes Hispanic students, white students, female students, students who are economically disadvantaged and suburban students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Reading scores from this test, on average, are not significantly different from performance in the first-ever administered test in 1971.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The lack of progress in 13-year-olds raises huge questions and ought to serve as a catalyst for change,” Lesley Muldoon, the executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, said during a press briefing. Her organization sets policy related to NAEP.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For these 13-year-old students, unlike their 9-year-old counterparts, the pandemic was the backdrop for much of their elementary school experience. In 2020, they were in second or third grade. Those critical years for literacy and math skills were disrupted by school closures, and this stagnant performance may be one consequence.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>3. Fewer students are reading for pleasure — than ever.\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>At the same time, the report found that reading is a pastime for a shrinking number of kids.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 1984, 35% of 13-year-old students reported reading for fun on a daily basis. In 2022 and 2025, only 14% said the same. A far greater share of 9-year-olds — 37% — indicated they read for fun every day, but that’s sharply down from decades earlier.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-66396\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/06/Reading-for-Fun.png\" alt=\"Graph showing downward trend\" width=\"2348\" height=\"1452\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/06/Reading-for-Fun.png 2348w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/06/Reading-for-Fun-2000x1237.png 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/06/Reading-for-Fun-160x99.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/06/Reading-for-Fun-768x475.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/06/Reading-for-Fun-1536x950.png 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/06/Reading-for-Fun-2048x1266.png 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2348px) 100vw, 2348px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>4. Math progress erased for 13-year-olds.\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>From 1978 to 2012, the average math scores on the LTT for 13-year-olds improved by 21 points. The climbing scores were a bright spot in more than 50 years of data. This report shows that most of those gains have been erased.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The lowest-performing students now show no gains at all compared with the 1978 math test results.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“As a nation, we have to bring more focus to the middle school years,” Muldoon told reporters. “It’ll take a lot of collective work, but we’ve seen progress before, and it’s possible to see it again.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>5. This is the last we’ll see of the long-term trend report for a while.\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>This is the first NAEP long-term trend report released since the Trump administration began making cuts to the U.S. Education Department in 2025. Those cuts \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/03/12/nx-s1-5325854/trump-education-department-layoffs-civil-rights-student-loans\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">included laying off more than half the workers at the Institute of Education Sciences\u003c/a>, the arm of the department charged with measuring student achievement and overseeing and processing the data that comes from the tests students take.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After those cuts, the department also \u003ca href=\"https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/fewer-subjects-students-data-points-feds-to-scale-back-naep/2025/04\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">canceled about a dozen national and state assessments\u003c/a> of student progress through 2032 — one of those being the next iteration of these tests. (Since then, \u003ca href=\"https://www.nagb.gov/news-and-events/news-releases/2026/release-board-meeting-actions-051526.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">plans have been announced\u003c/a> to restore some of those exams.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, sudents won’t see these questions again \u003ca href=\"https://www.nagb.gov/content/dam/nagb/en/documents/naep/assessment-schedule-051426.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">until 2033\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Edited by: \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/people/g-s1-123933/nirvi-shah\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cem>Nirvi Shah\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cbr>\n\u003cem>Visual design and development by: \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/people/348775569/la-johnson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cem>LA Johnson\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"npr-transcript\">\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Transcript:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some good news this morning from a pencil-and-paper test given every four years since the 1970s. After years of declines, the National Assessment for Educational Progress shows younger students gaining in reading and math. Many of them started school after the pandemic began. NPR’s Sequoia Carrillo reports.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SEQUOIA CARRILLO, BYLINE: As an education reporter, it’s been a while since I’ve heard this.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MATT SOLDNER: I think this is an optimistic release.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: That’s Matt Soldner. He’s acting commissioner at the National Center for Education Statistics, which helps oversee this exam. The federal long-term trend report looks at achievement in two key subject areas for 9- and 13-year-olds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SOLDNER: We’re seeing some really encouraging signs for our 9-year-olds. They’re making progress both in reading and in mathematics.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: Especially notable is the progress lower-performing students made. That’s a group that struggled to make gains. So what happened with those younger students?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SOLDNER: Our 9-year-olds were about 4 when the pandemic was declared.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: Their schooling wasn’t really disrupted.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SOLDNER: For 13-year-olds, though, the pandemic was the backdrop for the elementary school experience. When the pandemic was declared, they were in second or third grade, which are the years when they were surely learning foundational literacy and numeracy skills in the classroom setting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: It makes sense, then, that their scores continued the downward trend of the past decade. This is the first report of its kind since the Trump administration began making cuts to the Education Department last year. They also cut a dozen of these student assessments, which means the next time students see these test questions will be seven years from now.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sequoia Carrillo, NPR News.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>New federal test scores show younger students are making gains in reading and math — \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/09/09/nx-s1-5526918/nations-report-card-scores-reading-math-science-education-cuts\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">after years of declines\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think this is an optimistic release,” Matthew Soldner, acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, told NPR.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Results from \u003ca href=\"https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/2025/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the long-term trend (LTT) report\u003c/a>, released Wednesday, provide a national look at progress in reading and math for 9- and 13-year-old students. The tests, which students take on pencil and paper every few years, have asked many of the same questions since they were first given in the 1970s. The tests are part of the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) and are nationally representative of student learning. More than 30,000 students took the exams between October 2024 and March 2025.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-embed npr-promo-card insettwocolumn\">\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\u003c/div>\n\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Here are five takeaways from the results:\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>1. Nine-year-olds made some solid gains. \u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The younger students tested showed gains in both reading and math, “which is fantastic,” said Soldner. What’s notable is that students across the board improved their scores, including lower-performing kids.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It is just so encouraging,” he said. “Even though they’re performing below average, [they] are trending upward.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One possible reason for the overall improvement, the report points out, is the students’ age. They were 4 when the pandemic started in 2020 and didn’t begin school until after most places had returned to full-time, in-person instruction. That means they didn’t miss key lessons in literacy and math in the early years of elementary school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These students gave researchers hope about the potential that the nation can build back some of the slide \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2026/05/13/nx-s1-5812483/reading-math-scores-data\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">that began long before COVID-19\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>2. But 13-year-olds are hurting.\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The report paints a less optimistic picture about 13-year-olds. Compared to the last assessment, students showed no significant improvement in reading or math.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Scores in reading remain below where they were at the start of the pandemic on average, and that includes Hispanic students, white students, female students, students who are economically disadvantaged and suburban students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Reading scores from this test, on average, are not significantly different from performance in the first-ever administered test in 1971.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The lack of progress in 13-year-olds raises huge questions and ought to serve as a catalyst for change,” Lesley Muldoon, the executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, said during a press briefing. Her organization sets policy related to NAEP.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For these 13-year-old students, unlike their 9-year-old counterparts, the pandemic was the backdrop for much of their elementary school experience. In 2020, they were in second or third grade. Those critical years for literacy and math skills were disrupted by school closures, and this stagnant performance may be one consequence.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>3. Fewer students are reading for pleasure — than ever.\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>At the same time, the report found that reading is a pastime for a shrinking number of kids.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 1984, 35% of 13-year-old students reported reading for fun on a daily basis. In 2022 and 2025, only 14% said the same. A far greater share of 9-year-olds — 37% — indicated they read for fun every day, but that’s sharply down from decades earlier.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-66396\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/06/Reading-for-Fun.png\" alt=\"Graph showing downward trend\" width=\"2348\" height=\"1452\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/06/Reading-for-Fun.png 2348w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/06/Reading-for-Fun-2000x1237.png 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/06/Reading-for-Fun-160x99.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/06/Reading-for-Fun-768x475.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/06/Reading-for-Fun-1536x950.png 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/06/Reading-for-Fun-2048x1266.png 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2348px) 100vw, 2348px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>4. Math progress erased for 13-year-olds.\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>From 1978 to 2012, the average math scores on the LTT for 13-year-olds improved by 21 points. The climbing scores were a bright spot in more than 50 years of data. This report shows that most of those gains have been erased.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The lowest-performing students now show no gains at all compared with the 1978 math test results.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“As a nation, we have to bring more focus to the middle school years,” Muldoon told reporters. “It’ll take a lot of collective work, but we’ve seen progress before, and it’s possible to see it again.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>5. This is the last we’ll see of the long-term trend report for a while.\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>This is the first NAEP long-term trend report released since the Trump administration began making cuts to the U.S. Education Department in 2025. Those cuts \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/03/12/nx-s1-5325854/trump-education-department-layoffs-civil-rights-student-loans\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">included laying off more than half the workers at the Institute of Education Sciences\u003c/a>, the arm of the department charged with measuring student achievement and overseeing and processing the data that comes from the tests students take.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After those cuts, the department also \u003ca href=\"https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/fewer-subjects-students-data-points-feds-to-scale-back-naep/2025/04\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">canceled about a dozen national and state assessments\u003c/a> of student progress through 2032 — one of those being the next iteration of these tests. (Since then, \u003ca href=\"https://www.nagb.gov/news-and-events/news-releases/2026/release-board-meeting-actions-051526.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">plans have been announced\u003c/a> to restore some of those exams.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, sudents won’t see these questions again \u003ca href=\"https://www.nagb.gov/content/dam/nagb/en/documents/naep/assessment-schedule-051426.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">until 2033\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Edited by: \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/people/g-s1-123933/nirvi-shah\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cem>Nirvi Shah\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cbr>\n\u003cem>Visual design and development by: \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/people/348775569/la-johnson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cem>LA Johnson\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"npr-transcript\">\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Transcript:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some good news this morning from a pencil-and-paper test given every four years since the 1970s. After years of declines, the National Assessment for Educational Progress shows younger students gaining in reading and math. Many of them started school after the pandemic began. NPR’s Sequoia Carrillo reports.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SEQUOIA CARRILLO, BYLINE: As an education reporter, it’s been a while since I’ve heard this.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MATT SOLDNER: I think this is an optimistic release.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: That’s Matt Soldner. He’s acting commissioner at the National Center for Education Statistics, which helps oversee this exam. The federal long-term trend report looks at achievement in two key subject areas for 9- and 13-year-olds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SOLDNER: We’re seeing some really encouraging signs for our 9-year-olds. They’re making progress both in reading and in mathematics.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: Especially notable is the progress lower-performing students made. That’s a group that struggled to make gains. So what happened with those younger students?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SOLDNER: Our 9-year-olds were about 4 when the pandemic was declared.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: Their schooling wasn’t really disrupted.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SOLDNER: For 13-year-olds, though, the pandemic was the backdrop for the elementary school experience. When the pandemic was declared, they were in second or third grade, which are the years when they were surely learning foundational literacy and numeracy skills in the classroom setting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CARRILLO: It makes sense, then, that their scores continued the downward trend of the past decade. This is the first report of its kind since the Trump administration began making cuts to the Education Department last year. They also cut a dozen of these student assessments, which means the next time students see these test questions will be seven years from now.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sequoia Carrillo, NPR News.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>As colleges scramble to write rules for artificial intelligence in the classroom, one basic question remains unknown: How many students are actually using it?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">An anonymous survey of 338 undergraduates at the University of Chicago shows that the answer may be hard to pin down — not just because AI use is changing quickly, but because students may not be self-reporting it accurately.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In the survey, 60 percent of students said they personally use AI tools such as ChatGPT. But 90 percent said they believed the average student on campus uses AI. