But what if our students didn鈥檛 have to choose between the two? Imagine a student who excels in AP English discovering, through an internship at a tech company, how their passion for the written word can lead to a lucrative career in technical writing. Or a student earning a welding certification who enrolls in business classes that challenge them to think beyond employment to entrepreneurship.

As district leaders, we have to ask ourselves: Despite our best intentions, have we unknowingly limited students鈥� potential by creating rigid pathways that separate academic achievement from career exploration? 

For , it鈥檚 a question we needed to answer for our own students. What we discovered in talking with other innovative schools across the country changed our entire approach to career-connected learning . Today, DPS is considered by members of the a model to be studied on a national level; and as its superintendent, I have been named to the to speak on the district鈥檚 approach to career-connected learning.

Today, have CTE programs, and each looks completely different. In some cases, CTE is designed as , giving struggling students an 鈥渙ut鈥� from college preparation. In others, tech-focused, dual-credit courses are reserved for top-performing students.

As home to Connecticut鈥檚 largest high school, DPS understood this divide all too well. The district offered a CTE program, including a successful Certified Nursing Assistant pathway. Despite overwhelming interest, only 60 students could be accepted each year, closing opportunities for many qualified and motivated students. 

Meanwhile, graduation rates and student engagement were on a downward spiral. Recognizing that career  opportunities aligned with students鈥� interests for the future, DPS sought to create an equitable learning experience for all students, not just high achievers.

Building on best practices from National Career Academy Coalition nationwide, DPS launched , the Northeast鈥檚 first wall-to-wall career academy model. With eight academies 鈥� including Clean Energy, Green Design, Information Technology and Cybersecurity 鈥� students can explore 21 career pathways.

The academies are challenging the misconception that career pathways are only for those students heading directly to work after high school. Durable skills built through real-world, hands-on experiences 鈥� like critical thinking, adaptability and conflict management 鈥� are at every level of industry. Employers report that many young workers, including, are missing the critical skills essential for professional success. By equipping students with workplace competencies now, we can give them a meaningful advantage whenever they enter the job market.

Unlike traditional career programs that layer electives into a traditional classroom structure, the new generation of public school academies are built around exploration. There鈥檚 no 鈥済eneral track鈥� here 鈥� every student follows a career-connected pathway that allows for job shadowing, project-based learning, certifications and internships. The model ensures opportunities once reserved for a select group of students are available to everyone, including those who thrive in areas often overlooked by CTE programs, such as the arts and humanities.

Just as important, students are not sorted into pathways by a transcript or test score. They are empowered to discover their own path. In Danbury, freshmen are embedded in a year-long exploration of their interests, career goals and available opportunities. Through a variety of activities, including career fairs and industry field trips, they gain the insights needed to rank the pathways they plan to pursue in grades 10 to 12 based on their passions instead of their GPA. That freedom gives students a sense of ownership over their education, which becomes a powerful catalyst for engagement.

Finally, career exploration should open doors, not lock students into a single pathway. Educators must work with students to switch pathways if needed and adjust electives to meet their evolving interests. 

For example, a student pursuing a CNA certification may discover a hospital setting is not the right fit for them. However, through their Academy pathway, they may uncover aligned opportunities in fields such as social work or biomedical research. By adjusting their plans in high school, students avoid costly major changes in college and the debt that comes with them.

One of the most significant deterrents to building a robust CTE program is the . Investing in advanced instructional technologies, hiring additional staff and retrofitting existing buildings is often out of bounds for districts on tight budgets. 

Ensuring that a highly-trained workforce is ready to solve the requires businesses and trade associations to play a bigger role in preparing tomorrow鈥檚 talent. That includes opening their doors to students and offering mentorships, internships and hands-on learning that bring high school lessons to life.

At the same time, federal and state leaders must invest in the programs that prepare students for the jobs of tomorrow. Despite being one of the lowest-funded districts in Connecticut, DPS has scaled our program with intention, securing grant funding that has enabled us to invest in a new cybersecurity lab, advanced CAD equipment and drafting tables.

Since the launch of The Academies of Danbury High School in 2024, the district is already seeing its impact firsthand. While it will be four years before DPS has a complete picture of graduation trends, the early results are promising. The overall graduation rate rose 6.4 percentage points in one year, from 76.6% in 2024 to 83% in 2025. Among English learners, the increase was even greater: 17.9 percentage points, from 52.8% to 70.7%.

Rates increased by 10.2 percentage points among Hispanic students and male students, 7.1 points among high-needs students, 5.9 points among Black students and 5.4 points among Asian students. These results, alongside improved attendance and engagement, reflect students鈥� stronger connection to school and greater investment in their learning. Student focus groups also report high satisfaction with opportunities to choose and complete meaningful, hands-on work that builds toward a potential career.

As districts across the country grapple with student disengagement and declining test scores, we have to realize no superhero is coming to save the day. We have to put on our own capes 鈥� to be bold enough to reimagine the traditional learning model as a system that centers on every student鈥檚 career aspiration and unlimited potential. When learning is connected to purpose, students don’t just perform better; they become empowered to thrive in both the classroom and their future careers.

But unlike most 10-year-olds, a year ago this child left her family and her home, walking for days with little to eat. To protect her from the violence against women that is pervasive in rural Guatemala, and with the hope that she could have a better life, her mother sent her to the United States. Abiding by our immigration policy at the time, the young girl crossed the border and presented herself to immigration authorities to request asylum here. Yet now, due to policy changes, she is considered to be undocumented, part of a group that is being targeted politically. 

As a bilingual social worker, I have spent the past six years working closely with immigrants in southeast Tennessee. I鈥檝e heard many variations of this story. I鈥檓 not using names in this story to protect the immigrants I know. So many children and families have endured trauma in their country of origin and come here abiding by our rules; they work hard and contribute by supporting our schools, boosting local economies, and paying taxes to fund our government. 

And yet, common misconceptions persist and drive our immigration policy. Misconceptions like being undocumented means that an immigrant broke the law when they arrived, or that somehow simultaneously new arrivals are coming here to live off the government while also stealing American jobs. As someone who works daily with immigrants, I can assure you that those I know give much more to our country and to our communities than they could ever take. Their contributions are enormous 鈥� cultural, educational, economic and more.

For instance, a father immigrated from Venezuela through legal pathways years ago. When his children began attending school, he was shocked to see school staff members volunteering their free time to maintain and improve the campus. In the father鈥檚 home country, this was something parents did. He organized a parent committee to take the burden off of teachers, a contribution that has increased family engagement and improved teacher morale. And yet this father鈥� who has given so much to his community 鈥� is now considered undocumented due to policy reversals and is at risk of being targeted by immigration enforcement. 

Anti-immigrant politicians often portray immigrants as criminals who drain public resources and weaken American communities. And yet, the experiences of families I encounter tell a different story. The truth is that many undocumented immigrants have not violated the law, that immigrants contribute more to our economy than they receive in public benefits, and that they strengthen the communities they join through service, hard work and civic engagement. 

As an undocumented immigrant, the 10-year-old girl is not eligible for any public assistance: not food stamps, nor Medicaid, and she does not qualify for any type of subsidized housing. If she wants to attend college some day, to fulfill her dream of becoming a police officer and keeping others safe, she would not be eligible for any type of government grants or student loans. The only government support she receives is a free, public school education, a benefit she takes full advantage of every morning when she wakes herself up, makes her breakfast, dresses and eagerly waits for the school bus to arrive. 

However, even this benefit has been threatened. In both the 2025 and 2026 legislative sessions, Tennessee lawmakers sponsored bills that would deny undocumented students the right to a free public education. This legislation, a direct challenge to the United States Supreme Court鈥檚 1982 decision in Plyler v. Doe, could make it harder, or impossible, for many immigrant students to go to public school. Although the young girl followed our immigration policy and continues to attend her check-ins and court dates, she remains among those who many lawmakers believe are undeserving of the basic right to education. 

When attempting to deny a free public education to undocumented students, Tennessee state legislators have pointed to the high cost of educating undocumented children. While the economic burden of immigrants is often cited by those opposing immigration, a 30-year published by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, found that immigrants pay more in taxes than they consume in public services. Over the course of the study, there was a net positive contribution of more than $14.5 trillion. These are tax dollars that help reduce our national deficit. 

Immigrants also contribute by sustaining our population growth amid declining birth rates. Recent Congressional revealed that the Social Security program is now projected to be depleted in 2032, a year earlier than the estimate given in 2025, due in part to declining immigration. 

Many immigrants have not broken any laws, yet remain undocumented and legally vulnerable. They are portrayed as a drain on society, yet they help sustain programs like Social Security through their tax contributions, even though many will never receive those benefits. 

As we watch our neighbors being detained and deported, we see that we are not losing the “worst of the worst,” but people who embody some of the best American ideals: hard work, selfless contribution, and a desire to build a better future for their families and communities. 

Adults design policies for her future 鈥� the classes she takes, the programs available in her neighborhood, the career training offered at her school 鈥� but very few of us have ever asked her what she actually needs.

In New Orleans, we asked. And what we heard changed the way we design support for young people. Your city should, too.

For the past seven years, the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans at Tulane University has led the 鈥� a collaborative effort with a steering committee of community organizations, government agencies and school leaders to ask students directly about their lives inside and outside of school. Our , conducted with about 2,000 sixth through 11th graders across 16 public schools last spring, added new questions about mental health. The findings are hard to sit with.

About one in three New Orleans youth is struggling with their mental health. About 41% report feeling sad or hopeless almost every day. These are not just New Orleans numbers. show similar rates of adolescent depression and anxiety. 

What is distinctive about New Orleans is that we asked why they are not getting needed help. Twenty-six percent of students said they needed counseling at some point in the past year but didn鈥檛 get it. And more than half 鈥� 55% 鈥� have avoided seeking mental health help at some point because of what others might think. Among Black youth, the numbers are starker: Nearly twice as many reported needing counseling and not receiving it compared to white youth.

Perhaps most telling is whom young people turn to when they鈥檙e struggling. The majority said they鈥檇 reach out to a friend. Fewer than one in 10 would go to a school counselor. Almost one in five said they wouldn鈥檛 reach out to anyone. New Orleans youth told us why they are struggling. And knowing changes things.

When we released earlier surveys showing that students were leaving home before dawn to catch school buses, the district changed its busing policy. When a charter management organization noticed that its students鈥� sense of belonging lagged that of similar schools, they redesigned their social-emotional learning approach. When community leaders learned that New Orleans middle schoolers had far fewer career-preparation opportunities than students nationwide, local workforce organizations began rethinking what support looks like before high school. 

None of those changes would have happened if adults had continued making decisions based on assumptions about what young people need.

The mental health findings from this year are already moving conversations. At our public release event, a high school student who helped design the survey described watching classmates struggle in silence 鈥� afraid to ask for help, unsure where to turn, not trusting that anyone would understand. She was describing data she had helped collect from students who looked like her. 

The superintendent of New Orleans Public Schools, Fateama Fulmore, said 鈥淭his report provides encouragement and a sober reminder of the responsibilities we carry as a school system and as a city for our children.鈥� Meshawn Siddiq, deputy director of the city鈥檚 Department of Health, echoed, 鈥淎s a system, I feel like in order for it all to work, every aspect of it needs to work together.鈥� That is the point of this work.

Other cities can do this. The model is not complicated, but it requires intentionality: a commitment to collaborating with local stakeholders to know what information they need, to asking young people real questions, to sharing what you hear even when it鈥檚 uncomfortable, and to letting their answers actually drive decisions.

Our students are not getting the mental health support they need. They told us that because we asked. The least we can do is listen.

Education finance could learn a thing or two.

Policymakers intent on providing high-quality schools for everyone typically face a familiar problem: Variability in property taxes allows wealthier communities to send much more money to their local schools than those in poorer communities. That extra investment translates into opportunities that lower-wealth schools simply cannot afford. Education leaders across the country have tried to fix this by filling holes with state dollars. But they are faced with a common challenge: If local spending on education in high-wealth communities keeps rising, the bar for state contributions to poorer communities moves with it.

Many professional sports leagues grappling with similar issues of inequality have found a solution in salary caps that curb wealth hoarding and reward competitiveness. In the National Basketball Association, the salary cap is a set dollar amount that all teams must stay under to avoid a financial penalty. If my beloved Atlanta Hawks spent $100,000 above the threshold, for instance, they would pay an additional $100,000 as a luxury tax. These extra dollars would then be distributed to teams that have not spent as much, helping to level the playing field.

What could this policy look like in education? Vermont already has one in place. 

Like many states, Vermont calculates and guarantees a baseline amount of funding required to educate a standard student (which is adjusted by increasing funding for disadvantaged kids). But beginning in 1997, Vermont lawmakers adopted an additional process called the excess spending adjustment. If a town votes to spend more than the baseline per-pupil funding amount, it triggers the state’s version of the NBA鈥檚 luxury tax. Wealthy towns can still raise more money for their schools, but are then required to pay higher rates created in the funding formula. In Fiscal Year 2026, exceeded the $15,926 spending threshold.

