Once upon a time, educators worried about the dangers of CliffsNotes — study guides that rendered great works of literature as a series of bullet points that many students used as a replacement for actually doing the reading.
Today, that sure seems quaint.
Suddenly, new consumer AI tools have hit the market that can take any piece of text, audio or video and provide that same kind of simplified summary. And those summaries aren’t just a series of quippy text in bullet points. These days students can have tools like Google’s NotebookLM turn their lecture notes into a podcast, where sunny-sounding AI bots banter and riff on key points. Most of the tools are free, and do their work in seconds with the click of a button.
Naturally, all this is causing concern among some educators, who see students off-loading the hard work of synthesizing information to AI at a pace never before possible.
But the overall picture is more complicated, especially as these tools become more mainstream and their use starts to become standard in business and other contexts beyond the classroom.
And the tools serve as a particular lifeline for neurodivergent students, who suddenly have access to services that can help them get organized and support their reading comprehension, teaching experts say.
“There’s no universal answer,” says Alexis Peirce Caudell, a lecturer in informatics at Indiana University at Bloomington who recently did an assignment where many students shared their experience and concerns about AI tools. “Students in biology are going to be using it in one way, chemistry students are going to be using it in another. My students are all using it in different ways.”
It’s not as simple as assuming that students are all cheaters, the instructor stresses.
“Some students were concerned about pressure to engage with tools — if all of their peers were doing it that they should be doing it even if they felt it was getting in the way of their authentically learning,” she says. They are asking themselves questions like, “Is this helping me get through this specific assignment or this specific test because I’m trying to navigate five classes and applications for internships” — but at the cost of learning?
It all adds new challenges to schools and colleges as they attempt to set boundaries and policies for AI use in their classrooms.
Need for ‘Friction’
It seems like just about every week -— or even every day — tech companies announce new features that students are adopting in their studies.
Just last week, for instance, Apple released Apple Intelligence features for iPhones, and one of the features can recraft any piece of text to different tones, such as casual or professional. And last month ChatGPT-maker OpenAI released a feature called Canvas that includes slider bars for users to instantly change the reading level of a text.
Marc Watkins, a lecturer of writing and rhetoric at the University of Mississippi, says he is worried that students are lured by the time-saving promises of these tools and may not realize that using them can mean skipping the actual work it takes to internalize and remember the material.
“From a teaching, learning standpoint, that's pretty concerning to me,” he says. “Because we want our students to struggle a little bit, to have a little bit of friction, because that's important for their learning.”
And he says new features are making it harder for teachers to encourage students to use AI in helpful ways — like teaching them how to craft prompts to change the writing level of something: “It removes that last level of desirable difficulty when they can just button mash and get a final draft and get feedback on the final draft, too.”
Even professors and colleges that have adopted AI policies may need to rethink them in light of these new types of capabilities.
As two professors put it in a recent op-ed, “Your AI Policy Is Already Obsolete.”
“A student who reads an article you uploaded, but who cannot remember a key point, uses the AI assistant to summarize or remind them where they read something. Has this person used AI when there was a ban in the class?” ask the authors, Zach Justus, director of faculty development at California State University, Chico, and Nik Janos, a professor of sociology there. They note that popular tools like Adobe Acrobat now have “AI assistant” features that can summarize documents with the push of a button. “Even when we are evaluating our colleagues in tenure and promotion files,” the professors write, “do you need to promise not to hit the button when you are plowing through hundreds of pages of student evaluations of teaching?”
Instead of drafting and redrafting AI policies, the professors argue that educators should work out broad frameworks for what is acceptable help from chatbots.
But Watkins calls on the makers of AI tools to do more to mitigate the misuse of their systems in academic settings, or as he put it when EdSurge talked with him, “to make sure that this tool that is being used so prominently by students [is] actually effective for their learning and not just as a tool to offload it.”
Uneven Accuracy
These new AI tools raise a host of new challenges beyond those at play when printed CliffsNotes were the study tool du jour.
One is that AI summarizing tools don’t always provide accurate information, due to a phenomenon of large language models known as “hallucinations,” when chatbots guess at facts but present them to users as sure things.
When Bonni Stachowiak first tried the podcast feature on Google’s NotebookLM, for instance, she said she was blown away by how lifelike the robot voices sounded and how well they seemed to summarize the documents she fed it. Stachowiak is the host of the long-running podcast, Teaching in Higher Ed, and dean of teaching and learning at Vanguard University of Southern California, and she regularly experiments with new AI tools in her teaching.
But as she tried the tool more, and put in documents on complex subjects that she knew well, she noticed occasional errors or misunderstandings. “It just flattens it — it misses all of this nuance,” she says. “It sounds so intimate because it’s a voice and audio is such an intimate medium. But as soon as it was something that you knew a lot about it’s going to fall flat.”
Even so, she says she has found the podcasting feature of NotebookLM useful in helping her understand and communicate bureaucratic issues at her university — such as turning part of the faculty handbook into a podcast summary. When she checked it with colleagues who knew the policies well, she says they felt it did a “perfectly good job.” “It is very good at making two-dimensional bureaucracy more approachable,” she says.
Peirce Caudell, of Indiana University, says her students have raised ethical issues with using AI tools as well.
Others, she adds, worry about how much data users end up giving AI companies, especially when students use free versions of the tools.
“We're not having that conversation,” she says. “We're not having conversations about what does it mean to actively resist the use of generative AI?”
Even so, the instructor is seeing positive impacts for students, such as when they use a tool to help make flashcards to study.
And she heard about a student with ADHD who had always found reading a large text “overwhelming,” but was using ChatGPT “to get over the hurdle of that initial engagement with the reading and then they were checking their understanding with the use of ChatGPT.”
And Stachowiak says she has heard of other AI tools that students with intellectual disabilities are using, such as one that helps users break down large tasks into smaller, more manageable sub-tasks.
“This is not cheating,” she stresses. “It’s breaking things down and estimating how long something is going to take. That is not something that comes naturally for a lot of people.”
How often do you come in contact with a conspiracy theory?
Maybe on occasion, when you flip through TV channels and land on an episode of “Ancient Aliens.” Or perhaps when a friend from high school shares a questionable meme on Facebook.
How confident are you in your ability to tell fact from fiction?
If you’re a teen, you could be exposed to conspiracy theories and a host of other pieces of misinformation as frequently as every day while scrolling through your social media feeds.
That’s according to a new study by the News Literacy Project, which also found that teens struggle with identifying false information online. This comes at a time when media literacy education isn’t available to most students, the report finds, and their ability to distinguish between objective and biased information sources is weak. The findings are based on responses from more than 1,000 teens ages 13 to 18.
“News literacy is fundamental to preparing students to become active, critically thinking members of our civic life — which should be one of the primary goals of a public education,” Kim Bowman, News Literacy Project senior research manager and author of the report, said in an email interview. “If we don’t teach young people the skills they need to evaluate information, they will be left at a civic and personal disadvantage their entire lives. News literacy instruction is as important as core subjects like reading and math.”
Telling Fact from Fiction
About 80 percent of teens who use social media say they see content about conspiracy theories in their online feeds, with 20 percent seeing conspiracy content every day.
“They include narratives such as the Earth being flat, the 2020 election being rigged or stolen, and COVID-19 vaccines being dangerous,” the News Literacy Project’s report found.
While teens don’t believe every conspiracy theory they see, 81 percent who see such content online said they believe one or more.
Bowman noted, “As dangerous or harmful as they can be, these narratives are designed to be engaging and satisfy deep psychological needs, such as the need for community and understanding. Being a conspiracy theorist or believing in a conspiracy theory can become a part of someone’s identity. It’s not necessarily a label an individual is going to shy away from sharing with others.”
At the same time, the report found that the bar for offering media literacy is low. Just six states have guidelines for how to teach media literacy, and only three make it a requirement in public schools.
Less than 40 percent of teens surveyed reported having any media literacy instruction during the 2023-24 school year, according to the analysis.
Credible Sources
As part of gathering data for the report, teens were asked to try their hand at distinguishing between different types of information they might encounter online. They were also challenged to identify real or fake photos and judge whether an information source is credible.
The study asked participants to identify a series of articles as advertisements, opinion or news pieces.
More than half of teens failed to identify branded content — a newsy-looking piece on plant-based meat in the Washington Post news app — as an advertisement. About the same amount didn’t realize that an article with “commentary” in the headline was about the author’s opinion.
They did better at recognizing Google’s “sponsored” results as ads, but about 40 percent of teens said they thought it meant those results were popular or of high quality. Only 8 percent of teens correctly categorized the information in all three examples.
In another exercise, teens were asked to identify which of two pieces of content about Coca-Cola’s plastic waste was more credible: a press release from Coca-Cola or an article from Reuters. The results were too close for comfort for the report, with only 56 percent of teens choosing the Reuters article as more trustworthy.
Brand recognition could have played a role in teens’ decision to choose Coca-Cola over Reuters, Bowman says, a feeling that a more-recognizable company was more credible.
“Whatever the reason, I do think news organizations engaging young people on social media and building up trust and recognition there could have the potential to move the needle on a question like this in the future,” Bowman said.
Checking the Facts
Where teens did feel confident spotting hoaxes was with visuals.
Two-thirds of study participants said they could do a reverse Google image search to find the original source of an image. About 70 percent of teens could correctly distinguish between an AI-generated image and a real photograph.
To test teens’ ability to spot misinformation, they were asked whether a social media photo of a melting traffic light was “strong evidence that hot temperatures in Texas melted traffic lights in July 2023.”
Most teens answered correctly, but about one-third still believed the photo alone was strong evidence that the claim about melting traffic lights was true.
Bowman said that the fact that there was no difference in students’ performance when results were analyzed by their age leaves her wondering if teens “of all ages have received the message that they can’t always believe their eyes when it comes to the images they see online.”
“Their radars seem to be up when it comes to identifying manipulated, misrepresented, or completely fabricated images,” Bowman continued. “Especially with the recent advancements and availability of generative AI technologies, I wonder if it may be harder to convince them of the authenticity of a photo that is actually real and verified than to convince them that an image is false in some way.”
When it came to sharing on social media, teens expressed a strong desire to make sure their posts contained correct information. So how are they fact-checking themselves, given a minority of teens actively follow news or have taken media literacy classes?
Among teens who said they verify news before sharing, Bowman said they’re engaged in lateral reading, which she described as “a quick internet search to investigate the post’s source” and a method employed by professional fact-checkers.
Given a random group of teens, Bowman posited they would most likely use much less effective ways of judging a source’s credibility, based on factors like a website’s design or URL.
“In other words, previous research shows that young people tend to rely on outdated techniques or surface-level criteria to determine a source’s credibility,” Bowman explained. “If schools across the country implemented high-quality news literacy instruction, I am confident we can debunk old notions of how to determine credibility that are no longer effective in today’s information landscape and, instead, teach young people research-backed verification techniques that we know work.”
Actively Staying Informed
While conspiracy theories surface commonly for teens, they’re not necessarily arming themselves with information to stave them off.
Teens are split on whether they trust the news. Just over half of teens said that journalists do more to protect society than to harm it. Nearly 70 percent said news organizations are biased, and 80 percent believe news organizations are either more biased or about the same as other online content creators.
A minority of teens — just 15 percent — actively seek out news to stay informed.
The study also asked teens to list news sources they trusted to provide accurate and fair information.
CNN and Fox News received the most endorsements, with 178 and 133 mentions respectively. TMZ, NPR and the Associated Press were equally matched with 12 mentions each.
Local TV news was the most trusted news medium, followed by TikTok.
Teens agree on at least one thing: A whopping 94 percent said schools should be required to offer some degree of media literacy.
“Young people know better than anyone how much they are expected to learn before graduation so, for so many teens to say they would welcome yet another requirement to their already overfull plate, is a huge deal and a big endorsement for the importance of a media literacy education,” Bowman said.
Throughout the study, students who had any amount of media literacy education did better on the study’s test questions than their peers. They were more likely to be active news seekers, trust news outlets and feel more confident in their ability to fact-check what they see online.
And, in a strange twist, students who get media literacy in school report seeing more conspiracy theories on social media — perhaps precisely because they have sharper media literacy skills.
“Teens with at least some media literacy instruction, who keep up with news, and who have high
trust in news media are all more likely to report seeing conspiracy theory posts on social media at least once a week,” according to the report. “These differences could indicate that teens in these subgroups are more adept at spotting these kinds of posts or that their social media algorithms are more likely to serve them these kinds of posts, or both.”