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That 30-point gap could mean that students are underreporting their own AI use, overestimating their peers’ use, or both. Without reliable information about how many students are using AI and how they are using it, college administrators risk designing policies based on assumptions rather than evidence. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The University of Chicago researchers behind the survey suspect that college students aren’t being truthful about their actual use of AI because they’re ashamed. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">“Students don’t want to be perceived by their peers as not able to do the work,” said Alex Kale, a computer scientist at the University of Chicago and a co-author of the \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3772318.3791073\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">study\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, which was presented at a conference in Barcelona, Spain, in April. “They don’t want to be perceived by their peers as dishonest … And it feels deeply personal.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Kale calls this phenomenon “social desirability bias,” the human tendency to answer questions in a way that makes us look good to others (and to ourselves), rather than being completely honest, even in an anonymous survey. In a separate online survey of 98 undergraduates conducted by the researchers, respondents said that admitting to using AI was akin to admitting that you’re “not able to complete coursework independently,” or are “lazy.” Another respondent thought that students were hiding usage for fear of getting caught and possibly expelled.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The researchers offer an alternate explanation for the gap. Students may be overestimating how many of their peers are using AI because it is such a visible part of campus life. They hear people talking about ChatGPT. They see AI tools open on laptop screens. That can start to feel like the norm. One survey respondent expressed it like this: “I think only a small portion of students actually rely on LLMs to do coursework, while most students do not. That small portion leads some students to assume most are using it.” (The current post-2022 generation of AI tools like ChatGPT are often referred to as large language models or LLMs.)\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In other words, students may be using AI more than they admit, while AI hype may also be creating the impression that everyone is using it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This same phenomenon — a big gap between what students admit to doing and what they believe their peers are doing — is commonly found in public health research on \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10368559/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">alcohol, drugs\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> and \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://academic.oup.com/ijpor/article-abstract/20/1/52/738000?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false&utm_source=chatgpt.com\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">sex\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. Students often overestimate how much their peers drink heavily, use drugs or engage in casual sex. And that has had big implications for curbing unhealthy behaviors. When students believe that “everyone else is doing it,” they are more likely to engage in it too. The false perception becomes partly self-fulfilling.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">More than 25 years ago, colleges began to worry that warning students about binge drinking on campus was backfiring and actually encouraging students to get drunk. Many \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/03/us/new-tactic-on-college-drinking-play-it-down.html\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">shifted strategy\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, downplaying the problem of binge drinking and publicizing statistics that most students drink in moderation. The number of students who said they drink heavily declined, according to some public health officials. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There may be some lessons here for how to encourage the responsible use of AI, even though the University of Chicago study doesn’t link the AI use to drugs or booze. But it does raise the point that perceptions matter. If students believe that nearly everyone is relying on AI to complete coursework, they may feel pressure to use it themselves just to keep up.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Kristin Fasiang is a graduate student in computer science and learning sciences at Northwestern University. Fasiang reported and wrote this story along with The Hechinger Report’s Jill Barshay.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This story about \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-ai-use-college-campuses/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">AI use on college campuses\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> was produced by \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers education. Sign up for \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Proof Points\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> and other \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Hechinger newsletters\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>As colleges scramble to write rules for artificial intelligence in the classroom, one basic question remains unknown: How many students are actually using it?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">An anonymous survey of 338 undergraduates at the University of Chicago shows that the answer may be hard to pin down — not just because AI use is changing quickly, but because students may not be self-reporting it accurately.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In the survey, 60 percent of students said they personally use AI tools such as ChatGPT. But 90 percent said they believed the average student on campus uses AI. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That 30-point gap could mean that students are underreporting their own AI use, overestimating their peers’ use, or both. Without reliable information about how many students are using AI and how they are using it, college administrators risk designing policies based on assumptions rather than evidence. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The University of Chicago researchers behind the survey suspect that college students aren’t being truthful about their actual use of AI because they’re ashamed. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">“Students don’t want to be perceived by their peers as not able to do the work,” said Alex Kale, a computer scientist at the University of Chicago and a co-author of the \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3772318.3791073\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">study\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, which was presented at a conference in Barcelona, Spain, in April. “They don’t want to be perceived by their peers as dishonest … And it feels deeply personal.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Kale calls this phenomenon “social desirability bias,” the human tendency to answer questions in a way that makes us look good to others (and to ourselves), rather than being completely honest, even in an anonymous survey. In a separate online survey of 98 undergraduates conducted by the researchers, respondents said that admitting to using AI was akin to admitting that you’re “not able to complete coursework independently,” or are “lazy.” Another respondent thought that students were hiding usage for fear of getting caught and possibly expelled.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The researchers offer an alternate explanation for the gap. Students may be overestimating how many of their peers are using AI because it is such a visible part of campus life. They hear people talking about ChatGPT. They see AI tools open on laptop screens. That can start to feel like the norm. One survey respondent expressed it like this: “I think only a small portion of students actually rely on LLMs to do coursework, while most students do not. That small portion leads some students to assume most are using it.” (The current post-2022 generation of AI tools like ChatGPT are often referred to as large language models or LLMs.)\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In other words, students may be using AI more than they admit, while AI hype may also be creating the impression that everyone is using it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This same phenomenon — a big gap between what students admit to doing and what they believe their peers are doing — is commonly found in public health research on \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10368559/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">alcohol, drugs\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> and \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://academic.oup.com/ijpor/article-abstract/20/1/52/738000?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false&utm_source=chatgpt.com\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">sex\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. Students often overestimate how much their peers drink heavily, use drugs or engage in casual sex. And that has had big implications for curbing unhealthy behaviors. When students believe that “everyone else is doing it,” they are more likely to engage in it too. The false perception becomes partly self-fulfilling.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">More than 25 years ago, colleges began to worry that warning students about binge drinking on campus was backfiring and actually encouraging students to get drunk. Many \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/03/us/new-tactic-on-college-drinking-play-it-down.html\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">shifted strategy\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, downplaying the problem of binge drinking and publicizing statistics that most students drink in moderation. The number of students who said they drink heavily declined, according to some public health officials. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There may be some lessons here for how to encourage the responsible use of AI, even though the University of Chicago study doesn’t link the AI use to drugs or booze. But it does raise the point that perceptions matter. If students believe that nearly everyone is relying on AI to complete coursework, they may feel pressure to use it themselves just to keep up.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Kristin Fasiang is a graduate student in computer science and learning sciences at Northwestern University. Fasiang reported and wrote this story along with The Hechinger Report’s Jill Barshay.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This story about \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-ai-use-college-campuses/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">AI use on college campuses\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> was produced by \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers education. Sign up for \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Proof Points\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> and other \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Hechinger newsletters\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>In the past decade, student achievement has stagnated or declined \u003ca href=\"https://www.oecd.org/en/about/news/press-releases/2023/12/decline-in-educational-performance-only-partly-attributable-to-the-covid-19-pandemic.html\">around the world \u003c/a>as cellphones have become nearly ubiquitous Gen Z and Gen Alpha accessories. Educators from Florida to Sweden to Rio de Janeiro are responding with an increasingly popular tactic: restricting or banning cellphone use during the school day.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the first wave of rigorous research on those policies — including two major U.S. studies — do not point neatly in one direction. Some studies have found modest academic gains from cellphone restrictions. Others have found little to no effect on test scores, even when student phone use dropped sharply. Some studies suggest benefits for low-achieving students, others for girls, and still others for boys. In some places, attendance or student well-being improved. In others, they didn’t.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The scientific process can be messy. Cultural differences may explain why the bans are more effective in some places than others. But almost any education reform will get different results in different places, even within a single country. And the current confusion may also stem from how difficult it is to study cellphone bans in the real world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ideally, researchers would randomly assign some students to surrender their phones while others kept them, and then measure the effect on academic performance — the equivalent of a clinical trial for an education policy. But those experiments are difficult to enforce in schools, and so far only \u003ca href=\"https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5370727\">one study\u003c/a>, conducted among college students in India, has attempted a randomized controlled trial. It produced a notably strong improvement in course grades for lower achieving students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Instead, most studies rely on rougher real world comparisons that capture only partial effects of cellphone restrictions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A \u003ca href=\"https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w35132/w35132.pdf\">national study\u003c/a> released this month by researchers at Stanford, Duke, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan analyzed more than 40,000 schools across the country using data from Yondr, a company that makes magnetic locking pouches for student cellphones.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The researchers found that cellphone activity at schools dropped sharply after schools adopted the pouches. Cellphone “pings” from school grounds fell by 30 percent, and teachers reported far less nonacademic phone use in class.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the study found “close to zero” effects on test scores, attendance and online bullying, even three years after schools adopted the pouches. The researchers compared the Yondr schools to schools that had similar demographics and academic performance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At first glance, those findings appeared to conflict with a \u003ca href=\"https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w34388/w34388.pdf\">study of schools in Florida\u003c/a> released last year, which found small academic gains a year after statewide cellphone restrictions took effect in 2023.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The researchers behind that study, from the University of Rochester and RAND, compared schools where student cellphone use had historically been high with schools where phone use had already been relatively low before the statewide restrictions began. Their logic was that schools with heavier pre-ban cellphone use should experience a larger effect from the policy change.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The national Yondr study, by contrast, largely compared schools using one particularly strict form of enforcement against schools that often already had softer cellphone restrictions in place. Some schools in the comparison group still required students to keep phones tucked away in backpacks or out of sight during class.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In other words, the national study was largely comparing stricter restrictions against weaker ones while the Florida study was comparing schools with high versus low cellphone use before the ban.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even with the different methodologies and research questions, the researchers of both U.S. studies emphasized in interviews how similar their results actually were. The Florida study calculated that the academic gains, which materialized in the second year after the ban, were less than a percentile point, the equivalent of moving a student from the 50th percentile, dead in the middle, to the 51st percentile. In practical terms, the difference between a tiny gain and near-zero effects may not matter.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Both studies also documented an initial increase in disciplinary incidents before behavior stabilized, and both found signs of nonacademic benefits, including improvements in school climate or student well-being.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The broader international research, however, remains genuinely mixed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0927537116300136\">first quantitative study\u003c/a> of cellphone bans, published in England in 2016, found that cellphone restrictions improved exam scores primarily for low-achieving students. But a \u003ca href=\"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272775719303966\">Swedish study\u003c/a> in 2020 found no academic or behavioral benefits.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Swedish researchers speculated that their results might reflect the country’s long history of integrating computers into classrooms. In the 1970s, Sweden was an early European adopter of school technology, so students already relied heavily on laptops and other digital devices during lessons before the ubiquity of cellphones. A separate \u003ca href=\"https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A866544&dswid=6524\">Swedish case study\u003c/a> also found that students were often using phones between assignments rather than during instructional time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since then, studies in \u003ca href=\"https://www.emerald.com/aea/article/30/90/153/59588/Banning-mobile-phones-in-schools-evidence-from\">Spain\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://jhr.uwpress.org/content/early/2026/03/04/jhr.0224-13403R2\">Norway\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/RioPhoneBans.pdf\">Brazil\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5370727\">India\u003c/a> have all found academic benefits from cellphone restrictions, though the gains varied widely. The randomized trial in India produced some of the largest academic gains in the literature. Researchers there randomly assigned college students by field of study to store their phones in wooden cubbies before class while others kept them. Unlike in many American universities, there weren’t many laptops or tablets in these Indian classrooms. Removing phones, in effect, may have removed all digital distractions from the classroom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One possible explanation for the disappointing U.S. results is that students are still surrounded by digital distractions even when phones are gone. David Figlio, the lead author of the Florida study, said students often shift to texting, gaming or social media on laptops and tablets that remain permitted in school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another possibility is that the academic harms of modern technology aren’t primarily caused by classroom distraction itself. Smartphones may influence sleep, study habits, sustained attention and reading stamina outside school hours in ways that a seven-hour school day ban cannot easily reverse.