The additional tax revenue raised by property-rich towns is distributed to property-poor, rural school districts to ensure their students get a more equitable education. Three years into implementation, that legislative provisions including the excess spending adjustment had significantly reduced the relationship among property wealth, student resources and taxpayer burden.聽

What stops other states from following in Vermont鈥檚 footsteps? Policies like this do not come easily, and may require a shock to the status quo. The NBA salary cap and luxury tax were the result of difficult negotiations between the league and players. Vermont’s school funding mechanism was passed in response to a state Supreme Court ruling that the state’s previous education finance law was unconstitutional. Many wealthier residents expressed outrage at the new law 鈥� one going so far as to buy a car previously owned by one of the bill鈥檚 chief sponsors, bringing it to the state capitol and urging passers-by to to vent their frustration with the new law.

Interestingly, several of the financially affected by the excess spending threshold are not eligible to vote in Vermont: Many of its property-rich communities are ski resorts filled with second homes of out-of-state residents. This politically advantageous fact, paired with provisions that provided 229 of the state鈥檚 school districts with additional funding and only 23 districts with less, might help explain why the pushback was not strong enough to undo the law’s sweeping changes. Howard Dean, the incumbent governor, faced an opponent who tried to center the law as her chief campaign issue. Dean handily won reelection.

Vermont is not alone in structurally tackling this issue. Texas has , a state policy that requires wealthy school districts to send a portion of their local property tax revenue back to the state. In the 2024-25 school year, nearly was returned to the state under the program.

Policy advocates interested in finance equity policies should study these two states, and consider how private giving might circumvent any progress. 

In my work for , housed in the Southern Education Foundation, I regularly meet with education stakeholders across the country to imagine school funding and enrollment policies that undo the harm of intense segregation, specifically between districts. Income segregation leaves students in high-poverty schools with and few resources to meet them. Some state leaders treat the school district lines as impenetrable, for both students and dollars, leaving kids to the education provided by local property tax wealth. But every American has an affirmative right to public education, written into the state constitutions. Like the NBA power brokers of the 1980s and the Vermont lawmakers of the late 1990s, state legislators can work across lines of difference to devise a system where wealth hoarding is challenged. The ball is in their court.

Yet too many students lack the guidance they need to benefit from these growing opportunities. remain persistently severe, while career navigation is often a back-burner priority. High schools remain wedded to 鈥渃ollege for all,鈥� despite in alternative pathways. Consequently, too many young people are unaware of the careers they could pursue, the availability of jobs locally, and the skills required. A 2024 found that 66% of young adults ages 16 to 24 鈥渄o not know exactly what career they want to pursue.鈥�

This lack of guidance hinders students鈥� economic prospects and undermines employers鈥� efforts to get the workforce they need. But new approaches to career navigation could narrow this gap. 

As we found in researching a new FutureEd , innovations in curriculum design, service delivery and technology could broaden access to high-quality career guidance for students, and without massive staff hiring sprees few districts can afford.

One such emerging strategy is to integrate career navigation into curriculum. In California鈥檚 Cajon Valley Union School District, for instance, career exploration is part of the classwork, not shunted off to counselors. As part of the district鈥檚 鈥溾�� , students participate in 鈥渄eep career exposure鈥� with hands-on activities and real-life experiences. 

Students start learning about various careers as early as kindergarten, and by high school, they spend up to 40% of their time in job experiences or internships.

Enlisting teachers reduces the burden on counselors and encourages educators to develop academic content relevant to students鈥� postsecondary lives. Instead of learning about geometry in the abstract, for example, students apply geometric concepts to a construction project, making schoolwork more relevant and engaging.

Real-world career exposure especially benefits students without adequate guidance at home or in their communities. In Cajon Valley鈥檚 public schools, about 20 miles outside San Diego, nearly of students are economically disadvantaged. Research shows that low-income households and communities have less access than their wealthier counterparts to the professional networks and that enable upward mobility. 

A second emerging strategy leverages nonprofit intermediaries specializing in college and career navigation. A growing cohort of organizations 鈥� including Jobs for the Future鈥檚 and grantees of Strada Education鈥檚 initiative 鈥� are helping to expand schools鈥� counseling capacity by providing coaching, advising and access to work-based learning.

In Chicago Public Schools, for example, the nonprofit trains teachers as advisers to work with student 鈥渇ellows鈥� at 36 high-poverty high schools who receive college and career guidance for three years, including one year after graduation. Beyond job exploration, this includes social-emotional skills development, test prep, college admissions, financial aid applications and, in their final year, emergency financial aid, if needed. The University of Chicago鈥檚 Inclusive Economy Lab found that OneGoal fellows were more likely to graduate from high school than nonparticipants, and with higher GPAs. 

While administrators say Chicago public schools have made enormous progress in hiring more counselors, the average ratio still exceeds the recommended proportion of 250 to 1. Intermediaries like OneGoal compensate for that gap.

A third innovation broadening access to career navigation is the use of artificial intelligence-powered tools and platforms. Multiple platforms have recently come on the market, as ed tech entrepreneurs seek to address the demand for career navigation and credentialing. While some platforms offer little more than a chatbot, others provide useful, up-to-date information that could complement a human counselor鈥檚 guidance. 

One such promising platform is , developed by Diane Tavenner, former CEO of charter school provider Summit Public Schools. Its database features more than 800 careers that offer a living wage, half of which don鈥檛 require a four-year degree. The site also provides details about the day-to-day tasks involved in various jobs, along with data on expected pay and required credentials 鈥� information that counselors may not otherwise have readily available.

Of course, none of these new approaches is a cure for the overall crisis in postsecondary navigation. No career navigation curriculum, regardless of how well designed, can compensate for a lack of reliable data on credentials of value or on careers that can insulate young workers from the coming impacts of AI. Even with the aid of nonprofit intermediaries, many districts won’t have the resources to reach every student who could benefit from guidance. And while technological solutions can serve as powerful tools for career navigation, they cannot fully substitute for human counselors.

Nevertheless, the consequences of inadequate guidance are dire. Many high school graduates are toiling in jobs that do not lead to economic advancement, especially if they opt out of college. Less than of young employees without college degrees work in what one study called launchpad jobs, which have a clear trajectory for career growth. Meanwhile, nearly of recent college graduates are stuck in jobs that underutilize their credentials. Worse still, as many as young people ages 16 to 24 鈥� more than 1 in 10 鈥� are 鈥渄isconnected鈥� from both work and school.

Leaders of K-12 schools may prefer to focus on academics and college prep, even as they increase the availability of career and technical education and encourage early college access through strategies like dual enrollment. Yet the realities of today鈥檚 economy and the rising cost of college demand that quality postsecondary navigation become central to K-12鈥檚 mission. The stakes couldn鈥檛 be higher. 

To put these results in perspective, four years ago, the third grade ELA proficiency rate was 40% 鈥� nearly 30 points below its pre-pandemic highs. Moreover, according to a Universal Reading Screener, our kindergarten to second grade students were demonstrating mastery at levels far below prior cohorts. 

As executive director of the charter school, I recognized that the problem was not a lack of effort. When our staff observed classrooms, we saw teachers and leaders working incredibly hard. However, we also saw many ineffective practices, especially in our youngest grades: centers where students colored without purpose or attention, letter sounds introduced without sufficient practice, and Youtube videos replacing the joy of books read-aloud. It was no surprise so many third and fourth grade students struggled to read fluently, write complete sentences or access complex texts. 

Over the next four years, we changed almost everything about our K-5 literacy program. Today, our Title I school ranks in the state鈥檚 top 3% for 3rd Grade ELA achievement, outscoring every district in the state of Tennessee, including districts with far less diversity and far greater resources. While these results are extraordinary, the work we did was anything but. In fact, I am confident it can be replicated by any school or district. 

Here are six practices that moved the needle most. 

The Science of Reading is the tip of the iceberg. Starting in 2022, Tennessee began to implement training and curricula rooted in the Science of Reading, which we embraced and incorporated. Along the way, we learned that this evidence-based approach rests upon a broader foundation of cognitive and social science. This research has not reached most American teachers and school districts. Over the past two years 鈥� thanks to organizations like , , and 鈥� we explored the science of learning. 

Based on what we learned, we overhauled our approach to coaching and development. Today, every teacher at Nashville Classical is trained on basic concepts like the importance of securing and harnessing attention, the difference between working and long-term memory, the importance of background knowledge and the need to support encoding and retrieval. If you walk into a third grade classroom today, you might see students with a knowledge organizer on ancient Rome, quietly self-quizzing themselves on terms like patricians and plebeians. These simple daily practices are supported by science, but implementing them is not rocket science. Very few schools or districts have shared these practices with their teachers, which is a tragedy because anyone can learn them and every teacher deserves to know them. 

Don鈥檛 teach skills 鈥� build knowledge. features a listening comprehension strand, which we use to build background knowledge. In younger grades, we reinforce key terms, timelines and vocabulary through daily oral drills, content-focused songs and frequent opportunities to repeat ideas through 鈥渢urn and talks.鈥� As students move into tested grades, they practice reading short passages and answering multiple choice questions. But we avoid teaching test tricks like 鈥渃rossing out wrong answers鈥� or lessons on 鈥渉ow to find the main idea.鈥� Instead, our teachers ask themselves 鈥淲hat background knowledge or vocabulary might prevent students from understanding this passage?鈥� and 鈥淗ow can I build their knowledge to increase their comprehension?.鈥� By eliminating time spent trying to teach abstract 鈥渃ritical thinking,鈥� we have more time to build knowledge and vocabulary, which are the actual building blocks of comprehension.

Fluency 鈥� in all its forms 鈥� unlocks growth. Our benchmark assessment system measures fluency across grade levels, including for letter sounds, word reading, oral reading and silent reading. Our team took time to deeply understand the importance of each of these domains and unpacked what a fluent reader could think and do at each stage of their development, from kindergarten to middle school. Unfortunately, , prioritizing sound or word reading fluency at the expense of fluent reading in context. Our team worked to align vision of reading excellence across grades, which meant teachers were working toward a shared picture of what proficient young readers and successful adults readers can do down to the tiniest details of exactly how many words per minute a third grader should be able to read silently and what sorts of affixes, word roots, and phrases made passages appropriate for each grade. This level of granular detail meant teachers could identify students at risk early and clearly, intervening to provide the right support to the right students. 

Writing is thinking. We invested significant time in teaching students to write, starting in kindergarten. Our approach is rooted in with a focus on three areas. First, students write about complex topics directly connected to the knowledge and content they are reading about. So, our kindergarteners learn to speak in complete sentences while explaining what happens in nursery rhymes, our first graders learn to write sentences about Aesop鈥檚 Fables, and our second graders learn to write their first paragraphs about Greek myths. Next, our teaching focuses on sentence-level activities. By third grade, students have learned to expand, distill and express their ideas in complex and complete sentences. Finally, we teach students to revise. Teachers frequently display student work on document cameras, analyze it and then prompt students to apply concepts to their own work. 

Books belong in classrooms. Across the country, and many curricula emphasize short passages or excerpts. We believe books belong in classrooms and have selected curricula 鈥� Core Knowledge, Fishtank and Reading Reconsidered 鈥� built on this belief. Great books expose children to beautiful stories that have or will stand the test of time. When a classroom of second graders reaches the end of Charlotte鈥檚 Web, there is not a dry eye in sight and they are joining a cultural conversation that stretches across grades and generations. We鈥檝e found that the experience of reading great literature has grown our children鈥檚 attention and shaped their identity in the best way possible. There is a tradition of literacy and reading at our school, which we hope students carry with them long after they graduate. 

Play the long game. We are fortunate to have an incredible team of teachers and leaders who work with our elementary students. They deserve all of the credit for these achievements and many of them stayed at our schools through a period of significant change, where we implemented new curricula, changed schedules and raised expectations. We made many mistakes along the way, but always tried to balance the pain of changing too fast with the cost of changing too slowly. While we knew that we would not see gains happen overnight, we always believed positive habits would compound each day. For our curriculum and coaching to make a difference, we needed to stop implementation of any number of distracting, shiny objects: digital tutors, complex intervention programs, AI-everything, etc. We learned that investments in the practice and delivery of instruction may not pay off the fastest, but they take you the farthest. 

Today, I鈥檓 not just the leader of our school:  I鈥檓 a parent. And something else happened around the same time our third graders took their state test 鈥� my son, a kindergartener, learned to read. This summer, while I spent a late night hunched over a laptop to analyze results, he was upstairs reading Dog Man under his covers. 

Every kid deserves the type of teaching my son got in kindergarten and will get in the years to come. The only way to make that happen is for more schools to implement the ordinary practices that create extraordinary classrooms and outcomes. 

Youth mental health is no exception. As parents and former elected officials, we know there is no silver bullet to solve the mental health challenges young people experience today. What they鈥檙e facing is complex and shaped by a range of influences, including family dynamics, school environments, economic security, social isolation, overuse of devices and so much more.