With all the talk of the downsides of smartphones for teenagers, parents have looked to smartwatches as a way to stay in contact with their young children while avoiding the full internet and social media access of a phone.
At least that was the narrative a couple of years ago. But more recently, more companies have been marketing smartwatches to kids as young as 4 and 5 years old. And at younger ages, it’s not the kids asking for the devices, but parents looking to keep tabs on their children out of concern for their safety.
That’s what EdSurge senior reporter Emily Tate Sullivan found when she spent months researching the recent boom in smartwatches for kids, for a feature story that EdSurge co-published with WIRED magazine last week.
“The worst case scenario in the minds of the parents I talked to is just always looming,” she says. “These parents think, ‘If there's a school shooting, if there's a lockdown, I want to be able to communicate with my child in that locked down classroom. If they are abducted, I want to be able to know exactly where they are. Maybe there's still a watch on their wrist and I can track them.’ I mean, these are things that are so improbable, but it doesn't really matter. The fear is pervasive. It's a really powerful force.”
But while parents focus on physical safety as they hand kids smartwatches, they may not be considering the downsides of starting a digital life so early, according to digital media experts. And schools are increasingly seeing the devices as a distraction — sometimes from parents texting their kids during the school day. Yet watches are often not included in school bans on smartphones, and they’re not always mentioned in the conversation about the effects of digital devices on children.
For this week’s EdSurge Podcast, we go behind the story with an interview with Tate Sullivan, including details that she wasn’t able to fit into the final piece. And in the second half of the episode, the author reads the full article, so you can catch this story in podcast form.
What difference did $190 billion make for student success coming out of the COVID-19 health crisis?
Not as much as you might think.
An ESSER spending analysis by Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University found some puzzling instances where funneling more money into a pandemic-worsened problem didn’t help schools recover.
The data ultimately points to no “silver bullet” in spending aimed at improving students’ academic performance since the pandemic, says Marguerite Roza, director of Edunomics Lab.
Return on Investment
A crunch of the numbers found that states varied widely when it came to the return on investment of their ESSER dollars. Both reading and math scores increased in districts in states like Mississippi, North Carolina and Tennessee, where the rate of ESSER spending per student was relatively high (over $1,000) from 2022 to 2023.
States like Nevada, California and South Dakota were also high spenders, but they saw some of the lowest gains in reading and math during the same time period.
Analysts said the difference likely came down to leadership in some states being “simply more effective at steering districts to focus on student learning” in the face of vague spending guidelines from the federal government. Leaders in Mississippi, North Carolina and Tennessee focused on setting clear goals and checking progress for reading and math performance.
Each chart shows the ESSER funds each district spent per student during the 2022-23 school year compared to the average years of learning gains or losses in reading and math. Source: Edunomics Lab.
It is the weekend before my students arrive for the new school year. I am in my classroom listening to Lofi beats, pondering what has been and what is to come. All around my room are reminders of my identity as a 6’2, 280-pound Black and Puerto Rican man, husband, father, math teacher and basketball coach. I have come to find solace here; yes, these are part of my identity, which I hold dear to my heart — but as I have grown older, I have learned that few people ever see beyond them, including those who I call colleagues and peers in this education system.
In these moments, I frequently return to my favorite book, “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison. The novel’s exploration of invisibility, identity and the struggle for recognition resonates deeply with my experiences in education. Much like Ellison’s protagonist, I feel I have only been viewed as other people's definition of who I am supposed to be. When my students arrive, I feel I am expected to perform certain duties outside my job description simply because of my identity. My ability as a leader is hardly recognized. The struggles of being a husband and father are ignored. My existence as a person feels like an afterthought. These are the challenges I’ve faced. I want to feel seen for the many contributions I make in my classroom, school and community. This work is not easy, and feeling invisible at the same time is exhausting.
Ellison’s “Invisible Man” resonates deeply with my experiences and those of many teachers of color face in education. The novel’s themes of invisibility and identity crisis mirror the struggles I have faced in a system that frequently fails to properly acknowledge my presence and contributions. I hope that making my story of invisibility visible to those who may understand my struggle will help fellow educators of color feel seen, heard, valued, and, more importantly, retained in the classroom.
Who Am I in Education?
My career in teaching began in the fall of 2017, right after I completed the first summer semester of my graduate program. Soon after, I began my first summer professional development at a school in the neighborhood I grew up in. One of the first things I noticed was that all the students had to abide by a strict uniform policy, including shoes, belts and school colors, and middle school-aged children were walking in straight lines through silent hallways. I don’t remember middle school ever being like this, and the fact that it was mostly students of color gave me pause.
After my first three months as a teaching resident, the master teacher I shadowed went on maternity leave and never returned. Our principal also left a couple of months into the year, which prompted a takeover by central office leadership — all of whom were unfamiliar white faces in a school full of Black and Latino children. Before I knew it, I was teaching a seventh grade math class with little support on a tiny salary and barely any teaching experience.
Needless to say, I was not prepared for the unrealized stress. I quickly learned that teachers needed to play many different roles, wear numerous hats and complete far too many additional duties. I would be pulled from teaching almost routinely to address students with whom leadership in the building could not reach; that is when I earned the nickname child whisperer. Instead of a badge of honor, it felt like another invisible tax associated with being a Black teacher. It felt like my value was dependent on my ability to maintain order. From fist fights to classroom struggles, I felt limited and held within a box of preconceived notions about my role as the enforcer of system norms, the very things I despise about discipline-first school systems. It was as though I was a puppet and Geppetto at the same time. I felt like I was upholding a lie, having my students believe this is how things should be. I questioned my place inside the school, wondering what role I was really playing in students' lives.
I pressed on, hoping to still unlock our children's brilliance. Still, the beginning of my teaching career indicated that sometimes you need more than hope to make it in this profession as a person of color and education leader.
The Journey to Inspire Change
In the last five years of my career, the pandemic put a spotlight on the needs of our schools, teachers and students as conversations around what and how our children deserve to learn became divisive and critical race theory, and DEI became the debates of the time. Motivated to change this conversation and influence policy at the state and local levels, I ran for school board in 2021. It seemed like a great opportunity to try and create true change for our children while also creating an identity for myself in education that didn’t just center on how I enforce school policy for children who look like me.
Before I decided to run, I spoke with a few close advisors and the amount of immediate support was validating; however, I quickly learned that politics are not for the faint of heart. Narratives about my values and who I was were being established by everyone else. I was being accused of becoming Puerto Rican for the sake of the campaign, completely ignoring my upbringing and familial ties. The feeling I had when my wife was cropped out of an advertisement outside my campaign was infuriating. The lies about my allegiances and intentions were draining. It did not take very long for me to feel like I was just a name and face — and everyone created their idea of who I was behind it.
The campaign became draining for my family and tested the values that I chose to uphold and run on. Still, I hoped that being the only teacher on the ballot and having a commitment to my community through service would push me to victory, regardless. Unfortunately, it was not enough, and I would lose the race by a very slim margin.
A crushing defeat in many ways that made me feel like a failure. Watching others — white men, in particular — get the same opportunity after achieving less than me made me not only question my ability but also further reinforced the role the system wants me to uphold. At that moment, it all made sense. People see me how they want to see me. They prefer to keep me in a box. So, I choose to stay in the box that I’m most comfortable in —my classroom.
Making Peace with Reality
It is here in my classroom that I contemplate how to fight against a system that upholds injustice, a system that fights against the brilliance of diversity. This system does not allow everyone a seat at the table.
Nearly a decade in education, and I still wonder if I’ve truly existed. Does anyone see past my physical appearance? Do my titles of husband, father, teacher or coach even matter? Have I left an impact on anyone or anything? Am I invisible? I just maybe, and over the years, I’ve become ok with that feeling of invisibility.
Like the protagonist in Invisible Man, I may have been “looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.” It took me a long time and a painful adjustment of my expectations to realize that I am nobody but myself.
I do not need your eyes in order to be seen, and I do not need your validation to continue fighting for what I believe. I am everything and nothing of what you think I am, and I will move as I see fit.
Do new AI tools like ChatGPT actually understand language the same way that humans do?
It turns out that even the inventors of these new large language models are debating that very question — and the answer will have huge implications for education and for all aspects of society if this technology can get to a point where it achieves what is known as Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI.
A new book by one of those AI pioneers digs into the origins of ChatGPT and the intersection of research on how the brain works and building new large language models for AI. It’s called “ChatGPT and the Future of AI,” and the author is Terrence Sejnowski, a professor of biology at the University of California, San Diego, where he co-directs the Institute for Neural Computation and the NSF Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center. He is also the Francis Crick Chair at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.
Sejnowski started out as a physicist working on the origins of black holes, but early in his career he says he realized that it would be decades before new instruments could be built that could adequately measure the kinds of gravitational waves he was studying. So he switched to neuroscience, hoping to “pop the hood” on the human brain to better understand how it works.
“It seemed to me that the brain was just as mysterious as the cosmos,” he tells EdSurge. “And the advantage is you can do experiments in your own lab, and you don’t have to have a satellite.”
“What has really been revealed is that we don't understand what ‘understanding’ is,”
— Terrence Sejnowski
For decades, Sejnowski has focused on applying findings from brain science to building computer models, working closely at times with the two researchers who just won the Nobel Prize this year for their work on AI, John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton.
These days, computing power and algorithms have advanced to the level where neuroscience and AI are helping to inform each other, and even challenge our traditional understanding of what thinking is all about, he says.
“What has really been revealed is that we don't understand what ‘understanding’ is,” says Sejnowski. “We use the word, and we think we understand what it means, but we don't know how the brain understands something. We can record from neurons, but that doesn't really tell you how it functions and what’s really going on when you’re thinking.”
He says that new chatbots have the potential to revolutionize learning if they can deliver on the promise of being personal tutors to students. One drawback of the current approach, he says, is that LLMs focus on only one aspect of how the human brain organizes information, whereas “there are a hundred brain parts that are left out that are important for survival, autonomy for being able to maintain activity and awareness.” And it’s possible that those other parts of what makes us human may need to be simulated as well for something like tutoring to be most effective, he suggests.
The researcher warns that there are likely to be negative unintended consequences to ChatGPT and other technologies, just as social media led to the rise of misinformation and other challenges. He says there will need to be regulation, but that “we won't really know what to regulate until it really is out there and it's being used and we see what the impact is, how it's used.”
But he predicts that soon most of us will no longer use keyboards to interact with computers, instead using voice commands to have dialogues with all kinds of devices in our lives. “You’ll be able to go into your car and talk to the car and say, ‘How are you feeling today?’ [and it might say,] ‘Well, we're running low on gas.’ Oh, OK, where's the nearest gas station? Here, let me take you there.”
Listen to our conversation with Sejnowski on this week’s EdSurge Podcast, where he describes research to more fully simulate human brains. He also talks about his previous project in education, a free online course he co-teaches called “Learning How to Learn,” which is one of the most popular courses ever made, with more than 4 million students signed up over the past 10 years.
As Jennifer Hill’s eldest child was heading into fifth grade, she began to wonder how she would communicate with him in the hour between his school bus drop-off and her arrival home from work in downtown Cleveland.
“There’s no phone in this house if something goes wrong,” she remembers thinking. “It’s not safe.”
When Hill was a kid, there were no cellphones, sure, but there were landlines. And friendly neighbors keeping an eye out. And close-knit communities where everyone knew each other.
“It’s not the way it is anymore,” she says. “I can’t imagine my kid walking up to somebody’s house, knocking on a door, and saying, ‘My friend fell off his bike. Can I use your phone?’ We teach kids not to do that anymore.”
She wasn’t ready to get her 10-year-old a smartphone, not by a long shot. Nor did she intend to install a home phone. She wanted her son to be able to ride his bike around the neighborhood in the afternoons, too—not just be cooped up in their house.
She quickly whittled her options down to just one: a smartwatch.
Hill knew of another family that had just purchased their child one of these high-tech wearables. Back then, in 2018, the kid-focused options were fairly limited, as were their capabilities. Hill got her son a Verizon Gizmo watch, which, at the time, had only rudimentary features, storing up to 10 parent-approved phone numbers and allowing the user to send only a handful of preset text messages (think: “Where are you?” and “Call me”). The smartwatch also had some simple location-tracking capabilities.