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Cell phones still could be having a large effect on the diminishment of student achievement, even if cell phone bans are not turning this around by a tremendous amount,” Figlio said. “Students could be cutting corners on their studying, or staying up very late and getting less sleep.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Tom Dee, a Stanford education researcher who led the national study, said the “sobering” findings in this country should not discourage schools from continuing to experiment with cellphone policies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We should just continue to iterate, which is something we do too infrequently in education policy,” Dee said. “Let’s not move on to the next fad or the next flavor of the day. This issue is too important for us not to stay in the fight to try to figure out how to manage our children’s use of digital devices responsibly.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about\u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/global-research-cellphone-bans/\"> \u003cem>whether school cellphone bans are effective\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers education. Sign up for\u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\"> \u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>In the past decade, student achievement has stagnated or declined \u003ca href=\"https://www.oecd.org/en/about/news/press-releases/2023/12/decline-in-educational-performance-only-partly-attributable-to-the-covid-19-pandemic.html\">around the world \u003c/a>as cellphones have become nearly ubiquitous Gen Z and Gen Alpha accessories. Educators from Florida to Sweden to Rio de Janeiro are responding with an increasingly popular tactic: restricting or banning cellphone use during the school day.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the first wave of rigorous research on those policies — including two major U.S. studies — do not point neatly in one direction. Some studies have found modest academic gains from cellphone restrictions. Others have found little to no effect on test scores, even when student phone use dropped sharply. Some studies suggest benefits for low-achieving students, others for girls, and still others for boys. In some places, attendance or student well-being improved. In others, they didn’t.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The scientific process can be messy. Cultural differences may explain why the bans are more effective in some places than others. But almost any education reform will get different results in different places, even within a single country. And the current confusion may also stem from how difficult it is to study cellphone bans in the real world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ideally, researchers would randomly assign some students to surrender their phones while others kept them, and then measure the effect on academic performance — the equivalent of a clinical trial for an education policy. But those experiments are difficult to enforce in schools, and so far only \u003ca href=\"https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5370727\">one study\u003c/a>, conducted among college students in India, has attempted a randomized controlled trial. It produced a notably strong improvement in course grades for lower achieving students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Instead, most studies rely on rougher real world comparisons that capture only partial effects of cellphone restrictions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A \u003ca href=\"https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w35132/w35132.pdf\">national study\u003c/a> released this month by researchers at Stanford, Duke, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan analyzed more than 40,000 schools across the country using data from Yondr, a company that makes magnetic locking pouches for student cellphones.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The researchers found that cellphone activity at schools dropped sharply after schools adopted the pouches. Cellphone “pings” from school grounds fell by 30 percent, and teachers reported far less nonacademic phone use in class.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the study found “close to zero” effects on test scores, attendance and online bullying, even three years after schools adopted the pouches. The researchers compared the Yondr schools to schools that had similar demographics and academic performance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At first glance, those findings appeared to conflict with a \u003ca href=\"https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w34388/w34388.pdf\">study of schools in Florida\u003c/a> released last year, which found small academic gains a year after statewide cellphone restrictions took effect in 2023.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The researchers behind that study, from the University of Rochester and RAND, compared schools where student cellphone use had historically been high with schools where phone use had already been relatively low before the statewide restrictions began. Their logic was that schools with heavier pre-ban cellphone use should experience a larger effect from the policy change.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The national Yondr study, by contrast, largely compared schools using one particularly strict form of enforcement against schools that often already had softer cellphone restrictions in place. Some schools in the comparison group still required students to keep phones tucked away in backpacks or out of sight during class.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In other words, the national study was largely comparing stricter restrictions against weaker ones while the Florida study was comparing schools with high versus low cellphone use before the ban.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even with the different methodologies and research questions, the researchers of both U.S. studies emphasized in interviews how similar their results actually were. The Florida study calculated that the academic gains, which materialized in the second year after the ban, were less than a percentile point, the equivalent of moving a student from the 50th percentile, dead in the middle, to the 51st percentile. In practical terms, the difference between a tiny gain and near-zero effects may not matter.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Both studies also documented an initial increase in disciplinary incidents before behavior stabilized, and both found signs of nonacademic benefits, including improvements in school climate or student well-being.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The broader international research, however, remains genuinely mixed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0927537116300136\">first quantitative study\u003c/a> of cellphone bans, published in England in 2016, found that cellphone restrictions improved exam scores primarily for low-achieving students. But a \u003ca href=\"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272775719303966\">Swedish study\u003c/a> in 2020 found no academic or behavioral benefits.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Swedish researchers speculated that their results might reflect the country’s long history of integrating computers into classrooms. In the 1970s, Sweden was an early European adopter of school technology, so students already relied heavily on laptops and other digital devices during lessons before the ubiquity of cellphones. A separate \u003ca href=\"https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A866544&dswid=6524\">Swedish case study\u003c/a> also found that students were often using phones between assignments rather than during instructional time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since then, studies in \u003ca href=\"https://www.emerald.com/aea/article/30/90/153/59588/Banning-mobile-phones-in-schools-evidence-from\">Spain\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://jhr.uwpress.org/content/early/2026/03/04/jhr.0224-13403R2\">Norway\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/RioPhoneBans.pdf\">Brazil\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5370727\">India\u003c/a> have all found academic benefits from cellphone restrictions, though the gains varied widely. The randomized trial in India produced some of the largest academic gains in the literature. Researchers there randomly assigned college students by field of study to store their phones in wooden cubbies before class while others kept them. Unlike in many American universities, there weren’t many laptops or tablets in these Indian classrooms. Removing phones, in effect, may have removed all digital distractions from the classroom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One possible explanation for the disappointing U.S. results is that students are still surrounded by digital distractions even when phones are gone. David Figlio, the lead author of the Florida study, said students often shift to texting, gaming or social media on laptops and tablets that remain permitted in school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another possibility is that the academic harms of modern technology aren’t primarily caused by classroom distraction itself. Smartphones may influence sleep, study habits, sustained attention and reading stamina outside school hours in ways that a seven-hour school day ban cannot easily reverse.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Cell phones still could be having a large effect on the diminishment of student achievement, even if cell phone bans are not turning this around by a tremendous amount,” Figlio said. “Students could be cutting corners on their studying, or staying up very late and getting less sleep.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Tom Dee, a Stanford education researcher who led the national study, said the “sobering” findings in this country should not discourage schools from continuing to experiment with cellphone policies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We should just continue to iterate, which is something we do too infrequently in education policy,” Dee said. “Let’s not move on to the next fad or the next flavor of the day. This issue is too important for us not to stay in the fight to try to figure out how to manage our children’s use of digital devices responsibly.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>It seems like a tale of two school systems.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Washington, D.C., has emerged as the fastest-improving school system in the nation, according to a major new analysis of student test scores released last week by researchers at Stanford, Harvard and Dartmouth.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Education Scorecard \u003ca href=\"https://educationscorecard.org/\">analysis\u003c/a>, which compares more than 5,000 school districts across 38 states, finds that most of the country has been stuck in a reading recession — a decade-long slide in achievement that predates the pandemic. Between 2022 and 2025, only five states and the District of Columbia showed meaningful gains in reading. The nation’s capital posted the strongest growth of all and also led in math improvement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Washington students in both public and charter schools gained roughly two-thirds of a grade level in math and about a third of a grade level in reading over that period, according to the analysis. A grade level represents roughly a year’s worth of learning, which means that eighth graders in 2025 were about six months ahead in math compared with eighth graders in 2022.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the gains should not obscure a grimmer reality.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 2025, only 26 percent of Washington students met grade-level standards in math and only 38 percent were proficient in reading, according to a separate \u003ca href=\"https://www.dcpolicycenter.org/wp-content/uploads/v3_SODCS_2024_25_full_report-2.24-copy-2.pdf\">report\u003c/a> from the D.C. Policy Center, an independent local think tank. Just 16 percent of high school juniors and seniors were considered to be college or career ready.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A school system can improve rapidly and still leave most children behind. The contradiction is fueling an important politically and emotionally charged debate in education: Should schools be judged by how many students are proficient, or by how much students improve each year?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Critics of public schools are seizing upon the low proficiency rates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Gains of any magnitude are a good thing, but when most students — roughly two-thirds to three-quarters in the case of D.C. — are not functioning at grade level, this is nothing to applaud,” said Steven Wilson, a former education policymaker in Massachusetts and charter school leader. “Most students are still being failed by the system.” (Wilson’s 2025 book, “The Lost Decade,” criticizes recent school reform efforts.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even before last week’s national data release, Washington school leaders were celebrating the gains. Paul Kihn, deputy mayor for education, trumpeted the strength of the schools after 2025 annual tests revealed a whopping 3.6 percent improvement in reading and math, similar to the grade-level increases that the Education Scorecard team calculated. “Our academic achievement is unsurpassed in the country in terms of growth,” Kihn said in a March 2026 \u003ca href=\"https://dme.dc.gov/page/inside-dc-education-blog#03262026-1\">blog post\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Tom Kane, a Harvard economist and one of the authors of the new Education Scorecard report, explained that there is a long-running debate in the field of education about whether to focus on proficiency or growth. In this report, he said, the research team chose growth in order to “combat” what they see as an overly pessimistic narrative about public education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re trying to highlight that something good is happening in some of these places,” Kane said. “And hopefully, if we can, rebuild the public sense of agency with respect to public education.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In addition to highlighting Washington’s growth, the research team also released a list of 108 “\u003ca href=\"https://educationscorecard.org/districts-on-the-rise/\">districts on the rise\u003c/a>”: school districts where math and reading gains exceeded those of similar districts in their state. Washington was not included because there are no comparable districts within the city. But its gains are comparable to many districts on the list. And, like Washington, most of those districts still have large shares of students below grade level.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In theory, if a district’s scores keep growing by outsized amounts each year, students should catch up and eventually reach grade level. But public school critics like Wilson point out that even if a school system improves by one or two percentage points a year, it could take decades for the majority of students to get a decent education. In the meantime, the students who are currently in the system lose out. They can’t wait for that progress. Wilson worries that shining a light on a school system where most kids are far behind grade level can mislead the public and potentially cause school leaders to adopt the wrong policies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Let’s take the klieg light and move it to the school systems that are educating nearly all of their students, rather than a third of their students,” said Wilson.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wilson points to individual schools or charter school networks, where very \u003ca href=\"https://classicalcharterschools.org/\">high percentages of low-income\u003c/a> students are at or exceeding grade level. It’s much harder to replicate that success with low-income students across an entire large school district.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Income is a big factor in this debate. If the public and policymakers focus only on proficiency, affluent suburbs tend to dominate the results. High-income districts often appear to be the most successful, not necessarily because their schools are more effective, but because students from wealthier families begin far ahead.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That concern has prompted researchers to focus on growth-based measures of school performance over the past couple decades. A widely cited example came from research by Sean Reardon, a Stanford sociologist and co-author of the current report, who a decade ago found that Chicago was running the \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/05/upshot/a-better-way-to-compare-public-schools.html\">most effective schools\u003c/a> in the country based on student growth, even though many students were behind grade level. (Illinois was not among the 38 states in the latest analysis because of changes to its state assessment, so it’s unclear exactly where Chicago stands right now.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, many parents would probably rather enroll their kids in a school system where most of the students are on grade level, even if annual improvements are small or nonexistent, than a school where only a small share of students are on grade level but the school is turning around and improving.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Harvard’s Kane agreed that getting more students over the proficiency line is important too. For the team’s next Education Scorecard report, researchers are planning to add a new data point showing the share of kids who are proficient compared to other districts with similar demographics.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The disagreement persists because the two measures answer different questions. Growth captures whether students are learning more than they used to. Proficiency captures whether they have learned enough.