Many Americans understand that the complexity of this challenge requires balanced solutions that meet families and children where they are. New polling from the , where we both serve on the board of directors, found that roughly three-quarters of voters and parents favor comprehensive approaches to youth mental health over narrow ones, such as technology bans.聽

Seven-in-10 voters and three-quarters of parents also believe sweeping restrictions on phones and social media can create unintended negative consequences while failing to address the underlying drivers of mental health challenges.

Take a look at how restrictions are currently unfolding in Australia. Its nationwide social media ban was intended to help young people navigate the online world more safely. Instead, early evidence suggests that these restrictions may be producing outcomes very different from those policymakers intended. 

Research conducted in April 2026 by the found that many teenagers simply shifted their online activity elsewhere. Forty-three percent reported spending more time on gaming platforms, while 39% increased their use of messaging applications that fell outside the ban’s scope. One in five said they turned more frequently to unregulated social media platforms. Rather than disappearing, online activity became harder for parents to see and guide.

Encouragingly, Americans are pointing toward a more constructive path. In our survey, parents and voters overwhelmingly support equipping young people with the skills to navigate today’s digital world instead of isolating them from it. The vast majority of voters and parents believe young people should be taught digital literacy skills, including how to use artificial intelligence safely, and that parents also need those same tools. They also strongly support media literacy education in classrooms, digital wellness resources for families and professional training that equips educators to teach responsible technology use.

Examples of this work are already emerging across the country. In Washington state鈥檚 , each school has a full-time teacher librarian who provides media literacy lessons and helps students develop the skills to assess information and navigate online spaces responsibly.聽

In Miami-Dade County, The Children鈥檚 Trust, a nonprofit dedicated to improving the lives of children and families in the county, launched a 鈥溾�� offering free, countywide workshops that give families practical support on issues affecting their children, including strategies for building healthy digital habits. 

The goal should not be to raise a generation sheltered from technology until adulthood. Technology is woven into nearly every aspect of modern life, and young people will need the skills and judgment to navigate it successfully. Our focus should be on helping them use technology wisely, critically and responsibly while addressing the broader factors that shape their mental health and wellbeing.

New research from the shows scientists agree. Noting that social media is a piece of a larger interconnected societal system, researchers warn 鈥渞estrictions may not simply remove harms; they may also shift, reshape or redistribute them.鈥� Specifically, they warn against young people moving to harder-to-monitor spaces that bring new risks of 鈥渆motional dependence, manipulation, commercial exploitation or reduced adult oversight,鈥� just as early Australian evidence suggests.聽

Solutions work best when they prepare people for the world as it is, not the world we wish existed. The United States can learn from Australia鈥檚 well-intentioned but misguided efforts and the concerns of leading scientists. The lesson is not that we should stop searching for solutions, but that we should be wary of solutions that promise more than they can deliver.聽

A more promising path lies in comprehensive approaches that bring together parents, educators, healthcare providers and communities while expanding digital literacy, mentoring, family support and access to mental health care.聽

For example, the American Academy of Pediatrics鈥� 鈥溾�� gives pediatricians and parents a practical framework for discussing screens and healthy habits in the context of a child鈥檚 development and overall wellbeing. , a member of the Coalition to Empower our Future, is also helping K-12 health educators access evidence-based, classroom-ready resources on digital wellness, online safety, self-regulation and media literacy.聽

These strategies are already being put in place and help build resilience, address underlying challenges and better equip young people to thrive in both the digital and offline worlds. If we truly want to improve outcomes for the next generation, we must focus less on policies that simply signal action and more on those that prepare young people and their parents with the support they need and are asking for.

The intention is good. But it鈥檚 not good enough.

A strong state policy can create urgency, define expectations and keep attention on what matters. But policies typically don鈥檛 recommend new schedules, establish guidelines for community partnerships, incentivize effective teacher training or help organize limited resources to achieve results.

That work happens in districts and in schools. And if we ignore that work, even the strongest policy will produce uneven results.

from Louisiana shows that states can improve outcomes at scale when they provide clear direction, aligned incentives and sustained attention over time. In other words, states can鈥檛 simply pass better rules and wait for results. States must also provide districts with the nuts and bolts that translate policy into day-to-day practice.

If districts would just 鈥渄o the thing,鈥� so the logic goes, results would follow. My decades of experience helping districts implement ambitious change suggest a different reality: District leaders want more meaningful pathways to college and career. But they lack a workable blueprint to make these changes feasible.

Consider literacy. A state can adopt strong standards aligned with the science of reading, a high-quality curriculum and early screening. But a district still has hard questions to answer: Where will uninterrupted literacy time fit in the day? How will schools know which students need extra help, and when will they get it? Who provides intervention and how will reading specialists, tutors and classroom teachers work together instead of operating in isolation? What professional learning is essential? And 鈥� perhaps most challenging 鈥� what current work has to stop so that teachers aren鈥檛 buried under one more add-on initiative?

Those questions may sound mundane. But they are the difference between a reading policy that changes lives and one that produces new paperwork.

The same challenge is even more visible in high school, where states are increasingly promoting stronger college and career pathways. They鈥檙e asking for industry credentials, work-based learning and dual enrollment. These ideas have real promise. But they鈥檙e as complicated as literacy programs 鈥� maybe even more complicated 鈥� to design well.

In one district my nonprofit organization worked with, scheduling logistics meant that some students couldn鈥檛 participate in a pathway without sacrificing graduation requirements. In another district, the schools were simply too small and too remote to offer the range of pathways their students wanted. In another, it turned out that students鈥� lack of proficiency in reading, writing and math was preventing them from succeeding in career pathways. And in many districts, students must choose between a focus on academics and technical learning.

If states want these reforms to reach more students, especially students who have historically been furthest from opportunity, they need to treat implementation as a design challenge, not a compliance exercise. They must go beyond setting direction to enabling transformation.

That means doing a few things differently.

• State guidance should include frameworks that explicitly address the district-level choices that matter the most. For literacy, there are tough decisions around scheduling, staffing, curriculum, teacher training and progress monitoring. For career pathways, district leaders have to consider course sequences, scheduling, partnerships, transportation, staffing, labor market alignment and an equal focus on strengthening foundational skills.

• States should collect and share work being done in districts that are making progress. Leaders need to see the schedules, staffing models, course sequences, funding strategies and partnership agreements that prove it鈥檚 possible and that can be adapted to each leader鈥檚 unique context.

• States should invest real dollars to support districts in redesigning existing systems 鈥� rather than layering a new initiative on top of old structures. They should provide technical assistance, tools or incentives that reward coherence rather than mere adoption.

• States and districts need a clearer division of labor. States should focus on coherence and establishing guardrails. Districts should take the lead on making it work for their students, their teachers, and their local context.

Researchers have made progress in identifying what works. They know that when high school connects academic learning to life after graduation. They know that a focus on reading, writing and math proficiency in ninth grade . They know that simple credentialing requirements . And we know there鈥檚 still more to learn.

But the next challenge is not just discovering what works. It鈥檚 making what works feasible at scale.

If states and districts want career-pathway investments to change students鈥� lives, they have to pay as much attention to the machinery of implementation as they do to the promise of policy. That machinery may not make for a flashy press conference. But that鈥檚 where reform either becomes real for students鈥攐r doesn鈥檛.

With the state of Michigan enacting a that restricts students from using their phones during instructional time, lawmakers have left it up to school districts to create their own policies on how to enforce this ban.

A team of University of Michigan researchers parsed through and compiled nearly 800 schools across the state, some of them already in place, to examine the different approaches they are taking to enforce this statewide ban. While many schools have enacted their own approaches to limiting cellphone use in recent years, the data reveals that schools believe there are a number of different ways to keep students off their phones after the bell rings.

In fact, U-M鈥檚 research collected on policies enacted as of the 2025-26 school year reveal an even 50-50 split on when these bans are put in place. Half of the state鈥檚 schools have implemented 鈥渂ell-to-bell鈥� restrictions that don鈥檛 allow students to use their phones at any point during the day, while the other half have 鈥渟chedule-based鈥� restrictions that allow them to use their phones at designated times, including during lunch and between class periods.

U-M Education Policy Professor Brian Jacob said the research is intended to provide guidance on the trade-offs of different approaches as the state law goes into place this fall.

鈥淲e want to make sure state leaders and district leaders were cognizant of this as they were imposing mandates on their individual schools because I have a feeling restricting cellphone use in schools is going to be a nuanced, challenging, multi-year process,鈥� Jacob said. 鈥淭his is one big genie that is out of the bottle, and figuring out the best way to get it back in the bottle and stay in the bottle, I think, is going to take a little practice and iteration on the part of schools.鈥�

Two years ago, Novi Community School District took a nuanced approach to putting its cellphone restrictions in place.聽

In grades K-4, students aren鈥檛 allowed to have them in the building. In fifth through eighth grades, students can bring their phones to school, but they are locked up in at the beginning of the day and kept there until school lets out.  Phones are placed in pouches by staff and sealed shut, with a designated magnetic device used to unlock them when appropriate. While high school students also are issued their own pouches, the phones are locked up during instructional time, with students being able to unlock and access them between classes and during lunch.

Superintendent Ben Mainka said the different approaches are intended to give high school students more autonomy that mirrors how they might experience using a cellphone in the workplace.

鈥淎s students go through school, they’re learning and they’re maturing, and so we know that as they grow and mature, we want to be able to open up more freedom and responsibilities,鈥� he said. 鈥淭he other part is, as they get to high school, we’re really helping them understand what it is like in a workplace, and we know that they’re going to have their phones on them, but they also need to know how to manage that. So, basically, giving them the autonomy to know that there are certain times that the phone needs to be off limits and put away, and then there are times when you can check it.鈥�

U-M鈥檚 research found that just 2% of schools in the state have taken this approach. The most common type of enforcement of cellphone restriction is described as 鈥渘o-show,鈥� with 62% of schools requiring students to keep their phones in their backpacks or pockets.聽

Another 17% of schools allow students to bring cellphones to school, but keep them in their lockers throughout the day, while 9% of schools collect students鈥� phones and keep them in a designated place. Some schools (8%) have taken the approach of keeping cellphones out of schools completely, while another 3% have a centralized collection of phones with an administrator when they enter the building.

The research also showed that the type of school and its location impacted the type of policy the school enacted, with charter (79%) and urban schools (76%) substantially more likely to require bell-to-bell policies than suburban (49%) and rural (41%). 

Jacob said charters and urban schools might be more attracted to having complete control over when students can have access to their phones with options like centralized collection or lockable pouches, he said, because they might believe phones are more 鈥減roblematic鈥� in schools than suburban or rural schools do.

鈥淣ow, whether they actually are, I think many suburban schools might be fooling themselves by thinking, 鈥極h, the phones aren’t really much of a problem,鈥欌�� Jacob said. 鈥淏ut I think there’s a perception in urban school districts where there might be more chaos and more distraction that there’s something attractive about these more restrictive policies.鈥�

While Pellston Public Schools in Northern Michigan only enrolls around 500 students, the district has taken a more restrictive approach to enforcing its cellphone policy, which was enacted at the suggestion of middle and high school Principal Chris Schlappi in 2024.

Superintendent Stephen Seelye had initial concerns that Schlappi鈥檚 suggestion to have students lock their cellphones in Yondr pouches would be met with opposition from parents who were concerned about being able to contact their children in the event of an emergency.聽

With several other avenues for students to contact their parents, Seelye said it made sense for the school to spend $15,000 to purchase the pouches for students in grades 6 to 12, with a complete cellphone ban in place at the elementary level.

Students aren鈥檛 able to access their cellphones throughout the day after locking them in their pouches and leaving them with their home room teacher; Seelye said enforcement of the policy has gone better than he ever could have expected.

鈥淚 really think it’s one of the best decisions, if not the best decision I’ve made in education,鈥� Seelye said.

Rather than relying on teachers to keep an eye on whether students are taking phones out of their backpacks or pockets as 鈥渘o show鈥� policies do, locking cellphones into pouches has greatly reduced the burden on teachers to enforce the ban, he said, with the occasional 鈥渂ad actors鈥� quickly being discovered.

鈥淭eachers have got a lot of things to juggle and they’ve been given their time back,鈥� he said. 鈥淭hey no longer have to worry about if (a) kid has their cellphone and is seeking it. I would say I probably have 5% of my kids on a daily basis that are trying to hide their cellphones, and we catch most of them.

鈥淏efore, when every kid had a cellphone and there were seven of them out in class and one might buzz or beep, it was hard for my teachers to figure out where that came from, but now it’s not hard. Now everybody else has their phone locked up, and you know they can pinpoint who it was.鈥�

U-M鈥檚 research lays out three considerations for districts still working through enacting policies: Phone policies present difficult trade-offs for educators and policymakers; establishing and communicating a clear cellphone policy likely enhances adherence; and unintended consequences may occur in classrooms and broader school settings.

While no-show policies remain popular among Michigan schools, Jacob said teachers told him that the most effective approaches take them out of the role of being the 鈥渂ad guy.鈥�

鈥淚 think there’s a lot of pressure among teachers in that regard,鈥� he said. 鈥淭eachers that I’ve talked to really do like school-wide policies where some of the burden of enforcement is taken off of their shoulders.鈥�

The physical school environment is usually treated as an operational concern: square footage, maintenance, compliance, safety and cost. Those matters are real. But they are incomplete.