Fast-forward six years, and Hill’s two oldest children, now high schoolers, both have graduated to smartphones. Her youngest, a 10-year-old daughter, wears a Gizmo watch, only hers comes with all the technological advancements and upgrades accumulated over the prior years: photo and video capture, video calling, access to a full keyboard for texting, voice messaging, group chats, geofencing, and up to 20 parent-approved phone numbers.
Today, says George Koroneos, a spokesperson for Verizon, the smartwatch is “truly a phone replacement on their wrist.”
And the product category is booming. A decade ago, only a few tech companies made smartwatches for kids. Today, the market is bloated with players, new and veteran, vying for kids’ and parents’ loyalty—and advertising smartwatches to children as young as 5.
[Smartwatches] are becoming a child's first device.
— Kris Perry
“They are becoming increasingly popular,” says Kris Perry, executive director of Children and Screens: Institute of Digital Media and Child Development. “They are becoming a child’s first device.”
Families are noticing, too—after all, they’re the ones driving this “explosion,” as Shelley Pasnik, former director of the Center for Children and Technology, describes it.
Hill has seen the evolution since her first watch purchase. When her sons were younger, she says, only a handful of their friends and classmates had smartwatches. Now, the devices are “huge” in her affluent suburban community of Westlake, Ohio.
“With my daughter, everyone’s got them. They’re as popular as Stanleys and Owalas,” she says, referring to the colorful, reusable water bottles that children have helped popularize. “All the little girls have watches.”
Kids clamoring for their first digital device are easily winning over adults who, let’s face it, aren’t putting up much of a fight in the first place, when always-on communication and precise location-tracking are part of the package that comes with modern parenting.
In fact, parent fears may be the real force propelling smartwatch proliferation.
The T-Mobile SyncUp is a kid-focused smartwatch that first launched in 2020. The company targets children ages 5 through 12 for the device. Photo courtesy of T-Mobile.
T-Mobile, which makes the SyncUp watch, conducted a consumer insights study and found that 92 percent of parents of children ages 4 through 12 felt it was important to “always know where their child was,” says Clint Patterson, senior vice president of product marketing at T-Mobile.
Today’s tools make such tracking possible.
“The way that parents monitor their kids has changed dramatically in just a generation or two,” says Mitch Prinstein, chief science officer at the American Psychological Association. “Parents are monitoring their kids far more closely, really wanting to be aware of their location [and] concerned about their safety.”
This heightened surveillance has trade-offs. The trend has seeped into schools, where teachers and leaders have grown frustrated by the introduction of yet another digital distraction to students’ learning, even as more districts enact cellphone bans.
It’s possible there are ways in which smartwatches are creating an electronic umbilical cord. That has possible risks as well.
— Mitch Prinstein
Yet no one really knows where these gadgets fit into the larger conversation around children and screens. Research on kids and smartwatches is thin. Even data about adoption and use is lacking. This has left digital media and child development experts to extrapolate and hypothesize about the possible pitfalls and benefits.
“If this is a way of parents or kids achieving their goals and delaying their kids on social media, this might not be such a bad thing,” says Prinstein, who codirects the Winston National Center on Technology Use, Brain, and Psychological Development and whose research focuses on adolescents and younger children.
“On the other hand,” Prinstein adds, “we don’t have a lot of research yet. It’s possible there are ways in which smartwatches are creating an electronic umbilical cord. That has possible risks as well.”
Technology ‘Training Wheels’
When the Apple Watch was released in 2015, it was seen—and priced—as a luxury good, notes Girard Kelly, the head of privacy at Common Sense Media.
It was also, back then, marketed to adults. But as new generations of the Apple Watch came out, some parents handed down older models to their children, says Pasnik of the Center for Children and Technology.
“Naturally, kids like to do things adults are doing,” says Jon Watkins, senior product manager for Bounce, a kid-focused smartwatch made by Garmin. “There’s a natural tendency for kids to want a watch like they see Mom and Dad wearing.”
Garmin makes a smartwatch for kids called Bounce. "Let kids be kids," an online promotion for the device says. "Save the smartphone, and let them explore the world with the Bounce kids smartwatch." Photo courtesy of Garmin.
Noting the trend—and in some cases, helping to grow it—other companies began to release kid-specific smartwatches with more limitations than an adult device. Apple, too, released a version, the Apple Watch SE, in 2020, with restricted features and a lower price.
Around that time, demand for kids’ smartwatches spiked, says Perry of Children and Screens. Educators, too, note a bump in adoption around the pandemic—one that has been sustained in the years since. The smartwatch market for kids is estimated to be worth more than $1 billion in 2024—and it’s growing rapidly, Perry adds.
A typical kids’ smartwatch today costs around $150 up front, plus an ongoing monthly subscription fee of $10 to $15. That’s certainly no pack of bubble gum, but it does put the device within reach for many families, particularly those who view the product as one that enhances their child’s safety, says Kelly of Common Sense.
Parents are, like, halfway in between giving their child or teen a phone, and the watch makes sense. It’s cheaper.
— Girard Kelly
“Parents are, like, halfway in between giving their child or teen a phone, and the watch makes sense,” he says. “It’s cheaper.”
To adults feeling pressure to introduce their kids to technology, a smartwatch may feel like a safer starting point than a cellphone that grants exposure to the entire internet, argues Kelly’s colleague Laura Ordoñez, executive editor and head of digital media family advice at Common Sense.
“What is the low-hanging fruit that doesn’t feel like it’s doing the most damage?” Ordoñez asks. “I believe that’s what’s motivating these parents.”
Numerous people cited social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s new book, “The Anxious Generation,” in interviews, noting the harm that smartphones and social media may be causing young people. Most smartwatches don’t have web browsers or social media applications. That in itself gives many parents an enormous sense of relief.
“Parents are increasingly aware of the problematic designs of smartphones and the troubling data on social media apps,” says Perry. “They want the connection, but they don’t want their child scrolling and online constantly.”
As the price of kids’ smartwatches has come down, though, it may have muddled how the wearable fits into a family’s overall technology goals. What started as a consolation prize offered to an older preteen or young teenager who craves technology, communication, and social inclusion has evolved into a sort of gateway device. Like bowling with bumpers.
“It’s a great way to ease into tech,” says Hill, the Ohio parent. “You can learn to take care of the technology in a small way before you are given it in a bigger way.”
That seems to be how the smartwatch makers view it, too. In interviews with executives at Verizon, Garmin, and T-Mobile, they describe their target users as ages 5 to 12, with the core customer base as parents of 8- to 10-year-olds.
“This is a very safe way to have a means of communication with a child,” claims Watkins of Garmin.
Patterson, at T-Mobile, describes kids’ smartwatches as “training wheels in the adoption of technology.”
“Just like you wouldn’t throw your kid on a bicycle, you don’t throw them at a smartphone or tablet with unfettered access,” Patterson adds.
What exactly are these training wheels preparing kids for? The bicycle metaphor suggests that someday, children will be allowed to zoom off on their own, liberated from their parents’ purview.
Yet untethering is not the trajectory families seem to have in mind when they buy their young kids entry-level digital tools. It’s not why Tim Huber, principal at Harris Creek Elementary School, part of North Carolina’s Wake County Public School System, is seeing more and more children in the early grades show up to school wearing smartwatches.
“It has been just a steady increase of kids, at younger grade levels, all the way down to kindergarten,” Huber notes.
To be sure, the reason that 5- and 6-year-olds—children who may not even be literate—have smartwatches is not to delay the purchase of their first smartphone or to ward off social media. For them, the watches are serving another purpose entirely.
‘Better Be Safe Than Sorry’
When Kristi Calderon’s daughter was in fifth grade, one of her classmates made a bomb threat.
“I rushed to them,” says Calderon, referring to her three school-age kids. “It was very scary.”
She saw only one of her children walk out of the building as the school was evacuated. In those next moments, she did not know where two of her children were or if they were OK.
“That’s what, like, killed me,” says Calderon, who lives in Long Beach, California.
The experience rattled her. Ever since, she says, she has ignored school policies around devices. She would rather know where her kids are and be able to communicate with them, to know that they are safe, than to be left to wonder and worry.
The youngest of her four children, now an 8-year-old in third grade, wears a smartwatch. He’s had one since he was in first grade.
Kristi Calderon with her family. The youngest of her four children, an 8-year-old, has worn a smartwatch since first grade. Photo courtesy of Calderon.
Experiences like Calderon’s—and the seemingly ever-present possibility of children encountering violence in schools—have driven parents to seek out location-tracking devices for their kids. Some settle for a simple AirTag fastened to a child’s backpack, but many also want the ability to communicate with their child, as Calderon does with her son during and outside of school hours.
Tina Laudando, a parent of two in Park Ridge, Illinois, just outside of Chicago, says she got her older son a smartwatch when he was 11 “so we could stay in touch with him and give him a little bit more freedom.”
Tina Laudando with her 12-year-old son. He was 11 when he got a smartwatch. Photo courtesy of Laudando.
His friends were getting together at the park, and she wanted him to be able to join them. And at his age, she didn’t want him to have to come with her every time she needed to make a trip to the grocery store. The watch, she figured, would allow him to stay home alone or meet his friends and communicate with his parents in case of an emergency.
Did she ever consider letting him join his friends at the park without a communication device? No, she says. That was never an option in her mind.
“The idea of him going to the park alone, going for a bike ride with his friends, without adult supervision, I think for me as an adult is scary,” Laudando says. “Being able to just, for myself, have that comfort level, knowing he’s OK, it gives me peace of mind.”
It’s a win-win, Laudando believes. Her son gets the feeling of more freedom and independence, and his parents feel confident giving that to him.
Laudando, like most of the parents interviewed for this story, grew up during a time when many kids would leave home on their bikes and be gone, unreachable, for hours, returning only for dinner. That was normal.
“It’s kind of sad, right? Because we lived without technology for so many years, and as I’m explaining this, I’m like, I don’t know what we would do without it,” Laudando says. “We’ve become reliant on it.”
But Laudando feels the world her children inhabit today is less safe than the one she was raised in.
Tina Laudando's older son, Nico, on his 12th birthday. He wears a smartwatch so his parents are comfortable letting him join his friends at the park and stay home alone. Photo courtesy of Laudando.
Tara Riggs, a parent of two in Livonia, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, can relate. She sees videos on social media, hears stories from friends, reads the news. She feels “inundated” with negative information. It wears her down, she says.
“I’m constantly worrying,” Riggs admits.
Indeed, the internet—and social media in particular—can leave many with the sense that the physical world is more dangerous today than ever, when in fact, byanumberofmeasures, it is notably safer. (What has gotten worse, in the past few decades, is child and adolescent psychological and emotional well-being. Some researchers and leaders, including the US surgeon general, attribute this shift to high use of technology and social media among youth. Others cite intensive parenting practices that, ironically, seem to undermine the normal development of resilience in kids.)
“The perception of danger versus the actual danger is a distinction that’s probably important here,” says Prinstein, chief science officer at the American Psychological Association. “The perception of danger is heightened for a lot of parents.”
It’s a consequence of how much more connected our society is than it was a few decades ago, he adds. People can find out, in real time, about violent or disturbing events that happened many communities away. It leaves them with a sense that trouble—no matter how remote the possibility nor how many miles separate their families and the latest crisis making headlines—is looming.
Perhaps no tragedy feels more present and pernicious to a parent than a school shooting. One can take place on the other end of the United States, yet parents everywhere are reminded, viscerally, that their child, too, is at risk. It may have happened elsewhere, in Georgia, or Florida, or Texas, but the next one could be at their kid’s school.
“The psychology of fear—it’s extremely powerful,” says Huber, the elementary school principal. “We face that constantly. We are asking hundreds and hundreds of families every day to trust us with the safety and wellness of their child for seven to eight hours.”
Katie Joseph, assistant superintendent of Regional School Unit 1 in Bath, Maine, understands that school safety is a palpable concern for many families. Yet she urges those in her school community not to be overtaken by it.
I try to remind parents what I always tell myself: There is what is possible, and there is what is probable. Probably, all the things you’re worried about are not actually the things you should be worried about. You should be worried about the [device] in your child’s hand.
— Katie Joseph
“I try to remind parents what I always tell myself: There is what is possible, and there is what is probable. Probably, all the things you’re worried about are not actually the things you should be worried about. You should be worried about the [device] in your child’s hand.”
Joseph believes the kind of “independence” a child attains by donning a smartwatch only runs skin deep.