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That is what makes Washington such a revealing case. It shows how a school system can post some of the strongest gains in the country and still fall short by the most basic measure of success: whether students can read and do math at grade level.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-rapid-growth-low-proficiency/\">\u003cem>school improvement\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>It seems like a tale of two school systems.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Washington, D.C., has emerged as the fastest-improving school system in the nation, according to a major new analysis of student test scores released last week by researchers at Stanford, Harvard and Dartmouth.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Education Scorecard \u003ca href=\"https://educationscorecard.org/\">analysis\u003c/a>, which compares more than 5,000 school districts across 38 states, finds that most of the country has been stuck in a reading recession — a decade-long slide in achievement that predates the pandemic. Between 2022 and 2025, only five states and the District of Columbia showed meaningful gains in reading. The nation’s capital posted the strongest growth of all and also led in math improvement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Washington students in both public and charter schools gained roughly two-thirds of a grade level in math and about a third of a grade level in reading over that period, according to the analysis. A grade level represents roughly a year’s worth of learning, which means that eighth graders in 2025 were about six months ahead in math compared with eighth graders in 2022.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the gains should not obscure a grimmer reality.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 2025, only 26 percent of Washington students met grade-level standards in math and only 38 percent were proficient in reading, according to a separate \u003ca href=\"https://www.dcpolicycenter.org/wp-content/uploads/v3_SODCS_2024_25_full_report-2.24-copy-2.pdf\">report\u003c/a> from the D.C. Policy Center, an independent local think tank. Just 16 percent of high school juniors and seniors were considered to be college or career ready.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A school system can improve rapidly and still leave most children behind. The contradiction is fueling an important politically and emotionally charged debate in education: Should schools be judged by how many students are proficient, or by how much students improve each year?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Critics of public schools are seizing upon the low proficiency rates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Gains of any magnitude are a good thing, but when most students — roughly two-thirds to three-quarters in the case of D.C. — are not functioning at grade level, this is nothing to applaud,” said Steven Wilson, a former education policymaker in Massachusetts and charter school leader. “Most students are still being failed by the system.” (Wilson’s 2025 book, “The Lost Decade,” criticizes recent school reform efforts.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even before last week’s national data release, Washington school leaders were celebrating the gains. Paul Kihn, deputy mayor for education, trumpeted the strength of the schools after 2025 annual tests revealed a whopping 3.6 percent improvement in reading and math, similar to the grade-level increases that the Education Scorecard team calculated. “Our academic achievement is unsurpassed in the country in terms of growth,” Kihn said in a March 2026 \u003ca href=\"https://dme.dc.gov/page/inside-dc-education-blog#03262026-1\">blog post\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Tom Kane, a Harvard economist and one of the authors of the new Education Scorecard report, explained that there is a long-running debate in the field of education about whether to focus on proficiency or growth. In this report, he said, the research team chose growth in order to “combat” what they see as an overly pessimistic narrative about public education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re trying to highlight that something good is happening in some of these places,” Kane said. “And hopefully, if we can, rebuild the public sense of agency with respect to public education.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In addition to highlighting Washington’s growth, the research team also released a list of 108 “\u003ca href=\"https://educationscorecard.org/districts-on-the-rise/\">districts on the rise\u003c/a>”: school districts where math and reading gains exceeded those of similar districts in their state. Washington was not included because there are no comparable districts within the city. But its gains are comparable to many districts on the list. And, like Washington, most of those districts still have large shares of students below grade level.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In theory, if a district’s scores keep growing by outsized amounts each year, students should catch up and eventually reach grade level. But public school critics like Wilson point out that even if a school system improves by one or two percentage points a year, it could take decades for the majority of students to get a decent education. In the meantime, the students who are currently in the system lose out. They can’t wait for that progress. Wilson worries that shining a light on a school system where most kids are far behind grade level can mislead the public and potentially cause school leaders to adopt the wrong policies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Let’s take the klieg light and move it to the school systems that are educating nearly all of their students, rather than a third of their students,” said Wilson.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wilson points to individual schools or charter school networks, where very \u003ca href=\"https://classicalcharterschools.org/\">high percentages of low-income\u003c/a> students are at or exceeding grade level. It’s much harder to replicate that success with low-income students across an entire large school district.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Income is a big factor in this debate. If the public and policymakers focus only on proficiency, affluent suburbs tend to dominate the results. High-income districts often appear to be the most successful, not necessarily because their schools are more effective, but because students from wealthier families begin far ahead.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That concern has prompted researchers to focus on growth-based measures of school performance over the past couple decades. A widely cited example came from research by Sean Reardon, a Stanford sociologist and co-author of the current report, who a decade ago found that Chicago was running the \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/05/upshot/a-better-way-to-compare-public-schools.html\">most effective schools\u003c/a> in the country based on student growth, even though many students were behind grade level. (Illinois was not among the 38 states in the latest analysis because of changes to its state assessment, so it’s unclear exactly where Chicago stands right now.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, many parents would probably rather enroll their kids in a school system where most of the students are on grade level, even if annual improvements are small or nonexistent, than a school where only a small share of students are on grade level but the school is turning around and improving.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Harvard’s Kane agreed that getting more students over the proficiency line is important too. For the team’s next Education Scorecard report, researchers are planning to add a new data point showing the share of kids who are proficient compared to other districts with similar demographics.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The disagreement persists because the two measures answer different questions. Growth captures whether students are learning more than they used to. Proficiency captures whether they have learned enough.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That is what makes Washington such a revealing case. It shows how a school system can post some of the strongest gains in the country and still fall short by the most basic measure of success: whether students can read and do math at grade level.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-rapid-growth-low-proficiency/\">\u003cem>school improvement\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "students-test-scores-began-declining-way-before-covid-these-schools-are-making-gains",
"title": "Students' Test Scores Began Declining Way Before COVID. These Schools Are Making Gains",
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"content": "\u003cp>The pandemic-era backslide in math and reading scores for students across the U.S. was not a sudden catastrophe but the continuation of a brutal, decade-long “learning recession” that began years before COVID-19’s arrival. That’s according to the latest \u003ca href=\"https://educationscorecard.org/about/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Education Scorecard\u003c/a>, an annual deep-dive into student data from The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University and Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The new Scorecard, released Wednesday and in its fourth year, offers several revelations for families, educators and policymakers looking for clarity — and hope — at a time when public education has been blamed and battered for those persistent declines in student performance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-embed npr-promo-card insettwocolumn\">\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\u003c/div>\n\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Among the report’s takeaways: Most states are finally making gains in math; federal relief dollars likely helped the lowest-income districts mount a hearty comeback; and, while most states have yet to make gains in reading, those that have all made legislative changes to how it’s taught in their schools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Before we dive in, one caveat: The annual Education Scorecard includes data from the vast majority of states and Washington D.C. drawn from their own state tests — as opposed to the \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/09/09/nx-s1-5526918/nations-report-card-scores-reading-math-science-education-cuts\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Nation’s Report Card\u003c/a>. But some states were excluded for various reasons, including if their state assessments had changed recently (Illinois, Kansas), if test opt-out rates were too high (New York, Colorado) or if a state didn’t publish district-level data with enough detail.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>‘The learning recession’\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>For nearly a quarter-century, from 1990 to 2013, math achievement among fourth- and eighth-graders “rose steadily,” according to the Scorecard’s analysis. So steadily that “the average fourth grader in 2013 could perform the same math skills as the average sixth grader could in 1990. That’s enormous progress,” says Stanford University’s Sean Reardon, one of the Scorecard’s authors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Reading gains weren’t quite as eye-popping, but they were gains nonetheless.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These sustained gains “may be one of the most important social policy successes of the last half-century that nobody knows about,” says Harvard’s Thomas Kane, one of the Scorecard’s authors. “Racial gaps were narrowing too. We just need to get back on that track.\u003cem>“\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In short, much was right with America’s schools, which makes the decline that began around 2013 “appear more striking and anomalous,” the report says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>“\u003c/strong>Particularly in reading, test scores were going down for four to six years before the pandemic,” says Reardon. “In fact, you wouldn’t really know there was a pandemic effect if you just looked at the last 10 or 12 years of test scores. There’s been just a steady kind of decline regardless of the pandemic.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What might have triggered that decline?\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>The Scorecard’s trigger theories\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Scorecard researchers offer two possible explanations for the beginning of schools’ learning recession:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>1. The fade-out of test-based accountability\u003c/strong>: Remember the much-maligned federal education law, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/12/08/458844737/no-child-left-behind-an-obituary\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">No Child Left Behind (NCLB)\u003c/a>, that took a tough-love approach with schools to improve student performance? The law, implemented in 2003, threatened a host of sanctions, including school closure, if student test scores didn’t rise, but its standards were seen by many to be not just unrealistic \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2014/10/11/354931351/it-s-2014-all-children-are-supposed-to-be-proficient-under-federal-law\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">but unattainable\u003c/a>. By 2013, the Obama administration began issuing waivers to free states from the law’s consequences. According to the Scorecard, 38 states were granted relief in the 2012-13 school year. Eventually, Congress replaced NCLB with a new federal law that de-emphasized test-based accountability.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Around 2013, Kane says, “school districts learned that nobody was looking over their shoulders in terms of student achievement.\u003cem>“\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While the Scorecard researchers don’t draw a direct, causal connection between the declines of test-based accountability and student scores, it’s clear that the nation’s learning recession began at roughly the same time states and schools stepped back from the punishing consequences of NCLB.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>2. Students’ social media use:\u003c/strong> It turns out, 2013 also marks a period of explosive growth in teenagers use of social media. A \u003ca href=\"https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/08/10/teens-social-media-and-technology-2022/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Pew Research\u003c/a> study found that in 2014-15, roughly 1 in 4 teens said they used the internet “almost constantly.” By 2022, it was nearly half of teens.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The researchers also point to international testing data that shows that lower-achieving students are the heaviest users of social media. Students who spend more time (7+ hours per day) on social media score below students who spend less (1-3 hours). And this gap, between the highest and lowest performers, began growing before the pandemic, not just in the U.S. but in many other countries too.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>The end of the learning recession?\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The Scorecard devotes considerable analysis to what’s been happening in schools since the end of the pandemic, from 2022 through the spring of 2025. There are signs that the nation’s learning recession may be turning around, albeit slowly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In that span of time, most of the states covered by this year’s Scorecard showed students making meaningful improvement in math, with Washington D.C. coming in as the clear winner there. Only five states failed to make gains in math: Georgia, Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska and Iowa.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Reading, though, remains a cause for concern. While D.C., Louisiana, Maryland and five other states did experience meaningful improvement between 2022 and 2025, most states continued to stagnate or, as in Florida, Arizona and Nebraska, further declined.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s also worth noting, while schools are once again, on average, regaining ground in math and slowly turning the corner in reading, the declines that began around 2013 have been so steep and lasting that only one state, Louisiana, has returned to 2019 performance levels in both subjects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>No state has returned to 2013 levels, according to Reardon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s easy to be sort of doom and gloom,” he adds, “but when you look at the period from the ’90s through 2013, we made enormous gains. And we actually narrowed achievement gaps between racial groups. That says we can actually improve our schools in ways that also improve equality of opportunity. We just haven’t been doing it for the last decade. But we could do it again.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>The U-shaped recovery\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The Scorecard reveals a fascinating phenomenon in schools from 2022 to 2025: a U-shaped recovery. Meaning, schools with the least amount of poverty, alongside schools with the most poverty, saw similar gains in math and similarly small losses in reading achievement. That’s while the schools in the middle of the income spectrum, at the bottom of this U, improved the least in both subjects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Why? One theory is that the highest-poverty districts got the most help from Congress in the form of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2024/06/18/nx-s1-5010963/schools-aid-students-pandemic\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">federal COVID relief dollars\u003c/a> — money they could spend on interventions such as tutoring and summer school. Districts with the lowest poverty rates got little help from the federal government but were already well-positioned financially. It was the middle-income districts that needed more help but didn’t qualify for full federal support.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If it hadn’t been for the federal pandemic relief,” says Kane, “we estimate there would have been no recovery on average for the highest-poverty districts.