A school building is also an instructional system.

In my rural Midwestern school district, we drew on research in learning environments and early literacy development to create a new 108,000-square-foot elementary school that serves 900 pupils across 932 square miles.

We used the Framework, which connects physical design to instructional capacity, student experience, measurable outcomes, and equity impact.

Designed by CMBA Architects, our new campus serves many students facing poverty, geographic isolation and limited preschool access that has affected their readiness for school. 

Since opening our new campus in 2024, we have seen mixed results, but the strongest gains appeared among students most likely to benefit, especially those from low-socioeconomic households and groups affected by access gaps.

Architecture alone doesn鈥檛 drive these achievement gains. Instead, the findings suggest a stronger and more defensible claim: Intentional school design can improve the daily conditions that shape instruction, intervention, belonging, regulation, enrichment and student opportunity.

Students enter school with unequal early-learning access. In rural communities with limited or distant preschool options, many begin kindergarten without the vocabulary, routines, stamina, executive-function practice, and early-literacy exposure some peers already have. 

For low-income students, these gaps can be deeper. Poverty does not define potential, but it can limit enrichment, health care, transportation, routines, academic language, and early childhood access.

Schools designed for access, flexibility, belonging, movement, regulation and intervention can reduce barriers, save time, and make the building part of the learning infrastructure.

In our former four-story building, kindergarten transitions to recess, special events, services, and other activities required going up and down stairs multiple times a day. The daily minutes lost were small but cumulative. After the move, kindergarten teachers reported gaining two or more weeks of instructional time because students no longer navigated multiple stairways each day. 

This illustrates design as an instructional variable: Removing a physical barrier increased instructional time without changing curriculum or assessment. For early literacy, recovered minutes matter because repetition, oral language, small-group support, and predictable routines create opportunity.

Classrooms and shared spaces included mobile furniture, flexible seating, and layouts that let students sit, stand, move, collaborate, and reconfigure spaces with little disruption. The goal was not novelty, but access.

Because students learn differently across tasks and developmental stages, adaptable rooms allow instruction to shift quickly 鈥� from direct teaching to small groups, collaboration, independent practice or intervention 鈥� without the space becoming a barrier.

Flexible seating and movement-friendly spaces align with research linking classroom movement to attention and engagement. For students who need support with regulation, stamina, or focus, appropriate movement is not a luxury; it is part of access.

The facility includes murals that incorporate South Dakota history, geography, wildlife, agriculture, and phrases in the Dakota language. In a district serving a significant Native American student population, this decision matters.

Cultural representation in the physical environment signals that students are not merely accommodated, they are recognized.

When students see local language, landscapes, and identity embedded into the school, the building communicates belonging before a single lesson begins.

Murals and visual learning elements also expand background knowledge. They turn hallways into instructional spaces. A student walking past a mural of the Missouri River, the Black Hills, bison, prairie animals, crops, or Dakota vocabulary is repeatedly exposed to content, language, and place.

In that sense, the school becomes an environmental text. Students read the building long before they read the day鈥檚 lesson.

The results from the first two years in the new building include improved benchmark rates on the K鈥�2 Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills or DIBELS, a smaller gap for low-income students and fewer of them scoring Well Below Benchmark. The share At or Above Benchmark rose from 61.8% before the new facility to 67.9%. Scores for other students remained relatively stable, increasing from 70.7% to 71.2%.

Grades 3鈥�5 Smarter Balanced results showed similar equity-aligned gains, particularly for students eligible for free and reduced price meals and American Indian/Alaskan Native students in English language arts.

In other words, the largest movement occurred among students from low-socioeconomic households.

The district鈥檚 K-2 DIBELS data adds an important early-literacy lens to the Opportunity-by-Design Framework, since it provides multiple checkpoints within the year. The Smarter Balanced Assessment measures achievement at the end of the school year.

The data alone does not prove that a building, by itself, caused the achievement to rise. It does not show that every grade, every subject and every student group improved. The data does not erase the importance of the curriculum, teachers, intervention systems, leadership, attendance, family engagement, or student mobility. But it does suggest that intentional school design can positively impact students and educators and, in turn, produce better educational outcomes.

Yet one of the most consequential variables receives far less attention: what parents expect from their children and what happens when those expectations weaken.

The issue is not whether parents attend every school function or sit beside their children for every homework assignment. The research suggests that a more powerful form of involvement is often less visible: communicating that school matters, establishing expectations for effort and achievement, monitoring whether those expectations are being met and connecting present academic work to future goals.

That distinction matters because schools do not operate apart from families. When parents consistently reinforce academic and behavioral standards, schools have an ally in maintaining them. When families increasingly expect schools to accommodate failure rather than correct it, the pressure can gradually shift from helping students meet a standard to changing the standard students are required to meet.

Research on parental involvement is remarkably consistent on this point. A found that parental aspirations and expectations showed the strongest relationship with student achievement among the forms of involvement they examined. A of middle-school students similarly found that 鈥渁cademic socialization鈥� 鈥� communicating expectations, discussing goals, and linking schoolwork to future plans 鈥� was especially strongly associated with achievement, while direct homework help was not consistently beneficial. 

A 2024 has likewise found positive relationships between parental involvement, expectations, and academic outcomes across racial, socioeconomic and other demographic groups.

The conclusion should not be overstated. Parental expectations do not erase poverty, disability, family instability or differences in school quality. But the research does show that expectations remain consequential across those differences. Risk is not destiny, and disadvantage does not make standards irrelevant.

A single parent working long hours may have fewer opportunities to volunteer at school than an affluent parent with a flexible schedule. Yet  both parents can still communicate that homework must be completed, that a poor grade requires a response, that effort is expected, that teachers deserve respect and that education is connected to the child鈥檚 future. Those messages cost little financially, but they create a powerful psychological framework for how a child understands school.

Children learn what adults consider normal. They learn whether a C is a signal to improve or something simply accepted. They learn whether unfinished work has consequences. They learn whether a teacher鈥檚 criticism should first provoke self-examination or an angry call from a parent. 

A family that responds to a poor grade by asking, 鈥淲hat went wrong, and how are we going to fix it?鈥� communicates something fundamentally different from one whose first response is, 鈥淲hat did the teacher do wrong?鈥� One response reinforces accountability; the other can unintentionally teach that standards are negotiable whenever they create discomfort.

The consequences do not remain inside the home. They eventually shape schools. Teachers operate in an environment influenced by families as well as administrators. When failing a student routinely produces complaints, demands for extra credit, repeated retesting, deadline extensions, or pressure to change grades, the cost of enforcing a standard rises. When discipline is treated primarily as evidence that the school mishandled the child rather than as a response to the child鈥檚 conduct, behavioral expectations become harder to sustain.

None of these practices is inherently wrong. Retesting can be educationally useful. Extensions may be appropriate. Accommodations are essential for some students. The problem begins when individualized supports become the default response to ordinary failure. Institutions respond to incentives. 

Teachers learn that failing grades create conflict. Administrators learn that retention and low graduation rates attract scrutiny. Students learn that deadlines and standards are flexible. Over time, the system can become more concerned with preventing the appearance of failure than with correcting the learning deficit that produced it.

The national achievement data make this harder to ignore. In 2024, 45% of American 12th graders performed below NAEP Basic in mathematics and 32% fell below Basic in reading 鈥� sobering evidence that large numbers of students are reaching the end of high school without demonstrating even basic levels of academic mastery.

Those results cannot be attributed to parental involvement alone, but they should sharpen the discussion about expectations. One of the most damaging mistakes in education is confusing an explanation for poor performance with a justification for lower standards. Poverty creates real obstacles. Students with disabilities need appropriate accommodations. Children dealing with family instability may require flexibility and support. But support and standards are not opposites.

The distinction is simple. Compassion says: 鈥淵ou are struggling, so we are going to give you more help.鈥� Lowered expectations say: 鈥淵ou are struggling, so we are going to require less.鈥� The first approach treats the student as capable of growth. The second can quietly turn a temporary disadvantage into a permanent ceiling.

Parents therefore have a role that schools cannot replace. They need not become teachers or supervise every assignment. Their more important responsibility is cultural: to establish what is expected, to reinforce effort, to support reasonable academic and behavioral standards and to resist the impulse to remove every consequence when a child falls short.

Parents should also demand honesty from schools. If grades indicate success while objective measures show serious weakness, parents should ask why. If a student is being promoted without prerequisite skills, parents should insist on remediation. Accountability should run in both directions.

America will continue debating curriculum, funding, testing, technology, school choice and federal policy. Those debates matter. But decades of research on parental involvement point toward a more basic truth: Children tend to do better when the adults raising them communicate that education matters and expect them to meet a meaningful standard.

Schools cannot indefinitely substitute for standards that are no longer reinforced at home. Restoring academic achievement therefore requires more than asking what schools should do differently. It also requires asking what parents should once again expect.

Before I understood federal funding, program performance standards or the complicated systems that make Head Start possible, I understood what it meant to be a Head Start child.

Years later, I returned, first as a center director and later as a regional director of a Head Start program in Fort Worth, Texas. I have experienced Head Start from both sides: as a child who benefited from the program and as a leader responsible for ensuring other children and families received the same opportunity.

So, when the current administration says its proposed reforms will strengthen Head Start鈥檚 core mission by giving local communities greater flexibility, I have a perspective that is both deeply personal and professional. Let me tell you why I know I鈥檓 opposed to the changes outlined .

Head Start鈥檚 core mission has never simply been about putting more children in classrooms. The program was built on the understanding that a child鈥檚 ability to learn is connected to everything happening in that child鈥檚 life. That is why Head Start has always been more than early education.

Head Start recognizes that supporting a child often means supporting the entire family so the program offers a number of wraparound services to support families in helping their children thrive. From connecting parents with healthcare, dental care and mental health resources when needed, to providing nutritious meals for children, it鈥檚 about working alongside parents in partnership. 

The would dramatically reduce the federal standards that have helped define what families can expect from a Head Start program. 

For decades, Head Start has operated with clear expectations around the comprehensive needs of children. Under this proposal, many of those expectations would no longer be spelled out in the performance standards. Programs would have significantly fewer federal requirements governing how they address healthcare and developmental needs. 

As someone who attended Head Start, I have some of my earliest memories of being cared for in a safe environment by trusted educators and receiving healthy meals each day. For some families with limited resources, knowing their children would receive two nutritious meals and a snack helps ease the burden of choosing between keeping the lights on and providing healthy meals. Head Start also gives parents the opportunity to work while knowing their children are safe, cared for and learning. For my family, Head Start was not simply a place for me to go during the day. It was a support for our entire family.

As someone who has led a Head Start program, I know what these actions look like in practice. It looks like a teacher noticing something about a child and knowing there is a system for responding to the issue. It looks like a family services worker helping a parent navigate resources they may not have known existed. It looks like identifying a concern early enough to intervene. It looks like following up instead of simply handing a parent a referral and hoping for the best. 

Sometimes, Head Start is the first system that truly sees a family. That visibility and acknowledgment can change the trajectory of a child or a family’s life.

The proposed rule would also move away from many of Head Start鈥檚 existing expectations for curriculum, teacher development, coaching, classroom size and teacher-child ratios, to rely more heavily on state childcare requirements. 

I have managed Head Start centers and also worked as a preschool teacher. I know what happens when you increase the number of children in a classroom without increasing the number of adults responsible for their care. Someone pays the price. It may be a decrease in the individual attention a child receives, a delay in the teacher鈥檚 recognition of a developmental concern or less time available to build relationships with families. Removing any of these standards will have a domino effect. 

I struggle to understand how we can say we are giving communities more power while simultaneously weakening one of the clearest structures through which quality early education exists. 

Children growing up in low-income families do not deserve a lesser standard of early childhood education because it is cheaper to administer. They deserve high-quality classrooms. They deserve teachers who have the capacity to see them. They deserve safe environments. They deserve access to support when they need it. Their parents deserve a voice, and their families deserve to be treated as partners. That is what makes Head Start so successful. That is what contributed to my success. 

For generations, Head Start has represented creating opportunity by investing in the whole child and strengthening the entire family, and we cannot strengthen that mission by stripping away the very things that made it powerful.

I am a product of Head Start, and Head Start did not change my life by doing less.

On the second day, one of the teens was fed up. Gemini was broken, she told me. It kept asking her questions instead of answering them. She was adamant that ChatGPT was a better tool, and that we should use it instead. 

What she didn’t know was that I had told Gemini to behave that way, to question her about her daily reading instead of just handing her answers. Then she scrolled up and read the instructions I had written into the prompt, and her annoyance turned to understanding. She wasn’t fighting a broken tool; she was being forced to pause and think.

The next day, she scored 100% on a quiz covering the prior day’s reading. She started leaning into our daily lessons, taking the time to answer questions thoughtfully instead of rushing through them. During our final session, she was one of the last students to turn in her quiz, making her mom wait a few extra minutes while she finished. Unheard of, especially over summer break.