If a child’s parent is constantly monitoring them, in touch with their every move, then really they are not developing a strong sense of responsibility, she says. Everyday situations that might allow for a child to experience and overcome challenges, to take risks and build resilience, become virtually frictionless when their parents are just one tap away.
“If my child is riding his bike and something happens, he needs to be able to figure out, ‘What am I supposed to do in this situation?’” says Joseph, who has an 8-year-old. “The first thing we should want our kids to do is not to call us and have us do the thinking for them.”
Because of the relative affordability of the smartwatch, and its limitations, many families may not be asking themselves how likely it is that their child would be caught up in a violent event, Prinstein notes. Rather, they may be thinking, “Will I feel regret if I spend that 200 bucks on Starbucks versus just getting the device, just in case?” he says.
“I think the calculus there is a little bit like, ‘Better be safe than sorry,’ even though logic might follow that it’s not truly necessary,” he adds.
Yet Hill, the parent in Ohio, believes that her decision, years ago, to buy her kid a smartwatch as a safety precaution has been vindicated.
One afternoon, riding his bicycle home from swim practice, her oldest son was hit by a car. He wasn’t run over, Hill says, but the driver sideswiped him and he landed hard, with his bike toppling over him. With a few taps of his watch, he was able to make a quick call to his parents. Hill’s husband drove the mile to reach him and took him to the hospital.
“If that hadn’t been there,” Hill says of the watch, “I don’t know that he would have had the wherewithal to give my number to somebody with him. He was scared. He was 13. He was by himself. As much as we drill it into him, that’s a lot to ask of a kid.”
The smartwatch, in that moment, was a “resounding success,” she adds.
‘Opening Pandora’s Box’
Late last summer, Riggs, the parent who lives near Detroit, began to research smartwatches. She was considering buying one for her then 10-year-old daughter.
Riggs and her husband had recently caught their daughter disobeying them. One afternoon, their daughter was supposed to be at a friend’s house around the corner from their own, a block away. But when Riggs’ husband passed that friend’s house on his way home from work, he noticed their daughter’s bike wasn’t in the yard. Riggs sprang into action. She got in her car and drove around the neighborhood, going up and down each street until she found her daughter at another house.
“I didn’t like that feeling—that panicked feeling,” she says. “Where did they go? Did they cross the main road like they’re not supposed to? What are they getting up to?”
Her impulse was to prevent a similar situation by putting a tracker on her daughter. She spent months researching different smartwatch models, consulting other parents, scouring tech-focused parenting groups for insights. “I rabbit-holed that,” she says.
Then it occurred to her that maybe she was trying to solve the wrong problem. Riggs didn’t need a better strategy for monitoring her daughter. Rather, she needed to teach her child not to break the rules in the first place.
“It seemed like I was opening Pandora’s box, when it wasn’t absolutely necessary,” she says of purchasing a smartwatch. (Still, she didn’t forswear technology entirely. Her daughter now bikes with a Wi-Fi–only tablet, connects it to the internet when she arrives at a friend’s house, and sends her mom a message on Facebook Messenger Kids letting her know she arrived safely.)
The possible drawbacks of smartwatch use extend beyond stunting character growth. Even though smartwatches are virtually unexplored in academic research and will require further study before anyone can say, conclusively, how they may affect kids and childhood, it’s clear that screens, in general, can cause children harm, Perry of Children and Screens argues.
“They interfere with so many aspects of child development,” she says, rattling off some examples: cognitive development, language development, social emotional and behavioral development, mental health.
True, the screen of a smartwatch is much smaller than that of a phone. Its functionalities are more limited. Some of the “irresistible” qualities of other devices are missing from smartwatches, Perry concedes. And even though most kids’ smartwatches come with games, they can be difficult to use and may deter kids from playing for long, or at all.
Still, that doesn’t make smartwatches safe from some of the addictive, distracting tendencies of phones, experts say. Watches vibrate, chime, and ping with notifications. They, like other devices, are built with persuasive design.
“The evidence is really clear that the notifications—the visual cues to look at your watch—those things are really disruptive and provide a real distraction from something else the child should be doing,” Perry says.
Teachers and school leaders would vouch for that.
They’re disruptive, distracting. It all just gets in the way of what teachers are trying to do.
— Katie Joseph
“They’re disruptive, distracting,” says Joseph, the district leader in Maine. “It all just gets in the way of what teachers are trying to do.”
She doesn’t see watches and phones as being wholly different from one another, especially in middle and high school settings where, increasingly, students have both devices with them during the school day. A phone may be put away, out of sight, but the watch on a student’s wrist will still be buzzing with news alerts, incoming text messages and photos, social media notifications, and the like.
Joseph’s school district, RSU 1, encompassing a small coastal region of Maine, updated its device policy over the summer, at a time when many schools and districts opted to do the same. Except, unlike RSU 1, most districts are narrowly focused on the potential harms of smartphones, multiple people shared in interviews. Their revised policies may not even mention smartwatches, creating a loophole for those devices.
For leaders at RSU 1, whose school board voted to “eliminate” both smartphones and smartwatches in grades six to 12, it was an attempt to increase student connection—real-life, in-person connection—and by extension improve their mental health. They’ll enforce this by collecting all watches and phones at the start of the school day, placing them in lockable Yondr pouches, and distributing them at dismissal.
Huber, the elementary school principal in North Carolina, also recently wrote smartwatches into his school’s device policy, requiring that they be in airplane mode—functioning only as a watch, not as a connected device—during the school day. “The watch is considered a cellphone UNLESS airplane mode is activated,” the policy reads.
He would take the policy a step further if he felt he could. Airplane mode can be disabled with one touch, and truthfully he’d rather not see the devices in his elementary school at all.
“There has not been one time I have ever heard from anybody, ‘I’m so glad this kid had a smartwatch,’” he says. “I can’t think of any scenario where there is a need or benefit to having it.”
Still, he’s not sure how much additional harm they could be causing for a generation of children who “have already been raised on tablets,” glued to parents’ smartphones at the dinner table. What’s one more screen?
Perry invites parents and families to think about it another way. Once a child is given their own personal device, their digital life begins. The child’s data is collected. Algorithms are built around their preferences and practices. An online profile is developed.
That can seem relatively innocuous—it’s just a watch, right?—but what people may not realize is that smartwatches collect thousands of data points, “easily,” per day, per user, according to Kelly of Common Sense.
“The younger you’re connecting your child to that world, the more risk there is to them than if you didn’t,” Perry says. “That’s a tough calculation as a parent.”
Is it better to stay out of touch with a child, trusting that they’ll be safe enough as they move about the physical world? Or to invest in a tool that enables constant monitoring and communication, albeit through the shadows of the emerging digital world?
The big question today’s parents must wrestle with, Perry says, is, “Which risks can I tolerate?”
New federal survey data on the education workforce shows that a majority of schools had a tough time filling at least one fully certified teaching position this fall.
Parsing education data into snack-sized servings.
Public schools reported having six teacher vacancies on average in August, based on responses to the School Pulse Panel by the National Center for Education Statistics. About 20 percent of those positions remained unfilled when the school year started.
The two most common challenges schools said they faced in hiring were a lack of qualified candidates and too few applicants. Special education, physical science and English as a second language were some of the most difficult areas to fill.
NCES Commissioner Peggy Carr said in a news release that while the percentage of schools saying it was difficult to fill positions decreased — down 5 percentage points from 79 percent last year — “there’s still room for improvement.” Nearly 1,400 public K-12 schools from across the country responded to the survey.
While the comparison to previous years suggests that hiring is getting a bit easier, Megan Boren of the Southern Regional Education Board says the country is still mired in a teacher shortage.
Boren, who leads the organization’s teacher workforce data and policy work, says it would be a mistake to think of teacher shortages only in terms of positions filled versus vacant. Other factors to consider include the geographic regions of schools, academic subjects and student age groups where shortages are prevalent.
The organization also takes into account teacher demographics, the number of candidates graduating from teacher prep programs, alternative certification programs and their level of preparedness.
“When we think of it as merely a body count, we are not looking at the whole entire problem and to be honest, we're doing a disservice to our students and our educators themselves,” Boren says. “Of the utmost importance is the quality and the preparedness with which we are filling some of these vacancies, or that we have leading our classrooms, and the distribution of that talent.”
Boren expressed concern over schools turning to uncertified teachers to fill the staffing gaps, be they candidates with emergency certifications or long-term substitute teachers. Their inexperience can put strain on the more experienced teachers and administrators who support them, she explains, at a time when both administrators and traditional teacher prep graduates say even new fully certified teachers feel less prepared than those in years past.
Schools in high-poverty neighborhoods or with a student body that is mostly — 75 percent or more — students of color filled a lower percentage of their vacancies with fully certified teachers, according to the NCES data.
“It's a firestorm where folks are going, ‘What can we do to put out the fire and then rebuild?’” Boren says, “and unfortunately, we're seeing in some cases that the measures and strategies being taken to put out the fire are actually making it worse, and causing an exacerbation of the issues for our educators and leaders.”
She says there’s no single factor that has led to teacher shortages, but rather interplaying issues that include pandemic-related mental health strain, the pressure of filling in for vacant staff positions, and a lack of time for collaboration and planning.
Teacher shortages didn’t start with the pandemic, Boren explains, as her organization tracked a teacher turnover rate that hovered between 7 percent and 9 percent prior to 2020. But she says the pandemic did accelerate turnover, with some regions of the South now experiencing 18 percent turnover among teachers.
“Certain regions of states started to stem the tide, but by and large the turnover is increasing,” Boren says.
In recent years, a growing body of research has looked at the impact of college ‘deserts’ — sometimes defined as an area where people live more than a 30-minute drive to a campus — and found that those residing close to a college are more likely to attend. But a new study shows that these higher education deserts affect some groups of students much differently than others.
The study, which looked at a rich set of high school and college data in Texas, found that Black and Hispanic students and those in low-income families who lived more than 30 miles from a public two-year college were significantly less likely to attend college. But white and Asian students in those same communities were slightly more likely than other students in the state to complete four-year degrees, meaning that the lack of a nearby two-year option seemed to increase the likelihood of moving away to attend college.
“While all students who live in a community college desert are less likely to complete an associate’s degree, their alternative enrollment and degree completion outcomes vary sharply by race-ethnicity and [socioeconomic status],” the study finds. In other words, for low-income and underrepresented minority groups, living near a community college can be a crucial way to gain access to any higher education. Meanwhile, such proximity might lead students in other groups to attend two-year college rather than pursue a four-year degree.
The results are particularly important at a time when more colleges are struggling to remain open, says Riley Acton, an assistant professor of economics at Miami University in Ohio and one of the researchers who worked on the new study.
“If you don't have a car in rural Texas, that's going to be a very hard barrier to overcome” without some sort of help.
— Riley Acton, an assistant professor of economics at Miami University in Ohio
“If a public institution in particular, let's say a public community college, is thinking about closing, or is thinking about merging, or is thinking about opening a new campus or consolidating campuses,” she says, “they should be mindful about who the students are that live near those different campuses.”
The researchers also suggest that colleges should consider providing transportation options or credits to students living in college deserts. “If you don't have a car in rural Texas, that's going to be a very hard barrier to overcome” without some sort of help, Acton notes.
Novel Finding
Meanwhile, Black and Hispanic students are more likely than those in other groups to live in a college desert, according to research by Nicholas Hillman, a professor of educational policy at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who was one of the first researchers to draw attention to the effects of college location on educational attainment, back in 2016.
In an interview with EdSurge, Hillman says that the implications of Acton’s new study are “really interesting,” adding that it is probably the largest quantitative study to take on the question of how college deserts affect different groups differently.
“It makes clear that, ‘Wait a minute, distance is different for different groups of students,’” Hillman says.
One takeaway for Hillman is the importance of making the transfer process from two-year colleges to four-year institutions more frictionless, so that students who live near two-year colleges who are more likely to start there have ample opportunity to go on to get a four-year degree.
Hillman says that he began looking at geography out of frustration with an emphasis during the Obama administration on providing consumer information about higher education as a solution to college access. For instance, one major initiative started during that time was the College Scorecard, which provides information on college options based on various government datasets.
“The dominant narrative was, ‘If students just have better info about where to go to college, more would go,’” he says. “I said, ‘This is bananas. This is not how it works.’”
He grew up in northern Indiana, where the nearest college is 40 miles away. For people he knew there, information about college was not what was keeping them from enrolling. “If you don’t have a job, you’re not going to be spending all this money on gas to go to college,” he says.