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>The science of reading effect\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>There’s been an important wild card in the effort to improve students’ reading skills: A movement among states to change their approach to \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/02/12/582465905/the-gap-between-the-science-on-kids-and-reading-and-how-it-is-taught\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">teaching reading to young children\u003c/a> by \u003ca href=\"https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">embracing the \u003c/a>\u003ca href=\"https://www.apmreports.org/story/2025/10/16/legislators-reading-laws-sold-a-story\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">“science of reading.”\u003c/a> As of March, the Scorecard says, most states had passed new literacy laws, including doubling down on the importance of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/02/12/582465905/the-gap-between-the-science-on-kids-and-reading-and-how-it-is-taught\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">teaching phonics\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Scorecard authors note that all seven of the states (plus D.C.) that saw reading gains between 2022 and 2025 had put comprehensive science of reading reforms into place. Of the states that had not by January 2024, none saw improvement. The connection between these reforms and improved results isn’t necessarily causal, they warn, but there’s clearly a link.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With most states struggling to make reading gains, one district-level success story highlighted by the Scorecard stands out: Baltimore City Public Schools. In spite of the challenges posed by poverty — most students there qualify for free or reduced-price meals — Baltimore students have been making striking reading gains.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Under CEO Sonja Brookins Santelises, the district reformed its approach to literacy. It embraced \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2024/06/02/nx-s1-4916590/some-states-are-adopting-a-new-form-of-reading-instruction-to-combat-falling-scores\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the science of reading\u003c/a> even before the pandemic and years ahead of the national wave of state-based literacy legislation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When Brookins Santelises took the lead in Baltimore in 2016, she says she quickly embraced the science of reading districtwide and its emphasis on phonics, as opposed to the \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/03/11/591504959/rethinking-how-students-with-dyslexia-are-taught-to-read\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">whole language approach\u003c/a>, which teaches children to guess at words using cues from a text’s pictures.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I remember gathering the [district’s] literacy department. And I said, ‘If you want to do whole language, there are other districts in Maryland that are doing whole language, and you are free to go there. We are not doing that in Baltimore City. I respect you, but you cannot stay here. I’ve been ferocious about it ever since.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>‘Kiss your brains!’\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The benefits of these changes appear to have been twofold. During the pandemic, the Scorecard shows Baltimore schools lost far less ground in reading than schools with similar levels of poverty. Then, in 2022, with those practices firmly in place, the city’s reading scores began to skyrocket, erasing pandemic-era losses and rising back around 2017 levels.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Baltimore’s successful approach to teaching literacy was on full display on a recent May morning, in veteran teacher Kimberly Lowery’s kindergarten class at Johnston Square Elementary. Lowery sat at the front of a rainbow-colored reading rug, running through a series of phonics-based games that her kindergarteners seemed to genuinely enjoy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There was letter-sound bingo, guess-the-sound flashcards and even a visit from a special spelling helper — a toy owl, named Echo, who lives at the end of a yardstick. If the kids’ laughter and cheering isn’t sign enough that they’re learning, district data shows that, by the end of last year, three-quarters of Lowery’s students were reading at or above grade level.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lowery told the children to kiss their brains and asked, “You guys are super-duper what?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In unison, the children hollered, “Smart!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Yes you are,” Lowery answered.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Edited by: Nirvi Shah and \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/people/6576424/steve-drummond\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cem>Steve Drummond\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cbr>\n\u003cem>Visual design and development by: \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/people/348775569/la-johnson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cem>LA Johnson\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"npr-transcript\">\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Transcript:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>LEILA FADEL, HOST:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A report out today shows that big losses in reading and math scores did not begin with the pandemic. Researchers say they started more than a decade ago. NPR’s Cory Turner has more on what they call a learning recession and what some states are doing about it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CORY TURNER, BYLINE: The report, called the Education Scorecard, comes from researchers at Stanford, Harvard and Dartmouth. Let’s start with that headline about the nation being stuck in a learning recession.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SEAN REARDON: Particularly in reading, test scores were going down for four to six years before the pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: Stanford researcher Sean Reardon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>REARDON: In fact, you wouldn’t really know there was a pandemic effect if you just looked at the last 10 or 12 years of test scores. There’s been just a steady kind of decline.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: Reardon argues this learning recession began around 2013, after a quarter century of learning gains he calls astonishing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>REARDON: The average fourth-grader in 2013 could perform the same math skills as the average sixth-grader could in 1990.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: And that matters, Reardon says, because as bad as things are now, it means America’s schools have done incredible things before and can do them again. To stop this learning recession, though, we need to know not just when it started, but why. Tom Kane at Harvard says there are at least two possible explanations. One, schools stopped worrying about a tough federal law that punished them for low test scores.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TOM KANE: Under No Child Left Behind, school leaders every year had to be nervous the day that their test results were being announced.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: But Kane says around 2013, that law was essentially abandoned. So that’s one theory.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>KANE: The other one is the rise in social media, which happened about the same time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: Turns out, reading and math scores also started falling as teens’ social media use skyrocketed. What really caused the declines, though, it’s too early to know. Now, let’s jump to the present and some good news. Last year, students in most states showed improvement in math, offering fresh hope for an end to this learning recession. Reading’s been a tougher slog, but there’s hope there, too. The few states that have improved all have something in common.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: C. Cat.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: They’ve doubled down on phonics and the science of reading, including Maryland.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>KIMBERLY LOWERY: C-L-oud.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>KIMBERLEY LOWERY AND UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: C-L-oud. Cloud.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>LOWERY: You guys are super-duper what?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: Smart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>LOWERY: Kiss your brain.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: Baltimore City Schools have made big gains in reading. Last year, teacher Kimberly Lowery helped three-quarters of her kindergartners become grade-level readers or better. Her top boss, Sonja Brookins Santelises, has been Baltimore City Schools’ CEO for the past decade and says she came in determined to improve the district’s approach to literacy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SONJA BROOKINS SANTELISES: The first thing that it did mean was that we all learn together how young people learn to read.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: Brookins Santelises decided to move away from an approach known as whole language and toward the science of reading. So she told her literacy staff…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BROOKINS SANTELISES: There are other districts in Maryland that are doing whole language, and you are free to go there. We are not doing that in Baltimore City.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: Then, during the pandemic, Baltimore students lost far less ground than kids in schools with similar levels of poverty. And by 2022…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: (Laughter).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: The city’s reading scores were shooting up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>LOWERY: All righty. Raymond.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: Back in Mrs. Lowery’s kindergarten class, the kids have the giggles after a fun game of breaking down word sounds. Mrs. Lowery asks them one more time – you guys are super-duper what?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: Smart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: Smart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cory Turner, NPR News, Baltimore, Maryland.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(SOUNDBITE OF ROBERT GLASPER’S “RECKONER”)\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The pandemic-era backslide in math and reading scores for students across the U.S. was not a sudden catastrophe but the continuation of a brutal, decade-long “learning recession” that began years before COVID-19’s arrival. That’s according to the latest \u003ca href=\"https://educationscorecard.org/about/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Education Scorecard\u003c/a>, an annual deep-dive into student data from The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University and Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The new Scorecard, released Wednesday and in its fourth year, offers several revelations for families, educators and policymakers looking for clarity — and hope — at a time when public education has been blamed and battered for those persistent declines in student performance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-embed npr-promo-card insettwocolumn\">\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\u003c/div>\n\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Among the report’s takeaways: Most states are finally making gains in math; federal relief dollars likely helped the lowest-income districts mount a hearty comeback; and, while most states have yet to make gains in reading, those that have all made legislative changes to how it’s taught in their schools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Before we dive in, one caveat: The annual Education Scorecard includes data from the vast majority of states and Washington D.C. drawn from their own state tests — as opposed to the \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/09/09/nx-s1-5526918/nations-report-card-scores-reading-math-science-education-cuts\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Nation’s Report Card\u003c/a>. But some states were excluded for various reasons, including if their state assessments had changed recently (Illinois, Kansas), if test opt-out rates were too high (New York, Colorado) or if a state didn’t publish district-level data with enough detail.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>‘The learning recession’\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>For nearly a quarter-century, from 1990 to 2013, math achievement among fourth- and eighth-graders “rose steadily,” according to the Scorecard’s analysis. So steadily that “the average fourth grader in 2013 could perform the same math skills as the average sixth grader could in 1990. That’s enormous progress,” says Stanford University’s Sean Reardon, one of the Scorecard’s authors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Reading gains weren’t quite as eye-popping, but they were gains nonetheless.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These sustained gains “may be one of the most important social policy successes of the last half-century that nobody knows about,” says Harvard’s Thomas Kane, one of the Scorecard’s authors. “Racial gaps were narrowing too. We just need to get back on that track.\u003cem>“\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In short, much was right with America’s schools, which makes the decline that began around 2013 “appear more striking and anomalous,” the report says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>“\u003c/strong>Particularly in reading, test scores were going down for four to six years before the pandemic,” says Reardon. “In fact, you wouldn’t really know there was a pandemic effect if you just looked at the last 10 or 12 years of test scores. There’s been just a steady kind of decline regardless of the pandemic.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What might have triggered that decline?\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>The Scorecard’s trigger theories\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Scorecard researchers offer two possible explanations for the beginning of schools’ learning recession:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>1. The fade-out of test-based accountability\u003c/strong>: Remember the much-maligned federal education law, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/12/08/458844737/no-child-left-behind-an-obituary\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">No Child Left Behind (NCLB)\u003c/a>, that took a tough-love approach with schools to improve student performance? The law, implemented in 2003, threatened a host of sanctions, including school closure, if student test scores didn’t rise, but its standards were seen by many to be not just unrealistic \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2014/10/11/354931351/it-s-2014-all-children-are-supposed-to-be-proficient-under-federal-law\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">but unattainable\u003c/a>. By 2013, the Obama administration began issuing waivers to free states from the law’s consequences. According to the Scorecard, 38 states were granted relief in the 2012-13 school year. Eventually, Congress replaced NCLB with a new federal law that de-emphasized test-based accountability.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Around 2013, Kane says, “school districts learned that nobody was looking over their shoulders in terms of student achievement.\u003cem>“\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While the Scorecard researchers don’t draw a direct, causal connection between the declines of test-based accountability and student scores, it’s clear that the nation’s learning recession began at roughly the same time states and schools stepped back from the punishing consequences of NCLB.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>2. Students’ social media use:\u003c/strong> It turns out, 2013 also marks a period of explosive growth in teenagers use of social media. A \u003ca href=\"https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/08/10/teens-social-media-and-technology-2022/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Pew Research\u003c/a> study found that in 2014-15, roughly 1 in 4 teens said they used the internet “almost constantly.” By 2022, it was nearly half of teens.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The researchers also point to international testing data that shows that lower-achieving students are the heaviest users of social media. Students who spend more time (7+ hours per day) on social media score below students who spend less (1-3 hours). And this gap, between the highest and lowest performers, began growing before the pandemic, not just in the U.S. but in many other countries too.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>The end of the learning recession?\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The Scorecard devotes considerable analysis to what’s been happening in schools since the end of the pandemic, from 2022 through the spring of 2025. There are signs that the nation’s learning recession may be turning around, albeit slowly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In that span of time, most of the states covered by this year’s Scorecard showed students making meaningful improvement in math, with Washington D.C. coming in as the clear winner there. Only five states failed to make gains in math: Georgia, Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska and Iowa.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Reading, though, remains a cause for concern. While D.C., Louisiana, Maryland and five other states did experience meaningful improvement between 2022 and 2025, most states continued to stagnate or, as in Florida, Arizona and Nebraska, further declined.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s also worth noting, while schools are once again, on average, regaining ground in math and slowly turning the corner in reading, the declines that began around 2013 have been so steep and lasting that only one state, Louisiana, has returned to 2019 performance levels in both subjects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>No state has returned to 2013 levels, according to Reardon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s easy to be sort of doom and gloom,” he adds, “but when you look at the period from the ’90s through 2013, we made enormous gains. And we actually narrowed achievement gaps between racial groups. That says we can actually improve our schools in ways that also improve equality of opportunity. We just haven’t been doing it for the last decade. But we could do it again.