That moment showed what鈥檚 possible when AI tools are built to make students actively think rather than think for them.

Over the course of a week, I gave the students a series of short readings about how their own brains work, and each day they used AI in a different way to deepen their understanding. Some days, I had the tool summarize the reading and told them to simply use that summary to build their understanding of the material. Other days, the tool had them engage in a Socratic Q&A. And some days it made them write their own question first, letting their own curiosity lead the process.

Then I quizzed them on what they remembered, both after their study session that same day and again a day later.

The results were fascinating. On the same-day quiz, students performed about the same, regardless of whether the AI tool had summarized the reading or questioned them. But a day later, the students who had engaged in the Socratic Q&A remembered more, scoring, on average, 83% on a quiz about the material they had reasoned through, versus 67% on the material the AI had summarized for them. More than two-thirds of the students said the version of AI that questioned them helped them learn more than the one that just summarized their readings.

Throughout the week, the students鈥� perception of their own skill in using AI as a study partner rose sharply. But when I lined those ratings up against what they could actually remember, the two had almost nothing to do with each other. How much students鈥� confidence in using AI grew had almost nothing to do with how much they had retained. Feeling like you have learned is not the same as actually learning.

This should worry anyone who cares about education. AI is everywhere. Students carry these tools in their pockets. School districts are slated to spend in the coming years, without a clear idea of what they should be evaluating those contracts on. My week-long pilot program taught me that AI tools cannot be judged by student engagement or satisfaction alone. Success cannot be gauged by whether students finish a problem set, or whether they enjoy a particular lesson. It must be measured by what a student retains after the tool disappears.

My students told me one more thing worth highlighting. They want to learn to use AI as a thinking partner, but no one has taught them how. When they play around with AI to get answers, they often can鈥檛 obtain explanations at their own grade and language level. They told me it is sometimes harder to get what they need from these tools than to study on their own. The students who could benefit most from personalized learning get the least usable output, perpetuating the very inequity these tools are supposed to close. 

That is why AI literacy must be taught in schools. Kids with tech-savvy parents are already learning to use AI well; the rest are typing in prompts and hoping for the best. School is the one place that can close that gap.

My son Harry is twice exceptional, a term often used for children who are both gifted and learn differently. Like many kids who think intensely, he did not always fit neatly into the usual categories adults tend to understand. He was curious, capable and full of potential, but the places where children are often expected to find confidence did not always feel like the right fit.

Then chess entered the picture.

At first, it looked like a game. A board, some pieces, rules to learn, moves to remember. But the more I watched Harry play, the more I realized that chess was giving him something deeper than an activity. It was giving him an arena.

For children who think or learn differently, that word matters. An arena is not just a place to perform. It is a place to practice. It has structure, boundaries, feedback, challenge and room to improve. For some kids, the right arena can make the difference between feeling constantly measured and finally feeling capable.

Not every child finds confidence on a field, a stage or a basketball court. Not every child feels successful following the same classroom routines or social settings that seem to work for others. Some children need a different kind of place to discover that their mind is not a problem to solve, but a strength to develop.

Chess has a way of making thinking visible. A child makes a move and sees what happens. The feedback is immediate, but it does not have to be humiliating. A lost piece is not a ruined day. A mistake is not a permanent label. It is information.

That may sound simple, but for a child who struggles with frustration, impulsivity, perfectionism or self-doubt it can be powerful.

In school, mistakes can feel public and heavy. A wrong answer on a test, a confusing assignment, a social misstep,or a moment of lost focus can quickly become part of how a child sees himself. Chess gives kids a smaller and safer place to practice the same emotional muscles they need everywhere else.

Pausing before acting, noticing the whole board, considering what might happen next, making a choice, living with the result, learning from it and trying another move are not only chess skills. They are life skills. They are school skills. They are friendship skills. They are the skills children need when something is hard and they want to quit.

This is especially important for neurodivergent children, gifted children, ADHD kids, autistic kids, twice-exceptional kids and children who may be bright but easily overwhelmed.

In chess, a child who rushes may learn to pause. A child who hates losing may learn that losing a piece is not the end of the game. A child who struggles to plan ahead may begin to see that one choice can affect the next three. A child who feels clumsy or out of place in other activities may discover a world where patience, curiosity, pattern recognition and imagination matter.

The goal is not to turn every child into a tournament player, which is where adults can easily get it wrong. Chess loses much of its value when it becomes another pressure system that sorts children into winners and losers.

The gift of chess is not just competition. It is practice.

A child can benefit from chess without trophies, rankings, private coaching or long tournaments. Playing a short game, moving only a few pieces and talking through one decision can matter. The point is not perfect play. The point is giving a child a place to slow down, think and experience progress.

There is also something deeply encouraging about visible improvement. In chess, a child can look back and see growth. A move that seemed impossible last month suddenly makes sense. A mistake that used to happen every game starts to disappear. A child begins to notice, 鈥淚 am getting better at this.鈥�

For kids who think differently, that realization can be profound. Confidence is not built only by praise, it is built by evidence. Chess gives children evidence that effort can become skill.

This matters in education because schools not only teach content, they shape how children understand themselves as learners. A student who repeatedly feels unsuccessful may begin to believe that effort does not help. But a child who finds even one arena where effort leads to progress may carry that lesson back into the classroom.

That does not mean chess is a cure, a therapy or a universal answer. It is not right for every child. Some will love it and some will not. Some will need a gentle introduction, short sessions, simplified rules or a patient adult sitting nearby. That is okay.

But chess deserves a place in the conversation about how to support kids who do not fit the mold. It is inexpensive and portable. It can be played in classrooms, libraries, afterschool programs, community centers and homes. It can be social or quiet, competitive or casual, simple or endlessly complex.

In writing “Decoding Genius,” I became fascinated by the long history of chess and the extraordinary minds shaped by the game. But the most important lesson for me remains the one I first saw through my son: Chess can help a child feel capable.

For a child who thinks differently, that can be everything.

Solving this predicament is one rationale for the strong political support and attention shown to work-based learning and high school career and technical education programs. But leaders running these programs report a quandary of their own: They can’t find enough employers willing to host interested high school students in meaningful roles, or sometimes enough students to fill available spots.

The usual explanation, that one side or the other isn’t trying hard enough, misses what’s really going on. The problem isn’t effort. It’s infrastructure.

That’s the central finding of our new profiling six work-based learning programs: a network of CTE charter schools in South Bend, Indiana; an industry-themed school network in San Antonio; a multi-district rural collaborative in Colorado; a Purdue University-affiliated early college network in Indianapolis and South Bend; a rural alliance of districts in Randolph County, Indiana; and a Philadelphia earn-and-learn training program built around real wage progression.

Six different design choices. Six different communities. But all suggest that rather than treating work-based learning as another elective or an item on a 鈥渃ollege and career readiness鈥� menu, work-based learning requires intentionally designed infrastructure linking schools, employers, postsecondary institutions and community organizations.

After interviewing the leaders of these programs, we identified six conditions that enabled each program to move from a pilot to a permanent part of a redesigned high school experience.

First, school-based programs benefited when their state allowed work-based learning hours to count toward graduation requirements and higher scores for career and technical education on state school accountability ratings. Colorado and Indiana stood out by allowing students to satisfy graduation requirements or earn a distinction on their diploma by completing a capstone project or a career course pathway with relevant work hours. Program officials told us this recognition meant they no longer felt torn between what was best for students and what state policy required. Instead, they could spend the time and resources to create and sustain high-quality work experiences with employers.

Second, these programs relied on government funding as the core of their budgets, including state career-technical education money, state and local workforce development funds and school innovation dollars. For example, the Fremont Multidistrict Initiative, serving rural Colorado, turned a state P-Tech designation into federal P-Tech dollars 鈥� up to two additional years of per-pupil support after graduation. These were layered on top of a state Opportunity Now workforce grant as well as ordinary state and local school funding. By combining sources in this way, all the programs reduced their reliance on philanthropy, which also increased the sustainability of their work. Still, the leaders told us that none of these funding streams fully covered the true cost of their learn-and-earn programs, so philanthropy continued to fill important gaps.

Third, program leaders reported that flexibility in teacher licensure allowing industry-qualified professionals to teach relevant coursework in the classroom and supervise students in the workplace significantly eased staffing challenges. In many states, students can’t earn course credit for either unless the educator or supervisor holds a full license as a K-12 teacher, in addition to whatever certification their industry requires. Indiana’s 鈥渨orkplace specialist鈥� certification for qualified industry professionals eased some of this challenge for programs in that state. But programs across states pointed to licensure itself as an obstacle, and to allowing flexibility as a key action policymakers could take to support their work.

Fourth, fundamental to high-quality work-based learning is the ability to offer students meaningful experiences in their field of choice through employer partnerships. These must be structured to be mutually beneficial, which is best achieved through detailed partnership agreements. Program staff reported that the best partnerships were built on long-term relationships. Many had anchor partnerships with founding employers who helped design the pathway to a specific work experience. This ensured a core number of students could participate, while employers felt more confident that students would be prepared before their work placements.

Fifth, each program had dedicated full-time staffers for recruiting students and employers. The leaders consider these coordinators so essential that funding their positions is a budget line alongside teachers, supplies and transportation. To reach the scale needed to support one or more full-time coordinators, half the programs in our sample pooled school districts across rural counties or a metro area. Program leaders recommended that states earmark funding for these  coordinators and make it easier for school districts to formally collaborate and share resources.

Sixth, transportation plans helping students get to their jobs improved access, especially in low-income or rural areas. Programs solved this challenge in different ways. CAST Schools Network in San Antonio used its partner districts’ school buses. RAZ32 in rural Randolph County, Indiana, leveraged county workforce dollars for transportation. Launchpad Philly gave students tickets for riding public buses. But not all programs could afford to offer transportation, leaving students to find their own way.

All these programs had a final element in common: entrepreneurial leadership willing to work through challenges. But repeatedly, we saw how the underlying infrastructure enabled programs to create life-changing opportunities for students. Participants in Launchpad Philly‘s post-high-school LiftOff track, for example, averaged roughly $15,000 in annualized earnings six months after graduation, moving to nearly $30,000 by nine months and a $50,000 living-wage benchmark at the one-year mark. That’s against a baseline of about $12,500 a year for a young Philadelphian with only a high school diploma. For students planning to pursue a bachelor’s degree, the program shows them what jobs in a field are really like, which helps them choose the right educational path.

As long as work-based learning is filed under 鈥渋nitiative,鈥� it will depend on the allure of a particular principal or the persistence of a particular grant officer. But by filing work-based learning under 鈥渃ore experience,鈥� the integration that makes it work starts to look like something a state or a region is responsible for building, the way it’s responsible for roads or broadband.

Infrastructure and initiatives get treated very differently by the people who fund and govern them. Initiatives get pilot grants, three-year evaluation, and press releases. Infrastructure gets appropriations lines, dedicated staff positions and long-term institutional ownership.

The six programs in our report prove work-based learning can succeed in rural and urban settings alike, using very different designs. The remaining question is whether the country will treat the infrastructure behind them as seriously as it treats the problem itself.

This is the crux of the curriculum implementation gap. It’s not a teacher problem. It’s not a curriculum problem. It’s a leadership problem, and it’s one most districts don’t see until they鈥檝e already spent millions and fallen behind.

As a former middle school principal who has spent my career developing the leaders schools and districts need, I have seen how critical it is that principals are an integral part of instructional improvements. They are the connective tissue between curriculum intent and classroom reality. They as much influence, if not more, on student learning as teachers do. Without including them, districts navigating will never get their money鈥檚 worth out of new research-based literacy or math curriculums, or curriculum-focused professional learning for teachers.

There is much that can be done at the state and local , from improving principal preparation programs to increasing funding for school leader professional development. In the meantime, districts can make a few immediate changes to better position principals to lead their schools in getting the most out of their investment in high-quality curriculum.

First, meaningfully involve school leaders in choosing the right curriculum for their district. In most cases, district leaders drive the curriculum selection process, according to . Principals have a unique perspective on students鈥� learning needs and the kinds of professional development teachers have already received, making them an essential part of the conversations about which instructional materials are right for the school. They should be included in meetings with curriculum developers, so they can ask the hard questions about how those particular instructional materials will suit their teachers and their students, and given a say in deciding what will work for their schools. 

Second, give principals real time to learn the materials themselves. While teachers increasingly get learning opportunities grounded in their new curriculum, principals rarely have the chance to meaningfully grapple with the instructional materials, such as by studying and annotating complex texts and co-planning lessons. But they need to become experts in the materials so they can help their teachers get better at using and adapting the curriculum to meet the students’ needs. My organization has seen a real difference in schools when principals regularly participate in professional learning communities, coaching conversations and discussions with educators about what is and isn鈥檛 working, and why.