Social-emotional learning (SEL) has become a primary focus in many school’s strategic plans. Fortunately, there is a long list of literature, articles and research that outline the importance of SEL and the positive impact that it can have on student development. Knowing this, teachers try to fit these lessons into their morning meetings, projects, special classes, birthday celebrations, snack times and lunch hours. They are attempting to adapt to both learn about and create space for SEL, but SEL requires more time and consistency, with a heavy emphasis on time.
As an early childhood counselor and educator, I work with children in their beginning years of development and the families that care for them. Knowing that SEL is valuable and requires dedicated time, my school has taken the approach of allowing me and my colleagues to stay with the same caseload of children for five years, which is a rare opportunity for counselors and educators to have in this field. During this time, it takes students about two years to understand my role as a “feelings teacher.” They go from asking me, “Who are you, and what are you doing here?” to telling me about their feelings the moment I step into their classroom. By the time they are in kindergarten, they are fully accustomed to my presence. Some of them introduce me to caregivers I have yet to meet, while others greet me with a hug as they enter the building on their own or hand in hand with friends. They have grown physically, but also emotionally as they are able to notice and deal with their emotions more readily.
As I’ve built these foundational skills with my students, my school has also given me enough time to build an expectation that students discuss their identities as a valuable component within the SEL curriculum. My teachers and administrators understand that this is imperative to the work that I do in creating systemic change and in building relationships with my students where they can feel comfortable discussing identity in an authentic, holistic and vulnerable way. The time I have been given to incorporate identity into SEL has allowed me to explore, experiment, and, most importantly, give my students new tools to navigate the world and their identities and grow and mature in their learning.
Bringing Identity to the Forefront
In her book “Unearthing Joy,” author Gholdy Muhammad speaks on the importance and impact of taking the time to get to know your students deeply. Specifically, Muhammad says, “It is important to get to know children in authentic, loving, and meaningful ways so that you learn who they are, who they’re not, and who they are destined to become on this earth.” I have learned that it is important to center identity as I learn more about my students. Acknowledging and affirming their identities creates opportunities to teach SEL on a deeper and more impactful level.
Although I work in a predominantly white institution, I work to focus on uplifting each child’s experience in the world while simultaneously acknowledging the role of prejudice, racism and oppression in our schools. My experiences over the years, when I have had the time to work with and collaborate with a diverse group of teachers, have taught me that teaching SEL without discussing these topics is often the easier and quicker route to take, but it also creates more opportunities for harm. Instead of settling for this, I challenge myself and my colleagues to lean into discomfort and expand our understanding of SEL. In doing so, I find joy in the incremental and marginal change we have created within our school because it creates an opportunity for continued growth.
As I enter first grade with my students, I notice that as much as I have learned about them, they have learned about me. They expect to hear my jokes and know that as a Black woman, my hair will look different almost every time they see me. We have developed a consistent and trusting relationship where they are holistically seen and valued, and it shows in their engagement with SEL lessons and their ability to problem-solve and express themselves.
One day, during our fourth year together, I was preparing to read the book "What Do You Do With a Problem?” for my SEL lesson, and I began by asking, “What problems do you see in your world?” Students began speaking about gun violence, robberies and people being treated unfairly. When one student spoke, another would add to their idea and tell the story from their perspective. Students also spoke about their families in India, experiencing harm and the effects of racism in America.
One child expressed grave concern that “Black and white people would always fight.” This became a focus of the conversation for a while until one of my students noted that the injustices Asian Americans experience are rarely discussed. He challenged me directly, telling me that we don’t talk about these things enough. Instead of reacting negatively or quickly moving on as we ran well over time, I listened, made time and space for the student to discuss his experience, and respectfully validated him as this conversation continued. I was unprepared for this conversation and looked to my teacher colleagues for help; they stayed present for the conversation, which went on for 45 minutes. We never even read the book.
The True Power of SEL
As I left that conversation, I felt many emotions. Mainly, I was proud of them for being capable of a conversation that was so dynamic and important. Using their self-advocacy skills, they were able to speak up and challenge me, centering experiences that matter the most to them and their families. In learning their personalities over the years, I created a safe space where they knew their voices would be heard, valued and amplified. I could get to know my students for who they are as individuals, and they understood that not only did I know them, but I also had a relationship with their teachers, which created a village of care they could lean on when needed.
Giving SEL the time and space it deserves allows children to become more self-aware and connected to their peers and adults in the school setting. This feeling of safety allows for learning environments that encourage challenging and expansive conversations and community building that values and respects the identity of all students. Doing this while also building consistent and real relationships with students creates the foundation for a uniquely safe educational environment. It creates opportunities for students to learn to be better citizens to one another. When our students are regulated, able to think critically, and encouraged to speak up about the things that are important to them, educators can better navigate students' concerns while honoring the identities and feelings that come along with them.
SEL is and should always be a part of our work as educators. However, to have a positive and lasting effect on our students' lives and relationships, we must create environments where more purposeful and intentional time is dedicated to SEL and understanding the role of identity.
Coming out of the pandemic, students had a hard time returning to in-person classes, and they found themselves struggling to tread water academically as declining test scores made many in the country worry that students were drowning.
For school districts desperate to find a life vest for students, one response was to rely on tutoring services. These services — particularly high-dose tutoring, an evidence-backed form of small group, intensive tutoring — had been identified as a way to fight against declining student performance. But at first, in the rush to jump-start tutoring programs, schools plunked federal relief dollars down on less-researched tutoring models and created a cash-grab for companies in the tutoring space. Since then, educators have reputedly gotten more sophisticated when evaluating tutoring programs, focusing their attention on evidence-backed options like high-dose services.
Yet, it’s also unclear that the ample spending of federal funds on tutors has effectively countered learning declines. Plus, schools have had to turn to alternative funding sources to pay for tutors as relief funding fizzles out. Some programs, for instance, have started creatively using federal work placement dollars to grow their tutoring forces, even conscripting college students in the hopes that it would both bolster the outcomes for K-12 students and create the next generation of teachers from today’s college cohort at the same time.
Some hoped that presidential involvement would help. During the 2022 State of the Union address, President Joe Biden called for hundreds of thousands of new tutors, coaches and mentors for programs around the country. And seemingly, this use of the bully pulpit was a success. Now, two years later, an analysis from Johns Hopkins and the RAND Corporation suggests that schools and organizations around the country have surpassed that goal a year early. The Biden plea asked for an additional 250,000 tutors by the summer of 2025. In all, around 323,000 new tutors, mentors or coaches have already joined.
At an event for the White House this month — only weeks before an election where education has seemed a relatively quiet campaign issue — the administration pitched it as a coup for their “laser-focus” on student success. Student support organizations also took it as an encouraging sign for students. “The surpassing of President Biden’s call is a clear indicator of the strength of the American spirit and our collective dedication to the future of our youth,” said Michael D. Smith, CEO of AmeriCorps, one of the organizations involved, in a written statement.
Those volunteers will provide extra muscle for districts trying to support students. But given slumping test scores and vanishing federal relief dollars, is a surge in volunteers enough to stabilize learning?
A Small Victory?
The administration was able to steer a lot of volunteers to tutoring organizations, says Antonio Gutierrez, co-founder of Saga Education, a nonprofit organization focused on high-dose tutoring. It’s a big part of meeting the urgent need of schools post-pandemic and it’s encouraging, he adds.
But what have been the outcomes?
The Johns Hopkins report notes that 12,700 schools increased high-intensity tutoring, suggesting that the administration’s plea helped. Thousands of schools also reported an increase in other support for students. What’s more, 34 percent of principals surveyed reported that more students had access to tutoring in 2023-2024 than in the previous year. Relatedly, 24 percent reported that more students had access to mentors.
But how much of a dent does that actually make in the country? It’s hard to say, according to Gutierrez. But there has been recent evidence concerning “high-impact” tutoring in general, which he thinks might speak to how useful this approach could be for supporting students.
For instance: Preliminary findings from the University of Chicago “Personalized Learning Initiative,” meant to stimulate attempts to expand tutoring in the country, found that high-dose tutoring is effective. According to the study, which inspected a couple thousand K-12 students in Chicago and Fulton County, these tutoring programs inspired gains in math learning. The study was meant to assess how effective tutoring programs are when schools design them on their own, in Gutierrez’s summary. Gutierrez’s organization, Saga Education, has tried to support schools in those efforts by spelling out the best practices districts should follow. The study also found that making sure tutoring occurs during the school day, rather than “on demand” after school or on weekends, was important for getting large increases in student performance.
But there are reasons to slightly tamper that enthusiasm. A meta-analysis from Brown University’s Annenberg Institute looked at 265 randomized controlled trials and found that as tutoring programs get larger, they get notably less effective. While they still helped lift student learning, the benefits of tutoring appeared smaller in large-scale programs, according to this study. To Gutierrez, who notes that the study still noted a positive effect, that’s not really surprising. In other words, because schools are experimenting with these programs themselves, how well any particular program boosts student achievement will vary.
For the movement to make personalized learning a permanent feature of American education, there have been other developments as well.
The most flashy has been AI. This year, the Los Angeles School District, the second largest in the country, launched a high-profile $6 million chatbot called “Ed,” a talking sun that was supposed to boost personalized instruction. But the company behind that chatbot collapsed this summer, raising concerns about what would happen to the student data it collected. Some have suggested the project had been simply too ambitious, and the company has become a cautionary tale.
That’s a good example of what not to do with these programs, according to observers like Gutierrez. But more promising, he says, are efforts like Khanmigo, the personalized instruction tool from Sal Khan, and other chat-based tutoring programs. Those sorts of chatbots should be developed because they could add value, Gutierrez says.
They likely won’t replace human tutors, Gutierrez says. Because of how students learn, tutoring is highly reliant on the relationship between tutor and student, he adds. That’s how tutors can nudge students in the right direction, pushing them to learn. Still, these tech products hold the promise of translating into any language and also fine-tuning to a district’s needs, though there are questions about engagement from students with these tools, he says. But so long as districts don’t depend entirely on these technologies for personalized instruction, it’s probably useful to explore how human and bot tutors can work together to assist students, Gutierrez says.
Ultimately, the drove of tutors from the Biden-Harris administration push was a step in the right direction, but there’s a lot more work ahead, Gutierrez admits.
Angela Fleck says this was the typical scene last year in the sixth grade social studies classes she teaches at Glover Middle School in Spokane, Washington: Nearly every student had a smartphone, and many of them would regularly sneak glances at the devices, which they kept tucked behind a book or just under their desks.
“They're pretty sneaky, so you wouldn't always know that that was the reason,” says Fleck. “But over time, I'd realize no matter how engaging my lesson was, when it was time to turn and do the group activity or the assignment — something that wasn't totally me directing the class — there would be a large number of students that had no idea what we were doing.”
What students were doing with their phones, she says, was most often using Snapchat or other social media or texting with students in other classrooms, which she described as creating drama: “And then it would just spread rapid-fire, whatever the situation was, and it would sometimes result in altercations — meeting up at a certain place, and they'd arrange it all day on the phone.”
This year, though, the vibe has changed. Spokane Public Schools issued a new districtwide policy that bans the use of smartphones or smartwatches in classrooms during instructional time. So now students in elementary and middle schools have to keep devices off and put away during the school day, though high school students can use their smartphones or watches between classes and at lunch.
Now, she says, she feels like she has most students’ attention during classes since she no longer has to compete with buzzing devices. “In general, students are ready to learn,” she says. “As a teacher, I need to make sure that I have an engaging lesson that will keep their attention and help them to learn and help them to continue to want to be engaged.” And she says there are fewer fights at the school, too.
The district is one of many across the country that have instituted new smartphone bans this year, in the name of increasing student engagement and counteracting the negative effects that social media has on youth mental health. And at least four states — Indiana, Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida — have enacted statewide bans limiting school smartphone access.
For this week’s EdSurge Podcast, we set out to get a sense of how the bans are going. To do that, we talked with Fleck, as well as a high school teacher in Indiana, where a new statewide law bans smartphones and other wireless devices in schools during instructional time.
Fleck is a fan of the ban, and says she hopes the school never goes back to the old approach. But she admits that she misses some aspects of having phones available to integrate in a lesson when needed.
In the past, for instance, she allowed students to take pictures with their phones of the slides she was showing. And she would often designate a student as a researcher during lessons who could look up related material online and share with the group. Now she’s finding ways to adapt to keep those positive aspects of online access, she says, such as having student researchers use a computer in the classroom, or to make more use of the school-issued laptops for some lessons.