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>The U-shaped recovery\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The Scorecard reveals a fascinating phenomenon in schools from 2022 to 2025: a U-shaped recovery. Meaning, schools with the least amount of poverty, alongside schools with the most poverty, saw similar gains in math and similarly small losses in reading achievement. That’s while the schools in the middle of the income spectrum, at the bottom of this U, improved the least in both subjects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Why? One theory is that the highest-poverty districts got the most help from Congress in the form of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2024/06/18/nx-s1-5010963/schools-aid-students-pandemic\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">federal COVID relief dollars\u003c/a> — money they could spend on interventions such as tutoring and summer school. Districts with the lowest poverty rates got little help from the federal government but were already well-positioned financially. It was the middle-income districts that needed more help but didn’t qualify for full federal support.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If it hadn’t been for the federal pandemic relief,” says Kane, “we estimate there would have been no recovery on average for the highest-poverty districts.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>The science of reading effect\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>There’s been an important wild card in the effort to improve students’ reading skills: A movement among states to change their approach to \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/02/12/582465905/the-gap-between-the-science-on-kids-and-reading-and-how-it-is-taught\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">teaching reading to young children\u003c/a> by \u003ca href=\"https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">embracing the \u003c/a>\u003ca href=\"https://www.apmreports.org/story/2025/10/16/legislators-reading-laws-sold-a-story\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">“science of reading.”\u003c/a> As of March, the Scorecard says, most states had passed new literacy laws, including doubling down on the importance of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/02/12/582465905/the-gap-between-the-science-on-kids-and-reading-and-how-it-is-taught\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">teaching phonics\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Scorecard authors note that all seven of the states (plus D.C.) that saw reading gains between 2022 and 2025 had put comprehensive science of reading reforms into place. Of the states that had not by January 2024, none saw improvement. The connection between these reforms and improved results isn’t necessarily causal, they warn, but there’s clearly a link.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With most states struggling to make reading gains, one district-level success story highlighted by the Scorecard stands out: Baltimore City Public Schools. In spite of the challenges posed by poverty — most students there qualify for free or reduced-price meals — Baltimore students have been making striking reading gains.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Under CEO Sonja Brookins Santelises, the district reformed its approach to literacy. It embraced \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2024/06/02/nx-s1-4916590/some-states-are-adopting-a-new-form-of-reading-instruction-to-combat-falling-scores\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the science of reading\u003c/a> even before the pandemic and years ahead of the national wave of state-based literacy legislation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When Brookins Santelises took the lead in Baltimore in 2016, she says she quickly embraced the science of reading districtwide and its emphasis on phonics, as opposed to the \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/03/11/591504959/rethinking-how-students-with-dyslexia-are-taught-to-read\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">whole language approach\u003c/a>, which teaches children to guess at words using cues from a text’s pictures.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I remember gathering the [district’s] literacy department. And I said, ‘If you want to do whole language, there are other districts in Maryland that are doing whole language, and you are free to go there. We are not doing that in Baltimore City. I respect you, but you cannot stay here. I’ve been ferocious about it ever since.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>‘Kiss your brains!’\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The benefits of these changes appear to have been twofold. During the pandemic, the Scorecard shows Baltimore schools lost far less ground in reading than schools with similar levels of poverty. Then, in 2022, with those practices firmly in place, the city’s reading scores began to skyrocket, erasing pandemic-era losses and rising back around 2017 levels.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Baltimore’s successful approach to teaching literacy was on full display on a recent May morning, in veteran teacher Kimberly Lowery’s kindergarten class at Johnston Square Elementary. Lowery sat at the front of a rainbow-colored reading rug, running through a series of phonics-based games that her kindergarteners seemed to genuinely enjoy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There was letter-sound bingo, guess-the-sound flashcards and even a visit from a special spelling helper — a toy owl, named Echo, who lives at the end of a yardstick. If the kids’ laughter and cheering isn’t sign enough that they’re learning, district data shows that, by the end of last year, three-quarters of Lowery’s students were reading at or above grade level.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lowery told the children to kiss their brains and asked, “You guys are super-duper what?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In unison, the children hollered, “Smart!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Yes you are,” Lowery answered.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Edited by: Nirvi Shah and \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/people/6576424/steve-drummond\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cem>Steve Drummond\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cbr>\n\u003cem>Visual design and development by: \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/people/348775569/la-johnson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cem>LA Johnson\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"npr-transcript\">\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Transcript:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>LEILA FADEL, HOST:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A report out today shows that big losses in reading and math scores did not begin with the pandemic. Researchers say they started more than a decade ago. NPR’s Cory Turner has more on what they call a learning recession and what some states are doing about it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CORY TURNER, BYLINE: The report, called the Education Scorecard, comes from researchers at Stanford, Harvard and Dartmouth. Let’s start with that headline about the nation being stuck in a learning recession.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SEAN REARDON: Particularly in reading, test scores were going down for four to six years before the pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: Stanford researcher Sean Reardon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>REARDON: In fact, you wouldn’t really know there was a pandemic effect if you just looked at the last 10 or 12 years of test scores. There’s been just a steady kind of decline.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: Reardon argues this learning recession began around 2013, after a quarter century of learning gains he calls astonishing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>REARDON: The average fourth-grader in 2013 could perform the same math skills as the average sixth-grader could in 1990.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: And that matters, Reardon says, because as bad as things are now, it means America’s schools have done incredible things before and can do them again. To stop this learning recession, though, we need to know not just when it started, but why. Tom Kane at Harvard says there are at least two possible explanations. One, schools stopped worrying about a tough federal law that punished them for low test scores.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TOM KANE: Under No Child Left Behind, school leaders every year had to be nervous the day that their test results were being announced.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: But Kane says around 2013, that law was essentially abandoned. So that’s one theory.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>KANE: The other one is the rise in social media, which happened about the same time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: Turns out, reading and math scores also started falling as teens’ social media use skyrocketed. What really caused the declines, though, it’s too early to know. Now, let’s jump to the present and some good news. Last year, students in most states showed improvement in math, offering fresh hope for an end to this learning recession. Reading’s been a tougher slog, but there’s hope there, too. The few states that have improved all have something in common.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: C. Cat.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: They’ve doubled down on phonics and the science of reading, including Maryland.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>KIMBERLY LOWERY: C-L-oud.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>KIMBERLEY LOWERY AND UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: C-L-oud. Cloud.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>LOWERY: You guys are super-duper what?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: Smart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>LOWERY: Kiss your brain.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: Baltimore City Schools have made big gains in reading. Last year, teacher Kimberly Lowery helped three-quarters of her kindergartners become grade-level readers or better. Her top boss, Sonja Brookins Santelises, has been Baltimore City Schools’ CEO for the past decade and says she came in determined to improve the district’s approach to literacy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SONJA BROOKINS SANTELISES: The first thing that it did mean was that we all learn together how young people learn to read.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: Brookins Santelises decided to move away from an approach known as whole language and toward the science of reading. So she told her literacy staff…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>BROOKINS SANTELISES: There are other districts in Maryland that are doing whole language, and you are free to go there. We are not doing that in Baltimore City.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: Then, during the pandemic, Baltimore students lost far less ground than kids in schools with similar levels of poverty. And by 2022…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: (Laughter).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: The city’s reading scores were shooting up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>LOWERY: All righty. Raymond.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: Back in Mrs. Lowery’s kindergarten class, the kids have the giggles after a fun game of breaking down word sounds. Mrs. Lowery asks them one more time – you guys are super-duper what?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: Smart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TURNER: Smart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cory Turner, NPR News, Baltimore, Maryland.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(SOUNDBITE OF ROBERT GLASPER’S “RECKONER”)\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>A few days into the new semester this January, the LaSalle Parish school district in rural Louisiana made a pronouncement: No more homework.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since then, none of the 2,500 students in this district — from the youngest learners up through high school seniors — have been required to do schoolwork at home. Parents can request practice problems if they’d like, Superintendent Jonathan Garrett said, but that work won’t be mandatory or graded.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Homework assignments, it turned out, were among the biggest sources of complaints Garrett had heard from parents and students over the years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When there was a negative feeling about school, it usually stemmed from what kids are bringing home, the frustrations they feel completing that, and that parents and guardians feel trying to help them complete it,” he said in an interview.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Beyond that, Garrett said the move was driven by concerns – shared by many educators – that much of the homework students are assigned – especially in math – is needlessly repetitive, takes too long to complete and hasn’t adapted to the challenges posed by Artificial Intelligence.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The response to Garrett’s announcement was swift — and overwhelmingly positive. The message is the district’s most “liked”\u003ca href=\"https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=1444965060964889&set=a.499624705498934\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> post on Facebook\u003c/a> by far this year, with hundreds of shares — many of them by parents from neighboring parishes asking how they could get their own schools on board.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The scope of the district’s no-homework guidance is new, but it follows a trend that educators and researchers have been noticing for years: More teachers are moving away from homework.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Federal survey data shows that the amount of math homework assigned to fourth and eighth grade students, in particular, has been steadily declining for the past decade.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some educators and parents say this is a good thing — students shouldn’t spend six or more hours a day at school and still have additional schoolwork to complete at home. But the research on homework is complicated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some studies show that students who spend more time on homework\u003ca href=\"https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8025066/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> perform better than their peers\u003c/a>. For example, a longitudinal study released in 2021 of more than 6,000 students in Germany, Uruguay and the Netherlands found that lower-performing students who increased the amount of time they spent on math homework performed better in math, even one year later.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Other studies, however, suggest homework has minimal outcomes on academic performance: A 1998 study of more than 700 U.S. students led by a researcher at Duke University found that more homework assigned in elementary grades had no significant effect on standardized test scores. The researchers did find small positive gains on class grades when they looked at both test scores and the proportion of homework students completed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>More homework was also associated with negative attitudes about school for younger children in the study.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The best educators figured out a long time ago that we can control what we can control,” and that’s what happens during the school day, Superintendent Garrett said, not homework. “There has been a shift away from it naturally anyway, and I felt like this made it equitable across our entire school system.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>In math especially, students need practice\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The debate over homework has swung back and forth for more than a century, and the tide of public opinion has shifted every few years. It’s likely to continue changing for a simple reason: Researching homework is a challenge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s no good way to isolate the amount of time spent on homework and its effects on students, because it may take one student five minutes to complete the same math problem that another student spent 45 minutes on. That extra time doesn’t necessarily result in the struggling student performing better than the student who grasped the assignment more quickly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>However, just like playing the violin or hitting a baseball, or any other skill that requires training, there is evidence that students need practice to master academic subjects, particularly in math.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some experts worry the overall decrease in homework could be a problem for math achievement, at a time when\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/naep-test-2024-dismal-report/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> math scores across the country are already at a dismal low\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The best argument for homework is that mathematical procedures require practice, and you don’t want to waste classroom time on practice, so you send that home,” said Tom Loveless, a researcher and former teacher who has studied homework.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>The effects of AI on homework\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Generative artificial intelligence has added a new wrinkle to the homework debate, too. More than half of teens said they used chatbots to help with schoolwork, and\u003ca href=\"https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/02/24/how-teens-use-and-view-ai/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> 1 in 10 said they used virtual assistants\u003c/a> to do all or most of their schoolwork, according to a recent survey by Pew Research Center.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A different survey of teachers by the EdWeek Research Center found that 40 percent said homework assignments had decreased over the past two years, and of those, 29 percent said it was\u003ca href=\"https://www.edweek.org/leadership/are-schools-assigning-less-homework-a-new-survey-offers-answers/2026/02\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> because students’ use of AI had lessened the value of homework\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Between 1996 and 2015, very few fourth graders — between 4 and 6 percent — reported being given no math homework the previous night, according to surveys from the Nation’s Report Card. By 2024, that percentage was up to more than a quarter. There was a similar trend for eighth graders.