District leaders can ensure principals have dedicated time for this deep, hands-on work by reducing their administrative burdens, such as by having central office staff handle compliance tasks that don’t require the principal’s attention, and establishing predictable and consistent communications with school leaders, such as a weekly email. They should set clear expectations that principals spend significant time in classrooms working alongside teachers to strengthen instruction. And rather than holding district-led meetings where system leaders provide updates, they should use those times together to refine classroom observation and feedback practices and examine how principals are using data to monitor how changes to instruction affect student learning.

Third, shift the focus of classroom observation from compliance to quality. Teachers make real changes to their practice when they get meaningful, real time feedback. As principals develop a deep understanding of the instructional materials, they must also shift from using classroom observations as a compliance exercise 鈥� making the minimum required number of visits during the year with a checklist of basic expectations 鈥� to regularly stopping into classrooms to examine the quality of instruction. That means assessing how students are using the materials sitting on their desks and whether they are pushing real learning. How is the teacher tailoring the content to provide multiple ways for kids with different learning styles to engage? Are students discussing the material and challenging one anothers鈥� thinking? Whether through classroom walkthroughs and coaching with district instructional leaders or professional learning communities, principals must build the skills to truly understand surface level versus impactful use of curriculum. It鈥檚 one of the most important, and least expensive, investments a district can make.  

Fourth: make feedback specific and anchored to student learning. Classroom observations are only as useful as the feedback that follows. By knowing the curriculum intimately, principals can clearly and directly connect what they saw in the classroom 鈥� from the questions teachers asked students to the classwork they engaged in and their discussions 鈥� to the relevant pieces of the instructional materials. This kind of feedback can happen in one-on-one coaching conversations as well as in meetings to which teachers bring student work. The discussion should focus on where instruction broke down. What did and didn鈥檛 work? Where and how should the curriculum be adjusted? 

Fifth, get everyone speaking the same language. To ensure there is exceptional teaching in every classroom, everyone in the district and the school 鈥� from operations and instructional teams to schedule developers and recess aides 鈥� need to understand how student learning intersects with their work. How can business managers keep instructional goals top of mind when making budgetary decisions? Do schedulers understand instructional priorities well enough to use them to inform their efforts? The principal is central to ensuring that all the adults in the building knows how student learning goals can shape their work.

As districts prepare for the next school year with lingering questions about funding, it鈥檚 critical that they get their money鈥檚 worth from the investments they鈥檝e made. Putting principals at the center of efforts to adopt new and better curriculum is an essential step toward getting the most out of the millions already spent. Principals are key to marrying vision with reality on the ground. They should be treated as such.

But numbers can only tell part of the story. They never capture the child behind the score 鈥� the effort behind mastering a difficult concept, the pride of discovering their passion for history through a hands-on project, or the confidence that grows with every hard-earned breakthrough. We risk devaluing individual learning every time we celebrate a rise in collective scores.

While standardized assessments remain a traditional foundational measure of progress, achievement can no longer be dictated by these metrics alone. Over and over, research shows that high-stakes testing students and teachers and down to math and reading scores.

But we hold on to them because familiar systems are easier to defend than reinvent.

Thankfully, the tide is turning. As the framework gains momentum across the U.S., schools are primed to completely reimagine how we measure learning in a way that is authentic to the human experience and to select tools that support, rather than complicate, the work of capturing future-ready skills. 

One of the most harmful effects of schools’ over-reliance on standardized testing is that students leave unprepared for life after graduation. 

Instead of empowering students with the skills to navigate a complex world, educators are forced to 鈥渢each to the test,鈥� prioritizing performance on a single test over deep learning to satisfy accountability measures for policymakers and legislators.

Our students鈥� future success depends on more than reversing in reading and math. According to America Succeeds, most requested skills by employers are durable skills, such as effective communication, creativity and critical thinking developed through real-world, authentic learning experiences. 

However, the found that 84% of hiring managers say most high school graduates are not prepared for the workforce, and 80% believe they are less prepared than previous generations.

As educators, we have a moral obligation to ensure we are preparing students for the future. That means looking beyond a single standardized score as proof of readiness, toward multiple measures that capture the whole child. Traditional measures still have a place, but they can’t be the only way to assess a student. 

Districts that implement a Portrait of a Graduate initiative define the competencies they value and want every student to leave with 鈥� qualities like emotional intelligence, adaptability, collaboration and resilience. However, many struggle to put operations in place that turn aspirations from a poster on the wall into a fully functional system that monitors student progress and success. 

The result is predictable: 160 schools deliver 160 different experiences. This lack of systemic cohesion ensures that access to transformative opportunities remains uneven, directly impacting student outcomes.

When its accountability framework this past spring, districts gained the structural flexibility to look beyond rigid standardized ratings. By introducing local indicators of quality alongside state metrics, the state is empowering schools to demonstrate student growth through capstone projects, performance-based defenses and real-world learning aligned with the Portrait of a Learner framework adopted in 2022.

into this opportunity early through a simple, yet transformative shift: engaging community stakeholders from day one to co-create implementation playbooks, establish shared guidelines, define common rubrics, and run pilot programs that validate these authentic assessments of learning.

This collaborative approach helped school leaders ensure consistent experiences in all classrooms while still empowering teachers with the freedom to tailor instruction to students鈥� needs. Most importantly, the values became embedded in each district鈥檚 culture, from the district office down to each and every student.

For districts leading the work, technology that supports tracking and reporting on student skills is critical. They can no longer adopt one-size-fits-all tools when the goal is communicating highly personalized progress that reveals a student’s true capabilities. It’s more important than ever to evaluate every tool line by line against district initiatives and ensure a match.

The most effective empower teachers and students to collect and showcase meaningful artifacts of learning through the educational journey, including capstone projects, student reflections, work samples and project portfolios. At the same time, they must offer robust rubric assessments so that teachers can clearly identify when a student falls short of a benchmark 鈥� and where extra support may be needed to help strengthen durable skills needed for the real world. 

With these insights, schools no longer hold students accountable to a single, high-stakes measure of learning. Instead, they create multiple opportunities for growth. 

Society champions second chances as stepping stones: Drivers-to-be can retake their driving test, law school graduates can sit for the bar exam multiple times. Yet, we often tell a 15-year-old that their years of learning can be distilled into one test score. Students should be given opportunities to learn from their setbacks, to revise and resubmit work and to re-demonstrate mastery of content without judgement.

When we finally shift our focus from proving learning to nurturing it, we create spaces where every child has the chance to thrive.

As educators, we know when learning happens 鈥� we don鈥檛 need numbers to tell us. We know it when the shy student steps confidently in front of the class to deliver a presentation. We know it when a group of students tackle a complex, real-world problem together. But too often, these moments of learning are invisible to accountability systems that prioritize hard numbers over growth.

By measuring student progress through multiple forms of evidence 鈥� capturing not only academic achievement but also future-ready competencies 鈥� we honor students not just for what they know but for who they are becoming.

Dr. Terra Greenwell is an Educational Leadership and Systems Advisor, and former Chief Academic Officer for Jefferson County Public Schools.

At the same time, about 200 miles away, in Shinnston, West Virginia, I was an elementary student studying the weekly school lunch menu with my mom to decide which days I would rather bring food from home. Rarely did I select the school-provided meals, preferring a sandwich from Mom over the cardboard pizza, soggy tater tots and slimy fruit cocktail that defined school meals for many students of my generation. 

School lunches have long been the subject of jokes in cafeterias across the country. But in West Virginia and elsewhere, there鈥檚 an emerging commitment among leaders of both political parties to improving the quality of food schools serve their students. This trend has major implications for children鈥檚 health, academic success and long-term well-being 鈥� especially for the many low-income students who lack access to healthy, affordable food and for whom school cafeterias are the most dependable source of meals.

consistently shows that students perform better when they are well nourished. Unhealthy or unappetizing school meals can contribute to obesity, diabetes, fatigue and other chronic health issues that affect students鈥� energy, attention and ability to engage in the classroom. But children who have reliable access to healthy meals concentrate harder, behave better, fall sick less often, have and earn higher grades.  

Policymakers on both sides of the political aisle have long recognized that connection. The , administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has provided federally supported school meals since 1946. The of 2010, championed by then-First Lady Michelle Obama, strengthened nutrition standards by requiring schools to serve more fruits, vegetables, whole grains and low-fat milk while reducing starch, sodium and trans fats.

While well-intentioned, the Obama initiative didn鈥檛 seem to change much in my West Virginia school cafeteria. I still remember the jokes students made at lunch during that era 鈥� usually some variation of 鈥渢hanks, Michelle Obama鈥� while staring at the stale nachos and watery green beans that technically met the updated standards. For many students, there was little perceptible difference in how the food tasted and made them feel. 

Now, the Trump administration鈥檚 movement, spearheaded by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is putting school nutrition back on the national agenda, with bipartisan backing. Calls to reduce ultra-processed foods and artificial additives and to strengthen farm-to-school programs have in both Republican- and Democratic-led states. West Virginia is in the vanguard of the renewed national movement to improve school nutrition. 

In 2025, Gov. Patrick Morrisey signed banning several artificial dyes from school meals, making West Virginia one of the first states to impose such restrictions statewide. Earlier this year, the West Virginia legislature the Healthy Lifestyles Program, which includes a farm-to-school initiative that helps cafeterias serve locally grown produce. And other initiatives are on the legislative drawing board, including proposals to bolster and establish around sugar, sodium, fiber and foods. 

But my experiences in school cafeterias suggests that whether the momentum in West Virginia and elsewhere translates into meaningful improvements in student nutrition ultimately rests on state and local leaders鈥� ability to put on local lunch trays healthy food that students want to eat. West Virginia points to the magnitude of that task. More than 15 years after Oliver attempted to 鈥渞evolutionize鈥� Huntington’s school cafeterias, West Virginia near the bottom nationally in child well-being, educational outcomes and economic mobility. It also struggles with high rates of food insecurity and poverty 鈥� all conditions deeply intertwined with how students learn and develop. 

Still, after decades of school lunches serving as cultural punchlines, the renewed focus on student nutrition is encouraging. Children cannot learn effectively if they are hungry, fatigued or experiencing preventable health issues tied to poor nutrition. What is happening in West Virginia reflects a growing recognition that supporting students academically also requires supporting them physically 鈥� that improving educational outcomes begins, in part, with ensuring that students are properly nourished.

To be sure, the (pre-COVID) decline that set in during the mid-2010s had many causes, including smartphones, the aftermath of the 2008 recession and a steep drop in time spent reading long-form writing. But few serious scholars treat the link between rigorous accountability and student progress as a coincidence. Most see its rise and fall as a major driver of both the era of steady improvement and its disheartening retreat.

As a former superintendent of Newark’s public schools, deputy chancellor in New York City and New Jersey’s commissioner of education (and, as importantly, as an AP U.S. History Teacher for four years), I have seen firsthand that the value of meaningful accountability is profound. Is there any other domain in American life that doesn鈥檛 operate on the principle that 鈥渨hat gets measured gets done鈥� or that sets high-performance standards but then eschews objectively measuring whether they are met?

Anyone who says you can have high standards for students and then never measure whether they have been achieved has never spent a minute in a classroom. Isn鈥檛 there also a message in the fact that the handful of states, notably Mississippi and Louisiana, that have bucked the current education recession have dug in on accountability (improving upon the NCLB playbook)? 

I have seen accountability鈥檚 profound benefits but am well aware of its flaws: narrowing curriculum at the expense of untested subjects like art, emphasizing the anti-educational practice of teaching test-taking skills, over-indexing the relevance of test performance to the exclusion of other indicators of learning and more. I have also seen how powerful political forces work relentlessly to undermine state- or federally imposed accountability measures: diluting standards, eliminating high school exit exams, scamming parents by reducing passing scores to artificially boost proficiency rates and substituting a laughably inflated grading system for objective evidence of learning.   

Only rarely do opponents challenge accountability鈥檚 core purposes of shedding light on and advancing learning in schools, districts or populations that are underperforming. Accountability came under pressure less on the merits than because it drew resistance 鈥� from teachers unions wary of being judged by student results, from a generalized hostility to any that compromises local authority, from that recoiled at testing as a matter of personal philosophy or due to NCLB鈥檚 emphasis on proficiency (whether a student cleared a fixed bar) over growth (the rate of progress toward that bar).

As Aldeman persuasively argues, the answer is not to abandon accountability but to support its evolution in a manner that preserves its strengths and mitigates its flaws. Assessments will never be perfect, but they can be and are being improved. Louisiana鈥檚 work in partnership with Johns Hopkins is a prime example. Other states and districts should follow the lead of the many schools that have proven that art and non-tested activities actually improve performance in reading and math 鈥� or that teaching the skills and knowledge embodied in high standards rather than test-taking skills is not teaching to the test but the very essence of sound educational practice.

None of these salutary practices, however, addresses the core problem inherent in the vagaries of politics 鈥� the recurring pattern of yielding to political pressures to weaken accountability. I have lived this in both New York and New Jersey: a tough, accountability-centered body of reforms yields broad achievement gains, which then retreat when a subsequent administration abandons them in response to political opposition. Energized by the understandable, if often injurious, human tendency to replace hard expectations with more comfortable ones, opposition to serious educational accountability has proven an enduring feature of the policy landscape.    