Adam Swinyard, the superintendent of Spokane Public Schools, acknowledges that there are trade-offs to the new ban when it comes to the use of tech in instruction.
“We absolutely have lost some power of the opportunity that those devices provide, whether that's, ‘I can really quickly look something up,’ or ‘I can quickly participate in a class poll’ or ‘I can tune my music instrument,’” he told EdSurge. “But I think where we landed in our community, for our schools and for our kids, is what we gain in their level of engagement and ability to focus far outweighs what we're losing in a device being a powerful pedagogical tool inside of the classroom. But I think it's important to acknowledge.”
What they end up teaching students, he argues, is more important. The mantra for the district is that there is a “time and place” for smartphone use, says Swinyard, and that a classroom is not the right setting or occasion, just as he wouldn’t pull out his phone and write a text while he was being interviewed for this article, or sitting in an important meeting.
Some schools with new bans have faced pushback from students, especially where there has been a zero-tolerance for phones even during social time. At a Jasper High School in Plano, Texas, for instance, more than 250 people signed a petition calling on the principal to revise a new ban on smartphones, which forbids use of devices all day, even during lunch and in the halls between classes. “Before the restricted use of cellphones was prohibited, they were a social link, connecting students during lunch and hallway breaks,” the petition reads.
And some parents have complained about the new bans, out of concerns that they would not be able to reach their children in the event of an emergency, such as a school shooting. A new survey by the Pew Research Center found that about 7 in 10 Americans support cellphone bans during class, while only about a third favor an all-day ban.
So one takeaway is that how schools design their smartphone restrictions — and how they communicate the policies to students and parents — are important for how well they work in practice.
Hear more about the pros and cons of new smartphone bans on this week’s EdSurge Podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or on the player below.
One of Shane Woods’ favorite memories as executive director of Girlstart, a nonprofit that aims to empower girls in the sciences, was as a participant taking her own goddaughter to the organization’s back-to-school extravaganza.
Parsing education data into snack-sized servings.
They zipped through activities with rockets and robots, and Woods asked her goddaughter — named Sailor — what she thought of it all when they were heading home.
“She said, ‘I always liked science. Now I know I can do science,’” Woods recalls. “Unprompted — I didn't ask about careers. For her to have that connection lets us know that her perception is already there of, ‘I can do it.’”
The question for the adults who care about girls like Sailor, Woods says, then becomes: How do we sustain that interest?
That is one of the questions and challenges at the center of a recently released report based on the Girls’ Index, a survey of 17,500 girls in fifth through 12th grades that includes questions about their goals for the future and perception of science, technology, engineering and mathematics as potential careers.
While women are not just outpacing men in degrees — girls are doing better academically and completing high school on time more frequently than boys — the push for parity has been moving at a glacial pace in STEM. Though on the rise, women are still underrepresented in both degrees and employment in the sciences and technology.
Ruling Our Experiences — a nonprofit that studies the aspirations, behaviors and opinions of girls — compares results from the 2023 survey to those similarly gleaned in 2017.
Their researchers found that while girls who say they’re interested in STEM grew by 10 percentage points to 55 percent, compared to survey results five years prior, the number of girls who describe themselves as confident or smart enough to earn their dream job has plummeted.
“I want everybody who has a girl in their sphere of influence to be aware of this data, because I think that we all have a role in creating a generation of more confident, competent, and capable girls,” Lisa Hinkelman, founder and CEO of Ruling Our Experiences, says, “whether it's in the STEM arena, or in other spaces where girls’ voices and opinions are needed.”
High Interest, Lower Participation
Girls are interested in science and math. More than half of girls in every age group surveyed said they were considering a STEM career, according to the report, and overall interest is up by 10 percent since 2017 — something that holds steady among grade levels, income levels and ethnicities. Interest increased the most among the youngest girls, those in fifth and sixth grade, by 20 percent.
That doesn’t mean that girls are ready to dive into the field.
The report found a myriad of outside factors and social pressures that may be keeping girls from taking STEM classes or seeing themselves in science jobs.
The share of girls who say they are good at math and science fell sharply from 73 percent in 2017 to 59 percent in 2023, and that includes girls whose grades show they excel in those subjects.
“I think that should be especially concerning when we're thinking about the need to ensure that girls have increased representation in the STEM field, in that it's more than just exposing them to STEM opportunities,” Hinkelman says. “We also have to be simultaneously addressing these confidence challenges and their perceptions of their abilities that are simultaneously impacting what they might do next.”
Researchers also expressed concern that gender stereotypes and misconceptions about math and science could be deterring girls from taking those classes as they advance through school. About 28 percent of high school girls reported that they avoid classes with low female enrollment.
Overall, 56 percent of girls say they have felt excluded from an activity because of their gender, and the majority report feeling “pressured to fit into the specific stereotypes that are thought to be appropriate and expected for girls and women.” About the same amount said they avoided taking on leadership roles for fear of being seen as bossy.
In Girlstart’s work introducing girls in 24 school districts across three states to the world of STEM, which includes after-school programs, summer camps and an annual conference, Woods says that the organization strives to both provide role models and foster kinship. Girls already hear the message that there aren’t enough women in science and technology, she adds, and being the first or only girl in a science class isn’t necessarily attractive to them.
“Our girls like community, our girls like relationships, so what Girlstart does is provide that support network of peers who are like-minded,” Woods says. “You may be the only girl in your physics class at that high school, but hopefully through us you know of other girls in physics classes throughout the city, that you all have a network of support, that you are not doing this alone.”
STEM fields also have a messaging problem.
About 89 percent of girls said they want a career where they can help others, but they don’t necessarily see that happening in the sciences. Less than half of girls responded that they wanted both a service career and a STEM career.
“This gap may exist partly because of the stereotype that women are natural caregivers, steering girls towards traditional helping professions,” the report states. “However, STEM fields offer numerous ways to make a positive impact — from developing new medicines to solving environmental issues. By showing girls how STEM careers align with their desire to help, more diverse talent could be attracted to these fields.”
Crisis of Confidence
The data shows a troubling trend when it comes to how girls reported feeling about their abilities and potential.
The percentage of girls who consider themselves confident in 2023 dipped for nearly every grade level compared to 2017, with the largest drop among fifth and sixth graders. The share of girls who say they are not sure if they are smart enough for their dream career increased in every age group.
The confidence issues girls face extend beyond their perceptions of math and science. About 57 percent said they don’t feel cared for at school, and only 39 percent said they feel a sense of belonging at school.
Hinkelman says she was surprised by the particularly sharp drop in confidence reported by girls in fifth through seventh grades.
“I think girls are internalizing a lot of messages from the world that are telling them that they're not good enough, or they're not smart enough, or that there's certain kinds of jobs or careers that aren't really for them,” Hinkelman says. “For many girls, they have an overall low opinion of themselves and their opportunities and their abilities. I think we see that reflected when it comes to their perceptions of their abilities in STEM-specific areas as well.”
The education system on the whole needs to start building confidence in the sciences at the same time students are gaining competence in STEM subjects, she adds.
Woods says that in a digital world built on a system of “likes,” girls need environments where they know where they don’t have to be perfect so long as they are proud of what they’re doing.
The numbers support what Woods sees in her work. The study found that confident girls were 20 percent more likely than their peers to say they wanted a STEM career. The report found among girls who feel supported and accepted at school also showed more interest in STEM — 50 percent more than their peers.
Girls need to know “that they can take risks in that space, that it is safe to learn from one another, to fail in front of each other to get back up and take it as a lesson or a success,” Woods explains. “That is really what's critical in changing how girls see themselves in these careers and what they can do, so we have to reinforce that STEM will allow them to change the world.”
On the spectrum of professional experience for K-12 teachers, I am decidedly on the greener side. Although I knew I had a passion for teaching before entering college, I always had this idea in my head that teaching K-12 education wasn’t a real or appropriate profession for an Ivy League, engineering graduate like myself.
Instead of industry or academia, however, I joined the stream of my peers entering the world of business management consulting. I stayed in this role for only three years before going back to school to teach, but my short stint in the corporate world carried me to the classroom with a perspective that allowed me to see all the ways teaching is treated as a calling rather than a career, and how that impacts school teachers.
Teachers lack the structure and career development of other industry and professional jobs and this is important because it is one major factor in creating a broken public education system. Compared to what I experienced myself and have learned from colleagues and ex-classmates in consulting, finance and tech industries, it feels like this lack of opportunity for career progression within K-12 education disincentivizes a talented, driven and diverse workforce, which in turn inhibits the long term success of the education system.
Put more pointedly, teachers being perceived as saints and martyrs due to the realities of their working conditions, instead of serious professionals, is one of the more glaring issues facing K-12 education in the United States.
We’re Not in Consulting Anymore, Toto…
In my short time in the consulting world, I got a glimpse behind the curtain of how different industries operate. I learned about the massive scale of labor, human capital and strategic investment that go into making a successful organization. As a new college grad, I was lucky to work at a company that held an “up or out” culture and provided clear structures and routines for continuous professional feedback, networking and skill development. I also had great mentors who pushed me to think about what I wanted in a career and shared their experiences and advice to foster my professional growth.
Within public education, growth options are almost entirely outside the classroom, either through administration, teacher education or curriculum development. One common path that some teachers will take to advance is to go back to school and pursue an administrative credential to become a principal or vice principal, but it is a significant pivot and career change.
While I also have incredible mentors in teaching, when I asked my closest mentor for constructive professional feedback before she went on a sabbatical, the only thing she did was implore me not to get pulled away from the classroom and into leadership, most likely due to the aforementioned ways teachers attempt to advance and move through the field of education.
Clearly, there is very little formal growth inherent or possible within teaching, which I believe impacts the retention of a highly skilled and diverse educational workforce. Bringing my perspective as a young professional to a high school, I have been endlessly frustrated with the disparity between what I want and am inspired to accomplish and what the system allows me to reasonably get out of any effort I put in.
Feeling Stuck
Another thing I’ve found difficult about this issue is that simply being a teacher doesn’t really say much about your job description; it doesn’t give any information about your particular working conditions, responsibilities, expectations or compensation because these vary so much from school to school, not to mention across the country.
Though I’ve only worked at one school, I have had the opportunity to collaborate with math and science teachers nationwide. From the poorest rural schools to the most elite boarding schools, I have become increasingly vexed by the lack of incentive structure or clear avenues of professional growth within the teaching profession that I could verbalize in a meaningful way in a resume or cover letter.
Other fields offer structured opportunities for career growth in several ways, including but not limited to some sort of organizational hierarchy in which promotions lead to increased compensation and different responsibilities. While this sort of promoting-from-within and workforce investment and development is not the case for every corporation or industry, in the teaching career, it is practically nonexistent.
Public school teachers are often limited geographically by pensions, so moving across state lines means forfeiting your hard-earned retirement benefits. In some states, there are required portfolios or observations teachers must complete to receive tenure, but pay bumps are not always a guarantee. Once you have taught for a certain number of years, eager teachers can work incredibly hard for at least a full year to receive National Boards Certification, but first, they have to pass the test — and, yet again, the reward may differ by state. California has a stipend for those who achieve this distinction but not an actual raise; in many states, it is a purely symbolic title with no financial compensation.
Meanwhile, in my previous job industry, many of my colleagues were able to seek out a more supportive environment where they could be competitively compensated and grow in their careers. Clearly, not all companies or other jobs have these opportunities, but even the ability to switch employers for upward career mobility is complicated for teachers. All of these hidden factors baked into the decentralized educational system can prevent teachers from the same level of fluid movement between schools and districts that their similarly educated peers in professional industries are used to. Ultimately, this hinders educators' ability to navigate an employment landscape in a way that promotes their overall career growth and professional development.
Putting Your Money Where Your Labor Is
Many industries operate on the basic principles of rewarding talent for positive, sustained performance. In the many fractured systems that make up the overall U.S. education system, talent and effort often only lead to heartwarming notes, the occasional staff pizza party and more responsibilities with an ever-shrinking margin of effective compensation. With the lack of growth opportunities in this career, is it any wonder that recruiting and maintaining a diverse teaching workforce is an issue for our schools today?