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ariel Taylor Smith, senior director of the Center for Policy and Action at the National Parents Union, a nonprofit that advocates for parents, has seen this trend in her own fourth grader’s public elementary school class in Vermont, whose teacher doesn’t assign homework.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The thing they point to is that it’s an equity issue, and not all parents have the same availability and ability to support their students,” said Smith.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She believes, however, that students should do some homework without the help of their parents. “I would make the argument that if a kid is really far behind in school, that’s an equity issue. They need the additional time to practice.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Smith said she and her mother create their own homework now for her son: reading exercises and flash cards in math. Kids, she said, “need more practice. … Sometimes, you do have to practice the boring stuff, like math.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Not everyone feels this way about homework. For Jim Malliard’s two children in Franklin, Pa., adverse experiences at school became a barrier to completing homework.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It became a fight because the kids had so much school-based anxiety from trauma and bullying at school that they didn’t want to deal with school when they got home,” said Malliard, whose kids attended a public high school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Malliard, who\u003ca href=\"https://candyappleadvocacy.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> writes\u003c/a> about education issues and is a full-time caregiver to his wife, doesn’t think his children were overburdened with homework at their school, but he also doesn’t believe they were benefiting from it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The teachers would tell us homework only takes 15 minutes a night — sure, if a kid sits there and does it right away and is attentive and wants to do it,” Malliard said. “It was getting to be an hour for us.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He eventually enrolled his children in a virtual charter school, which they attended for the rest of their K-12 schooling.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>How much is enough?\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Over the years, research has attempted to answer the thorny question of how much homework is appropriate, with varying degrees of success.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Education groups and researchers generally recommend 10 minutes of homework each night per grade level. But it’s almost impossible to assign work that will take every student the same amount of time to complete, and research has shown there are harmful effects from too much time spent on homework.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A survey published in 2014 out of Stanford University that looked at more than 4,300 students in high-performing California high school schools found that the benefit of homework for high school students\u003ca href=\"https://ed.stanford.edu/news/more-two-hours-homework-may-be-counterproductive-research-suggests\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> plateaus after two hours a night\u003c/a>. Beyond that, the researchers found, it can lead to more stress and poor sleep.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Research on homework tends to focus on the amount of time students spend on it rather than the quality or purpose of the assignments, said Joyce Epstein, who has studied homework and is the co-director of the Center on School, Family, and Community Partnerships at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One option worth considering, Epstein said, is to design homework that has a specific purpose but is perhaps shorter than traditional homework assignments. Giving students the opportunity to practice is important, she said, particularly in math, where concepts build on each other and move relentlessly forward throughout the year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The interesting issue for folks to consider is not should there be more homework, but should there be better homework,” Epstein said. “Better homework in math might be knowing the fact that kids don’t have to be practicing for hours, 10 to 20 examples,” when they could establish mastery in less time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When students are completing math homework on their own but doing the problems incorrectly, some educators say it takes longer to reteach them the right way in class the next day.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wendy Birhanzel, superintendent of Harrison School District 2 in Colorado, said her district has taken the approach recommended by Epstein, of focusing on the quality of homework while assigning less of it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rather than long “drill and kill” worksheets she remembers from her time as a student, Birhanzel said elementary students in the district might have a reading assignment, a few math problems and a small writing sample. “It’s more purposeful and less intensive,” Birhanzel said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Louisiana’s LaSalle Parish, Superintendent Garrett said that to account for the lost practice time, he has given math teachers permission to slow down their instruction and give students time in class to practice concepts, even if that means they don’t cover as much content during the school year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We felt like doing that would actually be more beneficial than racing through and covering every single thing that was listed. We’ll see,” he said. “This might be something that helps us in the long run.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story was produced by\u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Contact writer Ariel Gilreath on Signal at arielgilreath.46 or at gilreath@hechingerreport.org\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>A few days into the new semester this January, the LaSalle Parish school district in rural Louisiana made a pronouncement: No more homework.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since then, none of the 2,500 students in this district — from the youngest learners up through high school seniors — have been required to do schoolwork at home. Parents can request practice problems if they’d like, Superintendent Jonathan Garrett said, but that work won’t be mandatory or graded.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Homework assignments, it turned out, were among the biggest sources of complaints Garrett had heard from parents and students over the years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When there was a negative feeling about school, it usually stemmed from what kids are bringing home, the frustrations they feel completing that, and that parents and guardians feel trying to help them complete it,” he said in an interview.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Beyond that, Garrett said the move was driven by concerns – shared by many educators – that much of the homework students are assigned – especially in math – is needlessly repetitive, takes too long to complete and hasn’t adapted to the challenges posed by Artificial Intelligence.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The response to Garrett’s announcement was swift — and overwhelmingly positive. The message is the district’s most “liked”\u003ca href=\"https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=1444965060964889&set=a.499624705498934\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> post on Facebook\u003c/a> by far this year, with hundreds of shares — many of them by parents from neighboring parishes asking how they could get their own schools on board.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The scope of the district’s no-homework guidance is new, but it follows a trend that educators and researchers have been noticing for years: More teachers are moving away from homework.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Federal survey data shows that the amount of math homework assigned to fourth and eighth grade students, in particular, has been steadily declining for the past decade.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some educators and parents say this is a good thing — students shouldn’t spend six or more hours a day at school and still have additional schoolwork to complete at home. But the research on homework is complicated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some studies show that students who spend more time on homework\u003ca href=\"https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8025066/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> perform better than their peers\u003c/a>. For example, a longitudinal study released in 2021 of more than 6,000 students in Germany, Uruguay and the Netherlands found that lower-performing students who increased the amount of time they spent on math homework performed better in math, even one year later.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Other studies, however, suggest homework has minimal outcomes on academic performance: A 1998 study of more than 700 U.S. students led by a researcher at Duke University found that more homework assigned in elementary grades had no significant effect on standardized test scores. The researchers did find small positive gains on class grades when they looked at both test scores and the proportion of homework students completed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>More homework was also associated with negative attitudes about school for younger children in the study.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The best educators figured out a long time ago that we can control what we can control,” and that’s what happens during the school day, Superintendent Garrett said, not homework. “There has been a shift away from it naturally anyway, and I felt like this made it equitable across our entire school system.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>In math especially, students need practice\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The debate over homework has swung back and forth for more than a century, and the tide of public opinion has shifted every few years. It’s likely to continue changing for a simple reason: Researching homework is a challenge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s no good way to isolate the amount of time spent on homework and its effects on students, because it may take one student five minutes to complete the same math problem that another student spent 45 minutes on. That extra time doesn’t necessarily result in the struggling student performing better than the student who grasped the assignment more quickly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>However, just like playing the violin or hitting a baseball, or any other skill that requires training, there is evidence that students need practice to master academic subjects, particularly in math.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some experts worry the overall decrease in homework could be a problem for math achievement, at a time when\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/naep-test-2024-dismal-report/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> math scores across the country are already at a dismal low\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The best argument for homework is that mathematical procedures require practice, and you don’t want to waste classroom time on practice, so you send that home,” said Tom Loveless, a researcher and former teacher who has studied homework.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>The effects of AI on homework\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Generative artificial intelligence has added a new wrinkle to the homework debate, too. More than half of teens said they used chatbots to help with schoolwork, and\u003ca href=\"https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/02/24/how-teens-use-and-view-ai/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> 1 in 10 said they used virtual assistants\u003c/a> to do all or most of their schoolwork, according to a recent survey by Pew Research Center.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A different survey of teachers by the EdWeek Research Center found that 40 percent said homework assignments had decreased over the past two years, and of those, 29 percent said it was\u003ca href=\"https://www.edweek.org/leadership/are-schools-assigning-less-homework-a-new-survey-offers-answers/2026/02\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> because students’ use of AI had lessened the value of homework\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Between 1996 and 2015, very few fourth graders — between 4 and 6 percent — reported being given no math homework the previous night, according to surveys from the Nation’s Report Card. By 2024, that percentage was up to more than a quarter. There was a similar trend for eighth graders.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ariel Taylor Smith, senior director of the Center for Policy and Action at the National Parents Union, a nonprofit that advocates for parents, has seen this trend in her own fourth grader’s public elementary school class in Vermont, whose teacher doesn’t assign homework.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The thing they point to is that it’s an equity issue, and not all parents have the same availability and ability to support their students,” said Smith.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She believes, however, that students should do some homework without the help of their parents. “I would make the argument that if a kid is really far behind in school, that’s an equity issue. They need the additional time to practice.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Smith said she and her mother create their own homework now for her son: reading exercises and flash cards in math. Kids, she said, “need more practice. … Sometimes, you do have to practice the boring stuff, like math.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Not everyone feels this way about homework. For Jim Malliard’s two children in Franklin, Pa., adverse experiences at school became a barrier to completing homework.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It became a fight because the kids had so much school-based anxiety from trauma and bullying at school that they didn’t want to deal with school when they got home,” said Malliard, whose kids attended a public high school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Malliard, who\u003ca href=\"https://candyappleadvocacy.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> writes\u003c/a> about education issues and is a full-time caregiver to his wife, doesn’t think his children were overburdened with homework at their school, but he also doesn’t believe they were benefiting from it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The teachers would tell us homework only takes 15 minutes a night — sure, if a kid sits there and does it right away and is attentive and wants to do it,” Malliard said. “It was getting to be an hour for us.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He eventually enrolled his children in a virtual charter school, which they attended for the rest of their K-12 schooling.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>How much is enough?\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Over the years, research has attempted to answer the thorny question of how much homework is appropriate, with varying degrees of success.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Education groups and researchers generally recommend 10 minutes of homework each night per grade level. But it’s almost impossible to assign work that will take every student the same amount of time to complete, and research has shown there are harmful effects from too much time spent on homework.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A survey published in 2014 out of Stanford University that looked at more than 4,300 students in high-performing California high school schools found that the benefit of homework for high school students\u003ca href=\"https://ed.stanford.edu/news/more-two-hours-homework-may-be-counterproductive-research-suggests\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> plateaus after two hours a night\u003c/a>. Beyond that, the researchers found, it can lead to more stress and poor sleep.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Research on homework tends to focus on the amount of time students spend on it rather than the quality or purpose of the assignments, said Joyce Epstein, who has studied homework and is the co-director of the Center on School, Family, and Community Partnerships at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One option worth considering, Epstein said, is to design homework that has a specific purpose but is perhaps shorter than traditional homework assignments. Giving students the opportunity to practice is important, she said, particularly in math, where concepts build on each other and move relentlessly forward throughout the year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The interesting issue for folks to consider is not should there be more homework, but should there be better homework,” Epstein said. “Better homework in math might be knowing the fact that kids don’t have to be practicing for hours, 10 to 20 examples,” when they could establish mastery in less time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When students are completing math homework on their own but doing the problems incorrectly, some educators say it takes longer to reteach them the right way in class the next day.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wendy Birhanzel, superintendent of Harrison School District 2 in Colorado, said her district has taken the approach recommended by Epstein, of focusing on the quality of homework while assigning less of it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rather than long “drill and kill” worksheets she remembers from her time as a student, Birhanzel said elementary students in the district might have a reading assignment, a few math problems and a small writing sample. “It’s more purposeful and less intensive,” Birhanzel said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Louisiana’s LaSalle Parish, Superintendent Garrett said that to account for the lost practice time, he has given math teachers permission to slow down their instruction and give students time in class to practice concepts, even if that means they don’t cover as much content during the school year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We felt like doing that would actually be more beneficial than racing through and covering every single thing that was listed. We’ll see,” he said. “This might be something that helps us in the long run.