The replacement of NCLB with the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015 reflected precisely this phenomenon at the federal level. The hard truth is that gains driven by accountability are especially fragile 鈥� vulnerable to reversal every time political winds shift or a new administration takes office.

A promising path to resisting this regressive tendency is to embed accountability in a place far less vulnerable to political revision and changing administrations. Working alongside local, federal-compliant performance standards, accountability should be situated in the purchasing decisions states and districts make every year. 

Outcomes-based contracting, like state or federal accountability mandates, measures results and attaches real consequences 鈥� aligning the district’s and the provider鈥檚 interests squarely with explicit learning objectives from the outset. Providers are compensated based on whether students demonstrate measurable learning gains, not on what materials they deliver. For children from under-resourced communities, a contract that ends when materials ship is not a neutral arrangement 鈥� it is a guarantee that no one answers when the work fails.

A provider with a genuine stake in the outcome builds responsive interventions 鈥� adjusting, coaching, reteaching 鈥� until gains are achieved. That is a fundamentally different accountability relationship than education has ever demanded of its vendors. 

The infrastructure to change this is beginning to take shape. The Center for Outcomes-Based Contracting, working with more than 70 districts as well as leading providers, is building shared standards and cross-district learning that enable both sides to enter these agreements with confidence.

Harvard鈥檚 Center for Education Policy Research is the impact of outcomes-based contracting on Indiana’s literacy strategy for grades 6 to 8. The state is also among several that are restructuring how they contract for literacy outcomes, focusing on middle grades where targeted, high-impact supports can make a meaningful difference. Nationwide, intervention for students above third grade has historically lagged.

 The lesson of the last quarter-century of school reform is not that accountability was misguided. But it can and should be reinforced by aligning vendor incentives with explicit student learning goals 鈥� putting accountability close enough to the classroom that there is no waiver to request, no reauthorization to wait for, no administration change to hide behind. 

Accountability at the contract level ultimately says to every provider what historic performance expectations have been saying to every district and school for decades: You will be judged by how much children are learning 鈥� and accept the consequences when they are not.

Unfortunately, our history 鈥� and too often our present 鈥� shows that many students still do not experience classrooms where educational expertise and civil rights protections work together. 

When a student with a disability is singled out and ridiculed because of disability-related behaviors, or when students with unevaluated disabilities are suspended instead of receiving assessment and support, their rights to educational opportunity are being denied in ways our nation鈥檚 laws have long prohibited. Every delay in identifying and correcting these failures deprives students of educational opportunities they cannot recover. 

Students cannot afford confusion about who is responsible for protecting those rights. The Trump administration’s agreement to move responsibility for administering the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act from the U.S. Department of Education to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is based on the mistaken assumption that educational rights can simply be transferred between agencies as an operational function. In reality, doing so risks weakening the protections IDEA was designed to guarantee. 

Similarly, the administration鈥檚 agreement to transfer civil rights investigations and resolutions away from the Education Department鈥檚 Office for Civil Rights to the Department of Justice reflects another significant misconception: that students have time to wait for federal actors to develop the expertise necessary to understand and resolve civil rights concerns in schools quickly, fairly, and in ways that keep students learning. 

Children only get one third grade. One seventh grade. One senior year. Learning is cumulative, and childhood does not pause while governments reorganize. 

A last week to reflect disapproval of some but not all of the responsibility transfers reflected in these interagency agreements.  That vote reflects that these new 鈥渁greements鈥� deserve far more attention than a debate over federal bureaucracy. They raise a fundamental question: Do we still understand that students with disabilities are first and foremost students whose right to learn must be protected by both educational expertise and civil rights enforcement? 

For decades, the answer has been yes. 

IDEA, like Brown v. Board of Education and subsequent federal civil rights laws, affirmed that equal educational opportunity is a right. Its most important contribution was recognizing that in schools, disability is fundamentally an educational responsibility requiring skilled instruction, accommodations and schools prepared to help every student learn. 

Helping a child with dyslexia learn to read. Designing instruction that enables a student with autism to participate fully in class. Developing an individualized education program that balances high expectations and meaningful inclusion. These are not intuitive acts. They draw upon decades of scholarship and professional preparation in learning, child development, assessment, curriculum, instructional design, and educational leadership. 

Lawyers protect educational rights. Educators make those rights real. 

For decades, that partnership has shaped our nation鈥檚 approach to educational civil rights. Education鈥檚 Office for Civil Rights has helped schools understand their obligations, provided technical assistance, resolved complaints without resorting to litigation, monitored compliance and worked to ensure students receive equal educational opportunity. That work requires not only legal expertise but also an understanding of how schools operate, how students learn and how educational systems improve. 

The DOJ plays an essential role through litigation and enforcement, but those responsibilities are fundamentally different from the day-to-day work of helping schools prevent discrimination and resolve problems before students lose years of learning. 

Those functions are complementary, not interchangeable. 

Students learning in school do not experience government through organizational charts. They experience it when a disability evaluation happens on time, or doesn鈥檛; when an accommodation is implemented or postponed; or when a discrimination complaint is resolved before years of instructional time are lost. 

Reasonable people can disagree about the size and organization of the federal government. But educational rights cannot be separated from educational expertise without risking the very outcomes those rights were created to secure. Rights alone do not teach children to read, create inclusive classrooms, or prepare young people for college, careers, and civic life. Skilled educators do. 

And, as this nation learned in and after Brown v. Board of Education, the daily work of ensuring that educators, their administrators and campus counsel understand and apply the legal guarantees of our nation鈥檚 civil rights laws is equally essential to ensuring that every student has an equal opportunity to learn free from discrimination. 

We write from different professions. One of us leads a school of education dedicated to improving teaching, learning and the systems that support education. The other, a former assistant secretary of the Office for Civil Rights, leads a law school center committed to strengthening democracy and protecting civil rights. Our work reminds us every day that educational opportunity depends on both educational expertise and legal protections. 

Our nation did not spend half a century moving toward inclusion only to forget the lesson that made that progress possible: educational opportunity is a civil right, and educational rights are strongest when they remain rooted in the institutions whose mission is helping every child learn.

It’s a clean story. It鈥檚 also wrong.

The interests of teachers unions and students are not always aligned. Until Democrats stop pretending otherwise, they will continue to lose credibility with voters 鈥� and they will deserve to. 

Teachers unions exist to advocate for the labor interests of their members, not the educational interests of kids and families. That is not a controversial claim; it is the truth. Expecting them to prioritize student outcomes over member interests is like expecting a union to negotiate its own pay cuts. It misunderstands what the organization is for.

The failure is not unions behaving like unions. The failure is Democrats pretending that union priorities and student priorities are the same thing, and building education policy around that fiction.

Union presidents are elected by their members and accountable to them. Like most elected leaders, they are especially responsive to their most engaged constituents. In the case of teachers unions, these are typically tenured educators who are the most likely to vote, attend meetings and shape their organization鈥檚 direction. Leadership priorities tend to reflect the interests of those members, not necessarily of teachers as a whole, much less students.

That, in turn, shapes the politics of union leadership. Pledging to always put students first is not what gets officers elected in a union hall. Their real mandate is to increase salaries, strengthen seniority, secure pensions and protect their members鈥� jobs. That is what they campaign on and what they pursue after they are elected.

Teachers union leaders understand classrooms and schools because many of them are educators 鈥� or at least, started their careers that way. But their day-to-day focus is not on education policy; it is on representing their members in disciplinary and grievance matters, arbitration hearings and contract negotiations, as well as engaging in political advocacy. They become experts on labor relations, employment law and politics. That is what their role requires.

That insight matters, because education policy is not the same as labor policy. Yet Democrats have spent years collapsing that distinction and outsourcing their education agenda to groups with a labor agenda.

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten has repeatedly that what is good for educators is inherently good for students. If that were true, there would not have been prolonged school closures during the pandemic after the costs to children were clear. There would not be continuing opposition to high-performing charter schools or resistance to accountability in chronically failing district schools.

The adults working in America’s schools have legitimate interests. Students do, too. But teachers unions are among the largest donors to Democratic candidates, giving them more leverage than students when their priorities diverge. The role of a healthy party is to navigate those tensions in the public interest, but Democrats have too often steered toward the union interest.

That dynamic has narrowed the party鈥檚 policy imagination. Despite a decade-long trend of declining academic outcomes, Democrats have offered little on education policy beyond familiar calls for . Since roughly 2015, they have effectively abandoned K-12 as a domain of serious policymaking. Instead of calling for urgent reform to address an acute crisis, they have defended the existing system and even further with the demands of teachers unions.聽

The cost of those choices has fallen disproportionately on the families who can least afford it. Black, Latino and low-income communities who have long formed the base of the Democratic Party stand to benefit the most from reform, but Democrats have stood in the way. The party that claims to fight inequality has kept families locked in a system that entrenches it.

The public has taken notice. As Democrats have stepped back from K-12 as a domain of serious policymaking, education has shifted from a reliable Democratic strength to a . Voters no longer trust the party to deliver for their kids. 

This reflects a larger crisis. The Democrats have come to govern as a coalition of organized interests rather than as a party with a clear mission. In that reluctance to challenge powerful stakeholders, voters see a party that lacks not only the will but the courage to confront hard problems 鈥� one that鈥檚 more inclined to manage decline than drive change.聽

When voters stop believing you will fight for them, they stop trusting you to govern.

Democrats are at an inflection point. The organized interests that have long anchored the Democratic coalition can no longer be the party鈥檚 north star. Challenging powerful allies and rethinking an entrenched system is never easy. That鈥檚 the point. It鈥檚 precisely what leadership requires, and what the moment demands. 

Education is a test of whether Democrats are willing to change course, put students first and lead again. It is a test the party can, and must, pass.

My job is to tell a student, kindly, when an argument is not working yet. But the machine had just told them it was. Not because the machine was broken, but because it had been optimized to agree.

For two years, educators have warned students that artificial intelligence makes things up. It can give a wrong answer wearing a confident face, a phenomenon known as hallucination. But there is also a quieter failure we have barely named, and it is more corrosive because it feels like support.

Researchers call it sycophancy: when an AI system flatters, agrees with or validates a user even when a correction would be more truthful. A hallucination is a wrong answer. Sycophancy is a wrong relationship.

When students head back to school at the end of the summer, AI will already be part of their schoolwork. Last year, the 鈦� that 84%of high school students used generative AI for schoolwork, and a February 鈦� found that 54% of U.S. teens had used chatbots for assignments: writing, summarizing articles or videos, studying, and creating or editing images.

A from Turkey illustrates why this is a problem. Nearly 1,000 high school students were given help from an AI math tutor powered by GPT-4, the technology behind ChatGPT, while practicing math. They solved more practice problems with the tool. But when the tool was taken away for the real test, students who had used the less restricted version, which could provide more direct answers, scored 17% worse than students who had no AI help. In the same study鈦�, a guarded tutor 鈥� designed to give hints instead of answers 鈥� avoided that drop in test performance.

AI can make learning look easier while quietly removing the struggle that makes learning stick. In writing and analysis, where judgment matters, it can even encourage students to do inferior work.

Learning runs on friction: the red pen, the Socratic question, the 鈥渘ot yet, try again.鈥� Education often tells students they are not right yet so they can become right. A tool engineered to affirm removes a core foundation that education depends on.

In April 2025, OpenAI rolled back a version of GPT-4o after it had become, in the company鈥檚 words, 鈥溾仩.鈥� The company later admitted it hadn’t tested for sycophancy before rolling it out to hundreds of millions of users. OpenAI pushed a temporary system-prompt fix, then returned users to the earlier version. The rollback fixed that release, but it didn鈥檛 address the broader problem of AI systems becoming too agreeable when users need correction.

The pattern is not limited to one chatbot. In March 2026, a Stanford-led team published a 鈦� across eleven leading models. When users asked for guidance about personal situations and relationships the models affirmed their actions 49% more often than humans did. In prompts involving deception, illegality or other harms 鈥� such as lying, manipulation or socially irresponsible behavior 鈥� they endorsed the behavior 47% of the time. People who interacted with sycophantic AI became more convinced they were right and more likely to trust and reuse the tool. 

A student who asks whether a weak thesis is strong, whether thin evidence is enough or whether a draft is ready to submit may not be looking for praise. They may be looking for a teacher. If the tool offers confidence instead of correction, the student never feels the discomfort that turns a half-formed idea into a real one.

I am not arguing that students should avoid these tools. But every student using AI should ask: When has this tool stopped helping me think and started flattering me into not thinking?

That confusion may cost the most among the students I work hardest to reach. At a historically Black university, I teach young people who are brilliant and underestimated, who are wary of how institutions judge them and who sometimes turn to AI because it does not seem to judge at all. 

For students surrounded by regular, trusted feedback, an over-flattering tutor may be an annoyance. But for those with fewer chances to get honest, trusted feedback, it can become a closed loop: The student asks, the machine praises, and no one tells the truth. 