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to addressing this issue. Districts and schools, whether public, private or charter, are all funded differently and have different methods for allocating their budgets. But in considering how to fix schools or taking stock of the current state and future of public education in the US, policymakers and stakeholders with any ability to make a change in their schools or districts should not discount the effect of developing a stronger route of professional advancement for teachers.
If we don't build a better system, one that rewards extra labor and additional roles that come with being a teacher, we risk further creating the feeling that being a teacher feels like a dead-end job, and while some educators have come to this conclusion and left the field, I hope myself and other colleagues can feel the growth and necessary support we need in our careers to stay in the classroom.
When Gina Petersen graduated with her associate degree from Kirkwood Community College two years ago, she described it as “the biggest accomplishment I have ever done.”
As a returning adult college student, she had struggled to fit her studies in part time, online, while working as a trainer for a tech company. She had gotten that job through connections, and she hoped that a college degree would be a big help if she ever needed to find a new job in the future.
We told the story of Petersen’s college journey — which took her more than seven years and a couple of false starts to complete — as part of a three-part podcast series we did in 2022 called Second Acts.
For this week’s episode of the EdSurge Podcast, we checked back in with Petersen to see what the degree has meant for her professional and personal life.
And we found that the credential has not opened as many doors as she had hoped.
A few months after we last talked to Gina, she got laid off from her training job after 10 years at the company. And at first she quickly found a project manager position through her networks. But she felt the job wasn’t a good fit, so she quit after a little more than a year, hoping she’d quickly find another position.
What she encountered, however, was a job market that suddenly felt much more daunting.
“I’ve sent my resume to, I’d say, 150 different places for 150 different roles, and yet, nothing,” she says, even after getting professional help crafting her resume.
What’s worse, she says, she has been ghosted by employers when she does get initial interest. “I’ve had two people reach out for phone interviews and say, ‘Yes’ and confirm, and then I literally don’t get called,” she says.
Petersen is not alone, according to labor market experts.
Guy Berger, director of economic research at the Burning Glass Institute, notes that because it has become easier to apply for jobs, thanks to one-click applications on company websites and the growth of platforms like Linkedin, job seekers have more opportunities than ever. But they also have to work harder to find the right fit as a result. Whereas once it might be common to apply to 15 jobs, now it’s not unusual to have to apply to more than 150, he says.
“Now, you’re applying to a lot more things – you’re getting more cracks at the bat — but you’re just getting a lot more rejections,” Berger says.
That can feel demoralizing to job candidates, he adds, while also hard for employers as they struggle to sift through a flood of applicants.
Meanwhile, Berger says that the number of jobs for recent graduates has fallen in recent years, and just having a degree is not as guaranteed a “meal ticket” as in the past.
“College graduates still get generally better-paying jobs than people who don’t have a college degree, and there’s a wider range of opportunities available to them when they’re looking for a job,” he says. “But if you’re looking at how much of a boost it provides, probably it’s smaller than it was in the past.”
Even so, Petersen says she is glad she got her degree, as she learned valuable skills in college that she put to use in her job. But she isn’t looking to go back for more higher education at this point.
Hear more about Petersen’s search, trends in hiring and what colleges can do to respond to this changing landscape on this week’s EdSurge Podcast.
Despite the historic funding that was funneled into the field in the wake of the pandemic, early care and education continues to be one of the most beleaguered occupations in the United States.
Early childhood educators earn, on average, $13.07 per hour, a wage that puts them in the bottom 3 percent of workers nationally. (Elementary and middle school teachers, by comparison, earn an average of $31.80 per hour, and U.S. workers, across occupations, earn about $23 an hour.)
That’s according to findings from the 2024 Early Childhood Workforce Index, a report that typically comes out every two years and is produced and authored by a team of researchers at the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (CSCCE) at the University of California, Berkeley.
The U.S. early care and education system was broken long before the pandemic, thanks to a dynamic where families can’t afford to pay more while providers can’t afford to charge less. Those costs are, in effect, subsidized by the paltry wages earned by early childhood educators — the teachers and staff in these programs, about 98 percent of whom are women and half of whom are women of color — even though they are entrusted with one of the most important jobs that exists, said Caitlin McLean, lead author of the report and director of multi-state programs at CSCCE.
“Our child care workforce — the majority of whom have some higher education — are building our children’s brains in the most critical period of their development,” McLean said during a press call last week. “[Yet] early educators are paid so little that many worry where their next meal will come from.”
In early care and education programs, employer-sponsored benefits such as health insurance and retirement plans are rare. Close to half (43 percent) of early educators rely on public assistance, such as Medicaid and food stamps, to make ends meet, which the report estimates is costing taxpayers $4.7 billion a year.
The billions of federal dollars pumped into the field in recent years — including $39 billion from the American Rescue Plan Act — are widely seen as having been successful in helping stabilize programs and prevent massive waves of closures. However, most of those dollars expired in September 2023, while the remainder expired about two weeks ago.
Absent ongoing funding and a more permanent solution for the field, ARPA dollars seem not to have meaningfully moved the needle. New data in the Workforce Index underscores that reality.
“The funding was not about making the ideal child care system,” McLean said. “It was about preventing the utter collapse of the system we had.”
Corrine Hendrickson’s situation illustrates why the funding stopped short of transforming the field and the lives of those who work in it.
Right now, it does not feel like a sustainable career, and it really isn’t.
— Corrine Hendrickson
Direct-to-provider payments from ARPA allowed Hendrickson to make changes to her licensed home-based child care program in rural Wisconsin and spend money that she’d never had. She hired an employee for the first time, allowing her to step away for personal appointments. She made repairs and improvements to the building. She increased her own wages from $8 an hour to $12, which she said gave her enough extra money to buy her own kids clothes and pay monthly bills on time.
“Without the ARPA funding, I would’ve closed and never reopened,” she said, adding that as a home-based provider, “if I closed, I would’ve lost my home.”
But then ARPA funding expired last year, and she was forced to make hard decisions just to maintain her new hourly rate of $12. She has raised tuition rates on families three times in the past year, she shared, for a total increase of $70 per week. Some families, she added, have reached out to inquire about her program but then backed off when they learn she charges $259 to $281 per week, depending on the child’s age. It’s just too expensive, they tell her.
“Right now, it does not feel like a sustainable career,” Hendrickson said, “and it really isn’t.”
Nationally, wages for early childhood educators have increased by 4.6 percent in the last few years, after adjusting for inflation, according to the Index. That’s still less than the overall workforce, whose wages have increased by an average of 4.9 percent, as well as those of fast food workers (5.2 percent) and retail workers (6.8 percent). The latter two occupations are relevant because many educators have left their positions in recent years for jobs in food and retail, where wages are similar or higher and stress is much lower.
The national average, though, is just an average. About a dozen states have stepped in with their own investments in early care and education since ARPA dollars expired, helping programs and staff to avoid the so-called “child care cliff” that others have endured.
Some states have seen much bigger wage increases for early educators; in nine states, plus Washington, D.C., early educators experienced wage increases of more than 10 percent. The highest gains were in D.C., with an average 27.1 percent wage increase for educators.
‘This Is a Serious Job’
Lida Barthol is an infant and toddler teacher in Washington, D.C., where her salary has soared in the last few years.
Barthol entered the field in 2016, when she was earning about $11 an hour. Now a lead teacher with a bachelor’s degree, and with help from the District of Columbia’s targeted compensation program for early childhood educators, she is making the equivalent of about $36 an hour.
In 2021, after the DC Council approved a tax increase on the city’s highest-income residents, the District launched the Pay Equity Fund, an effort to increase the compensation of early childhood educators so that it better aligned with that of K-12 teachers with similar qualifications and experience.
“Which is insane,” Barthol said. “It’s unheard of.”
In the program’s first year, educators received one-time payments of up to $14,000. Barthol remembers calling her friend, another early childhood educator, in disbelief over the state of her bank account. “We just sat there and cried,” she said. “It was a really big moment.”
Now, the District funnels Barthol’s wage supplement through her employer, so it is reflected in her regular paychecks. The program — which has led to higher recruitment and retention in the field — shows what is possible if early childhood educators are paid a livable wage.
“It really changed everything about my life,” Barthol said. It gave her and her partner of seven years the financial security to get engaged and plan a small wedding, which is set to take place next month. It’s a “cultural milestone,” she said, that she didn’t feel stable enough to have before.
It has also made her feel that her work — her career path — is valued.
“I used to say, ‘There’s no reason to get a master’s degree in early education because you’ll never earn that money back.’ But really, I love this field. I love learning. I love thinking deeply about the work I’m doing,” said Barthol, who graduated in the spring with her master’s degree in human development.
“It gave me the confidence to be like, ‘This is a serious job,’” she said. “You don’t need a degree to do an amazing job, but it is just that affirmation that this is serious work, and [with] young children, there’s complexity there.”
With federal pandemic relief now gone and a new presidential administration set to begin in a few months, the field is at a “crossroads,” the authors of the report wrote.
Barthol has been attuned to the candidates this election cycle, she said. The nominees of both major parties have mentioned child care at a number of campaign events and even during the recent vice presidential debate.
They’re not always getting it right, Barthol noted. She cited a recent interview with Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance, who argued that the solution to sky-high child care costs for families was, first, to lean more on “grandma and grandpa” for care, and then, if that option isn’t available, to reduce regulations and lower qualifications for entering the workforce.
Vance suggested that the problem with the field is that the barrier to entry is too high, Barthol said, and that plenty of people want to work in early childhood education but can’t get a degree.
“What barrier to entry? You don’t need a degree,” Barthol said. “The issue is the pay being so low and the unpredictability of benefits.”
She’s seen many young people enter the field, enthusiastic about working with kids, only to realize how “physically, mentally and emotionally demanding it is,” then receive that first paycheck and decide, nope, this isn’t going to work for them.
“It’s not that the barrier to entry is so high,” Barthol reiterated. “It’s that the system is not built to support young families and the people who care for their children.”
On a bright, sunny day, a group of first-graders eagerly begins a science investigation called “Shadow Town.” The teacher gathers them in a circle and asks, “What causes shadows?” It’s a good question. The students are all familiar with shadows, have had fun with them and no doubt played shadow puppets, but that’s different from being able to explain them. Many suggestions are shouted out as students’ imaginations get fired up by the mystery of light and darkness.
The teacher takes the students outside to test their ideas. “Can I run away from my shadow?” one student wonders. Another asks, “Can I trick my shadow into disappearing?” As they experiment with shadows, predict their movements, explore how light interacts with different materials, and discuss what they see with their partners, the students learn not just about the mechanics of shadows but also about the scientific process of inquiry and investigation. Through this exploration, they begin to apply their newfound knowledge to solve a real-world problem: why the town of Rjukan, Norway, spends much of the year in shadow and how different solutions could work.
Combining phenomena-based learning with 3D science standards helps students see science as a way to make sense of the world around them. They become more motivated to learn and more capable of thinking critically about the challenges they will face in the future.
“Shadow Town,” a module in the K-8 curriculum Twig Science, is an example of phenomena-based learning in action, an approach that taps into students' natural curiosity to make sense of the world around them. In this context, phenomena are simply observable events or situations. They play a crucial role in science education because they provide students with concrete, engaging examples of scientific concepts in the real world. They provide great opportunities to develop student inquiry — students see something happening, ask questions about it and conduct research to learn more about it.
In "Shadow Town," students investigate why the town of Rjukan, Norway, spends much of the year in shadow. Image credit: Imagine Learning
Phenomena in the Context of 3D Science
Phenomena-based learning also aligns with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and other three-dimensional (3D) science standards that emphasize a comprehensive, integrated understanding of science. These standards were designed to move science education away from rote memorization and toward engaging students in practices real scientists use to explore and model the world, fostering deeper understanding of scientific concepts and developing skills like critical thinking, collaboration and communication.
The NGSS and other 3D science standards are structured around three dimensions of science learning:
Science and Engineering Practices (SEPs): These involve the skills and behaviors that scientists and engineers engage in, such as asking questions, developing and using models, planning and carrying out investigations, analyzing and interpreting data, and constructing explanations.
Crosscutting Concepts (CCCs): These overarching concepts bridge disciplinary boundaries, such as patterns, cause and effect, energy and matter, structure and function, and stability and change.
Disciplinary Core Ideas (DCIs): These are fundamental ideas in science that students should understand, divided into four domains — physical sciences, life sciences, Earth and space sciences, and engineering, technology and applications of science.
The integration of these three dimensions helps students develop a holistic understanding of science, moving beyond memorizing isolated facts to actively engaging in scientific practices and understanding the broader concepts that connect different areas of science.