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story was produced by\u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Contact writer Ariel Gilreath on Signal at arielgilreath.46 or at gilreath@hechingerreport.org\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>As schools introduce artificial intelligence into the classroom, a new analysis suggests that these tools could be steering students in different directions depending on who they are.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Researchers from Stanford University fed 600 middle school essays into four different AI models and asked the models to give writing feedback. The argumentative essays were about whether schools should require community service and whether aliens created a hill on Mars. (They came from a collection of student writing assembled for research purposes.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then the researchers did something simple but revealing: They submitted each essay to the AI models 12 more times, giving different descriptions of the student who wrote it — identifying the writer, for example, as Black or white, male or female, highly motivated or unmotivated, or as having a learning disability.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The feedback shifted.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The researchers found consistent patterns across all the AI models. Essays attributed to Black students received more praise and encouragement, sometimes emphasizing leadership or power. (“Your personal story is powerful! Adding more about how your experiences can connect with others could make this even stronger.”) Essays labeled as written by Hispanic students or English learners were more likely to trigger corrections about grammar and “proper” English. When the student was identified as white, the feedback more often focused on argument structure, evidence and clarity — the kinds of comments that can push writers to strengthen their ideas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The AI models addressed female students more affectionately and used more first-person pronouns. (“I love your confidence in expressing your opinion!”) Students labeled as unmotivated were met with upbeat encouragement. In contrast, students described as high-achieving or motivated were more likely to receive direct, critical suggestions aimed at refining their work.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Different words for different students\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_66301\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2896px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-66301\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/04/AI-Race-Study-Hechinger.png\" alt=\"Table of words used in a test\" width=\"2896\" height=\"874\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/04/AI-Race-Study-Hechinger.png 2896w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/04/AI-Race-Study-Hechinger-2000x604.png 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/04/AI-Race-Study-Hechinger-160x48.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/04/AI-Race-Study-Hechinger-768x232.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/04/AI-Race-Study-Hechinger-1536x464.png 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/04/AI-Race-Study-Hechinger-2048x618.png 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2896px) 100vw, 2896px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">These are the top 20 statistically significant words that AI models use in feedback for students of different races and genders. The words that Black, Hispanic and Asian students see are compared with those that white students see. The words that females see are compared with those that males see. Underlined words indicate evaluative judgments of the writing. Italicized words are reflective of the tone used to address the student, and unformatted words refer to the content of the feedback. (Source: Table 4, “Marked Pedagogies: Examining Linguistic Biases in Personalized Automated Writing Feedback” by Mei Tan, Lena Phalen and Dorottya Demszky)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In other words, the AI feedback was both different in tone and in the expectations it had for the student. The paper, “\u003ca href=\"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.12471\">Marked Pedagogies: Examining Linguistic Biases in Personalized Automated Writing Feedback\u003c/a>,” hasn’t yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, but it was nominated for the best paper at the \u003ca href=\"https://www.solaresearch.org/events/lak/lak26/\">16th International Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference\u003c/a> in Norway, where it is slated to be presented April 30. (\u003cem>Update: A \u003ca href=\"https://url.us.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/5Nx-CDk0BlfD7JVlCAi2Tj38br?domain=dl.acm.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">final version of this paper\u003c/a> was published on April 26 in a \u003ca href=\"https://url.us.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/jWeMCERPDmIkw0D5CPsoT7aK0m?domain=dl.acm.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">collection of research\u003c/a> to be presented at the conference.\u003c/em>)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The researchers describe the feedback results as showing “positive feedback bias” and “feedback withholding bias” — offering more praise and less criticism to some groups of students. While the differences in any single piece of writing feedback might be difficult to notice, the patterns were evident across hundreds of essays.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The researchers believe that AI is changing its feedback on identical essays because the models are trained on vast amounts of human language. Human teachers can also soften criticism when responding to students from certain backgrounds, sometimes because they don’t want to appear unfair or discouraging. “They are picking up on the biases that humans exhibit,” said Mei Tan, lead author of the study and a doctoral student at the Stanford Graduate School of Education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At first glance, the differences in feedback might not seem harmful. More encouragement could boost a student’s confidence. Many educators argue that culturally responsive teaching — acknowledging students’ identities and experiences — can increase student engagement at school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But there is a trade-off.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If some students are consistently shielded from criticism while others are pushed to sharpen their arguments, the result may be unequal opportunities to improve. Praise can motivate, but it does not replace the kind of specific, direct feedback that helps students grow as writers. Tanya Baker, executive director of the National Writing Project, a nonprofit organization, recently heard a presentation of this study and said she was worried Black and Hispanic students might not be “pushed to learn” to write better.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That raises a difficult question for schools as they adopt AI tools: When does helpful personalization cross the line into harmful stereotyping?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of course, teachers are unlikely to explicitly tell AI systems a student’s race or background in the way the researchers did in this experiment. But that doesn’t solve the problem, the Stanford researchers said. Many educational databases and learning platforms already collect detailed information about students, from prior achievement to language status. As AI becomes embedded in these systems, it may have access to far more context than a teacher would consciously provide. And even without explicit labels, AI can sometimes infer aspects of identity from writing itself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The larger issue is that AI systems are not neutral tutors. Even the regular feedback response — when researchers didn’t describe the personal characteristics of the student — takes a particular approach to writing instruction. Tan described it as rather discouraging and focused on corrections. “Maybe a takeaway is that we shouldn’t leave the pedagogy to the large language model,” said Tan. “Humans should be in control.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Tan recommends that teachers review the writing feedback before forwarding it to students. But one of the selling points of AI feedback is that it’s instantaneous. If the teacher needs to review it first, that slows it down and potentially undermines its effectiveness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>AI also offers the potential of personalization. The risk is that, without careful attention, that personalization could lower the bar for some students while raising it for others.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-ai-bias-feedback/\">\u003cem>AI bias\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>As schools introduce artificial intelligence into the classroom, a new analysis suggests that these tools could be steering students in different directions depending on who they are.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Researchers from Stanford University fed 600 middle school essays into four different AI models and asked the models to give writing feedback. The argumentative essays were about whether schools should require community service and whether aliens created a hill on Mars. (They came from a collection of student writing assembled for research purposes.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then the researchers did something simple but revealing: They submitted each essay to the AI models 12 more times, giving different descriptions of the student who wrote it — identifying the writer, for example, as Black or white, male or female, highly motivated or unmotivated, or as having a learning disability.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The feedback shifted.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The researchers found consistent patterns across all the AI models. Essays attributed to Black students received more praise and encouragement, sometimes emphasizing leadership or power. (“Your personal story is powerful! Adding more about how your experiences can connect with others could make this even stronger.”) Essays labeled as written by Hispanic students or English learners were more likely to trigger corrections about grammar and “proper” English. When the student was identified as white, the feedback more often focused on argument structure, evidence and clarity — the kinds of comments that can push writers to strengthen their ideas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The AI models addressed female students more affectionately and used more first-person pronouns. (“I love your confidence in expressing your opinion!”) Students labeled as unmotivated were met with upbeat encouragement. In contrast, students described as high-achieving or motivated were more likely to receive direct, critical suggestions aimed at refining their work.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Different words for different students\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_66301\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2896px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-66301\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/04/AI-Race-Study-Hechinger.png\" alt=\"Table of words used in a test\" width=\"2896\" height=\"874\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/04/AI-Race-Study-Hechinger.png 2896w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/04/AI-Race-Study-Hechinger-2000x604.png 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/04/AI-Race-Study-Hechinger-160x48.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/04/AI-Race-Study-Hechinger-768x232.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/04/AI-Race-Study-Hechinger-1536x464.png 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/04/AI-Race-Study-Hechinger-2048x618.png 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2896px) 100vw, 2896px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">These are the top 20 statistically significant words that AI models use in feedback for students of different races and genders. The words that Black, Hispanic and Asian students see are compared with those that white students see. The words that females see are compared with those that males see. Underlined words indicate evaluative judgments of the writing. Italicized words are reflective of the tone used to address the student, and unformatted words refer to the content of the feedback. (Source: Table 4, “Marked Pedagogies: Examining Linguistic Biases in Personalized Automated Writing Feedback” by Mei Tan, Lena Phalen and Dorottya Demszky)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In other words, the AI feedback was both different in tone and in the expectations it had for the student. The paper, “\u003ca href=\"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.12471\">Marked Pedagogies: Examining Linguistic Biases in Personalized Automated Writing Feedback\u003c/a>,” hasn’t yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, but it was nominated for the best paper at the \u003ca href=\"https://www.solaresearch.org/events/lak/lak26/\">16th International Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference\u003c/a> in Norway, where it is slated to be presented April 30. (\u003cem>Update: A \u003ca href=\"https://url.us.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/5Nx-CDk0BlfD7JVlCAi2Tj38br?domain=dl.acm.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">final version of this paper\u003c/a> was published on April 26 in a \u003ca href=\"https://url.us.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/jWeMCERPDmIkw0D5CPsoT7aK0m?domain=dl.acm.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">collection of research\u003c/a> to be presented at the conference.\u003c/em>)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The researchers describe the feedback results as showing “positive feedback bias” and “feedback withholding bias” — offering more praise and less criticism to some groups of students. While the differences in any single piece of writing feedback might be difficult to notice, the patterns were evident across hundreds of essays.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The researchers believe that AI is changing its feedback on identical essays because the models are trained on vast amounts of human language. Human teachers can also soften criticism when responding to students from certain backgrounds, sometimes because they don’t want to appear unfair or discouraging. “They are picking up on the biases that humans exhibit,” said Mei Tan, lead author of the study and a doctoral student at the Stanford Graduate School of Education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At first glance, the differences in feedback might not seem harmful. More encouragement could boost a student’s confidence. Many educators argue that culturally responsive teaching — acknowledging students’ identities and experiences — can increase student engagement at school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But there is a trade-off.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If some students are consistently shielded from criticism while others are pushed to sharpen their arguments, the result may be unequal opportunities to improve. Praise can motivate, but it does not replace the kind of specific, direct feedback that helps students grow as writers. Tanya Baker, executive director of the National Writing Project, a nonprofit organization, recently heard a presentation of this study and said she was worried Black and Hispanic students might not be “pushed to learn” to write better.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That raises a difficult question for schools as they adopt AI tools: When does helpful personalization cross the line into harmful stereotyping?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of course, teachers are unlikely to explicitly tell AI systems a student’s race or background in the way the researchers did in this experiment. But that doesn’t solve the problem, the Stanford researchers said. Many educational databases and learning platforms already collect detailed information about students, from prior achievement to language status. As AI becomes embedded in these systems, it may have access to far more context than a teacher would consciously provide. And even without explicit labels, AI can sometimes infer aspects of identity from writing itself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The larger issue is that AI systems are not neutral tutors. Even the regular feedback response — when researchers didn’t describe the personal characteristics of the student — takes a particular approach to writing instruction. Tan described it as rather discouraging and focused on corrections. “Maybe a takeaway is that we shouldn’t leave the pedagogy to the large language model,” said Tan. “Humans should be in control.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Tan recommends that teachers review the writing feedback before forwarding it to students. But one of the selling points of AI feedback is that it’s instantaneous. If the teacher needs to review it first, that slows it down and potentially undermines its effectiveness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>AI also offers the potential of personalization. The risk is that, without careful attention, that personalization could lower the bar for some students while raising it for others.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-ai-bias-feedback/\">\u003cem>AI bias\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"info": "Possible is hosted by entrepreneur Reid Hoffman and writer Aria Finger. Together in Possible, Hoffman and Finger lead enlightening discussions about building a brighter collective future. The show features interviews with visionary guests like Trevor Noah, Sam Altman and Janette Sadik-Khan. Possible paints an optimistic portrait of the world we can create through science, policy, business, art and our shared humanity. It asks: What if everything goes right for once? How can we get there? Each episode also includes a short fiction story generated by advanced AI GPT-4, serving as a thought-provoking springboard to speculate how humanity could leverage technology for good.",
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"soldout": {
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"info": "The TED Radio Hour is a journey through fascinating ideas, astonishing inventions, fresh approaches to old problems, and new ways to think and create.",
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