A 2026 Stanford study of 鈦� makes that worry more concrete: identical essays received different feedback depending on how the student was described, with essays attributed to Black students receiving more praise and less substantive criticism. That is not reassuring.

So what do we do?

First, educators should teach AI as something to interrogate, not an answer machine. Assign students to make the model disagree with them, hunt for the moment it praised a weak argument, and grade that catch. 鈥淲here did it just agree with you?鈥� is a teachable skill.

Second, instructors and advisers should change the question they ask about AI help. Not just, 鈥淒id it give you an answer?鈥� but, 鈥淒id it make you explain your thinking?鈥� 鈥淒id it ask what evidence you had?鈥� 鈥淒id it push back?鈥� 鈥淒id it make the work harder in the right way?鈥�

That kind of friction has worked before when it is built into the tool, giving hints instead of answers, asking questions that make students show their reasoning and offering prompts that slow them down before they accept AI advice. In the Turkey study鈦�, the guarded version that guided students instead of simply spitting out answers largely avoided the learning harm. Other studies have found that prompts requiring users to 鈦�, 鈦�, and make their own judgment can reduce blind acceptance of AI advice. Until every tool is designed to slow students down in those ways, adults must teach students to add the friction themselves.

We spend our careers teaching students to tolerate being wrong long enough to get it right. The best AI tutor may not be the one students like most in the moment, but the one that refuses to finish the work for them. The friction was never an obstacle to learning. It was the learning.

Given that it鈥檚 money that doesn鈥檛 come from state or local taxes, we anticipate most states and districts will want in.

Our proposal: Districts set a fixed fee for access to a bundle of services. Imagine the district offers an $800 鈥淜12-plus plan鈥� that provides access to stuff like field trips, tutoring, homework help, assemblies, clubs or other services not required in the state鈥檚 definition of required public education. Every student signs up, but none 鈥� save for the wealthiest families 鈥� actually pay. Instead, a state-approved scholarship-granting organization sends the money from the withheld taxes to the district in the form of scholarships awarded for all the kiddos. 

To make this work at scale, employers are key. Major employers (think school districts, universities, hospitals, Walmart, Amazon) could invite employees to participate via a $1,700 payroll deduction to an SGO. Employees could pick their SGO and indicate which district would benefit, and since their contribution would immediately be offset by a corresponding dollar-for-dollar reduction in federal withholding, there would be no net change in their take-home pay. 

None of this would happen by itself. If state and local leaders want to tap the funds, they have work to do. Here鈥檚 where to start:

• Identify a state point of contact and launch a working group of state and district leaders. Include advocates, business community, PTAs, etc. The tax credit scholarship is a new and messy federal policy, and getting it up and running in each state will take a lot of coordination. Someone needs to be on point, and communication channels need to be set up.
  
• Engage the governor鈥檚 office. For a state to participate, its governor must opt in by Dec. 31. Most have, or eventually will, but some may take a while as they navigate tricky politics in their state. A few state legislatures have passed laws designating a different entity to opt in, effectively removing the decision from the governor鈥檚 desk and providing the state’s chief executive with some political cover for the decision to participate.
  
  Additionally, the governor or designated official will need to submit a list of qualified SGOs (also by Dec. 31). This step will require a process by which SGOs submit their information and the state verifies it.
  
• Identify a trustworthy SGO (or SGOs) ready to deliver scholarships to public schools. While the organization must be independent from the state, the hope is that a district-focused SGO will commit to communicating about the amount of expected contributions with districts, so they can set fees. There will also likely need to be a software platform enabling taxpayers to choose their district. The SGO will need to be approved by the Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)3 nonprofit and be listed on the state鈥檚 official list submitted to the IRS.
  
• Engage employers. Local employers need to understand the upside for students in public schools and how payroll deductions could work. They can also help shape what will likely become a major outreach effort to encourage taxpayer participation.
  
• Identify allowable fees. Each scholarship will need to be on behalf of a named student for an identified fee. Students will need to sign up (which can happen through the district). Lots of states have laws about what鈥檚 a permissible fee for public school students. (California鈥檚 laws are some of the strictest which, unless changed, might complicate this model in California). Since SGOs might not be able to predict their revenue by the start of each school year, districts might want to consider semester- or trimester-based fees.
  
• Set up data collection. Districts will need to ensure they have robust accounting for fee-related revenues (which have traditionally been treated as an afterthought). States will want to understand how funds are flowing. Giving state leaders visibility will enable them to address any inequities. Further, transparency is the best antidote to mischief, and even a small amount of fraud will sour the public鈥檚 appetite for participating.
  
• Consider income verification. The key to funding integrated services in schools is that every student participate. We hope the Treasury Department will allow families to sign a form attesting to their eligibility for scholarships based on income. This way, only a handful of wealthy families 鈥� those over 300% of their Area Median Gross Income 鈥� would need to pay the fee (our guess is that they won鈥檛 balk) or get funding from another source (say, their school’s PTA).
  
• Build a campaign explaining how public school students could benefit. Will they have richer electives and arts? Tutoring opportunities? Better career pathways? Some will want to focus on closing district budget deficits (the law鈥檚 language doesn鈥檛 prohibit supplanting), but keeping students at the center of the pitch is both good politics and good policy. Consider adding something that鈥檚 new: Perhaps drop-in math homework hours?
  
• Communicate! The federal scholarship tax credit should be on the agenda of every association conference, including those for superintendents, chief financial officers, boards and state boards of ed; local school board meetings; PTA briefings; and legislative hearings. There should be webinars, blog posts, media interviews and more. 

It might be tempting to wait a year and start in 2028, and there are still open questions 鈥� especially since Treasury鈥檚 draft regulations won’t be out until September. But delaying that long to get started puts public schools at real risk of missing out on some of this opportunity. Not only would schools forgo a year鈥檚 worth of funds, but taxpayer decisions and SGO relationships could form around other recipients. Also worrisome is that by waiting, a state wouldn鈥檛 be able to tap what is sure to be a big national push to get taxpayers signed up. 

For better or worse, this new federal money isn鈥檛 anything like traditional funding formula dollars. How much flows to public schools will depend almost entirely on how actively leaders pursue it.

Since I became a father three months ago, I cannot stop noticing everything my daughter will inherit simply because of where I am today, as a first-generation college graduate who now sits in rooms my parents never did. She will inherit relationships and people who can help her make sense of the world. She will grow up believing higher education is an expectation. She will know what a resume is. She will be confident enough to ask for help. She’ll know that internships matter and how to ask for letters of recommendation. She’ll understand that careers don’t simply happen.

None of that feels extraordinary to me anymore. It feels normal. But it didn’t used to, and for many talented young people, it still doesn’t.

During high school, I applied to the University of Iowa without ever visiting because most of what I knew about college came from movies. I wanted that picture: a big campus, far from home, nothing like where I came from. Driving out, watching the buildings thin into farmland, it hit me how far I was going.

By the second week, the challenge set in. In class, the professor referenced books my classmates had all read in high school. They could relate. I could not. There were dozens of moments like that, where I realized I was missing things other students already had. I didn’t have the language for it yet, but I was starting to understand that the things I’d thought of as normal weren’t the norm for the people around me.

Then I met a mentor who changed my trajectory. Nancy Humbles, director of the university鈥檚 Center for Diversity and Enrichment at the time, made me aware of what I now think of as the second curriculum: the unwritten lessons that would shape my time in college and everything after. At the start of my sophomore year, she asked what I was doing that summer. I hadn’t thought about it; I figured I’d go home and work. She said, absolutely not, you need an internship. I didn’t really know what that was. So she sat me down and walked me through it, including the part nobody tells you: that you apply for the competitive ones in the fall, almost a year ahead.

She didn’t just answer my questions. She asked me the questions I didn’t know to ask. When you are the first in your family to go to college, that is what you are missing. Not intelligence, not drive. You simply do not know what you do not know.

Years later, I was the one at the front of the classroom, a first-year elementary school teacher on Chicago’s West Side, seeing my younger self in students who were capable, hardworking and lacking the exact things I had been missing.

Today I work at Braven, a national nonprofit embedded within colleges and universities that partners with employers to build career readiness into the undergraduate experience. Students take a credit-bearing course and work alongside a coach, a working professional who helps them learn the second curriculum I once had to piece together on my own. 

More than 17,400 students have come through the program. Within six months of finishing college, had landed a strong first job or started graduate school, a 12-point edge over comparable students nationally. They also complete internships at rates 28 points above their peers. 

But a single program, however good, can’t be the whole answer. I still see students doing everything right, persisting, checking every box, who still don’t have the team around them that makes the difference.

Here is what I wish someone had told me earlier: Most of the rules that govern colleges and workplaces were made up by regular people. I used to treat those institutions with reverence until I got older, ended up in the rooms where decisions are made and realized the people there were ordinary, just like me. The systems that shape a life weren’t designed by geniuses. If ordinary people built them, ordinary people can rebuild them.

Too often, first-generation and low-income students are told that hard work is enough. But that message is incomplete. It assumes they already understand the rules of a game nobody has explained to them. The missing piece is someone willing to teach you that second curriculum, if you weren’t among the lucky few to inherit it.

I look at my daughter, and I am not worried about her. She will inherit that second curriculum without ever realizing it has a name. She’ll inherit people to call, expectations about college, confidence walking into unfamiliar rooms and the quiet assumption that she belongs there. What I am concerned about is how many young people who are just as capable will navigate without it.

Anyone can be a builder. It doesn’t take extraordinary genius to look at the future you want for other people’s children and start building it. It just takes deciding that the rules somebody else made up can be made again.

Drawing on this source material, Claude can generate lessons and materials aligned to an educator’s state standards and curriculum. Given how much teacher time goes into that kind of planning, it’s easy to see why CfT is appealing.

We’re glad to see artificial intelligence’s potential being tapped to help teachers individualize instruction at a scale that wasn’t possible even a few years ago. We are also happy to see a major frontier lab with the resources and technical skills to do it. But public school systems don’t operate like the private companies and government agencies Anthropic is used to working with. Teachers face legal exposure around sharing student data that simply doesn’t exist in those sectors.

This creates a severe employment risk for educators. 

Anthropic’s own shows the problem: 鈥淎nalyze class data to plan instruction. Hand Claude a folder of data 鈥� roster, diagnostics, attendance, your own notes 鈥� and it builds a clear picture of where every student is, allowing teachers to better tailor instruction. You control what data is shared; nothing you share is used in model training.鈥�

While this pitch appeals directly to overburdened educators, encouraging them to hand over those kinds of data immediately puts them at risk, because it invites teachers to sidestep district policy and, potentially, state and federal law.

CfT’s privacy terms are stronger than those of ordinary consumer AI products: It does not train on teacher inputs or outputs, and it offers data encryption, deletion rights, audits and breach notification. Anthropic says its with teachers is 鈥渨ritten to comply with FERPA鈥� 鈥� federal student privacy law 鈥� but that’s a claim about how the contract is drafted, not a promise that any individual teacher’s use is lawful.聽

Here鈥檚 the problem: The marketing prompt to 鈥渉and Claude a folder of data鈥� (even with the added disclaimer to check district policies) directly conflicts with CfT鈥檚 terms of service in two ways. First, the terms require that the teacher have the authority to designate Anthropic as a 鈥渟chool official.鈥� But FERPA dictates that a vendor qualifies as a 鈥渟chool official鈥� only if the district designates it as such and if the vendor is under the district鈥檚 鈥渄irect control.鈥� An individual teacher can’t make that designation.聽

Second, the terms of service require teachers to indemnify Anthropic for claims arising from what they upload. These terms also cap Anthropic’s liability. In short, the educator, not Anthropic, is assuming the risk. 

While the marketing describes an appealing set of features, the terms lay out requirements that are legally impossible for a teacher to meet. If educators agree to these terms and upload data, they could potentially be fired for it. These risks are even greater when any information about students with disabilities (like an individualized education program) or medical conditions (like a Section 504 plan) is shared. 

Both authors have spent years working with school district bureaucracies, so we know firsthand how hard the purchasing process can be and how legal barriers around data privacy and security can slow the adoption of innovative technology. We both agree that the procurement and purchasing process needs reform to enable such adoption, but bypassing districts and going straight to individual teachers defies fundamental tenets of education policy and practice. 

We want tools like CfT to work and to be used. But there need to be changes in how Anthropic (and other large-scale AI providers gain access to data. The way to make this work is to build data access and governance rules that school systems themselves control. Currently, several initiatives are underway to make this a reality. For example, the , the and the are active state- and district-led initiatives working to develop sophisticated, standards-based AI data access systems within district control. They ensure that AI models can draw on state-specific standards and curriculum and local classroom data where allowed, without requiring individual educators to take on the risk of feeding sensitive student information into third-party tools without the authority to do so.聽

Building such technology systems and their governance is hard and time-consuming work that may go against the 鈥渕ove fast and break things鈥� ethos that many tech companies embody. But Anthropic and other AI labs should be collaborating with states and school districts to help build and even assist in funding such systems for the public benefit. They would be part of the solution to this knotty problem instead of fueling the growing AI backlash in public education.