3D Learning with Twig Science
A Motivation to Engage
Phenomena-based learning and 3D science standards naturally complement each other. Phenomena-based learning provides the context and motivation for students to engage in the practices, concepts and core ideas outlined in the standards. For example, in investigating “Shadow Town,” students engage in Science and Engineering Practices by asking questions and planning investigations to understand why shadows change. They use the Crosscutting Concept of “patterns” to observe how shadows behave at different times of the day and the Disciplinary Core Idea of Earth’s movements to explain these patterns. Through this process, they’re not just learning scientific facts but experiencing science as a dynamic, integrated discipline that helps them make sense of the world.
The Ultimate Guide to Three-Dimensional Learning: Teach real-world skills with 3D science and find resources including practical approaches, printable posters and a podcast episode.
The Ultimate Guide to Phenomena: A guide to sparking student inquiry and discovery, including a podcast episode, a breakdown of anchor phenomena in Twig Science, and downloadable phenomena trackers.
Multimedia resources in Twig Science bring phenomena to life that students might not otherwise have access to. Image credit: Imagine Learning
Creating opportunities for such investigations requires thoughtful design and alignment with educational standards. In designing high-quality instructional materials and even entire curricula that support phenomena-based learning, several key areas demand attention:
Rich, real-world phenomena: Across grades K-8, effective curricula feature carefully chosen phenomena — such as the passing of the seasons, light reflecting in a mirror or the erosion of mountains — that are relevant, observable and meaningful to students. They’re complex enough to require students to engage deeply with the dimensions of science but accessible enough to be explored through student-led inquiry and investigation.
High-quality multimedia resources: Videos, interactive simulations and virtual labs bring phenomena to life that students might not otherwise have access to, providing dynamic, visual experiences that enhance understanding.
Engaging and clear learning materials: Learning materials should be engaging and aligned to 3D science standards. They should guide students through the inquiry process, provide opportunities for reflection and discussion, and scaffold learning to include all students in investigations.
An innovative assessment system: Assessment systems should help teachers evaluate student understanding of the three dimensions of the NGSS. These systems include a range of assessment strategies, from pre-exploration activities that gauge prior knowledge to formative and summative tasks, plus built-in data-reporting tools to help track student progress throughout their learning journeys.
Combining phenomena-based learning with 3D science standards helps students see science as a way to make sense of the world around them. They become more motivated to learn and more capable of thinking critically about the challenges they will face in the future. As students engage with real-world phenomena, they not only learn about science but also begin to think and act like scientists, developing a lifelong sense of wonder and inquiry that will help them deal with all kinds of challenges they will face throughout their lives, in education and beyond.
When Eve, a mother in Colorado, received a legal settlement, she found herself suddenly flush.
She drove over to the office of Eric Dearing, who was working with her as a family advocate for Head Start, and she gave him a shirt. Even though the shirt wasn’t his style, and he never wore it, he kept it in the closet. That was one of the few times that he’d seen a family, through “pure luck,” get a spike in income.
The change in Eve, when she went from receiving help to giving gifts, was palpable. “She was so excited and proud and suddenly full of this hope,” says Dearing, who is now a professor at Boston College.
Moments like that are rare these days. Social mobility in the U.S. is stagnant, with income inequality rising. Plus, the ability of people to move up in the world seems to decline with age, as their status gets set. It can cast doubt on the idea that schools prepare students to have good lives and raise questions about whether the country is a poverty-sustaining machine.
This may be getting worse, according to one researcher, whose recent study found that what matters for student outcomes isn’t so much money itself, but the number of supportive learning chances that a person gets.
But rare or not, that experience with Eve stuck with Dearing like it was pinned somewhere in his brain. How much does it matter when families gain income if they've been living in poverty, Dearing wondered. And why do all the high-quality programs out there seem to make such a little dent in boosting education achievement for students from low-income backgrounds?
It Adds Up
Years later, Dearing tried to tackle these questions. His answer? Some students just receive much fewer chances to thrive.
That’s what a new study, published in the journal Educational Researcher, suggests. The study aimed to figure out how access to opportunities accrued over time for students, and whether they explain the link between how much money their parents made — when the students were in early childhood — and how their lives turned out. To do this, the researchers pulled federal data that followed 814 students from birth until the age of 26. Those students lived in 10 cities from around the U.S.
What did they find? It’s about “opportunity gaps.” For example, from birth through the end of high school, children from high-income families had six-to-seven times as many chances to learn than those from low-income families. Middle-income families had four times as many chances as low-income families.
According to an author of the study, that means family income is indirectly related to how far a student pursues education or how much money they make in their mid-20s. What really matters is access to “educational opportunities,” or how often they find themselves in supportive learning environments, whether that’s in high-quality child care when they are young, in a home that has toys, puzzles and caregivers to support learning, or in high-quality school and after-school programs. So income helps, but primarily because it leads to greater access to good learning opportunities.
The study was descriptive, Dearing notes, so it can’t technically prove that the accumulation of opportunities “caused” higher educational achievement. But that story is consistent with their research, he adds. The paper also didn’t look into how the timing of learning opportunities — say, whether they occurred in early childhood or in high school — might make a difference.
But from the perspective of the researchers, what matters is the cumulative effect of those chances over time.
Some children are experiencing opportunities throughout their lives, in each of the settings in which they're living and growing — at home, in child care, at the school — and other children are, if they're lucky, experiencing an opportunity to be in a highly enriching context in one of those settings, Dearing says. And that has tremendous implications for solving achievement differences between children growing up poor and children growing up in higher-income families, he adds.
Given this, it shouldn’t be surprising that positively powerful programs such as high-quality preschool make only a small dent in how those children's lives turn out, Dearing says.
Translating these insights into more chances for students to thrive is tough.
“The inequity is extreme, and so it's going to take extreme measures to end that,” Dearing adds. And by extreme, he means structural. Success in education requires high-quality instruction, but that alone is not enough, he says. What matters when it comes to changing students’ lives is sustained quality. The sum is greater than the parts.
A consequence: Teachers alone, while crucial, can’t control all the factors here. The answer may lie more in support systems for students, Dearing says, pointing toward the community school model and support programs such as City Connects at Boston College. These models claim to support the “whole child” by building a network that can assist with needs outside of the classroom, such as connecting families to food banks when a child might be hungry or to a free eyeglasses clinic. In some sense, these models use the schools as “hubs” for supportive learning environments while letting teachers focus on the education component, Dearing says.
The Land of Opportunity?
Efforts to staunch inequality could also soon see a political push: Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign has outlined a plan for “economic opportunity,” including expansions of earned income tax credits, which it argues will breathe new life into the American middle class.
But in the meantime, circumstances may be getting starker.
Since 1991, when the students trailed by the study were born, the country has seen rising inequality and, in some sectors, stagnant wages. This may have accelerated or exaggerated the effects noted in the study. It’s entirely possible that we have underestimated how big the opportunity gaps are today, Dearing says. Had the children been born a decade later, it’s possible the students they studied would have had a wider chasm between opportunities, even between middle-class and upper-income families, he says.
There have also been some positive developments, though. There’s more public preschool these days, and there’s been an increase in the earned income tax credit, he says.
What’s more, there are still research questions to answer.
A previous study authored by Dearing showed that early childhood “opportunities” could compensate for poverty, lifting students’ educational attainment.
But if the research were being conducted today, Dearing says he would pay closer attention to cultural differences that might boost students’ life outcomes in the absence of money. For instance, in some Black communities caregiver roles often extend beyond the parents, with other family members like grandmothers playing a big role in childrens’ home lives and what learning opportunities they have there. But researchers have overfocused on “nuclear family” roles, and therefore may have a slightly misleading picture, Dearing says.
When Meta held its annual conference at the end of September, the tech giant announced it is betting that the next wave of computing will come in the form of smart eyeglasses.
Mark Zuckberberg, Meta’s founder and CEO, held up what he described as the first working prototype of Orion, which lets wearers see both the physical world and a computer display hovering in the field of vision.
“They’re not a headset,” he said on stage as he announced the device, which looked like a set of unusually chunky eyeglasses. “This is the physical world with holograms overlaid on it.”
For educators, this might not come as welcome news.
After all, one of the hottest topics in edtech these days is the growing practice of banning smartphones in schools, after teachers have reported that the devices distract students from classroom activities and socializing in person with others. And a growing body of research, popularized by the Jonathan Haidt book “The Anxious Generation,” argues that smartphone and social media use harms the mental health of teenagers.
When it’s proving hard enough to regulate the appropriate use of smartphones, what will it be like to manage a rush of kids wearing computers on their faces?
Some edtech experts see upsides, though, when the technology is ready to be used for educational activities.
The idea of using VR headsets to enter an educational multiverse — the last big idea Meta was touting when it changed its corporate name three years ago from Facebook — hasn’t caught on widely, in part because getting a classroom full of students fitted with headsets and holding controllers can be difficult for teachers (not to mention expensive to obtain all that gear). But if smart glasses become cheap enough for a cart to be wheeled in with enough pairs for each student, so they can all do some activity together that blends the virtual world with in-person interactions, they could be a better fit.
“Augmented reality allows for more sharing and collaborative work than VR,” says Maya Georgieva, who runs an innovation center for VR and AR at The New School in New York City. “Lots of these augmented reality applications build on the notion of active learning and experiential learning naturally.”
And there is some initial research that has found that augmented reality experiences in education can lead to improvements in learning outcomes since, as one recent research paper put it, “they transform the learning process into a full-body experience.”
Cheating Glasses?
The Orion glasses that Zuckerberg previewed last week are not ready for prime time — in fact the Meta CEO said they won’t be released to the general public until 2027.
(EdSurge receives philanthropic support from the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, which is co-owned by Meta’s CEO. Learn more about EdSurge ethics and policies here and supporters here.)
But the company already sells smart eyeglasses through a partnership with sunglass-maker Ray-Ban, which are now retailing for around $300. And other companies make similar products as well.
These gadgets, which have been on the market for a couple of years in some form, don’t have a display. But they do have a small built-in computer, a camera, a microphone and speakers. And recent advances in AI mean that newer models can serve as a talking version of a chatbot that users can access when they’re away from their computer or smartphone.
While so far the number of students who own smart glasses appears low, there have already been some reports of students using smart glasses to try to cheat.
This year in Tokyo, for instance, an 18-year-old allegedly used smart glasses to try to cheat on a university entrance exam. He apparently took pictures of his exam questions, posted them online during the test, and users on X, formerly Twitter, gave him the answers (which he could presumably hear read to him on his smart glasses). He was detected and his test scores were invalidated.
Meanwhile, students are sharing videos on TikTok where they explain how to use smart glasses to cheat, even low-end models that have few “smart” features.
“Using these blue light smart glasses on a test would be absolutely diabolical,” says one TikTok user’s video, describing a pair of glasses that can simply pair with a smartphone by bluetooth and cost only about $30. “They look like regular glasses, but they have speakers and microphones in them so you can cheat on a test. So just prerecord your test or your answers or watch a video while you're at the test and just listen to it and no one can tell that you’re looking or listening to anything.”
On Reddit discussions, professors have been wondering whether this technology will make it even harder to know whether the work students are doing is their own, compounding the problems caused by ChatGPT and other new AI tools that have given students new ways to cheat on homework that are difficult to detect.
One commenter even suggested just giving up on doing tests and assignments and trying to find new ways of assessing student knowledge. “I think we have too many assessments that have limited benefit and no one here wants to run a police state to check if students actually did what they say they did,” the user wrote. “I would appreciate if anyone has a functional viable alternative to the current standard. The old way will benefit the well off and dishonest, while the underprivileged and moral will suffer (not that this is new either).”
Some of the school and state policies that ban smartphones might also apply to these new smart glasses. A state law in Florida, for instance, restricts the use of “wireless communication devices,” which could include glasses, watches, or any new gadget that gets invented that connects electronically.
“I would compare it very much to when smartphones really came on the scene and became a regular part of our everyday lives,” says Kyle Bowen, a longtime edtech expert who is now deputy chief information officer at Arizona State University, noting that these glasses might impact a range of activities if they catch on, including education.
There could be upsides in college classrooms, he predicts.
The benefit he sees for smart glasses is the pairing of AI and the devices, so that students might be able to get real-time feedback about, say a lab exercise, by asking the chatbot to weigh in on what it sees through the camera of the glasses as students go about the task.
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